Remember Me (20 page)

9
PHILIP
: All women are the same, my dear; except you, of course.

10
MARGOT
: And that’s very patronising.

11
PHILIP
: What’s the matter with you tonight?

12
MARGOT
: Nothing.

13
PHILIP
: Were you on the phone just now?

14
MARGOT
: No.

15
PHILIP
: Oh, I thought I heard it pinging.

16
MARGOT
: Don’t you believe me?

17
PHILIP
: Of course. You’re very edgy, Margot. Perhaps you should have a tranquilliser before you go to bed.

18
MARGOT
: Perhaps.

Which being translated is:

1
PHILIP
: Is it safe?

2
MARGOT
: Yes.

3
PHILIP
: I’ll try to be polite, though I don’t feel like it.

4
MARGOT
: Actually, Enid’s not as boring as you thought.

5
PHILIP
: Yes she is. Boring and immoral.

6
MARGOT
: She’s nothing of the kind.

7
PHILIP
: I have some knowledge of human nature.

8
MARGOT
: You’re not the man I married.

9
PHILIP
: I have a low opinion of women, especially you.

10
MARGOT
: I know what you really mean.

11
PHILIP
: Why are you reacting to things as if I were saying them for the first time?

12
MARGOT
: I’m not telling you anything.

13
PHILIP
: Women. Always gossiping.

14
MARGOT
: I shall retaliate by lying.

15
PHILIP
: But I will catch you out in a lie.

16
MARGOT
: Am I in the custom of lying?

17
PHILIP
: You are a difficult woman and I am a very patient man. I make no distinction between you and my many middle-aged, neurotic female patients.

18
MARGOT
: That’s unfair.

Margot and Philip go to bed, and lie far apart. What’s the matter with them both? Margot lies awake. Philip sleeps.

Margot/Madeleine gets up and stalks the room, hollow-eyed. Devil, she thinks. This devil I’m married to. He uses up my youth, saps my strength, exploits my good nature; he uses me as servant, whore, a punch bag for his ill humour. He gives nothing in return. I am married to the devil. See, how he smiles in his sleep? He is impervious to my distress: worse, he grows strong on it.

The doctor’s wife pinches the doctor’s arm sharply and suddenly. The doctor wakes and cries out in alarm.

‘I want us to have Hilary here,’ says Margot/Madeleine, with the gravelly taste of blood in her mouth. ‘Do you understand?’

The doctor stares at the doctor’s wife. Long years of practice—in the days before the prudent introduction of his Night Service—have enabled him to wake suddenly from sleep, and face emergency.

‘What makes you think she’d want to come here?’ enquires the doctor. ‘Why should she? Stop behaving like a mad woman. You’re perfectly sane.’

To which there is no reply.

Philip falls back asleep. Presently Margot feels better, and creeps back into bed beside him, and closes her brown button eyes, and her face falls into its usual sweet, complacent lines, and the doctor’s wife sleeps too, and does not dream.

It is the cold, hard, dreamless sleep of the dead, all the same. As if, in mimicry of Philip’s father, who never wanted her, never acknowledged her, Margot is trying death out for size, getting into practice; as the womb will get into practice months before a birth, with a few trial contractions. Just in case you forget.

Margot was not exactly asked to Philip’s mother’s funeral, and did not attend. She went to Jill’s, however, the following year. Well, Jill had been to Margot’s wedding, and taken some lovely photographs, which now stand on the bedside table.

Margot’s younger, sweeter self smiles down on Margot’s cold, grey, unconsciousness.

If you come to my wedding, I’ll go to your funeral.

A
H, POSSESSIONS!

‘Someone’s got to go through her belongings,’ says Lily.

Jarvis does not reply. Jarvis the architect and Lily the architect’s one and only wife are watching television. Their dinner (lamb cutlets, salad and Camembert), is digesting, and their comforts are around them. Their chairs are designed for maximum viewing comfort and their distance from the screen for minimum eyestrain. They sit side by side, hand in hand, their drinks beside them. Hilary is in bed, reading; Jonathon is asleep. ‘There is nothing wrong,’ Lily keeps telling herself. ‘Nothing to be anxious about.’ But she cannot concentrate. Events in Ulster seem to have even less to do with her than usual; she cannot feel enthusiastic about the plans of the Young Conservatives. She wishes Jarvis would pay less attention to the screen and more to her. And she is worried about Jonathon.

Earlier in the evening she quite panicked about Jonathon. He was clearly ill and very feverish—his forehead burned to her touch. He lay in his cot, whining and grizzling, slapping at his leg with his hand. His eyes were cloudy, like the eyes of fish on a watery marble slab. She rang Philip Bailey, but could only get through to his Night Service, which with some reluctance agreed to send out a locum.

The locum, a sallow and disagreeable young man, unmoved by either Lily’s beauty or her distress, protests at having been called out unnecessarily. The child’s temperature is normal. Or so the thermometer says.

‘But you can
see
he’s ill,’ says Lily. The locum shakes his head: he can’t see it at all. All he appears to think is that Lily, though beautiful, is an over-protective, hysterical nuisance of a mother. And it is certainly true that the minute the doctor walks into the room, Jonathon stops his grizzling and tossing, and the turning up of his glazed eyes, and becomes a perfectly ordinary, plump small boy, with a cold in the nose, and eyes red from crying, who doesn’t want to go to bed.

But after the doctor has gone the dreadful keening and tossing starts again, and only stops when Hilary, in desperation, takes him into the camp bed with her.

Lily hates to see them thus so entwined, so comforted the one by the other; her golden boy enclosed, suffocated, trapped, by Madeleine’s lumpy, puffy, sulky girl.

Supposing, Lily thinks with horror, anyone thinks Hilary is
mine?

Ah, possessions. Some reflect credit on us, others don’t.

Lily turns off the television. She’ll have Jarvis’s attention, through fair means or foul. ‘Someone’s got to go through her belongings. Do try and face facts.’

‘Let Oxfam take them,’ says Jarvis. ‘Clear the place out. Sell what it can and throw away what it can’t.’

‘But everything there is ours,’ says Lily. ‘After all, you supported her. Everything she ever owned comes from you.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s much there,’ says Jarvis. ‘Do you mind if I watch television?’

And he turns the set on again, so Lily has to speak over the voice of Our Man in Israel. ‘What about all the things she took from here?’ she demands.

Some six months after Lily moved in and Madeleine moved out, Madeleine returned one day with furniture removers, in Lily’s absence, breaking the law, defying the injunction not to molest, and took away the brass bed which she and Jarvis had once shared, but which now was Lily’s own, by custom and convention.

What a lovely bed it was, too—not one with ordinary coarse bold bars at head and foot, but delicately filigreed into a glittering pattern of flowers and peacocks. Madeleine, Lily knew, didn’t really want the bed, could hardly have had pleasant memories of it, couldn’t even get it into her little flat—but had simply had it removed and sold, motivated by nothing other than spite. Not by sentiment—her sexual relationship with Jarvis had been totally miserable, almost non-existent, or so Jarvis assured Lily—merely by a dog-in-the-manger attitude. Spite.

Jarvis, you see, had at one time to have a restraining order taken out against Madeleine, who in the early days would lie in wait outside the house for poor Lily (who’d be returning tired from the ante-natal clinic, as like as not) and spring out at her and abuse her and pull her hair, poor mad soul—even Lily, her victim, could feel sorry for her, so awful and dreadful did Madeleine look.

And then Madeleine started making obscene telephone calls in the middle of the night, so that the number had to be changed: and then Madeleine started breaking the window, and pulling up the flowers (leaving poor little Hilary without a baby-sitter the while, no doubt, just as she’d left her alone on all those coach journeys whilst having it off with the courier—poor Jarvis!). And damage to persons and feelings is one thing, damage to property is quite another. So Jarvis and Lily were obliged to go to law; and the threat of prison if she persisted quietened Madeleine down considerably, and after the theft of the bed, the visitations stopped altogether.

Madeleine, taking to visitations, once again. The Visitings of the Dead.

But the day Madeleine and Hilary left Jarvis in that taxi (what extravagance! Wouldn’t public transport have done?), she took with her not just her and Hilary’s personal belongings, but some very nice fluffy towels and some hand-embroidered table linen to which Lily had taken an instant liking, in the few days she and Madeleine were under the same roof. Well, Lily under the spare-room roof, waiting. Madeleine under the bedroom roof, hesitating.

Possessions! Who cared? Lily, certainly. And Madeleine, rather more than she thought.

For Madeleine had no right to take them: they belonged to Jarvis, who’d paid for them. Jarvis paid for everything, after all. It all belonged to Jarvis.

Jarvis, Lily thought, was altogether too neglectful of his own interests.

‘Let’s hope the tablecloths aren’t too ruined,’ says Lily now, as the tanks rumble over Sinai, in retrospect. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much hope she did them by hand: just bunged everything in together in the launderette, I expect. At least, that’s what Hilary’s clothes always looked as if she did. We could get the poor child some new ones, now we know they won’t instantly be damaged by Madeleine. You must admit, Jarvis, there must be a lot in the flat worth salvaging. I know it’s distasteful, but I’m afraid that’s the other thing about people dying. There’s just a lot of work to be done.’

When Baby Rose had died, drowned, what a clearing up, a packing, a throwing away there’d been! ‘You’re such a good little worker,’ Ida had said, tears in her troubled eyes. ‘My only little daughter.’

Lily wears steel grey tonight—a slippery, shiny, shapeless dress. Her pretty feet are bare: her toenails scarlet.

Lily’s big toe is not altogether straight: in fact it all but folds itself over the adjacent toe. She has difficulty buying shoes.

Jarvis does not reply.

‘And apart from anything else, all Hilary’s shoes are there,’ says Lily. ‘We have to have those. She says the red ones hurt her. Well of course they do; those heels are absurd. I don’t know what Madeleine was thinking of.’

‘Can’t she have new ones?’

‘We’re not so rich we can afford to throw money away, Jarvis. Besides, I hate buying shoes.’

‘If you want to go down and loot,’ says Jarvis, ‘go ahead.’

Jarvis is worn and frayed. Identifying a dead body is not pleasant. Lily seems to have no idea of it. And he’s hungry. Cutlets, salad and Camembert may keep a man thin, but they do not keep him content. All he wants to do today is eat, drink, sleep, suffer in peace. But Lily keeps to her rules. Food as consolation? Never. Look how fat it made you before!

‘It is not looting,’ says Lily, ‘it is common sense. And I’m not suggesting for a moment that I do it. Why should I? It’s not my fault Madeleine killed herself in that ridiculous car she couldn’t afford, and ran at your expense, while I don’t even have a car at all but have to go everywhere by taxi or public transport: all
I
do is slave my guts out running this house, carrying your child, looking after a stepchild with no help let alone gratitude from you, putting up with your moods, your drinking and your abuse; and now poor little Jonathon is ill, but you don’t care, you go off to the pictures with Hilary leaving me alone to cope with the doctors, and I have to take responsibility for absolutely everything and I’m sick of it, and what’s more, you don’t even seem to
like
me any more.’

And off Lily goes to bed.

Jarvis drinks half a bottle of whisky, and goes to the kitchen and eats half a loaf (Jonathon’s) with a lot of butter and some plum preserve (Lily’s make, for displaying rather than eating), before coming to bed and telling Lily he is paying for Madeleine’s funeral. When she opens her mouth to protest he slaps her.

It is Jarvis’s way to meet attack by attack. He rarely responds to the detail of accusation, only to the spirit behind it. It makes him difficult to live with, Lily thinks, and Madeleine knew. He and Lily are either totally happy together, or completely miserable.

This evening they are completely miserable, and hate each other. They have both been unforgivable. They sleep on far sides of the bed, not touching. It is the same filigreed brass bed as once Jarvis and Madeleine shared, but neither of them think of that now.

Lily found it for sale in an antique shop on the Portobello Road a year before, and had to pay ninety pounds in order to get hold of it. But it was worth it, she felt, so as not to let Madeleine have her own way.

Ah, possessions!

P
ROPERTY, POSSESSIONS!

‘I wonder,’ says sweet Lily to mad Margot the next morning, ‘if you could possibly take Hilary round to Madeleine’s and bring back some of her things? In particular some decent shoes, so she doesn’t go on making the rest of us feel like dwarfs?’

Or as Philip says to his wife at lunchtime, over bacon-and-egg pie and baked beans, ‘What is the matter with that woman? Why should you have to go riffling through the relics of the dead? Tell her you won’t do any such thing.’