Remember Me (21 page)

But Margot has already said she will.

‘You get yourself too involved,’ says Philip, over peach slices and custard. ‘You’re not a friend of the family, only an employee. Margot, this meal tastes remarkably like the school dinners of my past.’

Is it a complaint or a compliment? Margot decides it is the latter. Philip liked his school. His winning of a national photography competition, and with a nude photograph, had made him something of a hero.

‘I had to sieve the custard,’ she remarks. ‘There’s something strange about the powder. It keeps going into lumps.’

‘Why doesn’t Lily do it herself?’ persists Philip. ‘She’s rather upset.’

‘That’s obvious,’ says Philip. ‘Calling out a doctor in the middle of the night to a perfectly healthy child. I wonder what she’s been up to?’

‘Up to? Why should she have been up to anything?’

‘Heaven knows. It’s just my experience of over-anxious mothers,’ says the doctor, ‘that they’ve been having a bit on the side, and expect lightning to strike.’

‘Lily and Jarvis have eyes only for each other,’ says Margot, in the language of the films of her youth. And all the doctor’s wife can offer the doctor, in the way of temptation, is sliced tinned peaches and custard, however smooth, however lovingly sieved, preceded by egg-and-bacon pie and baked beans. No time, no life, no emotion left for anything more adventurous.

And Margot, quite suddenly, quite painfully, feels such a stab of envy, that her hand slips as she makes the instant coffee, and she splashes her fingers with boiling water, and has to hold them under the cold tap until the pain abates.

‘Jonathon’s not himself,’ says Margot, ‘Lily’s worried. He cries if I go near him, and he’s usually so good with me. He only seems happy with Hilary so Lily’s kept her off school again.’

‘You complain if Lily sends her to school, and you complain if she doesn’t,’ says Philip. ‘You don’t seem to like her very much. I don’t know why you envy her. You have just as good a life as she does. Don’t you?’

Yes, of course Margot does. A good life.

Does the doctor’s wife envy the architect’s wife as the doctor claims?

Yes, she does. He’s right And why not? Well, none of our lives are so perfect that we wouldn’t want to change them—or at any rate some part of them—with some other person of our choice. Only when we are in love, and loved in return, does the pleasant singularity of being oneself fill the heart with joy; when we are the recipient of that insane love that on occasion comes from another, by-passing all defects, ignoring all faults of appearance, age, history, conduct, character and humour. Such love would alter, if it improvement found; so at such times we can be reconciled, for once, to our imperfect selves.

Margot envies the architect’s wife—but it is the talent of the architect’s wife (for she is in love with herself) to envy Margot hardly at all, except in so far as she imagines that to have a doctor for a husband would be useful when one had an ailing child. If Lily envies anyone, it is Judy, not because of Jamie, but for Judy’s courage, Judy’s ability to follow her own rash inclinations to their bitter, stylish end. Judy in her penthouse is not suburban. Sometimes Lily fears she is suburban. She has journeyed the length of the globe, but can never quite reach the centre of things.

Property, possessions! Quality or quantity?

The undertaker arrives to measure Madeleine. Five foot three in death, five foot four in life. Some jolting at his hand makes the corpse’s eyes fly open.

‘Funny eyelids,’ says the undertaker.

‘Very,’ says Clarence. Arthur is at the hospital, having his varicose veins injected. Clarence wishes Arthur would come back. His own feet feel cold. The shrouds, which he and Goliath folded earlier, are in heaps on the floor again. The cleaner, perhaps, being careless. Except there is no cleaner. Or did Arthur sweep them all to the floor again in anger, perhaps because they were not perfectly folded? Goliath was good at folding, being accustomed to helping his mother with the sheets off the line, and Clarence soon got the knack of it—only the shrouds were not evenly shaped, and no sooner had you got one edge to meet another, than everything else was out of true. Difficulties.

The eyes close again, like the hinged eyes on the more expensive kind of kewpie doll when laid on its back, with a strictly mechanical motion.

S
PACES, PLACES! SOME PLACES
we approach with dread: they carry the burden of our anxieties, if we have failed to shoulder them ourselves.

I am Hilary, daughter of a dead mother, scuffling through a pile of shoes at the bottom of a wardrobe. This is my home, no longer a home; it’s below ground level: I never thought of that. It was as if we lived in a hole, and a hole was all we were fit for. When I looked up to heaven, all I could see was the feet of strangers, passing behind bars. But here my mother lived for years, slept and woke, and ate and cried and sometimes laughed. Here, every Saturday night, we played Monopoly for my sake, to keep me happy: and every Saturday night I bent the rules (which only I remembered) so she could nearly win but let me do so in the end. We were kind to each other, my mother and I, quite apart from what she felt she owed me for having brought me into the world she made; and what I owed her for having given me life, to make of what I could. I shall remember my mother with love, when I have my own children. If I ever do. If I stay with Lily I never will: I will shrivel up completely in my shell, in the glare of something far too strong for me.

I am Hilary, daughter of a dead mother, child of a lost father: I am Hilary, Jonathon’s friend. I am Hilary, Lily’s obligation, Lily’s servant; Lily, spinning through the universe, a brilliant star, and me, a poor dead planet, revolving hopelessly around her. I am Hilary, lost to Lily. Almost.

‘Have you found them, dear?’ enquires Margot, as bright and brisk as she can manage. She and Hilary are sorting through the jumble in the bottom of Madeleine’s wardrobe, searching for Hilary’s sensible brown shoes. So far only one has been found.

Lily sent her, in the end, as one sends a servant on an errand. ‘Margot, be a dear. Poor Hilary! Stumbling about in those ridiculous shoes! Too dismal for her to go alone.’

‘Yes,’ said Margot. ‘She’ll need something quieter for the funeral.’

‘The funeral?’ said Lily, as if mystified. ‘Oh, she won’t be going to the funeral. It wouldn’t be suitable for a child. Is there going to be much of a funeral? Jarvis said something, but surely he was joking. The expense! And for what. Who would go? Madeleine has no family. Surely they’ll just bury her, cremate her, whatever it is that people do to corpses. It’s not as if she was religious. What a dreadful subject for so early in the morning. I’ve never been to a funeral. Have you?’

Lily is herself again: wild and wan in washed-out jeans, brown nipples bold through a white shirt, crimson belted. Jarvis relented at six forty-five. They made love—ah yes, and love it was. He to her and she to him. So many kinds of sexual congress! As many as there are of conversations. Sex with love, and sex without it, sex hostile, sex friendly, sex perfunctory, sex enjoyable, boring, disgusting, sanctified, disquieting, destructive; as many kinds as there are partners; as many with the same partner as that partner has frames of mind. This morning, between Jarvis and Lily, there is sex with love, and in the silence of mutual forgiveness.

Breakfast is on time this morning. Kippers for a change, boiled in a plastic bag. Lily enjoys dissecting the flakes of flesh from the flimsy bones. And Jonathon seems much, much better, although he has a nasty little blister on his heel which Lily has just discovered. It looks to her rather like a cigarette burn. Perhaps that was what was hurting and making him grizzle and keen, and why he didn’t want to be picked up? But how could he possibly have a cigarette burn? Lily doesn’t smoke, and Jarvis stopped when they were first married. When he was with Madeleine he smoked at least sixty a day: and of course Madeleine smoked like a chimney, then and afterwards. It was ridiculous, the way Madeleine kept pleading poverty while wasting all her (Jarvis’s) money on cigarettes. Everyone thought so.

Lily puts antiseptic cream and a plaster-dressing on Jonathon’s heel. Margot, watching, is about to suggest, from the strength of her position as doctor’s wife, that the burn would be better left uncovered, or at any rate with a simple dry dressing upon it, but she holds her tongue. Why? What new meanness is this?

‘I can’t think how it came to be there,’ Lily persists. ‘You don’t suppose Hilary’s a secret smoker, and brushed his heel with her cigarette, or something, and didn’t like to tell me? I wouldn’t put it past her … She’s so guilty about everything. Poor little Jonathon.’

And she hands Margot Jonathon to hold, as she has done a hundred times before, but Jonathon’s face puckers, so she sets him down instead, and Jonathon totters off towards the door, in his haste banging his head on the edge of the table, as not infrequently occurs, but this time stoically refusing to mind, just so long, it seems, as he can put as much distance between himself and Margot as possible.

‘When you’re there, Margot,’ Lily goes on, in the fluty tones she uses when she’s in an organising mood, ‘just have a look round. See if there’s anything of value.’

‘What do you mean by value?’ enquires Margot. ‘There is the guinea pig, I suppose.’

Lily looks blank.

‘In the sense that anything alive is of value.’

‘I certainly don’t want the guinea pig round here,’ says Lily, aghast. ‘No way. I hate small animals, don’t you? They’re dreadfully dangerous for small children. They carry any number of germs.’

‘What’s to become of it?’ enquires Margot. ‘Hilary’s very fond of it.’

‘Oh Hilary …’ sighs Lily. Margot, she notices, is limping.

Perhaps she is in pain: perhaps this explains her unusual sharpness.

This plump, soft, little body, the doctor’s wife, or so it seems to Lily, with her pouter-pigeon chest, and her warm brown eyes, and her brave little smile, is today all sharp edges and disapproval. What’s more, her tights are laddered. Amazing, to achieve ladders in tights made of such tough and sensible stuff, ladder-proof to the point of total if shagged opaqueness. Still, there it is. There they are. Laddered unladderable tights. The doctor’s wife looks a mess, thinks Lily. Not just boring, as she usually does, but dismal.

‘Isn’t your leg properly better yet?’ enquires Lily.

‘It still aches.’

‘What does your husband say?’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘Oh,’ Lily is nonplussed. If Lily has a broken fingernail, Jarvis is all anxiety and concern: Lily, his most precious possession, damaged!

‘He’s very busy—’ apologises Margot, after the fashion of wives.

‘I know a marvellous osteopath—’ Well, Lily would. What a kind and handsome man! It hurts? Poor thing, of course it does. Here, let me help. And a twist and a stretch and a snap, and there we are, some kind of violent muscular orgasm, and ah yes, that’s better, pain is passed, and a dull ache remains, like the memory of a sorry love affair, but how much better than the sharp nagging of desire. Ah yes, Lily knows an osteopath—Jarvis hates her going.

‘By something of value,’ murmurs Lily, ‘I meant, well, antiques, good towels, tablecloths, anything one wouldn’t want to go to Oxfam. Just have a look.’

So off Margot limps to Madeleine’s flat with Hilary lurching and looming beside her. Hilary is going to be as tall as her father, Lily fears. She already is, come to think of it, in the red platform heels.

And here they are now, as evening falls, in this dismal place; Hilary crouched in front of the wardrobe, scuffling through the rubbish left by the partly living. Her head is bent in a way as to remind Margot of someone. Whom? Lettice? No, little neat Lettice has nothing in common with this lumpy, overflowing creature. Something of Laurence, perhaps? Hilary’s hands. Yes, Hilary’s hands are like Laurence’s hands. They are large and red, and chilly knuckled. But that can only be coincidence: Laurence inherits his hands from Philip. Surely.

Hilary’s father’s hands? Jarvis’s fingers? Margot gasps at some sharp pang of memory: there is an indecent fluttering, an awful plucking at her private parts: gone, almost before she’s conscious of it.

Jarvis fifteen years ago had young man’s fingers, forceful, charming: drunken, certainly, but with the nice, the altogether legitimate, inquisitiveness of the young, and whose touch is not, as in an old man’s fingerings, merely to remember.

Oh, I have wasted my life, cries Margot in her heart. I am nearly old and I have known nothing. Only two men in all my life, Jarvis and Philip. I have wasted my youth, the body God gave me, I have muffled it up with respectability and the terror of experience. I have given myself away, for the sake of my children, my husband, my home: I have been the doctor’s wife, mother to the doctor’s children: I have been daughter to Winifred. Is there nothing left of me?

She moans. Hilary turns to look at her, curiously.

‘Don’t you like it down here?’ Hilary enquires. ‘It is rather spooky. Do you think mother’s haunting it? I am a bit frightened. Though why one should be frightened of one’s own mother … We had awful rows sometimes. She’d get angry with me and I’d get angry with her, and that was fine except I’d stop being angry and then I’d feel dreadful, as if there was nothing beneath me to walk on, only a kind of nothingness. I feel a bit like that now. There’s black all around.’

Hilary raises her voice.

‘Mother, mother do you hear me. You had no business dying. Leaving me alone like this.’

‘Quiet,’ begs Margot. ‘Hush.’

‘Leaving me to Lily,’ shrieks Hilary, into the blackness. Then her anger ebbs and she cries instead. ‘It was awful at the pictures last night,’ she complains through her sobs. ‘I couldn’t think of anything to say to Jarvis. I never can. It’s so embarrassing.’

Margot is dizzy. Her breath comes in gasps. Objects round her lose definition. Piles of clothing lie around her like hills in a night landscape.

‘If you want to come and live with me,’ she says, ‘you can.’ And instantly feels better, except for panic fear that Hilary might accept, and then what would she do? What would Philip say? Lettice, Laurence?