Remember Me (25 page)

Dr P. Bailey

Surgery: 9-11 5-7 Mon-Fri.

Sats: emergencies only 9-12.

Margot has turned this corner how many thousands of times? Wheeled Laurence’s pushchair, Lettice’s pram, up and over the kerb; carried Laurence in the full flight of tantrum, kicking and biting, tucked under her arm, herself nervous of the neighbours’ censure; carried Lettice unconscious, bleeding, fallen out of a tree, up the path and into the surgery; heavy as lead, light as a feather.

Ordinary life!

Turned the corner in stiletto heels, walking shoes, fashion boots: in her best evening dress; in her pregnancy smock; in her milkstained shirt, running out between feeds to buy baby Lettice a comforter—in the face of Philip’s wishes. That being the year comforters were unhygienic.

Margot has driven out from this drive, sitting beside Philip, in consecutively, a Ford Anglia, a Vauxhall Victor, a Volkswagen Van (that was in the camping days) and a Volvo Estate: sometimes bored, sometimes sulky, mostly brave, good, enduring, self-sacrificing; sitting in the back because the children loved the front, going on outings she never enjoyed except for the children’s sake; staying up late to make the sandwiches, prepare the flasks of soup, gather the cushions and rugs together which would in the end only crowd her out of her own seat.

Margot has seen the blossom on the flowering cherry come and go. Lately she has seen the big elm on the far side of the street felled.

Ordinary life! Home and safety.

The doctor’s cat sits on the porch roof, ears flickering in the twilight. How he gets up there no one knows.

Trees crowd around the home, shading it, so flowers seldom grow, only leaves. No one has the heart to fell the trees.

This is the front door where no one was refused. The lame, the sick, the distressed, the homeless, came knocking here, and were at least in part satisfied.

Every cushion inside is familiar; its goose down, chicken feather or Terylene pulp innards known and noted; every chip on every skirting can be accounted for. That was where we moved the piano. That was where Laurence’s awful friend once booted the wall, in an excess of energy. That was where Philip tried to open a jar of gherkins, and broke the glass but didn’t shift the lid.

One day, thinks Margot, one day there will be time to see to the trees, see to the garden, see to the skirtings, see to myself, see to everything.

But by the time there is time to see to myself, thinks Margot, what will there be left to see to? One old woman in a wheelchair, staring at photographs of her greatgrandchildren? If she’s lucky.

Margot goes down the side of the home, brushing past the damp rhododendron bushes, which flourish flowerless in the shade, cramped up against the neighbour’s fence. The cat follows Margot. How did he get down from the porch roof? No one knows, yet here he is.

Margot pushes open the back door. There’s the kitchen, clean, familiar and practical. Lettice and Laurence doing their homework.

Ordinary life!

Where’s mother been? In the arms of a lesbian lady: in the arms of her employer whom she has named (if only he’d been listening) as her son’s father. That’s where mother’s been. Inside Madeleine’s body, cold as ice, chilling proper response. Or Madeleine inside her, warming her up to unspeakable deeds; puppet performances, joyless and nostalgic: jerky spasm of change and acceptance.

Margot steps across the threshold and stares inimically at Lettice and Laurence. A blast of cold air comes in with her, raising the papers on the table, the hairs on their arms. Slowly their heads rise: they look back at her, unsmilingly. What have they to do with her, or she with them. So, she spewed them out into the world: baby fish into the stream of life: that was her compulsion, her event, not theirs.

Do they catch her indifference, or she theirs? Momentarily, it is mutual. Do they see her as some disagreeable, not altogether well-intentioned stranger, standing on their doorstep? Yes. Self-interest rules them. Thus they said in their tender years, if she dies, who’d look after us? Gran? An orphanage? Good. They have the colour telly there. Die, mother, we don’t care. Or tenderer, angrier still: die, mother, you’re horrible. We’ll cut you up like the cat’s dinner and put you in the dustbin.

Thus, through fair thoughts and foul, we all achieve our independence: swim off, like the cold fish we are.

Ordinary life!

The doctor’s cat slips in between Margot’s legs, then turns his rusty head, his round green eyes, to stare at her, and arches his back, and yowls and spits and retreats back into the dark again.

‘What’s the matter with the cat?’ enquires Lettice. ‘He’s acting the way I feel.’

‘Perhaps Mum’s possessed,’ says Laurence, ‘and that’s why she’s late home.’

‘Don’t talk about me as she,’ says Margot in her nasty harsh voice, ‘I’m not the cat’s mother.’

‘Do you think she could turn her head through 180°?’ enquires Lettice coldly, of her brother.

‘I hope she doesn’t try,’ says Laurence. ‘She’d only be sick with green vomit.’

Their talk does not amuse their mother: nor was it intended to. She stands where she is, and sways, hollow-eyed, her left hand beating and beating against her chest. Her children become frightened.

‘We were only joking,’ says Laurence. ‘You’re not really possessed.’

‘Bastard,’ she says. ‘Little bastard.’

Poor Laurence’s crimson cheeks grow darker still.

‘I’ll fetch Dad,’ says Lettice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her today.’

Or as Lettice says afterwards to Andrew Monk, a boy in her class, who, though under age, possesses a motorbike, ‘It must have been the menopause. She’s changed completely. She was like a different person.’

‘She ought to have oestrogen therapy,’ says Andrew. ‘It makes all the difference, I believe.’

Ordinary life!

Jarvis and Lily sit in the Casualty Department of the hospital and wait. Their car is parked on double yellow lines and is quite likely to incur a parking fine, which is now Jarvis’s main concern. So far as he can see there is nothing wrong with Jonathon, who sleeps peacefully in his father’s arms. Lily, however, is convinced that Jonathon is in a coma. There is no one available to reassure her. The department is busy. Lily and Jarvis, having registered their presence at the reception desk, must now wait. Nurses come and go, out of one door, into another: no one bothers to attend to Jonathon. Jarvis drowses, dreams of scarlet Poppy.

Lily is frightened. Lily, who cannot remember, as a child, a girl, a woman, ever wanting her mother, now wants her mother.

Ida, help me.

Ida, who married beneath her, married a butcher. Night of the long knives. Night after night. Until she took herself and Lily and newborn Rose off to Long Bay, Coromandel, and the Kiwi Tea House, and the truckloads of American servicemen.

From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli and don’t forget the Tea House, that little wooden shack perched on top of a sand dune, vibrating like a drum when wind and rain bounced upon its corrugated iron roof, and don’t forget the tea lady’s pale little daughter Lily, first shrinking, then beckoning, behind the white sand dunes and the bleached and stinking piles of driftwood.

One moonlit winter night, here at the very edge of the world, Baby Rose wandered off into the dark, and was found next morning floating face downwards in the rock pool Lily loved the best, where the crimson sea-anemones grew.

After the funeral (Lily didn’t go) Lily’s father reappeared, striding lopsided over the dunes, and took Lily and Ida home.

Did Lily push the misbegotten Rose into the rock pool, to be clutched and sucked at by the crimson anemones, as the long-toothed servicemen had clutched and sucked at her? Of course not.

Though had Lily thought of it, had Lily dared, Lily would have. And if the imagining is as bad as the doing, then Lily was to blame.

Well, Rose’s death solved so very many problems. Rose’s very life was an act of hostility against her family; her birth a declaration of war upon her mother. Love me, lose everything, cried Baby Rose, stretching up her tiny arms. There are such children. Lose me, gain everything.

Lily got her father back. Alas, so did Ida, rather spoiling things. Well, two’s better than three, and at least Baby Rose was out of the way, dead as a doornail, using up no more love and attention. And presently Lily could push Ida out, more or less, surpassing her mother, as daughters do. Mothers grow old.

Lily got Jarvis from Madeleine. Or almost. At least it was a good try. Now Madeleine’s out of the way, dead as a doornail.

Lily’s got what she always wanted. Sole possession.

Why now does Lily sit upon the hospital bench, in a frenzy of silent terror, calling upon Ida in her heart?

Ida, forgive me, help me, don’t punish me.

Madeleine, forgive me, help me, don’t punish me.

But Jonathon’s little foot slips out from beneath the blanket. It is piteously red and raw as if sucked at by a myriad acid tendrils.

Even Jarvis can see it now.

‘I say,’ says Jarvis in surprise, ‘it is rather a mess.’

‘Do something,’ begs Lily of Jarvis but Jarvis seems paralysed by the atmosphere, the institution, his own medical ignorance and his lack of trust in Lily’s panic, in Lily’s version of events.

‘You have to expect to wait,’ says Jarvis, ‘this is an emergency hospital.’

‘But supposing he loses his foot,’ she implores. ‘Look at it!’

And indeed, Jonathon’s entire foot seems to be swelling beneath their eyes. Lily wrenches her child out of Jarvis’s arms and carries him over to the nurse behind the reception desk.

‘Please,’ she begs. ‘Look at his foot. He must see somebody at once.’

The nurse looks puzzled.

‘It’s nothing much, mother,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid you are going to have to wait for half an hour or so. The doctors are busy. We have all the intensive care units in operation. Please sit down and wait quietly. The little boy is sleeping nicely: he isn’t in pain.’

But Jonathon tosses and moans in Lily’s arms. The nurse is clearly lying.

Oh, I am Lily, Jonathon’s mother, as I’ve never felt it before. The world in conspiracy against me. Is this what it’s like to be a mother? Was this what you felt like, Ida, when you found Baby Rose missing from her bed, and there were no neighbours, no one to help, and you ran the length of the lonely beach, up and down, up and down, looking, and when the dawn came, what did you find?

Poor mother, poor Ida, poor Baby Rose. I’m sorry. So sorry. Poor me.

Lily cries. Jarvis pats Lily’s hand.

‘It’s all right, Lily,’ he says. ‘Jonathon’s all right. He just needs some kind of injection.’

‘It’s Madeleine,’ says Lily. ‘She’s doing it to him. I know she is.’

‘We none of us behaved very well,’ says Jarvis.

Madeleine, I’m sorry.

Good behaviour? What’s that?

Not an activity much reckoned by those in the grip of incestuous passion, certainly. To those not involved, good behaviour may well be not leaving your wife for your partner’s young secretary. (But how great the temptation, the renewal of youth!) Nor may it be going to bed, after long and romantic delays, with your boss’s married partner. (But what vigorous young woman, erotically inclined towards her father, can resist a married man?)

‘Lily’s been turned out of her flat by a mad landlady,’ says Jarvis to Madeleine one evening. ‘She’ll have to come here, and use the spare room. It’s no use getting hysterical. You’ve always told me sexual jealousy was degrading—now’s the time to practice what you preach. Besides, she’s pregnant.’

Does Lily tremble as she approaches Madeleine’s territory? Does she hesitate as she goes up the linoed stairs to the spare room, with the ugly red roses on the peeling fawn wallpaper?

No.

That wallpaper will have to go, is what Lily thinks. And Jarvis is mine, and mine alone, thinks Lily, if she thinks, by virtue of my love for him.

‘The next few days won’t be pleasant,’ Lily tells her best friend Alice, who sits open-mouthed and marvelling. ‘But I’ve got to do it. His wife is so thick-skinned and insensitive, she just won’t budge, otherwise.’

Madeleine budges. Madeleine does. Madeleine takes some good towels and the best tablecloths with her, grabbing what she can, breaking a few windows as she goes, spilling ink into Lily’s suitcases—and all in front of poor little Hilary.

Madeleine’s quite mad. Jarvis and Lily agree.

Poor Lily, Jarvis comforts her. What she has to put up with!

Later there’s the restraining order, to stop Madeleine pushing, punching and snatching Lily, as Lily walks up Madeleine’s path to Madeleine’s front door.

Well, Madeleine shouldn’t have left. All the lawyers agree. Lily’s path. Lily’s front door.

Oh, punishment!

Lily rocks to and fro with Jonathon against her pretty brown-tipped breast. Nurses go to and fro, not bothering. Jarvis takes Lily’s hand. She shakes it off.

‘If I didn’t behave very well,’ says Lily, evilly, ‘I’m paying for it now, aren’t I?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m landed with Hilary,’ says Lily. It’s an easier thought than that she’s going to lose Jonathon.

‘I thought you wanted her,’ says Jarvis, baffled.

‘I didn’t ever want her; I just wanted to be better than Madeleine at bringing her up,’ cries Lily, into the antiseptic silence. Jarvis does not reply.

Jonathon’s foot throbs. He moans and tosses.

‘You’re so useless,’ says Lily to Jarvis, ‘I’m never going to have another child, not with you as a father.’

Lily’s own first pregnancy, the cause of her moving into the spare room, evaporated after two nights spent with Jarvis beneath the peeling, splodgy roses. Whether the bleeding started as the result of his ardour or because the pregnancy had only existed in her imagination, Lily never knew. She had dreadful period pains that month, anyway.

Jonathon, child brought to fruition, moans. He is in pain.

Oh, punishment! Madeleine, I’m sorry. Ida, forgive me. I’ll write to you tomorrow.

All this, for what? For Jarvis?

To have a husband is nothing. To be a wife is nothing. Sex is an idle pastime. To be a mother is all that counts. Lily recognises it now, and the shock of the discovery numbs her for a moment to the anxiety and distress which accompanies the state of motherhood. Then it surges back.