Remember Me (4 page)

Nothing wrong with such restitutions. On the contrary. We must rescue the nation’s past, if we wish to rescue our own. Jarvis says so. Jarvis knows. In this wisdom Jarvis has educated Lily.

Lily and Jarvis.

When Madeleine and Jarvis lived at 12 Adelaide Row it had no such social, aesthetic and emotional distinction. It was an ordinary house, practical and ugly. In Madeleine’s day, Jarvis’s talents never bloomed. How could they? Madeleine made no concessions to the beauties of the material world. Tat and junk, she’d say, trendy rubbish, vicious Victoriana, and millions starving in Ethiopia, or burning in Vietnam, wherever the season’s human ulcer happened to manifest itself; can’t you, Jarvis, turn your mind to anything more serious than a rotten old sampler badly embroidered by some miserable child in 1825? If you want to throw your money away, give it to Shelter and help house the homeless.

Because you are unhappy, Madeleine, shall there be no small delights for Jarvis?

No, there shan’t.

And Jarvis earned £5,000 a year as an architect, at a time when the sum meant something, but even this Madeleine could not approve. Shouldn’t you be a council architect, she’d ask? Shouldn’t you be turning your undoubted talent to some useful end? Instead of designing ridiculous modern villas on insanitary sunny slopes for ex-whores, property developers and other social criminals?

And so of course Jarvis should, and he knew it, which made matters worse. Madeleine was always right.

Nonetheless, as Lily later pointed out, Madeleine used the money Jarvis earned at his immoral tasks. Madeleine went on countless coach holidays with little Hilary, leaving Jarvis behind at the office, earning; and believing (as they both did; well, at any rate, she did) in the immorality of sexual possessiveness, Madeleine passed many a stopover night (or so it was imagined by Jarvis, and later Lily) in bed with the current courier; exercising her sexual rights in bleak bedrooms overlooking the teeming roads of Europe and the East. Madeleine even went as far as Turkey once, and heaven knows what oriental sexual athleticism that didn’t lead to! And what happened to little Hilary, alone (or so one hopes) in the next bedroom? How did little Hilary regard her mother’s quest for fun and self-expression; returning from abroad, as she would, even yet sulkier, blanker, and snottier than when she left? Hilary’s mind not so much broadened, as stunned.

Poor Jarvis, poor father.

Oh, I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I want Jarvis to be happy, to be himself, to be with me. I even want Hilary, Jarvis’s child. I want Hilary to be happy too, to make up for all the things she’s lost, all the things Madeleine has taken from her. I want to show everyone what a truly successful person I am: wife, daughter, mother, stepmother. Sister? No, don’t think of that.

Lily waits for Margot to arrive. Lily, waiting, telephones the hairdresser, and makes an appointment for that very morning, to have her own and Hilary’s done. It had not, until now, been her firm intention to do so, more a speculation for Jarvis’s benefit. Margot’s lateness, and the irritation it causes, drives Lily to action. Once done, she regrets it; how is she going to fit everything in? Too late now.

The milk, forgotten, would have boiled over if it hadn’t been prudently placed to heat (if slowly) on the simmer plate. Lily always puts the milk on the simmer plate.

Good Lily!

And here we are at last. The Victorian doorbell rings and here is Margot the doctor’s wife; she is late; she is breathless, but she is here. She has no key. Lily is very retentive of front-door keys. And her coffee is ready.

See, how hospitable, how tolerant, how understanding of the needs of others am I? Lily the architect’s wife! The servant is late and I’m giving her coffee!

Alas, the milk has turned in the pan. The coffee is undrinkable. Lily and Margot unite in deploring a world now so crassly run that the very milk is delivered to the door half-sour, or what passes for sour in these days of homogenisation, sterilisation and so on. A new cup of coffee is made, with different milk.

‘I was wondering,’ asks Lily, at last, ‘if you could possibly take Jonathon to playgroup today?’

These two women do not compose a family: they are not a secret society: there is little need for riddles. Lily (in her white cheesecloth Laura Ashley dress, unspotted by breakfast) can ask Margot (in her navy C & A skirt and pink fluffy M & S jumper) a straight question and get a straight reply.

‘Of course,’ says Margot. ‘Since it’s Monday. Invoice day. I’ll get those done with no trouble.’ There are, this month, some twenty per cent fewer invoices than there were in the same month a year ago. Lily is quite right to assume that Jarvis and his partners in architecture are in difficulties. There has been a twenty per cent redundancy in their staff, a twenty per cent inflation during the year, and twenty per cent drop in business. Lily lies awake at night, just occasionally worrying about it all, but Jarvis does not.

Jarvis has an inheritance; private means. How exotic, Lily used to feel, when first she met him, this simple fact. Jarvis’s inheritance. Later she came to see it as something which stood between Jarvis and the proper acceptance of reality—by which she meant, of course, herself. Once or twice she has even complained of having been seduced by his past. No one in New Zealand had inheritances. It seemed to be symptomatic of the English.

‘I’m going to take Hilary to have her hair cut,’ Lily announces. ‘It’s such a mess.’

‘Is she off school?’ enquires Margot. Margot feels tenderly protective towards Hilary, this ugly duckling in a household of swans.

‘I’ll take her out of school,’ says Lily. ‘No hassle. She only has swimming this morning and I’m sure she’s forgotten her things anyway, I’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s going to the dentist. But they won’t ask. They won’t know and even if they did they won’t care. Hilary is totally anonymous in that place. Two thousand five hundred children in a school; what madness! Comprehensive! My husband was quite prepared to send Hilary to a private school, but of course Madeleine has her principles, for which poor little Hilary has to pay the price.’

Lily likes to emphasise, when she can, the fact of Jarvis’s basic generosity towards his first family. Jarvis rashly leaves letters from his ex-wife’s solicitors for Margot to open and deal with; Lily wishes he wouldn’t.

‘I may be delayed,’ Lily murmurs. ‘You know what hairdressers are like. Do you have to leave sharp at twelve thirty? I was wondering whether you could possibly collect Jonathon at twelve forty-five?’ Margot, the implication is, has arrived late and so in all fairness should surely stay late.

‘The children come home for lunch,’ says Margot. ‘I must have it ready.’

‘Don’t they have school dinner?’

‘They don’t care for them.’

Silence. What, children thus unregulated and untrammelled? Jonathon, better brought up, always eats what is set before him.

‘Personally, I never eat lunch,’ says Lily, blandly. ‘So bad for the figure.’

I live a good and useful life, murmurs stocky Margot in her heart. I would be ashamed to go hungry in order to be beautiful. Is there something wrong with me? No. I am a good and serviceable person, wife and mother. My reward is in my children’s love of me, and mine in them; and my soft, familiar, permanent bed. I am a nice person. Your husband, yes your husband, told me so many years ago. He has forgotten—at least I hope he has—but I have not, and true he was drunk at the time, and married to Madeleine, which may have distorted his judgment, but Jarvis told me then that he preferred nice girls to beautiful girls! and what’s more that my nipples were pale and blunt and pink and that’s what he liked, he couldn’t bear the harsh brown aggressive kind, and that, I’m sorry to say, is what yours are, slim hungry wife of my employer; I can see them through your dress.

Margot knows she is being unfair. Who of us can help the texture of our nipples? A momentary surge of irritation, no doubt, of guilt about Jarvis, for which she will now pay penance.

‘I’ll take Jonathon home to lunch with me,’ she says. ‘And drop him back this afternoon.’

Guilt, about Jarvis?

Guilt, surely, is too strong a word. What, for something that happened fifteen years ago, when the world was young, and still full of causes and few effects? Surely not. Margot did no wrong, or none that she could recognise. She was not married at the time. True, Jarvis was, but could Margot fairly be expected to take responsibility for, let alone stand in the way of, the imperatives of male desire? And it can’t have been a good marriage anyway, or why would Jarvis have wanted to sweep her out of a party, up the linoed stairs, and into the spare room? A one night stand, no more, no less.

True, Margot was disappointed the next day (whoever isn’t) when the next day came, and the next, and there was no telephone call from Jarvis, no declaration of true love; no such magic, apparently, discovered in her body as would transfigure his life.

But it was a disappointment muted not by experience (and experience indicates that in nine out of ten of these passing sexual encounters, no particular magic is discovered, no great alliances made—but on the tenth—ah! happiness, fulfilment! Love enough to make up for the pain of the nine? Well, more or less) not muted by any such experience, any such calculating promiscuity in the interests of eventual respectability, but by a general apprehension of herself, a thorough muted expectation of life and the part she was to play in it.

Margot, born to be useful; daughter, wife, mother. This excursion into the erotic, this placing of her on him, for that was where he placed her, the better to admire her sweet pink nipples, scarcely seemed a proper part of her nature.

The activity, she felt, contained its own punishment: if virtue carries its own reward, so does sin carry with it a cosmic slapping of the hand, a down, you naughty girl, you presume: when lust fades, the sense of looking silly remains; and some slight knowledge of a door having opened and closed on the fringes of the memory.

Poor Margot, only too happy, after a silent day or two, to forget.

Later, when Jarvis and Lily became Philip’s patients, and baby Jonathon too, and Jarvis was overworked and underslept, and the strain of Jonathon’s early feeding problems telling upon him, not to mention Lily, it was Philip who suggested that Margot could go and work as Jarvis’s part-time secretary—thus killing three birds with one stone, his wife’s restlessness (well, the children were now increasingly busy with their own lives), his patient’s declared need for tranquillisers, and his own monetary difficulties—the latter admittedly too great and hefty a bird to be brought down by such a tiny shaft, but winging the creature nonetheless. A step in the right direction.

Philip always had the feeling, lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, unspoken, that Margot was ungrateful when it came to money, and did not quite recognise the difficulty with which it was earned, nor her good fortune in being allowed to spend what was by rights his and his alone.

Margot, meeting Jarvis for the second time, going to a house which she only dimly remembered, and now found altogether changed, thirteen years after that passionate, private (or so she believes) encounter, recognised Jarvis at once. He did not recognise her. How could he? It had been a dimly-lit party, in the days when most people smoked, and the smell of hot punch had filled the air, and one girl had been much like another, tight-waisted and teetering around on stiletto heels. But one man, then as now, not much like another at all. Poor Margot. Lucky Jarvis.

Margot accepted the offer of a job with alacrity. Why should she not? The advantages were, on the surface, so many. Namely:

(a)
Ease of access

The Katkins lived within walking distance. Six and a half minutes (fast) or nine minutes (slow). She would not have to stand about in all weathers at bus-stops, as did Enid.

(b)
Good pay and conditions

The pay was generous, and the work easy. Twelve pounds a week for ten hours light secretarial duties in pleasant surroundings, architect designed.

(c)
Independence

Margot, at last, would be able to buy clothes without first having to persuade Philip that she needed them. (And Philip believed, profoundly, that the purpose of clothes was to keep the cold out.) She would no longer have to account for every penny which left her purse. Not that she had ever really objected to so doing—and indeed had become adept at covering the cost of unallowed frivolities such as bars of chocolate or cartons of hot tomato soup from vending machines, under the cover of increased expenditure on washing powder, dishcloths, and mango chutney (Philip’s favourite). It wasn’t, as Margot observed to Enid, that Philip was mean. (Look how he never grudged a penny on household necessities.) Just that she, Margot, was extravagant, and he, as the breadwinner, had every right to say just how much butter and how much jam would be spread on each particular slice. What’s more, she would say to Enid, she found the sense of her husband’s control comforting, and even his censure satisfactory. What she did not say, however, and what made her vaguely uneasy, was her awareness that this particular comfort and satisfaction contained a languorous, almost erotic, quality, as if the financial strictures within which her husband held her, had their counterpart in the bonds and whips of her (rare) sexual fantasies. Well, all that would have to stop. Employment, as Enid would say, was the answer to housewifely broodings and fantasies. Satan finds work for idle hands to do, and dreams for idle minds, while fingers play.

(d)
Work interest

Proximity to a new baby. Jonathon. Sprung from Jarvis’s lean loins and Lily’s shapely ones. Margot, a lover of infants, finding her own children now too old for handling but still too young to provide her with grandchildren, had begun to crave babies as some people, finding themselves inland, will crave for the sea; or in the middle of a plain, feel they cannot live without a glimpse of hills. Margot would have had a dozen babies if she had had her way. But fortunately she didn’t. Philip felt that to have two children was both sensible and social, as indeed it was. (One must consider the quality, rather more than the quantity, of the human race.) Margot, as a doctor’s wife, was one of the first women in London to have a contraceptive coil fitted. After the initial heavy bleeding and stomach pains she settled down to it well. Again, the sense of her husband’s coital interest, the gratification of his non-procreative wishes, the very carrying around, inside her, foetus-like, of something she felt so strongly to be his, not hers, caused in her the same languor, the same erotic debility, as did his weekly checking of the household accounts; the shrinking of the weak from the moral blows of the strong. The presence of the coil, moreover, added a sense of dishonesty, even of sin, to their marital embraces and enhanced them, she rather thought, the more. She would not, now, be without her coil. Though sometimes she feared, vaguely, it might be going rusty within, or flaking away in the face of her internal secretions.