Remember Me (6 page)

‘What a dreadful place,’ says Madeleine to the stolid little body who opens the door. ‘I know now why I haven’t bothered to see it before. No wonder Hilary gets sick every Friday. It’s the thought of Saturday and Sunday.’

Madeleine! thinks Margot. Madeleine the ogre, the vampire, looking not so much dangerous as dirty and depressed. Madeleine, whom Margot once wronged, or would have done, in a world where women felt a sense of sisterhood, and not of competition. Madeleine brought down, reduced, humbled by life and Lily.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ says Margot mildly. ‘You should have seen it before.’

‘I did,’ says Madeleine sourly. Yes, of course. Madeleine once lived here. And here, under this very roof, Jarvis betrayed her. ‘Of course when I was with Jarvis he wouldn’t spend a penny on a new electric fire. Mean! Well, you’ll know what he’s like. You’re the secretary. Where’s Hilary? I know Lily’s taken Hilary. I’ve been to the school. What does she mean to do? Take out her white teeth and put in gold?’

‘They’ve gone to the hairdresser,’ says Margot unwisely, ‘not the dentist.’

Madeleine’s anger is mitigated by the gratification of finding Lily in the wrong, but she is nonetheless angry. ‘She took my daughter out of school to take her to the hairdresser? She told my daughter’s teachers lies?’ Madeleine sits down. Her toenails are dirty: her sandal-strap repaired with a nappy pin. Madeleine’s next sentences ought to be: ‘I’ll go to my solicitor. I’ll claim custody, care and control. Hilary shall never come to this house again.’ But Madeleine values her peaceful weekends: her Saturday and her Sunday, minus Hilary, marked by nothing more demanding than the change of programme on the radio. So Madeleine’s indignation loses its force.

‘I don’t want my daughter’s hair done by some poofy hairdresser,’ is all she says. ‘I want her to have her hair washed and combed like any other girl of her age. You don’t think Lily’s going to have it cut? She wouldn’t dare. I’d strangle her if she did.’

‘It’s a very good hairdresser,’ says Margot. What else can she say?

‘I doubt very much that it’s a good one,’ says Madeleine, ‘though I dare say it’s expensive.’

Margot smiles unwillingly. Is there a complicity between the two women? Yes. They are united in something not very nice: a dislike of Lily for being what they would hate to be, yet want to be. And besides, Jarvis wronged Margot: Jarvis wronged Madeleine. They are sisters in rejection, if nothing else.

‘At least,’ says Madeleine, ‘Hilary’s not been used to babysit for the snotty brat.’ Madeleine slipped a disc the week Jonathon was born, and lay on her back, in hospital and out of it, for some three months after the birth. The pain was intense, overwhelming even grief and jealousy. These days she contents herself with referring to Jonathon as the snotty brat. Jonathon should think himself lucky it’s no worse.

‘No,’ says Margot, oh, wicked Margot, ‘I’m doing that today.’ Madeleine smiles.

‘Fancy finding a human being in this shit-house,’ says Madeleine. ‘But you’re the doctor’s wife, aren’t you? Hilary told me about you.’

There Margot sits, in another woman’s house, on that woman’s enemy’s side. Oh, Margot feels pleasure in it. A manic malice, momentary but there: felt like a contraction in her private parts. Was it malice, or desire, which led her up the stairs with Jarvis, Madeleine’s husband? Love of the male, or spite against the female?

‘Jonathon isn’t a snotty brat,’ says Margot, in the interests of truth and kindness, recalled to sanity by her fondness for Jonathon. ‘He’s a very nice child.’

‘Then I can’t think who he takes after. Can you?’

‘Hilary is very fond of him. So am I.’

‘Yes, but you’re very nice,’ says Madeleine. ‘The mother we should all have had.’ And then, the words issuing out of some blackness in her head. ‘If anything happens to me I don’t want them to have Hilary. I’d like you to take her.’

Margot is startled. Madeleine sits on the edge of the white woolly sofa, her jeans limp with age yet stiffened by grease, dirty toe tapping. But Madeleine’s face, downcast, is beautiful: her voice seems to come out of the future, or the past, to have been heard by Margot over and over again: and her very words have the ring of familiarity.

‘What should happen to you?’ says Margot eventually. ‘I don’t know,’ says Madeleine. ‘I look forward into the future and it’s black. It’s my only real worry: what would happen to Hilary if I died? And all kinds of things happen to people. You put all your eggs into one basket and the handle breaks. Look at me. Yolk and mess everywhere. Now look!’

Now look indeed. What a handsome girl she’d been; up from the sticks, bright as a button. A father lost to another woman, true: a mother half blind, suffering from epilepsy (a war-wound really; struck on the head by an aircraft propeller when a young WRAC, though she must have been half-daft, to begin with, to have been standing in its way, as Madeleine kept remarking, entertaining her student friends with funny tales from family history—well, how else to deal with it?)—but never mind, for a time, at any rate, for lovely lively Madeleine, youth, energy and hope seemed to be winning over the disappointment of childhood, and idealism over anger, and her own griefs sublimating nicely, even creatively, into understanding and compassion. But then what happened? What does happen? The scar tissue of the past, as youth fades, hardening, coruscating, making itself more and more felt; or perhaps the prognosis was just too optimistic in the first place? Madeleine, linked to Jarvis—a man amiable enough, surely: without malice (much) and an inheritance to boot—abandoning her studies, her life, herself, in the interests of art (oh Art, Art, what deeds are not committed in thy name?). Madeleine, linked to Jarvis, suffered some kind of dismal change. Principle degenerated into self-righteousness. The sense of shared sorrow into self-pity.

As to love, after thirteen years of marriage Madeleine has all but forgotten what the word means. Jarvis, of course, has not. Sex is good enough for Madeleine, not for Jarvis. Jarvis falls in love with Lily. Who’s to blame him? His solicitors hurried the divorce through three months before the Married Woman’s Property Act came into effect. (Madeleine’s solicitors, of course, had not even heard of it.)

Who will take responsibility for Madeleine’s situation?

No one.

Madeleine must shoulder it herself. Madeleine means to do so. Something in Madeleine, something somewhere, perhaps her sleeping, not her waking self, doesn’t give up: intends eventually to return—perhaps after the menopause, when she can be her wombless, uncyclical self again—to the glory and cheerfulness of her youth.

Madeleine should get a move on, if that’s the case.

‘Be careful,’ says Madeleine to Margot now, ‘it could happen to you.’

Margot smiles, embarrassed. She feels threatened. Philip fall in love, run off, leave, abandon her? Is this what Madeleine is wishing on her, in return for that passing complicity? One should leave misfortune alone: stand well clear. Bad luck is as catching as the measles.

‘You may think I’m a neurotic bore,’ says Madeleine, ‘but it seems to me to be the least I can do for my sex to set myself up an object lesson. The world being what it is (not to mention me). I’m not the kind of person of whom people say, what a lot of friends she has, how truly gay and popular—using gay in either sense, though I’ve tried that too—and the upshot being, I’m all Hilary has. That’s where it all leads one. Mother and daughter. How it starts, how it ends.’

‘She has her father,’ says Margot.

‘Jarvis? He’s no kind of father to her. And what kind of man is he? A nothing. Jarvis had a little talent once: but he was too trivial to sustain it. He drank it all away. And then, of course, Lily got hold of him. All he’s got left is his business and that’s failing, and of course his cock, but who could sustain an interest in that? I couldn’t, I’m sure.’

Jarvis’s cock. Margot shivers not just at the crudity of the words, but at the shame of the memory.

The sense of complicity has gone. Margot is alienated, as perhaps Madeleine intended. But the complicity was there, for long enough. Some connection has been made; some fragile cogs have interlinked. Malice is a powerful force. Margot’s malice, unacknowledged, welling up, spilling over, perhaps more powerful than most. The flicker of an unkind smile, returned: the sly look, amusingly exchanged, and more travels between two people than you might suppose; the very devil floating, as you might say, on the beam of interpersonal communication.

B
E BOLD!

Madeleine, returning home, finds a letter from a computer-dating firm, giving the name and telephone number of a Mr Arthur Quincey of Cambridge as a possible marital contact. (See how Madeleine, clinging to the past, still scrabbles for a future?) Mr Quincey is described in the letter as being forty-three years old, tall, slim, dark, Anglo-Saxon, well-educated, owning own house and having no objection to slim dark lady under forty with own child. Madeleine rings the Cambridge number: a landlady fetches Mr Quincey; Madeleine finds she has agreed to be in Cambridge, yes, Cambridge, at seven thirty that evening in order to be taken to the pictures. Mr Quincey’s voice has a quiet, wheedling insistence; she recognises it as the voice of the male in the grip of sexual desperation, whose determination it is to bring fantasy down to the realms of reality. It is hard to resist.

‘It’s like being a girl again,’ she complains to Renee, who lives above Madeleine, on the ground floor. Renee has left her husband, and had her children taken from her. It is a house full of women without men, and children without fathers. As you begin, so you end. ‘To-ing and fro-ing to the snap of male fingers. Only in the old days one did it in hope, now it’s in terror.’

‘Terror of what?’ Renee is a delicate, wide-eyed young woman, fresh, long-legged and clear-complexioned, like some outdoor girl on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Renee has two equally pretty little daughters, sometimes with her. Renee claims to be bitter; Renee was abandoned by her father, and then abandoned her husband. Renee has, she says, renounced men. Renee has her girlfriends instead, from whom, physically and emotionally, she extracts comfort, company and solace. From time to time Renee kindly offers the same to Madeleine, in the shape of a warm and companionable bed, but Madeleine is too conscious of her own raggedy body and troubled mind to be able to offer herself on such simple terms. Although, as Renee complains, she seems perfectly well able to offer herself to any passing man.

‘Terror of loneliness,’ says Madeleine. ‘And being rejected, and of loss of status, and the general humiliation of being a woman without a man. Isn’t that terror enough?’

‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ says Renee. ‘You think life for a woman has to revolve round a man.’

‘I can’t help it,’ says Madeleine, old Madeleine, to this silky young woman. ‘I feel it does, though I know it doesn’t. Without a man to revolve around, I scarcely seem to exist. Yet when I had one, I was brave enough.’

So she was. Bold, too bold! Neglecting the washing-up on the grounds that it was trivial, housework humiliating, cooking a waste of human energy and world resources. Taught within a year of marriage that sexual fidelity was meaningless, Madeleine learnt the lesson well. Once having discovered Jarvis, disappeared at his own twenty-ninth birthday party to the (comparative) privacy of the spare room, interrupted him in mid-intercourse with a dumpy nurse, on the spare bed amongst the guests’ coats, and having retreated unseen, too distressed to speak or make her presence known, too shocked for action, then recovered quickly and set about using the incident to her own advantage.

‘Jealousy,’ Madeleine would say, returning home to Jarvis from God knows where but suspiciously late, smelling of drink and sex, ‘is such a low, disgusting emotion! Don’t you think so? Surely we’re above that, you and me? We agreed before we were married that we would never be sexually possessive.’ And though no such agreement had ever been made, though Jarvis had no idea that Madeleine had discovered him and the transient Margot (for Margot it was, though Madeleine never knew her name, never saw her face) together on the bed that rainy birthday night amongst the damp coats, something in Jarvis, amounting perhaps to sheer forgetfulness, but no doubt bolstered up by some weakness, some guilt, some meanness learnt from his stepfather, prevented him from finding the energy to contradict her. Easier, for a time, to admire her.

Madeleine was brave, oh yes she was, with the courage of anger: what an angry little girl she’d been, smearing the walls with far worse than puffed wheat, swearing at her mother, arms clutched round her father’s pillar legs (in the process of being dislodged, she’d once had her thumb broken, so possessive, so determined, so desperate was her grasp).

‘Someone’s chalked a sentence on a wall in Shepherd’s Bush,’ says Renee now. ‘It says—a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ But Renee offers Madeleine the loan of her new white silk shirt for the evening, though it is much against her principles. Pandering to heterosexual vanities! Madeleine accepts, with pleasure. Quincey is a nice name, Madeleine thinks. Madeleine Quincey.

The afternoon proceeds.

Hilary, horrified by her appearance, leaves the hairdresser in tears. Lily is irritated by this display of ingratitude, and what is more, is landed with Hilary for the rest of the day. For Hilary refuses to return to school: not only will it be quite obvious to everyone that she has been to the hairdresser, and not to the dentist, but how can she face her classmates looking such a freak?

Margot collects Jonathon from playgroup, takes him home with her and serves veal-and-ham pie and salad for lunch. She bandages Laurence’s bruised hand, assuming, rightly, that Philip will not have the time to do so. Lettice declines to have Jonathon sit upon her knee. Lettice always appears fearful of the demands of babies and small children.

Laurence tells Lettice that in the last 600,000 years some 74,000,000,000 people have been born and died. ‘So what,’ says Lettice. The children return to school. Philip returns to his rounds. Three flu’s, one pneumonia, one tonsillitis, one manic depression, and one terminal cancer.