Remember Me (11 page)

‘Of course, I didn’t pinch him,’ says Hilary, with the straight-forwardness of one fresh from sleep, ‘I love him.’

And the window bangs and rattles until Jarvis shuts it. Lily must have opened it. But why blame him?

‘This house is falling to bits,’ says Jarvis. ‘One day we’ll have to move. Go back to bed, Hilary. You’re indecent.’

Hilary blushes, clutches her open nightie together, and goes, not without a curious look at Margot, who is now sitting upright on the sofa, pink in the face and with the buttons of her dress undone and her brassière clearly unfastened, but otherwise composed. ‘I’m quite all right,’ says Margot. ‘I’m sorry, everyone. I’m really quite all right.’

I am Margot the doctor’s wife, fresh from public humiliation; what will they think of me? How will I face them again? Little Margot, all of five, wetting her pants at a party. Medium Margot, all of eleven, interrupting her parents’ lovemaking in the bath: big Margot, all of sixteen, bloodstains on the back of her dress, unnoticed, all day. Of such stuff are nightmares made; of deeds that cannot be undone: sights that cannot be unseen; neither time nor laughter can erase. Margot on the floor, writhing from a pain that went as quickly as it came, leaving not a trace behind, except the look in Lily’s eye, and Jarvis’s, and Jamie’s, and Judy’s, and Hilary’s even; and the tired pressure of Philip’s hand. When he is angry his face goes grey, heavy, like a stone. So it is now.

Philip smiles, talks, but his face is stone.

‘I think I’d better take you home,’ says Philip.

‘I don’t want to break up the party,’ says Margot.

Jonathon’s shrieks subside as Lily reaches his door: he is asleep again by the time she is by his bed: the only sign of his distress is a damp forehead and a tear left on his cheek.

Oh, I am Lily the second wife, mother of the first real child. Why am I frightened? I have done nothing wrong. Only what I had to, and all in the name of love. See how quietly he sleeps—my son, my dearest inconvenience. Why did he wake? Does Hilary love him? Or does she only pretend; was it hatred of him, her jealousy, that swept through the house like a whirlwind just now, flapping curtains, banging doors, frightening us all? What does Hilary plan, my stepdaughter, as she bounces my son, her rival, on her pudgy knees? She could so easily harm him; he is her rival, her replacement, usurper to her rightful throne. Push him too high on a swing, let his pushchair run into the road? No, she wouldn’t dare. I have shown her my strength: I have made my mark on her: I have cut her hair, her pretty hair.

By the time Hilary has climbed back into her bed, and Lily can go downstairs again, Margot and Philip are preparing to leave. The evening is over.

Or as Jarvis says to Lily later, ‘Let’s never give another dinner party, ever.’

Jamie and Judy depart, as quarrelsome as they came. That night Judy, on Jamie’s insistence, rides Jamie like a horse, taut neck stretched, head flung back, lean thighs gripping. It is not what she wants. She wants her boring husband back again, boringly on top of her, indifferent to her pleasure, quiet on account of the children sleeping in the room beside. She wants to be a housewife again, despised by the world, at peace with herself.

‘I love you,’ says Jamie.

‘I love you,’ says Judy.

Do they? Does she? Not to want is not not to love. There are as many different kinds of wanting, surely, as there are of loving, and there are as many kinds of loving as there are of conversations. Take the population of the world and divide by two, or if you must, three, and that’s how many kinds there are. Or so says Enid to her junior secretary (who is much impressed) but not, of course, to her husband Sam, who likes to be the one of the family to know about these things.

Enid sleeps uneasily that night, and waking, has to go down to the bathroom to spend a penny. Is she pregnant? Surely not. Enid has been taking the pill for fifteen years though Sam never wanted her to; but that was crazy, since he didn’t want children either. What were they supposed to do—live in fear? Lately the reason for taking it seemed largely to have evaporated, so she had stopped mid-month, for no reason she could really think of.

Sam sleeps heavily, without dreaming. He has drunk his usual nightly four whiskies and a bottle of good wine. Such a high consumption of alcohol—as Enid keeps observing—inhibits the normal dreaming function. ‘Dream deprivation,’ she keeps telling him, ‘does a man no good. You end up with DTs.’

But Sam takes no notice.

‘It’s sex deprivation,’ he says bitterly, ‘that’s all that’s the matter with me,’ and promptly falls asleep beside his resigned wife, Margot’s friend, who composes herself for sleep. What else can she do? In the morning, if all else fails, she gets up and pleasures herself with a cucumber, while Sam is in the bathroom. She doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t know. Well, they’re all getting older.

Miss Maguire, the doctor’s Monday patient, stirs in the heap of old blankets and coats, urine stiffened and cat-hair whitened, which makes up her bed. She dreams of 12 Adelaide Row, and the days of her youth, when she and Philippa Cutts were in service together. Poor Philippa died, in an influenza epidemic. Who remembers her now?

On the motorway, beneath the moon, ambulance men, policemen and wreckage crews work around the remains of Madeleine’s car. The motorway has to be closed; wreckage has been flung across the tarmac. The ambulance men remove the body, not forgetting the severed leg, which is wrapped in a plastic bag and placed next to its owner. When they tilt the stretcher to get it into the ambulance the sheet falls away from Madeleine’s face. It is the face of a living person in a deep sleep, thinks the attendant, although the state of the body is such that life cannot possibly be present. All the same, in the ambulance, he finds himself taking the pulse of the corpse, and even being anxious as his delicate fingers fail to find a response in the wrist.

What was he hoping for? Is he so convinced that life is better than death?

The AA man is sick. It is his first night on the job.

‘This is nothing,’ says the policeman, who had closed the staring eyes. ‘It’s when you find an eye looking up at you from a puddle—’

The AA man is sick again. He is in his early twenties, and used to be in insurance, until made redundant under the last-in-first-out policy, and thereupon succumbed to the lure of the open road.

The car is towed away. The policemen and the A.A. man depart. The moon shines calmly on, untouched, over the low sweep of the hills.

The ambulance driver means to deposit the body at the Stortford General Hospital morgue, but arriving, finds their freezer unit is giving trouble, and proceeds to Custerley Mortuary. Here he has some difficulty in persuading the authorities (namely Arthur, the mortician, white-coated and wearing slippers but no socks, and seventy-five if he’s a day) to accept a body not strictly their business, and poorly documented at that. ‘It’s asking for trouble,’ says Arthur.

It is Arthur’s assistant Clarence, a philosophy student on vacation, who belongs to a freer, less fearful generation who persuades his superior to relent. In any case Arthur wants to get back to bed.

The body is decanted on to a trolley and wheeled in, sheet-covered. Again the sheet slips from the head. The moon shines through the windows. Madeleine’s eyes, open again, catch the light and glitter. Her face, drained of blood, smoothed out, is as beautiful as it has ever been.

‘Poor lady,’ says Clarence, and the eyes close momentarily, but it is only, presumably, the trolley’s jolting over the uneven ground that gives this effect of the dead being alive again. ‘No seat belt, I suppose,’ says Arthur, whose custom it is to greet cadavers with some grudging remark, not so much, one might charitably suppose, because he wishes to be disagreeable, as to make himself, as well as them, feel that to be dead is not so different from being alive.

The police, meanwhile, have been doing their best to contact Jarvis. Madeleine always carries her marriage certificate, worn thin along the folds, in her handbag, together with the one affectionate letter from Jarvis she has ever received.

The handbag is of battered crocodile. Hilary found it in a skip when out on a treasure hunt expedition with Jarvis and Lily, and hid it beneath her coat and took it home to Madeleine. And Madeleine made use of it, out of deference to Hilary and also, of course, in memory to the crocodile, slaughtered to gratify the rich and vain.

The bell of the telephone extension by Jarvis and Lily’s bed has been switched to the off position. The instrument trembles fractionally as the contact is made, but no one answers. Sergeant Corvey cannot get through.

Hilary lies sleepless in her bed. It’s spooky in here, she thinks, and she turns on the ceiling light to supplement the night-light. Jonathon whickers in his sleep, and reminds her of her guinea pig.

Hilary sings.

To his nest the eagle flies, O’er the hill the sunlight dies, Hush my darling, have no fear, For thy mother watches near.

So’ sings Hilary softly to herself, remembering what she never knew. So sang Iris, once long ago. Hilary never met Iris. Iris died before she was born. ‘One of those people,’ as the six-year-old Hilary observed to her mother Madeleine, thus comforting her somewhat, ‘whose time for being alive was before ours.’ As if all the world, in life and death, was fair and properly regulated. Perhaps Hilary’s daughter will be able to say the same for Madeleine, and as calmly. Perhaps not.

Philip and Margot are late to bed. Lettice, in some spasm of housewifeliness, has boiled up what remains of the chicken for stock, and gone to bed, and left the pan to boil dry. The stench of burnt bones and pitted saucepan fill the house. When the windows have been opened and the mess cleared, it is past two o’clock. Tiredness has passed; exhaustion has set in. Philip lies in bed, waiting for his wife to join him. Margot creams her face in the mirror.

‘I’m so ashamed,’ she says. ‘Writhing about on the floor like that.’

‘As well you might be. Well, never mind. It got us home.’

‘I didn’t think you wanted to leave. You seemed very happy.’

‘Nonsense. They’re perfectly dreadful people.’

‘What was wrong with me?’ she persists, although he has explained patiently, over and over again, that her symptoms, responding as they did to a harsh word and a slap, were hysterical and not functional, and best ignored and forgotten.

‘Jealousy,’ he remarks, driven to it by a mixture of exhaustion and irritation. ‘Perhaps you thought it was time you got a little attention.’

Margot does not reply. She removes the cream from her face, stares into her own eyes as into a lover’s.

Oh, I am the doctor’s wife, mother of the doctor’s children; I am used, put up with, ignored; I gather scraps from other people’s tables. I am the doctor’s wife, my husband’s wife, an only partly welcome guest; my husband’s adjunct, neither smart, nor beautiful, nor successful, but useful for filling up an empty seat between two males, useful in order to make the hostess shine. I am the doctor’s wife, fresh from a public humiliation I shall never forget, creaming my face before a mirror as I have done a thousand times before, seeing the detail not the whole, as plain girls quickly learn to do, and now, I find, the ageing woman.

Margot stares into her eyes. Margot sings.

To his nest the eagle flies, O’er the hill the sunlight dies—

‘Is that you singing?’ asks the doctor. ‘Couldn’t you come to bed? I can’t get to sleep until you do.’

‘Was I singing?’ Margot enquires, and realises, yes she was.

‘Hush my darling, have no fear …’ she goes on, but can’t remember what comes next—

‘For heaven’s sake,’ says the doctor.

Deep set brown eyes stare back at her from the mirror. They close, momentarily. Margot sees them do so. But how can you see eyes close, if they’re a reflection of your own?

‘Philip—’ says Margot, frightened.

‘Christ almighty,’ says the doctor. ‘Don’t you understand I’m tired.’

Margot gets into bed beside him. She is stiff with an unfamiliar resentment. The doctor sleeps. He smells of tooth powder, she thinks. A musty, dusty, sickly smell. He who uses toothpaste. Margot sleeps.

Again the telephone by the Katkin bed vibrates, unnoticed. Lily and Jarvis are locked in a languorous embrace, which took them from the bathroom, where Jarvis soaped Lily’s white body with creamy soap, up the stairs, where discomfort finally led them to their bed, where Lily all but fell asleep, and now lies on her side with him behind her, half way between waking and dreaming. He moves inside her, it seems, like a large fish in a tiny pool, importunate yet affectionate, pleasurable yet puzzling. All the same, the vision of Margot writhing on the floor, on her side, remains with Lily, holding her in the outer world. Her climax approaches, recedes; his arrives; hers evaporates. She is quite content.

‘What a waste of an evening,’ says Jarvis. ‘We could have spent all of it in bed.’

Lily laughs, and stretches out her white hand to flick out the light. ‘The clock has stopped,’ she remarks. ‘I thought I’d wound it up yesterday.’ And so it has although she did. Jarvis picks up the telephone to dial TIM, and hears Sergeant Corvey’s voice addressing him. He is at first too confused to comprehend what is being said: it is the voice of accusation he hears, as he was accustomed to hearing it in his childhood—loud and reproachful and coming suddenly, thunder out of a blue sky, turning his life upside down. Hector his stepfather had a loud voice, and was given to shouting.

‘Who are you speaking to,’ enquires Lily in his other ear, spreading her limbs over his, naked and naughty—‘at this time of night? I know. It’s Madeleine. It’s Madeleine, isn’t it? She says her drains are blocked and she wants you over right how to fix them. Tell her she can’t have you. Tell her you’re mine.’ But Jarvis quietens her with his hand. He pushes her off. What is Jarvis saying? Lily listens.

‘Stortford General Hospital? … What are you talking about? … Their freezer unit? … I’m not an electrician: I am an architect and it’s three in the morning … my wife is here beside me in bed … is this some kind of practical joke? … Madeleine Katkin? Madeleine? …’