Remember Me (12 page)

And Lily is pushed altogether aside, and Jarvis sits on the edge of the bed, head in hands, and Lily’s small white hands flutter against his turned back, brown, toughened, resolute against her, and her voice in the room where once Jarvis and Madeleine walked and talked, sounds plaintive and ridiculous and out of place.

Madeleine dead?

Oh, I am Lily, once the second wife, now the only wife. What is to become of me now? This was not what I meant at all. I married Jarvis, Madeleine’s husband: Am I to have the full weight of him upon me now? Jarvis, Lily’s husband: Lily, Jarvis’s one and only wife?

The moon goes down behind banks of clouds: the first signs of morning can be seen in the sky.

In Custerley mortuary the electric light is beginning to pale. Madeleine lies, sheet-covered, on her trolley. Arthur has pattered off home in his slippers. Clarence is in charge. Clarence sings: a lullaby. He can’t remember where he heard it, learnt it; Clarence’s mother was not the kind to sing lullabies. She worked as a waitress, at nights, leaving the home when his father came back. But he likes to think she would have, if she could.

Hush my darling have no fear For thy mother watches near—

Time passes.

At six o’clock punctually, Goliath strides into the mortuary to relieve Clarence, who is more than ready for his breakfast. Whether through tradition, superstition or common politeness, the bodies of the dead are not left unattended. To devalue the dead, after all, is to devalue the living. At the same time, staffing problems here, as anywhere, are acute. Goliath is a West Indian lad, seventeen, and studying for A-levels in Art and History. From six in the morning until ten he caretakes in the mortuary, and does his homework the while. At ten he goes round the corner to school, where they are pleased to see him, late or not. From five to eight each evening Goliath trains for the school team in the local swimming baths. Then Goliath helps his father in his garage until midnight, when it’s time to go to bed. On Saturday nights Goliath takes out his girl: on Sundays Goliath goes to church with his family, to whom he is a credit (as he is to the school, the swimming team, his girlfriend, and the mortuary). Goliath is condescending towards Clarence, who clearly cannot manage his life, as his shaggy hair, red-rimmed eyes and frayed jeans indicate.

‘Singing?’ remarks Goliath now, reproachfully. ‘To my mind we owe the departed rather more respect than that.’

‘It quietens them,’ says Clarence, meaning to tease.

‘Prayer does that,’ says Goliath, alarmed, ‘not song. But if you don’t mind, we will discontinue this conversation. Discussion of the supernatural is not healthy; it dissolves one’s senses of the reality, and renders one more open to unhealthy extra-sensory experience.’

‘In other words,’ says Clarence, ‘if you see a ghost, don’t mention it.’

‘Quite,’ says Goliath, uneasily, and doesn’t add, ‘Why? Have you seen one?’ for fear of hearing an answer he’d rather not. Goliath enquires instead why Madeleine’s body has not been decanted from its trolley and placed in the appropriate wall unit.

‘Poor lady,’ says Clarence, unctuously. ‘She looks so beautiful with the moon upon her face. She will never feel it in life again.’

‘I am a Christian,’ says Goliath sternly, ‘and I believe in the immortality of the soul. What lies there upon the trolley is dust and ashes. The soul has flown.’

‘Do you really think so?’ enquires Clarence, peering at Madeleine’s white, quiet face. ‘She might be temporarily gone, I grant you. Off visiting, here and there; one gets the feeling she is. Busy as a little bee she’s been, all night.

‘What do you mean?’ Goliath is uneasy now, as well he might be. He loosens his beautifully white collar with his fingers; pulls at the smooth black tie he always wears to work. As the morning light increases, so Goliath’s fine black face emerges out of the background and Clarence’s pale features lose their definition. It is clearly time for Clarence to go home: Goliath’s time has come. Clarence is a creature of the dusk, Goliath of the dawn.

‘The newly dead do go visiting,’ says Clarence firmly. I’m quite sure of it. They go off on a tour of their family and friends: they visit their nearest and dearest first; then the rest of their acquaintance in order of precedence. It can mean a lot of waiting about, if someone dies who is not very close, or not as close as you had hoped. You sometimes have to wait days, or even weeks before you feel their spirit come to touch yours. Then they make their peace and say goodbye, good night: and off they go wherever it is they go. After that, you stop feeling so irritated and impatient with them for dying, and begin to feel sorry about it, and presently forget them altogether. As for the dead, they lose interest in the living, in the same way as the living lose interest in the dead, and as you, Goliath, no doubt lose interest in a girl once you’ve had her.’

Does Clarence believe what he’s saying? Clarence scarcely knows himself. The day after Clarence’s mother died of thrombosis—she had had varicose veins, from a life of so much standing about—Clarence had certainly felt the breath of her presence, and sensed the process of incorporation, so that later, he could stand at his mother’s graveside and feel not so much grief as exaltation. But perhaps Clarence imagined it? Perhaps it was Clarence’s way of denying loss? How is Clarence to know? In the meantime, he has clearly upset Goliath.

‘I am not in the habit of having girls,’ says Goliath stiffly. ‘I am in the habit of going steady, and that’s the difference between you and me.’

All the same, after Clarence has left, Goliath, instead of decanting Madeleine’s body, as he is employed and paid to do, leaves it where it is, and sits and eats his breakfast sandwiches, first removing the ham his mother has put between the bread, for he has some aspiration to being converted to Judaism, in the hope of being able to battle on equal terms with a single-minded Jehovah rather than having to succumb, worshipfully and meekly, to the unchancy will of the Holy Trinity, as is his present obligation. Goliath finds himself singing.

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

and stops himself. Goliath does not wish to behave like Clarence. Goliath has never been personally acquainted with death or suffered any great personal loss: youth and the cultivated health of his body, the surging of the blood in his veins on Saturday night, and of his heart on a Sunday morning as he lifts up his soul to the Creator, inclines him to notions of his own immortality, physical as well as spiritual. Well, he is young, and strong, and that is that.

This morning Goliath cannot concentrate. He feels restless: Clarence, or something, has upset him. The air in the white-painted room is in some kind of turmoil. Goliath is accustomed to the company of the dead, but today he wishes to be gone: he wishes he was a schoolboy like any other, and not a paragon of both the children’s and the adults’ world; he waits impatiently for Arthur to arrive and relieve him of this noisy silence.

What would Goliath hear, if he had ears to hear? He would hear the reproaches of women. What else? He knows them well, as do all the family of man. He heard them first on the day he was born. Listen; from the delivery room, where new life bursts, amidst grunts and groans, from old. ‘Oh how you hurt me, how you tear me, you beautiful boy, my love, my pride, my ruin. Ouch! You devil, monster!’ He will hear them, no doubt, on the day he dies. ‘Why are you going into that dark vale, why are you leaving me here all alone? What is your male death to my female misery? Devil! Monster! Deserter!’

He knows them well; he knows them by heart. As he knows the cacophony of female neighbours, crowding, protesting, at the door of the wife-beater, the baby-batterer, the drunkard, the deserter. ‘Villain! Devil! Monster!’

Goliath puts down his book, goes to Madeleine, pulls back the sheet from her face. She is unsmiling, intent. She seems to listen. To what? The air is thick around her body, busy with complaint. Goliath senses it. Alive, it seems, Madeleine was nothing to the heavenly female host. Dead, at least she proves a point, becomes the focus of womanly discontent.

Cover your ears, Goliath! The chorus is at it again. ‘Why is this woman dead? Who killed her? If she killed herself, who drove her to it? Some man! Who? You?’

Goliath pulls the sheet back over Madeleine’s face, breathing deeply to steady his racing heart; goes back to his place at the table; re-opens his history book. Reason prevails. The dead are silent.

Be quiet, Madeleine. Lie still. So you were wronged: so were a million, million others, dead and gone or on their way. You were wronged by women as much as men, you know you were. By your mother; by your friends; by your especial sisters, those sweet flowers, by Lily, by Poppy, by Iris, sending out their sickly perfume over the generations. Debilitating.

And by Margot, housewife, unflowerlike, dumpy, powerful in her fertility, lying with Jarvis beneath a pile of damp and musty coats.

Be quiet, Madeleine. Lie still. Let young Goliath turn the pages of his history book in peace. You came top in history once, when you were his age. You can afford to leave him alone. You can afford to leave them all alone. You had your patch of blue sky, your glimmer of sun, the awareness of your body as it took its nourishment, reproduced itself, and was finally destroyed. That’s all there is to any of it. Acknowledge your mortality.

Lie still, forget, say your goodbyes and go.

No.

S
IX O’CLOCK IN THE
morning. Who’s awake? Lily, loved by many in spite of herself.

Renate Kominski, out of Poland, ageing lady withered up by disappointment and a Southern sun, loved little Lily and almost no one else besides. Who else was there to love? Her family was lost in the holocaust—all except Karl, whom she never liked, and who took up residence in an old house somewhere in London. Renate herself chose New Zealand as her future home, that being the farthest she could possibly get from Europe. A Jewish Agency paid her fare and gave her enough to buy a little flat, and that was all. Well, it was enough.

Renate landed in Auckland, in 1939, full of hope, but found herself an outcast in a foreign land. She kept herself alive by weaving raffia plates and baskets, which were sold to unenthusiastic buyers in the local Arts-and-Crafts shop. Not only was it a meagre living, but her hands were always cut and sore from the sharp edges of the raffia. She was a handsome girl, but she had trouble with the language: she was too clever for local tastes: she kept herself to herself. What young man in the Bay of Islands could understand Renate’s mind, habits, culture? Renate did not marry. The able bodied men soon all went off to the war, in any case, leaving a nation of women and children behind. They were tough women, too, who could shear a sheep and mend a roof in the morning, and in the afternoon throw a Pavlova cake together and serve it on a lace doiley for tea. Not like Renate. No talk of ideas, or art, or poetry: not even any recognisable political fear, of loss of freedom or identity—just the sheer physical fear of the Japanese, with their fiendish torturing skills, pressing nearer and nearer to the shores of the Land of the Long White Cloud. New Zealand! What a paradise, a pearl, a prize …

Guard Pacific’s triple star From the. shafts of strife and war—

sang the little children, in a frenzy of war-like enthusiasm.

And no one cared to listen to Renate, husbandless, childless, crippled by experience.

I am Renate, woman without mother, country, husband, child I have only myself to offer. It is not enough.

But Ida the butcher’s wife was kind; cultured, even. Renate bought half a pound of pressed ham from the best butcher’s shop in New Zealand—the butcher himself about to go away to the war—and stood on the sawdust floor, weeping with longing for a garlic sausage. Ida, though she had never tasted garlic, recognised nostalgia when she saw it. Did Ida herself not suffer this same sad emotion? Did she not long for the soft, weeping skies of England? And how she was frightened, by day, by the bright and glaring skies of the Southern Hemisphere, and by night by its great cold arch of starry sky, with all its intimations of infinity; and frightened most of all by her own nature, which had made her trip out of England on her little high shoes, in her little peek-a-boo red hat, and follow her butcher to the very ends of the earth. The Land of the Long White Cloud.

Ida tried to get away from him once. She bedded with a poet during the butcher’s short absence in the Philippines, but all she got from that was Rose, Baby Rose, with her thick curly hair, and a whole lot of trouble when the butcher returned with an amputated big toe. Fingerless, toeless man. Ugh! How lovely.

Lily has a mourning ring which her mother gave her when she came to England. It contains a lock of Baby Rose’s hair. Lily keeps it, not for Baby Rose’s sake, but her mother’s.

Renate comforts Ida through her trials. Ida learns to weave raffia plates: together they teach the butcher cultural ambition and Lily cultural discontent.

Renate one day receives several thousands of pounds in compensation from the German Reparations Board—for loss of mother, country, future. Renate gives it, not to Ida so that Ida can pay her fare back to England and start her life again, but to the butcher, so that little Lily can be properly educated, and get to the Northern Hemisphere, where by now, ambitious and discontented, she spiritually belongs. ‘You’re too old, Ida,’ says Renate. ‘You’re too old, like me, to start again. Blame the war, not me. Besides, we have to think of the children.’

Renate, female in spite of her situation in the world, abandons her own generation in favour of the next. Ida and Renate quarrel and part.

Ida smiles at Lily now, distantly, on her return from boarding school. Lily has stolen Ida’s heritage. Well, she was bound to. It is what daughters do, given half a chance. Daughters steal youth, beauty, hope and future: or so mothers are inclined to think.

‘Mother darling,’ sighs Lily, boarding the plane for England, home, safety and the secretarial college, ‘I’ll miss you so much. What will I do?’ But she doesn’t mean a word of it. And Ida knows it.