Remember Me (15 page)

The girl, alas, was less easy to throw off than he had assumed girls were. (Margot being his model of femininity.) This one was an artist’s model who worked at the local art school, and spending as she did most of her time naked and observed, had developed a fine sense of her own importance. Throughout the ensuing years Philip would, from time to time, at two, three, four in the morning be summoned to emergencies at strange addresses, and when he rang the bell, why there she’d be, naked on the step, inviting him in.

He either had to have her certified or pay for a Night Service. He chose the latter, regretfully enough. It saved him sleep but cost him money and the goodwill of his patients.

But this, he acknowledged was the price one must expect to pay for professional indiscretions. He was lucky it was no worse and that Margot was such an understanding wife.

Not this morning.

This morning Margot is all the wronged women in the world, and being so, he finds it all the more natural to wrong her.

‘My patients are waiting,’ the doctor observes, and so saying, he leaves her, her Madeleine-mouth still open in abuse, and, as one might say, egg around it.

Oh, I am the doctor, I am any man leaving home with a jaunty step, off to work, putting the trial of breakfast time behind me: off out into the world where I can deal fairly and squarely and be the decent man I know I am. And pray God by supper time she is herself again.

Oh, I am the doctor’s wife, any wife, Jarvis’s one and only wife, left with the dishes as the front door closes. My own words corroding my own sweet mouth; his still rankling in my ears, unforgivable. I shall feed off them all day, and they off me … it’s a poisonous diet, but I’m hungry and if there’s nothing else, it’ll have to do.

Poison indeed! And the only antidote is love. If there’s a scrap of it left, find it.

Presently Margot does so, and feels better. The cat emerges from under the table and jumps on her lap. The doctor, after all, has not left the home: he is only the other side of the dividing wall. She can almost hear his patient voice, slow and reassuring, he sympathises with, understands and heals the whole world and its populace, with the single exception of herself. Well, it has to be put up with.

Margot thinks of Hilary, poor Hilary, with her shorn hair, and the thought lifts what remains of the oppression on her spirit. She clears the table, and sweeps up and presently goes to the bedroom and takes off the sweater and skirt, and puts on her navy and white suit, and looks in the mirror somewhat nervously, and is pleased to see her own plump and easy face. It is more than time for the doctor’s wife to go to work.

Ten o’clock. Bonjour! Lettice’s French class commences. Last year Lettice came top in French.

Arthur the mortician arrives for his day’s work. Goliath gathers his belongings together, and prepares to leave for school.

‘What’s she doing out?’ enquires Arthur, of Madeleine’s body, sheeted and harmless on its trolley. ‘Well, she’s not doing any harm,’ says Goliath. ‘Enough of your lip,’ says Arthur. ‘That’s a white woman lying there, let me remind you.’ Goliath smiles grimly but patiently at his aged superior.

Bonjour!

Margot arrives at the Katkin household in command of herself, and cheerful, her earlier breakfast behaviour all but forgotten, so little does it accord with her normal experience of herself. In much the same way will a virtuous woman expunge from her mind the memory of an untoward sexual adventure, attributing it, if she thinks of it at all, to some split-off part of her personality, for which she can hardly be expected to accept responsibility.

Margot is let in through the stripped pine door, and there, staring and distraught is Lily. Lily’s face is paler than ever, and her lipstick more scarlet, more clearly-edged than usual. Lily wears the same dress she was wearing the day before. Lily’s finger is bleeding.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ says Margot, feeling that perhaps an apology might help. ‘You know what family breakfasts are.’ It is not the kind of remark she usually makes.

‘I do indeed,’ says Lily, and continues to stare unflinchingly at Margot.

‘It was a lovely evening we had last night,’ says Margot. ‘I’m sorry I was taken ill.’

‘You’re quite better now?’ enquires Lily, politely.

‘Perfectly,’ says Margot. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘No,’ says Lily, ‘it isn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Margot. ‘Why not?’

‘My husband is drunk,’ observes Lily. ‘He is drinking whisky with his bacon and eggs, and seems disinclined to go to the office. Madeleine is dead. She was killed in a car crash last night. It was to be expected—she drank very heavily, as you know, and she kept her car—Jarvis’s car—in a dreadful condition. In fact, the only surprising thing is that she only managed to kill herself, and not a dozen other people as well.’

‘Where’s Hilary?’ asks Margot, a reaction well within character. In times of stress the doctor’s wife always thinks first of the children.

‘Gone to school,’ says Lily. ‘The thing to do is to carry on as usual. Well, isn’t it? Was I wrong?’

Margot says nothing. She is conscious of a spasm of rage. She limps into the kitchen, and there sits Jarvis slouched over the table like an old man.

‘I’m sorry, Jarvis,’ says Margot, ‘I’m really sorry.’

Lily snorts behind her: a mad bull’s snort through delicately flaring nostrils.

‘Jonathon bit very deep,’ Lily complains, waving her hand, ‘do you think I ought to have a tetanus injection? God knows what’s got into the child.’

‘Can’t you think of anyone except yourself?’ Jarvis demands. ‘You are a callous, selfish, monstrous bitch.’

Margot retreats to the study, to nurse her sense of shock. Hilary. What’s to become of Hilary?

‘Nicely spoken,’ Lily remarks to Jarvis, cool as a cucumber, ‘and in front of witnesses too. However, you did marry me. You did prefer me to Madeleine. If you feel like joining her, please feel free. I shan’t stand in your way.’

‘Lily,’ groans Jarvis ‘for God’s sake allow me to be just a little upset. She was my wife for thirteen years.’

‘Twelve years,’ his wife corrects, ‘and very miserable years they were, too.’

‘Leave her alone, she’s dead,’ says Jarvis, but his wife’s refusal to allow him to mourn is having its effect. He’s beginning to feel better already.

‘Dead she may be, but her spirit’s going to hang round for some considerable time,’ observes Lily, with more truth than she knows, ‘at least it will if you go on behaving like this. The truth of the matter is, some people are better dead, and Madeleine is one of them.’

What can Jarvis say to this? He does his best.

‘When you first went out with me, Lily, you knew I was a married man. In fact, you only ever went with married men; you boasted of it. How are you going to get on with me, now I’m a widower?’

And with that Jarvis goes off back to bed.

Oh Jarvis, old-fashioned Jarvis, with your public-school tie at the bottom of your drawer, tucked away beneath the Mao-blue shirts, Jarvis, last of a long line of English gentlemen, revering women yet fearing them, flying to the bottle for comfort, consolation, to fan the tiny female spark of creativity to flame: finding there the strength to insult, combat, and defy the female principle in its crude and cuntish form. Jarvis, born of woman, fashioned by man, yearning yet despising: full of talent on a good day, full of rubbish on a bad: terrified of stridency, of the raising of a female voice and yet embracing it: showing your love in bed but seldom out of it.

When Madeleine saw through you, raised her voice to crush and crucify, it was time to go.

And what are you to do with Hilary, Jarvis? She is not beautiful, but she is a woman. Jarvis is confused. Poor Jarvis.

Poor Jarvis, Madeleine sometimes felt, sometimes feels: Madeleine leaves Jarvis alone, as latterly in her life she left him, reserving her spleen for Lily, her sweet betraying sister, and innocent Jonathon, who had no business to be born.

Madeleine’s spleen burst. Even had she been wearing a seat belt, Madeleine would have died, would have been lost to Hilary, who needed a mother and never had a proper one; though she might have found one, breathing, living, happy, and recovered from a lifetime’s desolation—given just five minutes more down the motorway, and a phone-call or two from Mr Quincey.

Poor Mr Quincey, rising with Madeleine’s sweet breath still warm upon his nostrils, strong and eternal in his memory, as his tooth powder is in hers.

Bonjour!

Margot starts work on the invoices.

And so the morning proceeds.

Hilary is sent home from school; she was sick in the Art room. When asked if there’s anyone at home to look after her, she says ‘Yes, my mother,’ and is then sick again. Hilary ate quite a lot of lemon mousse, it becomes apparent, between hearing of her mother’s death and going off to school. Had Lily kept Sugar Puffs in the house, Hilary would have eaten those. As it is, the lemon mousse sits uneasily on her troubled stomach, and is finally ejected, to the great inconvenience of pupils and staff.

When Hilary gets to her basement house, she feeds the guinea pig on a couple of withered carrots left at the bottom of the vegetable box, and automatically tidies away the jumble of clothes Madeleine left out in her hurry to get to Cambridge and Mr Quincey, her Dial-a-Date. Then Hilary lies down on her mother’s bed and goes to sleep.

It is the heavy dreamless sleep that comes after shock, or great mental distress, as near to death as anything.

Jarvis sleeps.

Jonathon sleeps, as the doctor had predicted he would. Lily worries. Perhaps Jonathon has suffered some kind of alcohol-inflicted brain damage?

Bonjour!

Bonjour! The French teacher moves on to take Laurence’s class. Last year Laurence came twentieth in French, and only twenty-two in the class. He prefers the sciences.

The police arrange for formal identification from the deceased’s husband, and for an inquest. Again, a formality. The car wasn’t fit to be on a side road, let alone a motorway. Women drivers, the policeman in charge snorts. Arthur snorts too, in sympathy. There are three other traffic fatalities, all male, in the mortuary, but safely shut away.

Madeleine sleeps.

Arthur worries about her: he put her away in the cool but now he keeps opening up the hatch to make sure she’s still there and still dead. Once, in Arthur’s youth, an apparently dead woman sat up on the trolley, threw back the sheet, and demanded to see her daughter. And the cremation only hours away. Of such stuff are nightmares made.

Of course, clinical tests determining death are more refined now than ever they were in Arthur’s youth, and there is no logical possibility that Madeleine’s corpse can retain any vestige of life. All the same Arthur will feel happier when Katkin, Mrs M., with her sweet, sad face, is properly identified, inquested, taken to the undertaker’s and safely buried.

No one, in her lifetime, could have described Madeleine’s face as sweet.

Bonjour!

Lily telephones Judy to tell her she is an only wife at last. Judy bursts into tears and says she knows her ex-husband Billy wants her dead, and she has a thrush infection of the vagina from taking the pill, and she wants her children back, but Jamie won’t have them. He says they have each other. At the same time she has recently overheard Jamie making a secret assignation with his ex-wife Albertine, Everyone wants Albertine back, it appears; even the Amateur Dramatic Society she left in mid-production is willing to forgive her. No one seems willing to forgive Judy anything. Why is that? Lily gives up trying to talk to Judy about Madeleine.

Enid faints at work, whilst chairing a meeting on the implementation of the Anti-discrimination (female) Bill. The assembled Trade Unionist and Management delegates look at each other in dismay. Is this the stuff of which the future is made?

Mr Quincey telephones Renee from Cambridge and asks to speak to Mrs Katkin. The warmth of their encounter is still fresh upon his flesh, and he feels he cannot rest until he has at least spoken to her, and at best slept with her again. He is disappointed to hear she is out.

Where, he wonders jealously.

Philippa, Sam’s secretary, makes this the day to come to work without her knickers. Sam, observing, thinks longingly of Enid. Sam is not altogether happy in the permissive age. Nakedness, he fears, is becoming clinical rather than erotic. The hairy redness of Philippa, revealed, is too reminiscent of the many images of women in childbirth, that he has seen on television, to be exciting. Dear Enid, thinks Sam. She is such a good and uncomplaining wife: unexciting, true, but always reliable, not very bright but restful; perhaps it is unfair of him to require so much from Enid whilst lusting so desperately after younger, sexier women? But how can he help it? It’s the way he is made, after all; and in the meantime two phone calls from reasonably serious clients indicate that the property market is looking up. The trouble with Philippa, Sam concludes, feeling more himself again, is that she’s not as young as she was. Pushing thirty, if she’s a day.

Quelle horreur!

Lettice, ever obliging, helps the caretaker sprinkle sand over the yellowish slime left by Hilary on the Art room floor, and shovel the resultant sludge into a bucket. ‘What can she have been eating?’ Lettice remarks. Lettice has recovered from her morning’s despair: she bought Tampax on the way to school, and discarded her belt and towel in the girls’ loo.

‘I am a doctor’s daughter,’ Lettice says to herself, scraping away with a will, ‘and neither disgusted nor disturbed by the by-products of the body.’ Though this resilience may in fact come from her mother’s side—Lettice’s great-grandmother, Alice, Winifred’s mother, Margot’s grandmother, wore a bracelet composed of her own gallstones, polished to perfection. When old Alice rattled and shook her bracelet and chomped her husband’s teeth, how she defied her own mortality!

Lily’s sulking.

Well, why not? It’s a perfectly horrible day and none of it her doing.

Lily looks at her sleeping husband, and feels a pang of horror at his sudden, apparent decrepitude. He seems inappropriate to her life and times. The bedroom is so young, so clean, so fresh, in its muted pinks and greys, the bed itself so delicately wrought in brass; her little jars of cosmetics (Lily’s mother Ida contented herself with sensible tubes of sheep lanolin) so expensive and so pretty on the pine dressing table—and here in broad daylight, gross, unshaven and snoring, lies this man, this husband, this creature, surely of the night, from whom admittedly all money flows, but on whose absence during the day she totally relies.