Remember Me (2 page)

Hilary’s tights are torn; Hilary’s blouse has lost its button and Hilary’s skirt has shrunk in the wash so the waistband won’t close, and safety pins have to be found. Hilary does not care about any of these details, so Madeleine has to cling the more carefully to her own maternal concern, lest it evaporate altogether in the general depression of the morning.

Hilary is fourteen and weighs eleven stone: she has size eight feet and a thirty-eight C bust, so the missing button is important. Hilary eats Sugar Puffs as she gathers her homework together, every now and then sprinkling more spoonfuls of sugar on the already sweetened cereal. Madeleine hasn’t the energy, indeed the desire, to stop her daughter destroying her looks. Why should she? Hilary is walking witness to Madeleine’s wrongs, Madeleine’s ruin. See, says Madeleine in her heart, regarding Hilary, see what has become of me. See what Jarvis has done?

And Hilary stuffs and puffs, shovelling in fuel: for what? Resentment, boredom, anxiety, despair? Or gathering her reserves against the onslaught of the next weekend?

During the week Hilary lives with her mother. At weekends she lives with her father Jarvis and her stepmother Lily, sleeping not in the spare room (which is kept for guests) but on a camp bed in Jonathon’s room. Lily means to slim Hilary down. It is her earnest desire. On Saturdays and Sundays Lily gives Hilary a breakfast of lemon tea with artificial sweetener, two boiled eggs and one slice of starch-reduced toast spread with low-calorie margarine. But such a breakfast, followed by equally austere lunches and dinners, cannot, alas, undo the damage done by Madeleine on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

During recent months Hilary’s bosom has expanded alarmingly. Puffed wheat has become her favourite food; yes, she is altogether puffed out. Hilary stares out of pale eyes: has her mother’s sallow complexion, a puffy face, a double chin, a stodgy body, beautiful thick and golden hair tumbling on to graceless shoulders, and a sharp, sad mind.

Madeleine is forty-four, and gaunt. Madeleine is like her daughter; she eats and eats Sugar Puffs by the jumbo-size packet, and tinned milk (cheaper than fresh) by the dozen cans—but Madeleine just gets thinner and thinner. Unlike her daughter, Madeleine is vain. Her ragged jeans, her old brown matted sweater, torn beneath the arm, proclaim her with a fine exactitude to the world. This is me, Madeleine, what I am, what I have become, what I have been driven to. By Jarvis.

Wicked Jarvis. Madeleine goes to jumble sales, elbowing and stamping in order to achieve a yet more ragged pair of jeans, a yet more matted jersey by way of illustration. Madeleine will examine herself carefully in the mirror before leaving the flat: adjusting the armpit hole just nicely, so it hides the wisp of underarm hair, but not for long. Madeleine has a yellowing complexion and thick, rusty, vigorous hair, which tears teeth from combs. Madeleine’s cheeks are hollow; her huge brown eyes stare reproachfully from deep sockets. Madeleine’s voice is husky. Madeleine looks mean and hungry, which is what she feels.

Madeleine and Hilary make their home in two basement rooms in a terrace house. It is all Madeleine can afford—or rather, all that Jarvis will afford. The front room has a barred window which looks out on to a white-painted basement area. This room is the kitchen. That is, there is a sink beneath the window, with a damply rotten brown wooden draining board and an electric hotplate with two burners, which stands on top of a hospital locker. Thanks to Hilary, who has saved and scraped and stolen the loose change which lies about her father’s house in order to buy her mother this splendid present, Madeleine also has the use of a rotisserie-and-grill. This appliance has not been fixed to the wall because the plaster will clearly not stand its weight, and so it stands, perforce, on the small pre-war refrigerator, bought second-hand in the market (on Hilary’s insistence). Madeleine does not much care for cooking, which in any case is an expensive and time-wasting occupation. Why have toast when bread and butter will do? But Hilary likes a kitchen to look like a kitchen.

Poor Jarvis.

A brown guinea pig in a cage on the table, staring and snuffling, eats every morning what Sugar Puffs Madeleine and Hilary leave. Hilary picks up old cabbage leaves and vegetation from the street market on her way home from school to provide his evening meal: so the pig can be said not just to cost little, but to save waste on a national level.

Madeleine’s back room looks out on to a damp and sunless London garden, to which only the top floor tenants have access. In this room are Madeleine’s double bed and Hilary’s camp bed, and their wardrobe and their piles and piles of washing. Madeleine and Hilary are the recipients of countless articles of cast-off clothing, which they neither care to wear, let alone wash, or can bear to throw away.

So they lie about in heaps ankle deep.

Madeleine pays £5.23 a week rent (a sum fixed by the Rent Officer) and receives from Jarvis maintenance of £20 a week for herself and Hilary. Once this sum seemed lavish. Now inflation makes it a dubious means of support, although it still looms large enough in Lily’s mind. (Twenty pounds? Lily’s father the butcher brought home fifteen and that was at the height of his career as the best butcher in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.) Madeleine should go out to work; Madeleine will not for ever be able to put off doing so. But why should she earn? To salve Jarvis’s conscience? To enable Lily to buy even more expensive little pairs of white French socks for baby Jonathon’s tender, much resented feet? No. And how can she earn? Hilary comes home from school, and needs a mother. Hilary’s school holidays last for four months of every year. Fathers such as Jarvis don’t stop work on a child’s account. Mothers such as Madeleine are expected to.

Listen now, carefully, to their conversation. Madeleine and Hilary talk in riddles, as families do, even families as small and circumscribed as this one, using the everyday objects of life as symbols of their discontent.

1
HILARY
: Mum, I can’t find my shoes again.

2
MADELEINE
:
(looking)
They’ll be where you took them off.
(Finding)
Here they are.

3
HILARY
: Not those old brown things. My new red ones.

4
MADELEINE
: You can’t possibly wear these to school. They’re ridiculous. They’ll cripple your feet.

5
HILARY
: No they won’t. Everyone else wears platforms.

6
MADELEINE
: In that case, everyone else will be going round in plaster casts, and serve them right.

7
HILARY
: You only don’t like them because Lily bought them for me.

8
MADELEINE
: I don’t like them because they’re ugly and ridiculous.

9
HILARY
: I can’t find the other ones, and I’m late. Please, mum. They’re my feet.

Which, being translated, is—

1
HILARY
: Why is this place always such a mess?

2
MADELEINE
: Why are you such a baby?

3
HILARY
: You know nothing about me.

4
MADELEINE
: I know everything about you.

5
HILARY
: I want to be like other people.

6
MADELEINE
: Other people aren’t worth being like.

7
HILARY
: I know all about you, don’t think I don’t.

8
MADELEINE
: You force me to tell the truth. Our whole situation is ugly and ridiculous and I despair of it.

9
HILARY
: Then let me find my own way out of it, please.

So Hilary defeats her mother, as the children of guilty mothers do, and goes off to school wearing the red shoes with platform heels; she trips over them in the Humanities lesson and cricks her ankle, and pulls a video tape machine from a shelf to the floor in so doing, and does £115 worth of damage. The headmistress subsequently attempts to ban all platform heels from the school, and fails.

Once Hilary has left, Madeleine goes back to bed, and half sleeps until half past ten, when she gets up, makes herself some instant coffee, sweeps the floors vaguely and washes up badly; and peers up through the area bars into the dusty brightness of the streets, wondering what there is in the outside world that others find so animating, and that keeps them so ceaselessly busy.

Madeleine, sweeping and dusting, thinks, feels, hurts, tries. Listen. Madeleine’s inner voices cajole, comfort, complain, encourage, in equal measure.

Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife. I am the victim. I have right on my side. It makes me strong. I feed on misery. But I no longer have the strength to be unhappy, not all the time. It has been going on too long. Days drift into weeks, and weeks into months. Three years since Jarvis married Lily, two since she had her brat. Even so, every morning for an hour or so, this sick and angry misery. It tenses my muscles; this, or something, gives me fibrositis. Bile rises in my mouth and burns my throat. I keep myself still and silent by an act of will, when the only thing to give me peace would be to search out Jarvis, waylay him, attack him, mutilate him; shriek and scream and by the very dreadfulness of my behaviour, flying in the face of my own nature, which he knows so well, so well, demonstrate how much, how very much, he has hurt me, damaged me, destroyed me. I want Jarvis to acknowledge the wrong he has done me. I want him to love me again. I want to burn down Jarvis’s home, my home, and Lily and Jonathon with it. Jonathon, the son I should have had; never will have. And that would be an end to them and it and me and everything, and thank God for his eternal mercy.

Courage, Madeleine!

If I wait, if I lie quite still, warding off, fending, pretending that these attacks of what? Of hate? Madness? come from outside me, have been sent by the devil or his equivalent, and do not arise (as I know they must) from within me, being as they are the sum of every fear and sorrow, rage and despair I have ever felt, ever known; if I forbid myself to move, to act, to pick up the telephone; then the rage passes. I breathe more easily. The pain in my shoulder disperses. Then the rest of the day is mine. The devil is off tormenting someone else; he won’t be back until tomorrow, with a fresh set of mirrors, to tease, exalt and magnify my wrongs. Alas, the devil, once departed, leaves me not so much unhappy as dazed, and worn out, and fit for nothing. My vision still looks inward, not outward. I can wash and dry the dishes, but not get them back on to the shelves. I can sweep the dirt from the floor into a heap, but not get the dust into the pan. The gardens are full of late roses, Hilary tells me, and beautiful. I cannot see them.

The doorbell rings.

Good morning!

Madeleine cranes up through the basement bars to see who’s at the door, sees familiar broken shoes, stocky, wide-apart legs, a thin uneven hem, a basket of flowers, shaking as does the red hand which holds it. Madeleine draws back into the gloom, hiding. It’s the gipsy.

Good morning!

Madeleine’s flat is stuck with withered sprigs of heather, held in twists of tinfoil, bought weekly from the gipsy’s basket. Ten pence the sprig. Dried heather flowers drift into cups of tea, settle in hair, cluster like dead insects in the corners of the room. No one wants to keep them. No one likes to throw them away, in case they’re throwing away luck.

What luck?

Good morning! The bell goes again, harsh and reproachful. ‘I know you’re in there, hiding.’ Madeleine gives up, emerges into the light, goes upstairs, answers the bell. The gipsy’s plump round face is purple with cold, exhaustion and ill health. Her teeth are black and broken. A coat strains across her overfed body. Sweet tea and sugar buns. She has tears in her eyes, and not, as Madeleine prays, from conjunctivitis, or as a result of the cold wind, but because she has indeed been crying. Her husband has a bad heart; the hospital has sent her son-in-law home to die; her nephew has lost a leg from TB of the bone. The fares from Epping, where she lives, to Muswell Hill, where the habit of years, rather than common sense, still leads her, now exceed her takings.

‘Help me out, dear. Daffs at fifty, heather at ten. Lucky heather from bonny Scotland.’

Madeleine takes two sprigs of heather and parts with twenty pence out of the milk money.

‘Never mind,’ says Madeleine from her heart. ‘Never mind. Good times will come again. Or at any rate we had them once.’

And so they will, and so she did. Once Madeleine woke up singing. When she was pregnant with Hilary she even sang in her sleep. Jarvis heard her. Once Jarvis loved Madeleine, drew back chairs for her, brought her tea when she was tired; held her hand in the cinema: scowled at her admirers: brought her yellow daffodils fifty at a time.

Bad times come, but can’t undo the past. Mostly they come when we are ill, and old, and dying. Few of us die with dignity, or without pain. But how we once lived; when we were young! How we laughed!

‘I’ll tell your fortune,’ says the gipsy, drawing Madeleine’s strong, worn hand into her own red, dirty one, but Madeleine pulls it back.

‘I’ll do it cheap,’ says the gipsy. ‘You’re a kind lady. You’ve got a lucky face.’

‘No,’ says Madeleine. She is frightened. She looked into her own future, at the gipsy’s touch, and saw nothing but blackness. Well, she is depressed. That is what depression is, Madeleine thinks. The looking forward to blackness. Surely.

Good morning!

The gipsy goes. Madeleine goes down to her room to stand beside the sink, motionless, unable to make order out of the chaos of chipped and dirty china.

I am Madeleine, first wife of Jarvis, Hilary’s mother. I am Madeleine, thorn in Lily’s white soft flesh.

Lily, the second wife, Margot’s employer.

T
HE DOCTOR WAKES, LATE.
Margot is up: he can hear the sound of breakfast. The doctor closes his eyes again. These are the moments of the day he most values, when he is most himself and least the doctor. It is in these minutes, the doctor knows, these minutes between waking and sleeping, that the events of the past, of infancy and childhood, churned to the surface by the fragmented memory of dreams, lose their haphazard nature and make some kind of pattern; effecting, with luck, some small improvement in our nature, loosening the grip of resentment, altering expectation, refocusing obsession. Thus, building on the impacted rubble of the past, we construct the delicate filaments of the present. Or so the doctor thinks.