Remember Me (26 page)

Jonathon, little Jonathon, don’t die. What will become of me if you do? I will have nothing. I will be nothing.

Jarvis, you don’t count.

Oh, punishment!

P
HILIP, PUZZLED, REGARDS HIS
drumming, tapping, scowling wife.

‘Is it the menopause?’ enquires Lettice, taking her revenge upon Margot, remembering her mother’s callousness of the morning, how she savagely stripped the blood-spotted sheets from the bed. Be as unkind as you like, mother. See, I grow up. You grow old. If I start bleeding, you’ll have to stop. ‘Do go away, Lettice,’ says Philip. Laurence has already gone, sidling out after the cat into the dark to seek out friends and the more ordinary aspect of life, in households not (for the time being, at any rate) in the throes of that black convulsive tumult of discontent and resentment, which will overwhelm the most calm and pleasant home from time to time, so that the plants wilt, the children stay out, and the cat leaves home—until it’s some other family’s turn, and ordinary life returns.

‘But I’m doing my homework,’ protests Lettice. ‘Do it upstairs,’ says Philip, and Lettice capitulates. ‘I should try oestrogen therapy,’ she says, as she leaves: not so much pert, as terrified. Her mother’s hands seem unfamiliar; taut and tense, and curved almost into claws.

Mother, I’m sorry. What would I do without you?

Oh, punishment!

‘Margot,’ says Philip, when Lettice has gone, in the soft voice he used during their courtship, and regards her—how? lovingly, soulfully, or in the manner of some deceitful spaniel, droopy eyes, licking his lips after the lamb chop, cowering under the kitchen table, trying to avoid retribution.

Margot, peering at her husband through a mania of suspicion and resentment, clearly thinks it is the latter.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s you, is it,’ as if she were some rich and famous lady, and he a debt collector, or a despised ex-husband, who dared to approach her at a party at which she was having a good time.

‘You’re behaving very oddly, Margot,’ he remarks mildly.

‘Me?’ she is outraged. ‘You’re trying to drive me mad. But you’re the one who’s mad.’

It is quite normal in any marital quarrel for both parties to consider the other mad, and more, to be incensed at the insult of an accusation which both are quite happily making about the other. But Margot seems to have drummed this quarrel up out of nothing: Philip says as much, and declines to take offence. His very mildness inflates her fury.

‘Go back to your surgery,’ says the doctor’s wife. ‘Go on sticking your hands up the lady patients.’ At which the doctor blinks.

‘That’s the only reason you’re a doctor,’ says the doctor’s wife, ‘so you can stick your hands up young girls and get them to undress for you.’ Still the doctor just smiles, as if about to prescribe a tranquilliser. ‘You killed my baby,’ says the doctor’s wife. ‘How many other abortions have you done?’ But nothing seems to move the doctor. He smiles.

‘Answer me,’ she shrieks.

‘Do be quiet, Margot,’ he murmurs. ‘Don’t upset the children. I know you’re very upset yourself.’

The words are quiet and reasonable; but is there pleasure in his eyes, as he watches, from the cool heights of his aloofness, his wife’s distressed and murderous writhings? Yes. Or at any rate she sees it there, through glazed eyes which in their lifetime saw little else but the disagreeable underside of things: the mould and mess behind the refrigerator, the rot under the floorboards, the mice droppings at the back of the cupboard: the malice behind kind words.

Oh, punishment!

‘You don’t care about the children,’ whispers Margot/Madeleine, in her dusty dead voice. ‘You don’t care about me. The only person you ever cared for was your sister Jill, and you killed her. As good as. First you stripped her, then you killed her. That’s what you do to women. Or want to.’

The doctor frowns. His face stiffens: the cracks in his façade deepen. She has made him angry now. He looks what he knows he is—his sister’s murderer—an old, old man, his true face, his true nature, at last revealed. It is a skeletal face, grinning animosity. His father’s face, his own as well.

Oh, punishment!

Margot smiles, in triumph. She sees him now for what he is.

‘I never loved you,’ she says.

‘Then why did you marry me?’

‘Because I was pregnant.’

‘I loved you,’ he says.

Ah, love. So long ago, and in the past, in both their true voices. A great grief overwhelms Margot.

‘Thank you,’ says Margot/Madeleine harshly thrusting back grief with anger. ‘And your deigning to love me is supposed to compensate for a lifetime of servitude? What a con it all is. I love you; you wash my socks.’

The room is very cold. The doctor’s wife bites and bites her yellow hand with her long teeth, as if to stop herself speaking the words her mouth utters.

‘Can there be anything left for you to say,’ he enquires, ‘anything left to hurt me and damage you? Take your time.’

‘It’s all been worth nothing,’ she says. ‘My life wasted,’ and she believes it.

‘You have more than most women,’ he reiterates. ‘A house, a garden, a husband. We have a car, two children—’

‘I have two children, you have one.’ And her long jaws clamp into her hand, too late, to stop the words.

Philip laughs.

‘Which of them isn’t mine?’

‘Laurence.’

He laughs again. Blood flows from the wound from her hand.

‘I hate this home, this prison. I hate you,’ she shrieks.

He shivers. So his sister Jill once spoke to him. Why is it so cold? The back door is open, wasting the central heating. Her strong, bleeding hands move towards his throat. They will clearly kill him if they can. He catches them in his own. She screams. It is a strange distant sound, as if there was not enough breath left in her body to give it proper strength.

‘Margot,’ says the doctor, in desperation, ‘you are not Madeleine. You are my wife. Madeleine is dead. This is some kind of hysteria. Please stop it.’

Margot’s hands lose their strength. Her breath, coming in gasps, gradually quietens. She looks at him with her own eyes: her hands are familiar once again—small, powerless, unblemished.

‘All I can say,’ says the doctor, ‘is that if having Hilary here means so much to you, by all means go ahead.’

Oh, I am the doctor. I have seen the past resurrect and resurrect itself, in the lives of my patients. I thought I was immune but I am not. The dead rise up and speak against us, with our own voices.

He looks at his wife, sadly and warily. The doctor’s wife is puzzled: she had forgotten all about Hilary; the sense of her own grievances drowning all ordinary, everyday compassion. Why does the doctor mention her now? He smiles. The habit of acceptance, of subservience, is strong. She forgets the past: her wrongs are swept away in the relief of his forgiveness: she smiles; she stretches out her small plump hand and touches his cold, bony fingers, allowing them their secrets. She is the doctor’s wife again, mother of the doctor’s children, feeder of the doctor’s cat.

Habit triumphs, or is it love? What’s love?

Presently the cat creeps back, and Lettice with her homework, and Laurence from his friends. The doctor’s wife makes cocoa.

Yes, says Lettice. I’ll move over, I suppose; make room for Hilary. If I have to.

Yes, says Laurence. I did it once for Lettice. I’ll do it again, for Hilary. If I have to.

Making room!

In the Outpatients Department, still sitting on the shiny plastic sofa, Lily sits clasping Jonathon, who now lies completely still. His eyes are partly open; and as far as Lily can see, they are glazed over. She is in a frenzy of grief: she looks like some wild old woman: her hair in the harsh neon light has the greyness of age, not of artifice. So Ida looked, once. Lily believes that Jonathon is dead. Jarvis has gone looking for a doctor. Jonathon moans. It is not all over yet.

‘Lily.’

Lily looks up. There’s the familiar clatter, and here comes Hilary, loping in her ungainly fashion down the glaring length of the waiting room.

‘Lily, what’s the matter with Jonathon? You didn’t tell me you were here. I thought you were out.’

Hilary speaks reproachfully, more like mother than child, and takes Jonathon from his mother without so much as by your leave, and shakes him automatically to bring life and senses back into him.

‘He should be in bed,’ she cries. ‘Look at him. He’s exhausted.’ And Jonathon, no different from any other half-asleep child who does not care for his surroundings, grizzles feebly, and then, waking up sufficiently to perceive their full horror, buries his head in Hilary’s puffy bosom and begins to bawl, crimson in the face. Every now and then he lifts his head from the enveloping flesh to gain more breath to make more noise.

The noise is indeed astounding. A doctor comes running. He is a fierce dark-eyed young man of Mediterranean complexion. He has a silky beard.

‘What’s the matter with this child?’ he demands. ‘Why is he making this dreadful noise?’

‘It’s his foot,’ says Lily.

The doctor picks up the foot and inspects it disdainfully. ‘It’s only a little blister,’ he says. And so it is. ‘Any child who can make a noise like that is perfectly healthy.’ And it is true that thereafter, Jonathon, having learnt that it is better to protest than to endure, will set up such a volume of noise to get his own way that the people in Nos. 9, 13 and 11 Adelaide Row sometimes debate whether or not to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and report his callous mother.

Making room!

Lily takes Jonathon home. Jarvis follows. Hilary lumbers behind, limping where she has turned her foot in her absurd platform heels, in her hurry to get to the hospital and protect Jonathon from his past and her own.

‘You’re lucky,’ says Jarvis, ‘that you didn’t break your ankle.’

Lucky Hilary!

Jarvis has a parking ticket. He will have to pay. a £6 fine. He does not mind. He has got off lightly. He knows it.

Lucky Jarvis.

Hilary squeezes into the back of the car. She has been hurrying. Lily wishes that Hilary used a deodorant. Madeleine disapproved of them. Smell is natural, Madeleine would say. Only people who are afraid of sex are afraid of smelling. Well, Lily will soon bring Hilary round to better, nicer ways of living. Lily thinks.

‘I took the guinea pig round to the doctor’s house,’ says Hilary.

‘And they asked me if I’d like to stay. I said I would. Well, it’s nearer school. Would you mind?’

‘It’s as you want,’ says Jarvis, with a touch, the merest touch, of sadness. But enough.

‘If you’d be happy there,’ says Lily, dazzled by her good fortune.

‘I could come to you at weekends,’ says Hilary, kindly.

‘The same as usual. And look after Jonathon.’

‘I’ll make over the spare room into a proper bedroom for you,’ says Lily. ‘After all, it’s your house as well as mine. You were there before I ever was.’

Stepping back, chastened, making room. Understanding what she’s done.

‘If Jonathon wakes in the night,’ says Lily, ‘I’ll go to him myself. I am his mother.’

Lucky Lily, to have a child to go to, who wakes in the night.

Lucky Lily, to have a child to go to.

Lucky Lily, to have a child.

Lucky Lily.

Lucky Lily, thinks what remains of Madeleine, without envy and without regret. Lucky Lily. You are my sister too. Keep your child. Just don’t keep mine.

Good night, goodbye.

There is, after all, quite a respectable gathering around the grave, as the coffin is lowered on its canvas holders into a hole which is tactfully lined with sheets of plastic green grass. Not a worm in sight. Such burials in Mother earth, decently clothed, come expensive. Jarvis does not mind. The new stair carpet and the new roof will have to wait a while. He has told Lily so and she accepts it.

‘I worry about the paper in the spare room,’ says she, ‘that’s all. I don’t want the roof to leak and the paper start peeling, I want it to be nice for Hilary at weekends.’

And so she does. Nice Lily.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘it’s not for nothing I come from the Antipodes. As for the roof, I’ll get up there and mend it myself.’ And so Lily does. Good Lily.

Hilary eventually chooses new wallpaper for her room at Adelaide Row. A twenties revival—splodgy red roses on a fawn ground. It is not to Lily’s liking but she allows Hilary her choice. Kind Lily.

The doctor is at Madeleine’s graveside, and the doctor’s wife, and the doctor’s children, Laurence, Lettice and Hilary.

Renee is there, with her friend Bonny, back from her husband for the fourth time. Renee smiles at Margot, and Margot smiles back. Each to her own taste.

It is not a particularly tearful or dismal funeral. The cemetery is at Ruislip, in North London: a green and leafy place. The wind blows fresh and strong; the sun even shines.

Lily is glad she came. Though she finds the decor and the plastic music of the chapel distasteful, and the presiding clergyman, though pleasant enough, quite hopeless when it comes to comprehending the sorrows of strangers—as how could he not be? At least the coffin is longer than Baby Rose’s must have been.

Lily has had to bring Jonathon with her; she cannot find a baby-sitter. He totters off, confident, to play hide-and-seek amongst the tombstones. Thousands of them, stretching off far beyond the limits of his vision. His foot is completely healed, except for a small drying blister, which, on Margot’s instructions, Lily is leaving uncovered.

Margot has handed in her notice. She will not be working with Jarvis any more. Nor will Jarvis replace her. Business is contracting to such an extent it is hardly sensible to do so, and Lily is pleased to observe he can be so realistic and sensible about his affairs.

Mr Quincey is there, smelling strongly of tooth powder. Renee relented sufficiently to tell him the time and place of the funeral.

Standing there watching the gold wood box lowered into the bright green fronds, he feels, if not part of the family, at least part of a greater humanity, and the living part of it at that. His ulcer has all but healed.