Remember Me (7 page)

Miss Maguire, muttering up and down the High Street, calls a black man a stinking nigger. He offers her his card and suggests she sees a doctor. He is a psychiatrist. Miss Maguire says she’s under the doctor. The psychiatrist, relieved of responsibility, pats her kindly and proceeds.

Lily goes to Selfridges Food Store and there buys a crown roast, some mangetout, some Jersey potatoes, some lump-fish roe, double cream, French loaves, cheese and six lemons.

A shorn, sulky, tearful Hilary helps Lily carry the provisions home. Let us not suppose that the excursion to the hairdresser was organised totally with the image of Hilary as beast of burden in mind. Not totally.

When Lily returns home, she finds a message on the answering machine. The Bridges cannot come to dinner after all. Harvey Bridge has flu, or so Moira alleges, in a voice brimming over, Lily thinks, with insincerity. It may be the quality of the tape, of course, but Lily doubts it.

Lily throws the Brie across the room, in petulance, and Hilary stops to wipe up the spatters before finally going round to Margot’s to pick up Jonathon. She wears a headscarf. It is by now three fifteen.

Madeleine uses Renee’s phone to telephone Lily, and reverses the charges as is her custom. Madeleine speaks coldly but politely, finding it difficult to abuse or insult Lily to her face. Though once it was very different! These days Madeleine suffers from the general paralysis of the defeated. Madeleine ignores the matter of the hairdresser and requests merely that Lily will keep Hilary for the night, as she, Madeleine, is going out: and will Lily ask Hilary to ring her at Renee’s between four and four thirty. Lily acquiesces to both requests, charmingly, with the sweet chilliness she reserves for her enemies. Madeleine has the vision of some biting summer drink, served in a thin glass with a frosted rim. Typical, thinks Lily, putting the phone down. Mad Madeleine using Lily as a dumping ground for Hilary. Not in the least grateful.

Hilary returns home with Jonathon, saying that Margot is annoyed at having had to keep him so long. It is not strictly true, but Hilary will have her revenge. What’s more, Hilary says, Madeleine was round at Adelaide Row, looking for Hilary and furious because she wasn’t at school. Lily is horrified. Is the persecution going to begin again? Is she never to be free of Jarvis’s past?

Lily forgets to ask Hilary to ring her mother.

Lily, instead, anxious to undo any damage Madeleine may have done to Jarvis’s image, not to mention her own, telephones Margot and asks if she and her husband would care to come to dinner that evening? A spur of the moment affair, she claims. A panicky action, born of general upset, Lily knows as soon as she has done it.

And done it is. Margot accepts the invitation; and then dances round the kitchen like an excited child, relieved of the necessity of cooking this, the 5,323rd dinner of her married life.

Lily actually cries.

E
VERYTHING HAS MEANING. NOTHING
is wasted. Only the young believe that they can stand alone in the world, for good or bad, their own master, independent of the past—will cross the very globe, from south to north, like Lily, in the blithe belief that she will thus put her past behind her.

As we grow older we sense more and more that human beings make connections in much the same manner as the basic materials of matter: that we cluster, in fact, as do those complex molecular structures which we see as models in physical laboratories. The linkages are unexpected: they can be of objects, plants, places, events, anything. It is perhaps why we should take good care to polish furniture, water plants, telephone friends with whom we have nothing (apparently) in common, pay attention to coincidence, and in general help the linkages along, instead of opposing them—as sometimes, in our panic at our very unaloneness, we are moved to do.

Consider now these linkages: these interconnections:

Miss Maguire, now fifty-seven, was at the age of twenty the general maid at No. 12 Adelaide Row where Lily now lives. Her employers were a Mr and Mrs Karl Kominski.

Mr Karl Kominski’s sister Renate, in 1942 a refugee from Poland living in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, bought half a pound of pressed ham from Lily’s father Matthew. That was the day before Matthew was called up and had to leave his pretty young English wife Ida behind to run the business, which she declined to do.

Margot’s friend Enid, now living at 24 Kafka Rise (which incidentally lies parallel to a Thomas Mann Crescent, at right angles to a Goethe Avenue, and is bisected by Balsac Street) has a pot plant which originated, as a cutting, from a plant which once flourished in Hamburg in the thirties, and belonged to old Mrs Kominski, Renate and Karl’s mother.

Enid’s husband Sam is an estate agent. In the golden days when money meant something and a house was a place you lived in and not the focal point of the occupier’s monetary, social and emotional fears, Sam’s first sale was of 12 Adelaide Row to Madeleine and Jarvis Katkin. That was in July, 1960, six months before Madeleine had discovered Jarvis copulating amongst the furs with a passing party guest.

Both Madeleine and Jarvis were overjoyed by the condition of the house, which had not been repaired, let alone painted, inside or out, since 1939. But whereas Jarvis saw the house as a challenge to his architectural skill, his ability to make something new and glorious out of the wreckage of the past, Madeleine’s pleasure found its source in the delapidation itself. She did not wish anything changed. Even in those days her suspicion of prosperity and comfort ran deep, though she chose to blame her circumstances rather than herself for the bleak discomfort in which she always lived. Madeleine declined Jarvis’s offer of joint ownership. No, she wished to be free, to have no ties. No dogs, no cats, no budgies, no carpets, no pot plants, no copper-bottomed saucepans. No Jarvis, one would almost have thought. The sink, later the launderette, when one finally opened in the new shopping precinct round the corner, was quite adequate to wash the clothes in.

Jarvis’s early offer of a German designed washing machine, Italian made, with the first kite mark of the British Design Council hanging from the handle, was rejected with such scorn and derision, was such a defeat in that enduring domestic battle, waged to and fro over ever-changing demarcation lines, that Jarvis never fully regained his strength. He fought, after that, in a desultory fashion if he fought at all—the house remained much as it was. It might be said that the house was in the end triumphant: entering the marriage as more of a third party than Lily ever was; it was the house that tore Madeleine and Jarvis asunder. Or that was how Jarvis saw it.

This was the house that Sam sold. Sam’s wife Enid went to school with Margot.

Margot has pink nipples. Madeleine, later Lily, brown. Jarvis’s preference for pink nipples was of the mildest order—yet it was this appreciation of Margot’s breasts, so seldom observed, so rarely complimented, that turned what in those days was called a snog into actual lamentable making love. As in those days the act was so innocently known.

Poor Margot, to be so forgotten.

Poor Jarvis, in those early married days with Madeleine! It is very sad to have overwhelming bourgeois ambitions and yet know in your heart that they are trivial. Madeleine was right; that was the dreadful truth of the matter. She was right about everything. Morally, Madeleine was more refined, more sensitive than Jarvis, and he knew it. Jarvis, heading through the fifties and sixties towards a goal of aesthetic truth and material nobility, shutting his eyes the while to the mayhem and madness of the outside world, seeing only pureness of line, curve and design, has now run up against a bizarre dead end. Decoration is back. Frills and squiggles and nonsense, and vulgar disposability. The squatters are in next door. They light fires with pieces of fifties’ furniture which would make at least a fiver down the Portobello Road, except they haven’t the energy or interest to take them there. Madeleine, torn and worn and honest, is at least in keeping with the spirit of the times. They have finally caught up with her, and passed Jarvis by.

And Jarvis, these days, for all this is happy. Jarvis has Lily. She does not need design. Lily, Jarvis sometimes fears, is conventional, trivial, selfish, unmaternal and manipulative. He is better than her, as Madeleine was better than him. He can be himself. They suit each other. Oh, they love each other. They do.

The week after Jarvis married Lily he found a model steam engine in the long grass of the garden of No. 12. A hired gardener, employed by Lily, had started making sense out of the jungle tangle Madeleine favoured, and there it was. The engine was made out of a shell case brought home from France as a souvenir by (as it happened) Philip’s father. That was in 1917.

Philip’s father, Alan, had for a time courted a certain Philippa Cutts, who lived in Adelaide Row: One summer evening in 1919 after lying in the long grass of the garden with Philippa (as if he were a romantic lad of seventeen and not a shell-shocked veteran of twenty-seven) he had left the engine behind in the grass. He had brought it along to show her as an item of interest, a token of experience, but finding himself the interest, himself the experience, had never got round to reclaiming it. Why should he bother? Are not most of our treasures, in any case, offerings to romance, and well lost in its cause?

Now the model engine stands, restored, polished and admired, as centrepiece to the teak room divider on the ground floor where Margot, Alan’s daughter-in-law, types Jarvis Katkin’s invoices.

Alan lives in an old people’s home in Crouch End. It is his habit to disconcert the morning nurses by feigning death, lying grey, starey-eyed and open-mouthed when they come to wake him. It is not so much that he wants to upset them by this habit, or so he tells Philip on his weekly visit, as that he’s getting into practice. He never quite understood why he had been spared, he used to complain, one man out of the fifty lying lack-limbed and fly-blown in the mud around him, dead as doornails: but being spared, thought he might as well make himself useful. And so he was. So is Philip, after him.

The nursing home is in Heine Avenue, near where Enid lives. The chairman of the local Ways and Means Committee, back in the thirties, had been much shocked by Hitler’s burning of the books and had done his bit to compensate, to keep Europe’s culture alive, when the question of the renaming of streets in the district had arisen.

All things have meaning. Almost nothing is wasted. Old friends, encountered by chance: old enemies, reunited to hate again, old emotions, made sense of and transmuted into energy; old loves reappearing; all the material flotsam washed up by the storms of our experience—all these have implication, and all lead us to the comforting notion that almost nothing in this world goes unnoticed; and more, that almost nothing is unplanned.

Dumpy, flushed Margot linked to lovely bleached Lily by chains more profound than those of employment and Margot’s childminding nature? Surely not! Lily would never consent to it.

But see the pair of them now, Margot and Philip, on their way to the dinner party. Margot scurries behind Philip, as is her habit.

‘I don’t like it one little bit,’ he flings to her, over his shoulder. She is pleased. Remonstrance is better than silence; a milder form of reproof. ‘Don’t like what?’ she asks, though she knows very well.

It is a windy night: the sky is alternately lowering and bright: clouds chase across the moon.

‘Getting socially involved with patients,’ he says, as expected. His suit is too tight: he has put on weight.

Shepherd’s Pie is his favourite dish, and Margot’s speciality.

She is a good plain cook—plain to the point of obstinacy, he sometimes thinks.

‘We’re only going because her other guests dropped out,’ says Margot, as if this made all the difference. The wind pushes her along, the moth into the flame.

‘We’re going because his first wife turned up and you were there to witness it,’ says Philip. ‘You know what some people are like. She wants us all together in one big double bed.’

‘Do you think so?’ she enquires, surprised. But he does not reply. If he hadn’t thought so, he wouldn’t have said it.

Margot feels foolish. Her little feet are tight in their best shoes. Walking fast in high heels, she thinks, gets more difficult with the years: or else Philip is increasingly difficult to keep up with. Perhaps Madeleine is right, perhaps she is living in an entirely false security, and her trust in Philip is misplaced. Perhaps Philip envies Jarvis; perhaps he too would like a newer, fresher wife: perhaps he is not as indissolubly linked to her as she believes: perhaps one day he could speak of her as Jarvis speaks of Madeleine, as a stranger and enemy. The thought catches her breath, and there is a pain in her chest as if some cold hand gripped her heart. Her eyes smart.

‘Do you love me?’ she begs him, ridiculously, as she hasn’t begged for at least ten years. But either he doesn’t hear or he doesn’t want to reply. She trots a little faster. ‘You don’t ever feel you want to start again, with someone else?’

‘Good God,’ he says, ‘I wouldn’t have the strength,’ and his voice is blown away by a gust of damp wind, and his long stride takes him ahead of her again. And Margot recalls, quite clearly, the smell of the wet furs fifteen years ago, before ever she was married to Philip—well, not ever, only some four months before: when she married Philip she was three and a half months pregnant—and puts it from her mind. The past, thinks Margot, rashly and wrongly, is past.

A
H, BON APPETIT!

Lily is an altogether admirable hostess. What a happy note she strikes between ostentation and prudence, between self-advertisement and the pleasure of her guests. Dinner will be served in the dining room: french doors open on to the long garden: it is summer. The weather, contrary to the long-range forecasts, is good. The garden itself has a pale and washed out look: partly due to the lack of rain and partly to Lily’s liking for plants with pale foliage and paler flowers. A spectacular passion-flower vine covers the high trellis, which shuts out the neighbour’s gardens, but does not keep out the sun. The big lime tree, which once housed a wood pigeon’s nest, and every second year shed a sticky substance mortal to all growing things, and from the boughs of which the infant Hilary used to swing, has long been cut down. Pale rock plants grow obediently in the crevices between the York Stone slabs with which Lily and Jarvis personally sealed down the recalcitrant roots of the tree, for the stump refused to die for several years. (Sam the estate agent eventually suggested drilling a hole in the stump and inserting a common kitchen clove, which rite Jarvis duly performed. Whether the final death of the tree was due to the York Stone or the clove was never known—but one or the other worked.) A pond, moulded in plastic to a shape somewhere between a kidney and a heart, but its edges now tastefully mossed, is currently a home for some seven hundred tadpoles (Hilary counted, one infinitely boring Sunday afternoon), seven goldfish and twelve frogs. A fountain plays, thanks to a pumping mechanism bought cheap from Gamages in the week before that useful emporium closed; the pump is splendidly reliable, except in the spring, when clogged with tadpoles.