Remember Me (8 page)

Bon appetit!

The guests will dine on cold consommé, topped by lump-fish roe and whipped cream, served with little hot crescent rolls (for the greedy) followed by the Selfridge’s crown roast, served with mange-tout, pommes duchesse (for the weak) and green salad: then lemon mousse, the Selfridge’s cheese served with low-calorie crackers (which Lily will eat). Jarvis bought the wine at Augustus Barnett—it is a light Beaujolais and innocuous enough. Lily asserts that she prefers Beaujolais to claret, but never gives a reason. She would really rather not think about it.

(Lily’s first sexual experience—a near rape, alas—was with a business executive who had taken her out to an expensive dinner, ordering fillet steak and a good claret—which latter seemed in retrospect to taste of menstrual blood and graveyards mixed.)

Lily bleeds, yes she does. Red drops of death and birth, like anyone else. She is bleeding tonight: though through such a barrier of aspirin, expanding plugs of cotton wool and proofed pants that she is able to forget all about it. Lily’s dress tonight is silver grey, slippery, high in the waist, low in the bust: her breasts are clearly defined, her ankles neat in newly fashionable, high-heeled, dainty shoes. In the kitchen, between courses, she goes shoeless for speed and efficiency.

The refectory table on which they will dine is in faded English walnut. It cost £65 in the days—the happy days—when such a price seemed exorbitant. Jarvis bought it as it happens, in the week during which both Madeleine and Lily lived in the house. The table mats are a pale brilliant green and come from Heal’s. The cutlery is of silver, and was left to Jarvis by his mother Poppy. Lily, dear Lily, has had the dents made by Madeleine beaten out. Madeleine used the spoons, Jarvis’s heritage, to open stubborn tins; she used the points of knives to change electric plugs; she used the forks to stir up the earth in the cat tray. Lily arrived in the house only just in time. As it is, Jarvis estimates that an eighth of his mother’s knives, a quarter of his mother’s spoons and a sixth of his mother’s forks have found their way, via Madeleine’s malice, into the dustbin. It is a matter of some grief to him.

Lily has had a waste disposal unit installed, so any cutlery in danger sets up an instant uproar. His mother’s silver remains as it should—clean, dry, polished and safe in a green felt box; on the table only on special occasions, and then briefly, very briefly, in the washing-up bowl.

On the table Lily has placed two white china candlesticks, containing pale green candles; these she will ask Jarvis to light as soon as the guests are seated. The matches stand ready. There is a posy of pale wild flowers in the centre bowl (of fairground glass; only 25p in a junk shop which knew no better). The chairs are matching and are in mid-Victorian maple. The walls around are papered in a floral pattern; tiny white daisies and pale pink roses intertwine on a pale yellow ground. The dining room curtains are pale yellow velvet and a mistake, but one too expensive to rectify.

The guests this evening are a mistake, Lily fears: boring and blatant at the same time, like the curtains. The meal, costed by Lily at £24.25—she calculates such costs to a penny, including an estimate for electricity for cooking; and two runnings of the washing-up machine after the meal—will, thanks to the loss of the Bridges, bring very little return in either entertainment, improved contacts for Jarvis, or return invitations which she will enjoy. Why she ever asked Dr Bailey and his wife she cannot now imagine. Nor can Jarvis.

Margot arrives dressed in a dinner gown bought (in Lily’s estimate) in 1969, and timeless even then. It is of shiny black material, high-necked and long-sleeved. Wearing it, Margot looks more like a plump skin-diver than a doctor’s wife. The image flashed through Philip’s mind as his wife dressed, but he was too loyal to utter it.

If Philip has infidelities, they are in Margot’s mind, not his.

Philip wears the brown suit he always wears when he goes out. He bought it at C & A eight years previously; it is of a hardwearing Swedish cloth, in an enduring style. It is tight round his waist. Much of his dislike of going out lies in his dislike of putting on the suit, and knowing that every time he does so it will be a little tighter, and his end a little nearer.

Jarvis, as befits the husband of a young bride and father of a two-year-old, wears jeans and Mao-blue shirt. If Lily has her way, Jarvis will hold back the passing of years for ever. Sometimes he would like to sigh, and heave, and sink back gratefully into a middle-aged torpor like a hippopotamus into mud, but Lily will not have it. Lily keeps him slim, healthy and sober. Lily even cooks in margarine, not best butter. Lily will keep Jarvis alive for ever, if she can.

In the pale, plumply upholstered living room, which runs through from the front to the back of the house, Jarvis provides Margot with sherry, Philip with a glass of red wine, and himself with whisky. He makes Lily a long Campari and soda. The glass stands waiting, frosted and sugared at the rim. Margot marvels, as Lily had supposed she would.

Conversation, at first, is difficult. The Baileys seem, outside their own territory, to be a silent pair. Philip is in the habit of thinking before he speaks, lest his patients misunderstand his meaning, as they will if they can. His family wait kindly upon his words, but in households such as these, he has no sooner opened his mouth than the conversation has leapt three subjects on. His very slowness gives him an air of wisdom, as if though clearly considering what has been said, he does not see fit to comment upon it. He makes poor Lily nervous. That, and the fact that he knows about the sometime erosions on her private parts, the result of too violent intercourse: knows her ridiculous fears of VD: weighed her weekly during her pregnancy with Jonathon, during which she under-ate absurdly, weighing as much at thirty-six weeks as she had at four; once even pushed his sheafed finger up her anus, inspecting piles. He knows too much and speaks too little. And as for Margot, she clearly waits to take her conversational lead from her husband and he is offering no leads at all. Lily thanks God she is not as other wives.

Lily’s colour is brighter than usual as she steers what passes for a conversation; gracefully and quickly over subjects which scarcely count as politics, since they are surely open to little dispute, but which she assumes will interest the doctor and his wife.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Lily, in her cool sweet tones, ‘but I think, personally, we all have a perfect right to educate our children how and where we want and to pay as much as we want for the medical attention we choose. What business has the State to tell us what to do and how we’re going to live?’

No one replies. Only Jarvis, passing, grabs at her buttocks and vulgarly squeezes. Lily grows quite pink. ‘Personally I want the best for Jonathon and I hope you do too, Jarvis. It’s like workers’ control, socialism run riot. I mean, the average person’s IQ is a hundred, isn’t it. And someone with an IQ of a hundred can barely read or write. How can people like that run the factories, poor things? But I mustn’t bore you with politics; Jarvis is making dreadful faces at me. Why, darling? Am I being too political? Am I behaving like Madeleine? Mind you, Madeleine was red in tooth and claw, and I’m sure no one can say that of me.’ She laughs, apologetically, and then remembers, too late, that the Bailey children go to the same Comprehensive as Hilary.

‘Oh well,’ she says, ‘oh well. I have my own views. I’m sorry if they don’t suit. Poor Jarvis, how he suffers from his wives. What did you think of Madeleine, Margot?’

‘She seemed much like anyone else,’ says Margot.

‘Was she drunk?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Margot is quite startled. ‘She usually is, by lunchtime. It was always her great problem. It was very silly of her to come round here—she knows we can get the restraining order re-enforced anytime we like. If she really wanted to know where Hilary was, she could have phoned. But then she’d have lost the opportunity of making a scene in front of you. Poor thing. I really feel sorry for her. I just wish she wasn’t so rotten to poor Hilary: she stuffs the poor girl like a pig for the slaughter. And, of course, I’m good for playing nursemaid tonight, since she’s off gadding somewhere. She really has a good time, that woman, on Jarvis’s money; but she loves to pretend she doesn’t. Are you
sure
she wasn’t drunk, Margot?’

‘I suppose she might have been,’ says Margot, betrayer. And Jarvis, to change the subject, pinches his wife. Colour again.

‘Please don’t do that,’ says Lily, ‘it makes me feel ridiculous.’

‘You never mind in private,’ says Jarvis, and Lily relaxes, bridles and giggles. Jarvis can always bring her pleasure by alluding publicly, and naughtily, to their private happiness. ‘I expect Jamie and Judy are late because they’re quarrelling,’ says Lily, to her punctual guests, of her unpunctual ones. ‘Judy says they always quarrel when they’re coming to us.’

The doorbell rings. Jamie and Judy stand quarrelling upon the step, like fieldmice arguing over a grain of wheat.

Jamie is fifty and feels thirty: Judy is thirty and feels twenty. That’s only ten years difference. Jamie is short, well-dieted and trim, grey hair tight and curly, face benign and wrinkled; he too is dressed in conventional Mao-blue. Judy is a top-heavy little thing; Afro hair shelters a small grey face and a spindly little body. Her thighs are taut and narrow, as if made for the forcing apart, and her mons pubis is apparent beneath a startling dress of red and yellow and very thin African cotton.

Jamie’s voice is powerful, booming. Hers, answering, is soft but nasal. Judy was a working girl from Liverpool, and sees no reason to forget it. Judy married a London business man on her twentieth birthday and came south to live on a Span housing estate, all glass and greenery. Living next door, the other side of a couple of sheets of glass and a bush or so, who did she find but her heart’s desire, Jamie, actor and would-be writer and connoisseur. And also, of course and alas, Albertine his wife, who claimed to be an actress but was really only a store demonstrator; unemployment in the acting profession running at a slightly higher than usual eighty-five per cent. There, next door Judy lived for eight years, during which time she had two children, made love with her husband some 2,000 times, and with Jamie some 500 times. On the 501st occasion Jamie’s wife and Judy’s husband, returning together from the local dramatic society’s rehearsal of
Cosy Nook,
interrupted Jamie and Judy’s ardours, and responded not with grief, remorse and self recrimination, but by falling in love with each other and absconding together, taking all the children, all, to create a cosier and more reliable nook elsewhere, and who could blame them?

Judy and Jamie, left with what they so much desired—that is, their freedom and each other—were married. Well, the other two were. Judy freaked out her hair and Jamie took to wearing jeans: she writes theatre crits, he runs a little theatre. They live in a penthouse, caring for a rich man’s dogs while he is on safari, and hopefully lost forever in the jungle.

They seldom venture out so far into the suburb, but Lily is known as a good cook and Jarvis and Jamie are old friends, left over from other days. Jamie went to school with Jarvis.

Listen to Jamie and Judy now, as Lily opens the front door to them.

JUDY
: Lily, I’m sorry we’re late. Jamie has no sense of direction. That’s his trouble. When I pointed out we were driving round in a circle and it was symptomatic of his whole life, he hit me. Look! Is it bleeding? His nails are very sharp.

JAMIE
: I apologise for Judy. She’s been drinking. It’s the depressed housewife syndrome.

JUDY
: If only it were a house. You’ve no idea how pokey a penthouse can be. Especially when it’s not even yours, and you never know where you’re going to be living from one week to the next.

LILY
: Do both come in. No, Judy, you’re not bleeding, not that I can see.

JAMIE
: Of course she’s not bleeding. I had to slap her. If I hadn’t stopped her nagging there would have been an accident. Judy has simply not caught up with one-ways. She lives in the past. Women do, over a certain age.

JUDY
: Shall we just stop all this? It’s very boring for everyone.

JAMIE
: I didn’t start it. It’s not surprising we never get asked anywhere. Lily darling, you look angelic. The pallor amazes. Jarvis is the luckiest man alive. You and Judy scarcely seem to belong to the same species. Look at you both!

Poor little grey, badly-behaved Judy. Poor smarting Jamie.

There are few riddles left in such exchanges. Resentment, fear, rejection; the desire to hurt, the craving to be hurt; the tangle of love me in spite of me, see how you’ve wounded me, offered up and opened up for all the world to see. A cry for help, seldom answered. Lily, good kind Lily, makes the attempt to do so. Her own armour is not so well made as she would like it to be. Chinks keep opening up in her carapace of conventionality, letting in shafts of understanding and compassion.

LILY
: Judy and Jamie, do stop it, whatever it is. You do love each other. You always have. You’ll never part, so you might as well be happy together. Do forget it, whatever it was. Kiss and make up.

Bon appetit!

Judy catches Jamie’s hand. But Jamie’s hand remains cold and hostile. Tears start to Judy’s eyes. Jamie’s hand relaxes just in time. For the rest of the evening they sit together when they can, touching flesh to flesh, as they did when their love was still illicit, and so much more satisfactory.

‘Where are the Bridges?’ asks Judy now, looking round hopefully. Harvey Bridge, the (quite) famous architect; Moira Bridge, the lady TV director. ‘I thought they were coming.’

‘They’ve got the ‘flu,’ says Lily. ‘But do meet the Baileys. Philip is our noble GP. And Margot helps Jarvis out. Between them they know more about us than anyone else in the world. I’m surprised they came.’

The shadow of the missing guests, of possible excitements and elusive good times, hovers over the rest of the evening: though Jamie does, between the jellied consommé and the crown roast, ask Philip for a diagnosis of a recurring pain under his right ribs: and Judy complains about service in the Casualty Department of the local hospital as if it were all Philip’s fault.