Remember Me

by Fay Weldon

  Renate Kominski, out of Poland, ageing lady withered up by disappointment and a Southern sun, loved little Lily and almost no one else besides. Who else was there to love? Her family was lost in the holocaust—all except Karl, whom she never liked, and who took up residence in an old house somewhere in London. Renate herself chose New Zealand as her future home, that being the farthest she could possibly get from Europe. A Jewish Agency paid her fare and gave her enough to buy a little flat, and that was all. Well, it was enough.

  Renate landed in Auckland, in 1939, full of hope, but found herself an outcast in a foreign land. She kept herself alive by weaving raffia plates and baskets, which were sold to unenthusiastic buyers in the local Arts-and-Crafts shop. Not only was it a meagre living, but her hands were always cut and sore from the sharp edges of the raffia. She was a handsome girl, but she had trouble with the language: she was too clever for local tastes: she kept herself to herself. What young man in the Bay of Islands could understand Renate’s mind, habits, culture? Renate did not marry. The able bodied men soon all went off to the war, in any case, leaving a nation of women and children behind. They were tough women, too, who could shear a sheep and mend a roof in the morning, and in the afternoon throw a Pavlova cake together and serve it on a lace doiley for tea. Not like Renate. No talk of ideas, or art, or poetry: not even any recognisable political fear, of loss of freedom or identity—just the sheer physical fear of the Japanese, with their fiendish torturing skills, pressing nearer and nearer to the shores of the Land of the Long White Cloud. New Zealand! What a paradise, a pearl, a prize …

  Guard Pacific’s triple star From the. shafts of strife and war—

  sang the little children, in a frenzy of war-like enthusiasm.

  And no one cared to listen to Renate, husbandless, childless, crippled by experience.

  I am Renate, woman without mother, country, husband, child I have only myself to offer. It is not enough.

  But Ida the butcher’s wife was kind; cultured, even. Renate bought half a pound of pressed ham from the best butcher’s shop in New Zealand—the butcher himself about to go away to the war—and stood on the sawdust floor, weeping with longing for a garlic sausage. Ida, though she had never tasted garlic, recognised nostalgia when she saw it. Did Ida herself not suffer this same sad emotion? Did she not long for the soft, weeping skies of England? And how she was frightened, by day, by the bright and glaring skies of the Southern Hemisphere, and by night by its great cold arch of starry sky, with all its intimations of infinity; and frightened most of all by her own nature, which had made her trip out of England on her little high shoes, in her little peek-a-boo red hat, and follow her butcher to the very ends of the earth. The Land of the Long White Cloud.

  Ida tried to get away from him once. She bedded with a poet during the butcher’s short absence in the Philippines, but all she got from that was Rose, Baby Rose, with her thick curly hair, and a whole lot of trouble when the butcher returned with an amputated big toe. Fingerless, toeless man. Ugh! How lovely.

  Lily has a mourning ring which her mother gave her when she came to England. It contains a lock of Baby Rose’s hair. Lily keeps it, not for Baby Rose’s sake, but her mother’s.

  Renate comforts Ida through her trials. Ida learns to weave raffia plates: together they teach the butcher cultural ambition and Lily cultural discontent.

  Renate one day receives several thousands of pounds in compensation from the German Reparations Board—for loss of mother, country, future. Renate gives it, not to Ida so that Ida can pay her fare back to England and start her life again, but to the butcher, so that little Lily can be properly educated, and get to the Northern Hemisphere, where by now, ambitious and discontented, she spiritually belongs. ‘You’re too old, Ida,’ says Renate. ‘You’re too old, like me, to start again. Blame the war, not me. Besides, we have to think of the children.’

  Renate, female in spite of her situation in the world, abandons her own generation in favour of the next. Ida and Renate quarrel and part.

  Ida smiles at Lily now, distantly, on her return from boarding school. Lily has stolen Ida’s heritage. Well, she was bound to. It is what daughters do, given half a chance. Daughters steal youth, beauty, hope and future: or so mothers are inclined to think.

  ‘Mother darling,’ sighs Lily, boarding the plane for England, home, safety and the secretarial college, ‘I’ll miss you so much. What will I do?’ But she doesn’t mean a word of it. And Ida knows it.

  Goodbye, daughter.

  ‘Father dear, oh father—’ but the butcher is an old man now, waving stubby fingers in farewell, and old men are better left. If you can. Not so easy.

  Goodbye, father. Goodbye, mother. Hello, life! Lily, once in England, sensibly finds work as a secretarial assistant on an elegant women’s magazine, and from its monthly columns sets about bettering her appearance, refining her manners, improving her conversation, and changing her culinary repertoire from mulligatawny soup and bacon-and-egg pie to consommé and aioli.

  Goodbye, father. Goodbye, mother. Hello, Jarvis. Public-school, stockbroker belt, but an artist none the less. Going to waste with Madeleine.

  Oh, Jarvis.

  Six o’clock in the morning. Who’s awake?

  The doctor, the doctor’s wife, the doctor’s children, and of course the doctor’s cat, loved and hated by many, whose courting habits caused an uproar as dawn broke over Muswell Hill, waking the entire household with its screeching and yowlings.

  Laurence the doctor’s son climbs out of bed and gropes his way into the garden to rescue the cat, whom he assumes to be in great distress, both physical and mental. The circle of cats, disturbed by his big bare feet, stare at him with hostile eyes before dispersing, their coven’s communion broken. Laurence picks up the doctor’s cat, soothing and comforting, and carries the unwilling creature inside. Laurence’s feet are wet from the damp grass: his pyjamas are damp from drizzle: he does not care. Lovingly he feeds the cat with the chicken breast left uneaten the night before by Lettice and himself. The kitchen still smells of poultry bones, boiled dry.

  I am the doctor’s son: I am the cat’s protector. No one in this household loves him properly. Chicken is too good for us, not good enough for him, that’s my opinion of the world this morning.

  Laurence gets back into bed, damp and chilly. He sneezes and drifts back into nightmares. The cat forgives him and comes to sleep on his bed. Thus are the virtuous rewarded.

  The doctor’s wife wakes with a tightness on her chest, which she puts down to last night’s drink and dinner and with an unfamiliar feeling of resentment which she attributes to her husband’s callous behaviour of the night before, though in what respect it was callous she cannot now quite remember. The doctor rolls towards her, embraces her, murmurs comfort in her ear, and folds himself upon her. Margot’s resentment remains with her; her body goes as usual through its familiar warm and compliant rites. But this is ridiculous, thinks Margot, spitefully; it’s ridiculous and boring: he’s using me, pretending, giving nothing of himself: I don’t really like him at all, let alone love him. And Margot’s heart stays as cold as her body is warm. To be thus unusually separated mind from body, feeling from act, gives Margot an almost pleasant sensation of freedom and power, and since it in no way interferes with her orgasm, but even heightens her sexual response, she is not as dismayed by the alteration in herself as she might otherwise have been. Philip notices nothing: how could he? Only afterwards Margot says, ‘You smell of tooth powder: or that stuff my grandfather used to drop his false teeth into every night,’ which slightly takes him aback. When Margot’s grandfather died, Margot’s grandmother, much taxed in the past by a husband over-finickity about his food, took to wearing the false teeth of the deceased in the interests (or so she said) of economy. It used to upset Margot’s mother Winifred quite dreadfully: for a time she ceased to visit her mother at all; to see her father and her mother speaking from one mouth was more than Margot’s mother Winifred could endur
e.

  Lettice wakes to find her crotch sticky and spots of blood upon her bottom sheet. Her instinct is to call her mother for help—‘Mother, come quickly! See, I am hurt, wounded, ill in some dreadful way.’ But the truth of the matter is soon apparent to Lettice: she is menstruating for the first time, as to all accounts was only to be expected. A dreadful gloom falls upon her: she has the vision of a life to come which is womb-centred, messy, uncontrollable; a whole future of pregnancies and miscarriages, cysts, fibroids, erosions, VD, breasts swollen with milk, riddled with cancer, the sorry women sitting in her father’s surgery. She is at the end of her neat, self-controlled pre-puberty prime. I am finished, thinks Lettice, not without truth. No age will suit me so well as my late childhood. Five days a month like this, for the rest of my life? One week out of every four, or as good as? Sheets and knickers stained and messy? My lifeblood draining away, monthly?

  Lettice’s grandmother, Margot’s mother, Winifred, referred to menstruation as the Curse, and to Lettice’s mind the description is more apt than that offered by her brisk and sensible teachers, who present, with evident untruth, the genital and reproductive processes of the human female as ordinary, pleasant and orderly.

  Lettice, who never cries, cries, and lies as still as she can, for fear of making yet more mess.

  Miss Maguire wakes early: she, who rarely dreams, had a vivid and disturbing dream that Mr Karl Kominski and his wife have returned and taken up residence in 12 Adelaide Row, and that Philippa Cutts rose from the dead from amongst the long grass in the back garden and helped her make pressed meat sandwiches. Miss Maguire unfolds herself from her blankets and sets out to see if it is true. She wears the same clothes night and day.

  Sam wakes earlier than usual. He has a headache. Sam has been mixing his drinks again. Enid his wife, though feeling sick herself to the point of retching, runs to fetch him Alka-Seltzer. Enid normally rises at six, and Sam at eight thirty. Every morning Enid brings Sam his breakfast in bed: sorts the clothes for the washing machine: washes up, sweeps, dusts, tidies, leaves a note for the milkman. This morning she has time for a cup of coffee before she leaves for work, although not time to sit down while drinking it. Enid is an efficient woman. Sam complains that she moves unrestfully fast. Enid will shop for food in the lunch hour and collect Sam’s suit from the dry-cleaners. She travels by public transport, much weighted by shopping-bags. Sam does not think she has enough concentration to drive, and would be a danger on the road to herself and others.

  Only sometimes on a winter evening, waiting in the rain as bus after bus, over-loaded, pass the stop without pulling up, will Enid feel sorry for herself. Otherwise she remains cheerful, stoical and happy to love Sam and be loved by him. She cannot talk to him about her work but she can listen to him talking about his and she can always tell Margot, her confidante, all about everything on Wednesday evenings.

  A sex shop opens just by her bus stop. Enid toys with the idea of buying a vibrator, but the bus always comes before she plucks up courage to go in. Just as well—the use of a simple cucumber seems far less disloyal to Sam, besides being cheaper, and less potentially, electrically speaking, dangerous.

  At 12 Adelaide Row Hilary and Jonathon sleep. Some bond between them, some quiet companionable love, sets up a barrier against disturbance and allows the two of them an hour or so’s grace before waking to their dreadful day.

  Thus, so far, has Hilary armed herself against her mother, and grown from Madeleine towards Jonathon, that lovely child, born of love and need, whom Madeleine so unreasonably detested in her life and in her death.

  Jarvis and Lily are awake, never more so. Lily lies on her back in bed, furious and resentful. Jarvis paces the room. His face is flabby with lack of sleep and last night’s alcohol, and pale beneath its stubble. Jarvis’s pyjama trousers gape open and Jarvis’s genitalia, disregarded, fall out. From time to time tears burst out of his eyes, and he groans and gasps at air.

  And Lily lying watching him, remembers vaguely but with repugnance some other such scene from out of her past—the collapse of some other male personality. When? Who? Lily would rather not remember, but eventually she does. Lily’s father the butcher in tears in the cold room, stumbling amongst the hanging mutton carcases, blinded by grief, stabbing uselessly at the smooth white flanks as they swung towards him and away from him. Is it a real memory, or an imagined one? She does not know. At any rate, it enables her to view Jarvis’s present collapse with distaste rather than despair. He will recover, as did her father, to hold her hand and give her treats again. At least partially. Well, Jarvis must recover. If anyone went on like this for long, Lily thinks, they would clearly have to be put in a lunatic asylum. Lily takes some comfort from the thought.

  It’s Lily’s habit to let her mind race along to the very worst that might develop out of any given situation, accept it, and deal with it as best she may. Lily has already worked out in detail how she would survive in the face of most losses—if she were widowed; or Jarvis was bankrupted; if Jonathon was lost, kidnapped, brain-damaged or killed; if Hilary or herself were raped; if the house burned down; if the H-bomb fell—but never, oddly, has the death of Madeleine entered into Lily’s calculations. Perhaps for Lily it was an event too devoutly to be wished. Although now the actuality is here, she finds it acutely upsetting. Who is to tell Hilary, and how? And if Jarvis loves her, Lily, as he alleges, and she has believed, and has put Madeleine out of his life, why is he now so totally out of control?

  It will be a great saving, thinks Lily, looking, as always in moments of crisis, at the positive side. (So her mother taught her.) Twenty pounds a week, clear of tax, will be added to their income. The new roof can be started; the hall recarpeted: unless of course Jarvis decides to send Hilary to a private school, but that will surely no longer be thought desirable, for Hilary will have the civilising influence of Adelaide Row as her permanent home, and won’t have to put up with Madeleine any more and Lily will have a baby-sitter every day, not just at weekends. On the other hand—no, don’t think about it. Not yet.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ says Lily to Jarvis, ‘either come back to bed or get up. It doesn’t make any difference to anything you wandering about, tearing out your hair. Dead is dead.’

  ‘I know it means nothing to you,’ says Jarvis bitterly, ‘but she was the mother of my child.’

  ‘Of one of your children,’ says Lily, and Jarvis stops pacing to glare at the butcher’s daughter, that upstart lady. ‘Death is not such an awful thing,’ announces Lily, getting out of bed, peeling off her nightie and standing nude while she searches for her knickers; and the awful thing is, she means it. Death lurked over the sandy beaches of her childhood: Lily is accustomed to the end of things. Why else does she pay such reverence to what is here and now? Dead birds, dead wood, dead sailors, in the end even a dead little sister lying on the white dry sand, washed up by the Pacific waves. All in all it was the pounding and dragging, pounding and dragging, as the oceans of the world slopped this way and that beneath the circling moon, which in the end made a silence in Lily’s shell-like ear, blotting out all but the most vivid sounds of distress.

  After her quarrel with Lily’s father the Bay of Islands butcher, Lily’s mother Ida, that delicate lady from the Home Country, took herself and Lily and the new-born Rose off to Long Bay, Coromandel, where she lived and sulked the war out, running the Kiwi Tea House for the benefit of swimmers, ornithologists and truckloads of American servicemen, then on leave in this New Zealand paradise, resting after Okinawa. The tea house was little more than a wooden shack perched on top of a sand dune, vibrating like a drum when wind and rain bounced upon its corrugated iron roof. Ida made it nice; nice as middle-class England in the thirties, when the servants knew their place and the workers doffed their caps. Ida served tea in china pots on check tablecloths, weighted down against the wind by cowrie shells; she served passion-fruit ice cream in scallop shells: and slices of cherry madeira and crab sandwiches besides, and if the sand fle
w into your mouth as you ate there was nothing she could do about that, except to request you to keep your mouth shut while you ate. The bay was sheltered from the open passions of the huge Pacific; here the sea ran sluggishly; the waves were an apology for the huge rollers Lily loved. Everything here was second-best, Lily used to think, like her mother, like her life; little bleached girl on a hot dry beach, thin arms lifting trays, filling teapots, taking tips from the large-teethed, yellow-skinned open faced Americans, with their free, loping gait. In the winter the beaches emptied, the tea house closed, the shutters went up over the windows, and Lily’s mother Ida occupied her time dreaming of England, home, green fields and tea-dances, teaching little Lily the art of English housewifery, and looking after Baby Rose, that little bundle of sorrow and shame, while the sea sand whipped against their oil-lit, wood warmed cottage, and Lily wondered if she would ever see her father, or a school, or the real world again.

  ‘What did Madeleine have in front of her, anyway?’ enquires Lily. What indeed? The fading of her youth: the growing estrangement of Hilary: the falling value of twenty pounds a week: the encroachment of rust through the fabric of her refrigerator, and wet rot spreading through the draining board? Some households, as Lily is aware, like some people, if left spiritually unattended will move steadily away from grace and towards corruption, will become a prey to the breaking in of thieves and damp, and moth.

  As to Madeleine, as to her home. ‘What did she have in front of her?’ Lily repeats.

  Jarvis, under his wife’s disparaging gaze, straightens up and defends himself.

  ‘Life,’ replies Jarvis.

  ‘She must have died about the time you were wishing her dead,’ says Lily, unforgivably, ‘so I think you’re being very hypocritical. I can’t bear hypocrisy in a man. It’s the last quality one looks for. And what’s more, the clock stopped at the time she died.’ She says it in triumph, as if this last fact somehow proved her value and his worthlessness.