by Fay Weldon
‘I wondered when you were going to bring that up,’ says Jarvis. ‘I wondered when the farrago of superstitious nonsense was about to begin. I know what we’ll be having next. It was Madeleine’s ghost swept through the house last night, opening the windows, sticking a cosmic pin into Margot Bailey’s leg, another one into Jonathon, and another into Hilary, but missing you altogether. Is that what you believe? It wouldn’t be like Madeleine one little bit. Why should she have anything against the doctor’s wife? It was you she didn’t like, and with good reason.’
‘Good reason?’ enquires Lily dangerously, and with what remains of her common sense. Jarvis refrains from pursuing this particular tack, which would consist of variations on a theme of Lily as home-breaker, marriage-wrecker, child-stealer. But two can play at that game, and he knows it. ‘If you and I are going to get through the next few days, Lily,’ says Jarvis instead, with that paternal pomposity to which his wife responds so well, ‘we are both going to have to behave. And you can start by not implying that it was I who killed Madeleine by wishing her out of the way. I’m sure you were wishing harder than me, in any case.’
Lily is quiet, for she is frightened. What is Jarvis implying? That Madeleine, at the moment of death, did indeed send her spirit out to 12 Adelaide Row, Lily’s home, with its pale new carpets and its pale clean walls? Stop the clock? Why should she? Madeleine hated the house in her lifetime, had been heard a hundred times to say so, had at one time quite deliberately broken its windows and torn out its flowers: she had left no part of her spirit here. Everyone agreed. Otherwise Lily would have insisted, yes, of course, she would, that Jarvis and she had started their married life in a new house. She could only enter in to No. 12, as its mistress, by virtue of the fact that Madeleine had left so remarkably little mark upon it. If Madeleine’s spirit was to turn up anywhere, thought Lily, on its way to wherever it was that spirits went, surely it would be in her present basement home? Yes, Lily can quite imagine that. She shudders.
‘What’s the matter?’ enquires Jarvis. ‘Or is someone walking on your grave?’ And Lily begins to giggle, and then to laugh, and then to cry, and then to have hysterics, so that presently Hilary and Jonathon, woken by the noise, come into the bedroom and stand staring at her in horror—cool, quiet Lily, Jonathon’s mother, Hilary’s step-mother, thus for once so flushed and noisy—and Jarvis their father feeling too dull and indifferent to so much as slap his wife and bring her to her senses. She has to do even that, or its equivalent, for herself. She bites her hand, hard.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Hilary.
‘Your mother’s dead,’ says Lily, just like that. Well, once Lily’s mother said to Lily ‘Your sister’s dead,’ and Lily felt only relief, so why should Hilary feel differently? All Hilary says, in any case is, ‘I don’t believe you,’ thus betraying stupidity, ingratitude, and callousness, and making Lily want to scream once more. Is this what she’s going to have to cope with, from now on?
Jarvis takes another swig of whisky, and puts down the bottle on the floor. Jonathon totters over, picks up the bottle, and copies his father. He swigs: Lily gets to her son but not before he’s taken at least a couple of swallows. Lily snatches, Jonathon wails, Jarvis rants, Hilary asks unnecessary questions about the manner of her mother’s death, and Lily is left to ring the doctor to ask his advice about Jonathon’s drunkenness.
Philip Bailey, woken from early morning sleep, says not to worry, let him sleep it off, and puts the phone down without, Lily realises, so much as a thank you for last night’s dinner. Lily wishes she’d never asked him. She can see she’s going to have to change doctors, sooner or later. Some other finger will have to inspect her cervix.
Breakfast is clearly going to be late.
Well done, Madeleine! More effective in death than in life. At least at breakfast time.
Eight o’clock.
‘I don’t believe you,’ cries Hilary, beating at her stepmother with clenched fists, as Lily tries to make Jonathon vomit by sticking her finger down his throat. All Jonathon does is bite.
‘You’re lying. My mother isn’t dead.’
‘You’d better get ready for school,’ says Lily. ‘You’ll be late.’
‘School?’ enquires Hilary, blankly.
‘S-C-H-O-O-L,’ Lily spells it out. ‘You have to carry on.
We all have to carry on.’
So Hilary put on her red platform shoes and stumbles off into the day, and carries on.
Eight thirty.
Breakfast at the doctor’s house is similarly disturbed by Margot’s ill temper, and the doctor’s early awakening. Margot, hollow-eyed, strips the stained sheets off Lettice’s bed with unnecessary force and a muttered ‘Well, it’s started now.’
‘What’s started,’ demands Lettice. ‘What?’ She is pale and furious.
‘Trouble,’ says Margot, and that’s all she will say. Margot, suddenly cruel mother, offers Lettice neither comfort, advice, nor help, beyond handing her a towel, a belt and a couple of pins, which Lettice knows to be hopelessly old-fashioned. What’s the matter with her mother, Lettice wonders, this morning of all mornings? Can she be jealous? The notion cheers her up a little. ‘Will you tell Dad?’ Lettice murmurs to her mother later, with some faint notion of being proud of her new status as fecund woman but Margot merely stares at her daughter and says bleakly, ‘Tell him what?’ so that poor shattered Lettice goes off to school feeling resentful and miserable.
And when Laurence insists on telling her in detail about the behaviour of matter in black holes, the doctor’s wife remarks, ‘Facts never made anyone intelligent,’ so that Laurence leaves the house upset and hurt. And then when the doctor asks her why she is limping she retorts ‘I’m not,’ although the pain in her thigh still comes and goes.
She burns the bacon and eggs, tips the lot into the bin, and starts again.
‘What’s the matter with you today?’ he enquires. ‘Isn’t that rather wasteful?’
‘No more wasteful than your Amateur Photographer every week. It’s not as if you ever even opened it.’
The size of the weekly newspaper bill is a matter of some grievance to Margot. Through the letter-box every day comes The Times, the Guardian and the Mail, and on Sundays The Observer, The Sunday Times and the News of the World, and once a week New Scientist, New Society, the Statesman, The Listener, the B.M.J, and The Lancet, and once a fortnight Amateur Photographer.
The doctor does not like to see unopened newspapers and periodicals thrown away. Margot stacks them, badly and unwillingly, in the hall between the kitchen and the surgery. One day the doctor (he claims) will get round to reading them. In the meantime a nest of fieldmice lurks unseen but sometimes heard in the 1971 back numbers. One day, all the same.
One day.
One day, in 1948, when Philip was sixteen, prize pupil at the grammar school, and form prefect, he entered a photograph into a local amateur photography competition, artistic nude section. The photograph was of his sister Jill, then twelve, who took off her clothes for her brother, not only willingly but almost eagerly. Perhaps something of her smiling complaisance showed, because the photograph won first prize locally, and then nationally—and appeared in all the national newspapers. (Those were the days when photographs of naked girls needed to be backed by an excuse of some kind—artistic, medical or geographic.) Jill had to be taken away from school, out of range of the sniggers of her contemporaries and the shocked disapproval of their parents, and sent off to boarding school. Mr and Mrs Bailey did not in any way blame Philip after all, they had given him the camera for Christmas but the whole episode was distressing. Jill contracted infantile paralysis at boarding school and lost all movement from the waist down. Mrs Bailey nursed her at home for some five years, until herself contracting cancer of the spine.
In those days the word cancer, like the word bankruptcy in the previous era, was whispered; a disease as socially embarrassing and as little understood as insanity. Mr Bailey, that lover of ope
n spaces and wild flowers, was tied to a home of shame and illness. Philip abandoned his ambition to become a newspaper photographer and became a doctor instead.
His parents were much relieved by his change of plan. It seemed to them that the cloud which had descended on the family the day Jill took off her clothes and posed for Philip had finally lifted, and the purpose of Mr Bailey’s survival of the battlefields of World War I made clear at last.
Philip was to be a doctor.
Even though he spoiled things rather by presently marrying Margot, a little pregnant nurse.
Since the doctor started in General Practice he has had little time for photography, let alone remorse. His sister’s death from pneumonia, by comparison to many deaths he had seen, seemed merciful; his mother’s lingering end no worse than many: his father’s condition, living in a nursing home in the daily expectation of death, of no great moment. He has trained himself in compassion for others, and has little left for himself. He expects Margot to be likewise, and she is.
She is the doctor’s wife. She is there to help. When the telephone rings, she replies patiently and carefully. When her husband is tired and cross, she understands. When he is unreasonable, she forgives him. When he is selfish, she makes allowances. When young women undress for him she knows his interest is in public health and not their sexuality (as once his interest lay in lighting, grain and texture, and not the naked body of his little sister Jill. Or so he told his parents and they certainly believed him). His patients’ needs, in fact, are greater than hers. She knew that when she married him.
Not today.
Today she brings the subject round to the unread copies of Amateur Photographer and the size of the newspaper bill, or (if we’re translating riddles) the unacknowledged and painful traumas of his adolescence. It is a declaration of marital war to which he responds with alacrity. He has spent a disturbed night, after all, and his digestion is still labouring under the strain of last night’s lamb, vinaigrette and Beaujolais.
‘Since I earn the money,’ retorts her husband, ‘I can surely spend it how I please, and if I want to buy seven thousand copies of Amateur Photographer and never read one of them, it is nothing whatsoever to do with you.’
It is a statement which normally she would accept as self-evident truth, but today she feels argumentative.
‘What nonsense,’ she observes. ‘You can only earn the money in the first place because I set you free to do it. Washing and cleaning and cooking and looking after your children.’
So saying, she drops a cup and breaks it. Is it accidental? She scarcely knows. Certainly it is Philip’s favourite cup—bowl-shaped, the better for tasting the flavour of coffee, and given to him by an emergency lady patient from Paris, whose peritonitis he diagnosed when all others had failed to do so, and whose life he (allegedly) saved. She was a very French, very blonde, very grateful patient indeed,
‘What is the matter with you? The cost of breakages in this house must run to hundreds.’
‘You could always deduct it from the housekeeping,’ observes Margot. ‘It’s what they used to do to servants.
Charge breakages.’
‘A very good idea,’ says Philip. ‘You might learn to be careful.’ The doctor’s wife, for once, is not wearing her seersucker dressing gown. She is wearing her oldest skirt and an old grey jersey she uses for spring cleaning. There is a hole in the armpit. No doubt if she included jeans in her wardrobe she would be wearing those.
‘Are you going to work like that?’ he enquires.
His wife seems confused, plucks at the jersey, regarding it with some astonishment, and says, ‘Of course I’m not.’
‘Why not?’ he enquires. ‘Sackcloth and ashes might well be appropriate.’
‘I couldn’t help being taken ill.’ She is hurt now, and subdued.
‘If that’s what you call it.’
‘What else?’ she begs.
‘Very well. What diagnosis would you prefer? Hysteria or brain tumour?’
Philip surprises himself by his own competence, unpractised as he is, in this flare-up of hostilities between them. He is almost enjoying himself. The second lot of bacon and eggs is burning in the pan. He looks at his wife with the hatred she seems intent on inviting. Shaken, she turns to the stove. She is getting scrawny, he thinks: lanky and sinewy like some tough old lady in the Appalachian Mountains.
‘All I can say,’ he observes to the back, ‘is that as a servant you’re a failure, and not worth the wages you’re paid. Look at the state of this place.’
And it is certainly not tidy, but then when was it ever? The injustice of his own remark troubles Philip; he certainly does not normally regard his wife as a servant. On the other hand, the lanky, angry creature at the cooker, her back set against him, burning his breakfast, seems to expect and deserve abuse. He has the feeling he is required to provide it, much as it goes against the grain.
Margot turns back to him. There are tears in her little button eyes.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ she says. ‘And what about you last night anyway, ogling Lily like that. Suggesting they found a gigolo for Madeleine.’
‘So that’s what it’s all about. You’re such a prude,’ he laments. ‘I was only entering into the spirit of the evening, after all. I thought that’s what you wanted.’
Philip’s long fingers drum upon the table. His hands seem to have declared their own independent war against his wife.
‘You’re turning into a dirty old man,’ she says. ‘I suppose you fancy her tits. Brown-nippled bitch.’
Philip is quite shaken. Perhaps his wife has a brain tumour after all?
‘Margot my dear,’ he says—all his own animosity evaporating, his fingers quietening.
‘Don’t you my dear me,’ says Margot. ‘I know you and your dirty tricks. Sticking your hands up women when there’s no need. And weren’t you sorry when you got a Night Service and had to stop visiting your slut. I knew where you were going, up and off in the middle of the night, don’t think I didn’t.’
Once, long, long ago, when Philip was thirty-three and feeling older than at any other time in his life, before or since, when Margot was pregnant with Lettice and his life seemed to be closing in upon him, as once his father’s had, Philip had an affair with a patient. An affair? It was hardly worthy of the name: more like a scuffle, three times enacted in the back of a car, and then boredom interceded, or was it prudence?—and Philip, in the interests of honesty, harmony (or was it fear of blackmail?) confided in his wife. She understood, as a good wife should. (By that time Lettice was born and Margot was struggling to establish breastfeeding.) Where had she been herself, after all; deserting her post, off at the ante-natal clinic, concerned with the pressure of the baby (unborn) on the sciatic nerve, and (born) on her nerves, rather than with her husband’s emotional and sexual needs—and so on. He’d been lonely, and the girl had thrown herself at him, and how could he, why should he, resist? He loved his wife, after all. It had meant nothing.
The girl, alas, was less easy to throw off than he had assumed girls were. (Margot being his model of femininity.) This one was an artist’s model who worked at the local art school, and spending as she did most of her time naked and observed, had developed a fine sense of her own importance. Throughout the ensuing years Philip would, from time to time, at two, three, four in the morning be summoned to emergencies at strange addresses, and when he rang the bell, why there she’d be, naked on the step, inviting him in.
He either had to have her certified or pay for a Night Service. He chose the latter, regretfully enough. It saved him sleep but cost him money and the goodwill of his patients.
But this, he acknowledged was the price one must expect to pay for professional indiscretions. He was lucky it was no worse and that Margot was such an understanding wife.
Not this morning.
This morning Margot is all the wronged women in the world, and being so, he finds it all the more natural to wrong her.
&n
bsp; ‘My patients are waiting,’ the doctor observes, and so saying, he leaves her, her Madeleine-mouth still open in abuse, and, as one might say, egg around it.
Oh, I am the doctor, I am any man leaving home with a jaunty step, off to work, putting the trial of breakfast time behind me: off out into the world where I can deal fairly and squarely and be the decent man I know I am. And pray God by supper time she is herself again.
Oh, I am the doctor’s wife, any wife, Jarvis’s one and only wife, left with the dishes as the front door closes. My own words corroding my own sweet mouth; his still rankling in my ears, unforgivable. I shall feed off them all day, and they off me … it’s a poisonous diet, but I’m hungry and if there’s nothing else, it’ll have to do.
Poison indeed! And the only antidote is love. If there’s a scrap of it left, find it.
Presently Margot does so, and feels better. The cat emerges from under the table and jumps on her lap. The doctor, after all, has not left the home: he is only the other side of the dividing wall. She can almost hear his patient voice, slow and reassuring, he sympathises with, understands and heals the whole world and its populace, with the single exception of herself. Well, it has to be put up with.
Margot thinks of Hilary, poor Hilary, with her shorn hair, and the thought lifts what remains of the oppression on her spirit. She clears the table, and sweeps up and presently goes to the bedroom and takes off the sweater and skirt, and puts on her navy and white suit, and looks in the mirror somewhat nervously, and is pleased to see her own plump and easy face. It is more than time for the doctor’s wife to go to work.
Ten o’clock. Bonjour! Lettice’s French class commences. Last year Lettice came top in French.
Arthur the mortician arrives for his day’s work. Goliath gathers his belongings together, and prepares to leave for school.
‘What’s she doing out?’ enquires Arthur, of Madeleine’s body, sheeted and harmless on its trolley. ‘Well, she’s not doing any harm,’ says Goliath. ‘Enough of your lip,’ says Arthur. ‘That’s a white woman lying there, let me remind you.’ Goliath smiles grimly but patiently at his aged superior.
