by Fay Weldon
Former deeds, forgotten words.
In those days the bathroom was not this confection of blue and white tiles, gilded fittings, and carpeted floor. Envisage it then, with its big white bath, cracked basin, cream walls, dark green paint, brown lino floor, and the whole dominated by a big gas geyser in chipped white enamel discoloured by fumes, with a metal spout and controlled by levers, through which, if you put pennies into the meter below the basin, hot water would eventually trickle.
Madeleine always bought Lifebuoy soap: the room used to smell of carbolic. So did little Hilary, as a baby, her bottom red and sore with nappy rash.
There is a smell of tooth powder in the room, and a movement in the mirror. Jarvis sees a face reflected there.
When the family cat dies, its owner will sometimes see its movements thereafter, but only out of the corner of his eye; only for a day or two, a week or so. And looking, will see there’s nothing there but the shadow of his remembrance. Or perhaps he’s obtuse and sees nothing, and it’s left to a friend to say, ‘You’ve got a cat just like your old one,’ and for the bereaved owner to say in surprise, ‘No I haven’t,’ and the friend to say ‘But I saw it there just now, sitting on the stairs, just like the old one did—’
Jarvis sees Madeleine’s face reflected; at least he thinks he does. The mirror is steamed up, so it’s hard to be sure. Steamed up? But he hasn’t been running the taps; how can it be?
Jarvis turns, and sees Margot standing there.
‘I thought you Were Madeleine,’ he says, blankly. The light shines from behind Margot, so that Jarvis can see her shape but not her face, not her eyes. Thus once Madeleine turned, to look at Jarvis her husband, standing there, outlined in the doorway, twenty-nine, handsome, lusty, and turned back to face the mirror again, with wifely docility. Oh, those were the days when the plan for our lives was less obscure: when our puppet strings pulled, and we danced, and did not struggle. Jill, said Philip, all of sixteen, nude photography is art, and besides, I am your brother: and there she is, as God intended, in her wheelchair for ever and ever amen.
Harsh deeds, kind words.
‘I’m not Madeleine,’ says Margot, but she advances towards him as if she were; only now Jarvis stands where Madeleine did, and she where Jarvis did, and as Jarvis once did to her, she closes up to him, and he turns away, so his back is to her.
What happened next?
‘You shouldn’t have,’ says Margot, her cheek lying against her husband’s shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t have done it.’
Good deeds, or harsh words? Which does she lament? Which most bound her to him?
He could swear it was Madeleine’s voice, but breaking away from the arms, and turning, he still sees Margot standing there. Or is it himself, remembered, when he was young and never thought of death, let alone corruption.
‘Come upstairs,’ says Margot, in Jarvis’s voice, and the room is heavy with cigarette smoke and the smell of spilled beer and boiled, spoiled punch. ‘No one will notice.’
And from his own lips he hears Margot’s light, young voice.
‘What for?’
But she knows, quite well. Does she want Jarvis, or to usurp Madeleine’s rightful place? Ah, both.
Women, children, are usurpers all. Men just sit on thrones.
And what is this? What is Margot doing? What she always meant to do. Did you think she was there to type, to help, to learn, to suit her husband and Jarvis’s wife? Never. She was there to suit herself.
Margot, who should be pattering away at the typewriter, in middle-aged complacency, is upstairs with Jarvis, Lily’s husband, underneath the fur-bedspread of the spare room, as once she lay with Jarvis, Madeleine’s husband some sixteen years ago. Only now the walls are freshly papered brown and white, in a Liberty pattern with matching curtains, and not with large pink splashy flowers on a fawn ground, peeling where the roof leaks. What horror, what shame, to bring back the past; the bits of it, at least, which we so earnestly wish to forget.
Delapidation, degradation. The smell of damp plaster, dry rot, wet rot: corruption, dull-eyed, fish-eyed.
‘I haven’t changed,’ murmurs Margot, bold as brass, ‘don’t you remember? How can you forget? Did it mean so little to you? Look,’ she says, baring her breasts, ‘don’t you remember my breasts? They have pink nipples, not brown. You liked that.’
Margot, in truth, has pretty breasts, plump, firm and white. Renee admired them, and Margot now has a better opinion of them. If Margot this is, upon the bed, her breasts may be those of a girl, but her eyes are glazed like a dead woman’s.
But her nipples, thus revealed, seem brown enough to poor Jarvis, recalling to his mind those of his wife so that he pulls back from this obliging, frightening woman on the bed and says: ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I have no idea how I came to be up here—’
Bad deeds!
‘You were drunk,’ she says, ‘you brought me up here. I was upset, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was very young. I’d just had an abortion. You had no right—’
‘What are you talking about?’ he pleads. ‘Please, Hilary’s somewhere in the house. Lily will be here soon—’
Harsh words.
Margot shrieks at him, as Madeleine would, and did, and belabours him with her fists, as Madeleine would, and did.
‘What do I care about Lily? What do you care what damage you do? You took away my life, my home, and gave them to Lily. Now you want to destroy my child as well.’
But really, Jarvis looks incapable of destroying anyone, anything: a large, middle-aged gentle man, erratically dieted, occasionally drunk, in love with his wife, with a past of erotic plundering so far behind him as to be barely remembered. Who did he sleep with, long ago, how many, and why, and where? Does it matter? Did it ever? All Jarvis ever wanted was a nice home and a nice wife, loving and uncritical. Kind words. And when Madeleine quite wilfully failed to provide what he wanted, what he had a right to expect, what any husband has a right to expect from a wife, he put up with it as long as he could, and then stepped aside, reluctantly, almost against his will, and turned her out and took in Lily.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Madeleine cries, in death as in life.
Oh, Jarvis, I am Madeleine. Give me permission to hate you. Approve of my malice. Acknowledge I was right and you were wrong. Then I’ll be quiet. Please.
‘I should have behaved better to Madeleine,’ says Jarvis, finally, years too late. ‘I was unfair to her. You are quite right.’
Oh, I am Jarvis, Poppy’s child. And there is such a pleasure in rejecting, turning love away, abusing trust. Poppy, turning her indifferent eyes away from her husband, my stepfather, staring away out over the golf course, sipping gin, gazing blankly at her poor plain children. Poppy, smiling only at Jarvis, child of shame, child of the Great North Road, this side of Doncaster, the far side of Grantham. I am Jarvis, husband, father. I smile at Jonathon, child of comfort, stare through Hilary, child of bare boards and leaking roof. What else can I do? It’s what I feel like.
‘Hilary might like to come to me,’ says Margot.
I am Margot, Winifred’s daughter, Lettice’s mother: not fit to be either. I am myself at last, naked of titles, lost to all dignity. Help me, God. I prayed to you as a child: help me now. Save me from Madeleine, save me from myself.
Does God hear? He didn’t when Margot was a child, when she had her knuckles rapped for not understanding long division; she never quite lost her faith in Him, all the same. The teacher who did it fell under a bus, years afterwards.
‘Hilary’s all right here,’ says Jarvis, blankly. ‘Isn’t she? Lily’s very good to her.’
‘If she came to me she’d be with children her own age,’ pleads Margot. ‘Young people. It’s more suitable. And Laurence is her brother, after all.’
Does Margot say that, or Madeleine? Certainly Margot never meant to; hardly believes it herself. A child belongs to whoever looks after it; she’d be the first to say, who cares who conceived it? Ho
w can Laurence be Jarvis’s child, any more than Jarvis was the lorry-driver’s child? Except, of course, in Poppy’s longing, memory, and imagination. Little Jarvis at the breakfast table; Ruth of the piano legs beside him, teasing; the stockbroker at the head, disapproving, toying with his kedgeree: Jarvis was a true child of this family, not of the open road. Did any of it happen? Perhaps it was Poppy’s imagining; an opium dream of the thirties: perhaps there was ever only the stockbroker, the golf course, the gin, the children duly, dully, begotten? Perhaps she just told Jarvis stories. He was her eldest son. He scarcely knows the truth of it any more.
Good words, harsh deeds.
Laurence sits at the doctor’s table, measuring the distance from earth to moon; the doctor keeps his peace with him, therefore Laurence is the doctor’s child, not Jarvis’s.
Hilary sits at the architect’s table, and the architect stares through her: seeing in her his own ugliness, his own unkindness to her mother. Hilary eats her Sugar Puffs; Jarvis looks the other way.
Jarvis does not hear what Margot said. He can’t afford to. Margot’s child, his own?
‘Has Hilary said she wants to live with you?’ Margot, that teller of the truth, speaks lies. More her mother’s child than she had thought, or more of Madeleine.
‘Yes,’ says Margot, ‘she isn’t very happy here. She feels she has no right.’
‘It’s her home.’
‘It’s Lily’s home,’ says Margot, and so it is. ‘She loves Jonathon,’ says Jarvis.
‘I could give her Laurence to love,’ says Margot, persisting in madness. ‘She’s as near to him as she is to Jonathon.’
Still Jarvis seems not to understand.
Margot thinks she is going to faint. She is very cold. The open casement window bangs in the wind. Jarvis goes to shut it—but the double glazing is firmly in place. How long since there was a casement window there?
Madeleine’s home.
Jarvis has lost the vision of himself when young, and his remembrance of her; all he sees now is a couple embraced, on the old divan beneath a heap of coats, and the smell of cigarettes, spilled beer and hot punch comes seeping up the stairs, and such a sorrow fills Jarvis/Madeleine, that he turns out of the room without saying a word, and goes downstairs, hearing his feet clattering on the linoed floor, although were he to look he would see the pale carpets nicely fitted as usual. Beautifully brushed, properly swept, bringing out the faint pattern of the starry wallpaper, much as usual. Lily imagines they are worn, and wishes to replace them yet again. But they are not worn: floor coverings are her especial and expensive preoccupation. Well, Madeleine will have her coffin instead.
Jarvis remembers. Jarvis sits upon the stairs, carpeted, linoed, and weeps for Madeleine, alive, and Madeleine, dead, Madeleine in the bathroom, Madeleine entering the spare room, seeing; and presently Jarvis feels the better for it.
What can anyone do?
Once, in the war, a bomb fell at the bottom of the garden. Not a large one, but enough to bring down a section of the back wall of the house. Miss Maguire, household help to Mr Karl Kominski, was sheltering at the time in the cupboard under the stairs. No one knew she was there. She was bricked up in the dark for some six days. When they found her she was speechless with shock and fright. She recovered physically, but such oddness in the head as she’d heretofore suffered from—and there was certainly a degree of it (you never saw such inefficient sweeping, such greasy washing-up) was reinforced. Karl Kominski thereafter looked after Miss Maguire as best he could, but when his reparation money came through and he sold the house to the Katkins and went to live in Italy, where it was warm, he could no longer keep in touch with her. She had no relatives; Mr Kominski was sorry for a fellow sufferer from the Nazis, but what could he do?
What can anyone do?
Jarvis weeps upon the stairs. Lily comes in, through the front door, holding Jonathon in her arms. ‘He has to go to the hospital,’ she says, distraught. ‘They think he’s got blood poisoning.’
‘What do they mean, blood poisoning?’ Jarvis is agitated.
But Lily doesn’t know.
By the time Margot comes downstairs, adjusting her dress, as once she came downstairs fifteen years ago, to meet her friend Katriona’s reproachful stare—poor Katriona, who as it happened had good reason to fear the results of fulfilled desire—Jarvis and Lily have gone, all else forgotten, on their way to hospital with their child.
Good, thinks Margot, with what’s left of her unforgiving, good.
I hope he dies.
She is certain of the thought, but not quite of which ‘he’ she can mean.
Bad deeds. Bad thoughts.
24
HOME AND SAFETY!
Or so Margot, rashly and falsely imagines. Margot’s step quickens. Since leaving Adelaide Row she has been free from pain.
Ordinary life!
There’s the familiar corner house: the familiar brass plate upon the wall. Lettice polishes it daily. Good little Lettice.
Dr P. Bailey
Surgery: 9-11 5-7 Mon-Fri.
Sats: emergencies only 9-12.
Margot has turned this corner how many thousands of times? Wheeled Laurence’s pushchair, Lettice’s pram, up and over the kerb; carried Laurence in the full flight of tantrum, kicking and biting, tucked under her arm, herself nervous of the neighbours’ censure; carried Lettice unconscious, bleeding, fallen out of a tree, up the path and into the surgery; heavy as lead, light as a feather.
Ordinary life!
Turned the corner in stiletto heels, walking shoes, fashion boots: in her best evening dress; in her pregnancy smock; in her milkstained shirt, running out between feeds to buy baby Lettice a comforter—in the face of Philip’s wishes. That being the year comforters were unhygienic.
Margot has driven out from this drive, sitting beside Philip, in consecutively, a Ford Anglia, a Vauxhall Victor, a Volkswagen Van (that was in the camping days) and a Volvo Estate: sometimes bored, sometimes sulky, mostly brave, good, enduring, self-sacrificing; sitting in the back because the children loved the front, going on outings she never enjoyed except for the children’s sake; staying up late to make the sandwiches, prepare the flasks of soup, gather the cushions and rugs together which would in the end only crowd her out of her own seat.
Margot has seen the blossom on the flowering cherry come and go. Lately she has seen the big elm on the far side of the street felled.
Ordinary life! Home and safety.
The doctor’s cat sits on the porch roof, ears flickering in the twilight. How he gets up there no one knows.
Trees crowd around the home, shading it, so flowers seldom grow, only leaves. No one has the heart to fell the trees.
This is the front door where no one was refused. The lame, the sick, the distressed, the homeless, came knocking here, and were at least in part satisfied.
Every cushion inside is familiar; its goose down, chicken feather or Terylene pulp innards known and noted; every chip on every skirting can be accounted for. That was where we moved the piano. That was where Laurence’s awful friend once booted the wall, in an excess of energy. That was where Philip tried to open a jar of gherkins, and broke the glass but didn’t shift the lid.
One day, thinks Margot, one day there will be time to see to the trees, see to the garden, see to the skirtings, see to myself, see to everything.
But by the time there is time to see to myself, thinks Margot, what will there be left to see to? One old woman in a wheelchair, staring at photographs of her greatgrandchildren? If she’s lucky.
Margot goes down the side of the home, brushing past the damp rhododendron bushes, which flourish flowerless in the shade, cramped up against the neighbour’s fence. The cat follows Margot. How did he get down from the porch roof? No one knows, yet here he is.
Margot pushes open the back door. There’s the kitchen, clean, familiar and practical. Lettice and Laurence doing their homework.
Ordinary life!
Where’
s mother been? In the arms of a lesbian lady: in the arms of her employer whom she has named (if only he’d been listening) as her son’s father. That’s where mother’s been. Inside Madeleine’s body, cold as ice, chilling proper response. Or Madeleine inside her, warming her up to unspeakable deeds; puppet performances, joyless and nostalgic: jerky spasm of change and acceptance.
Margot steps across the threshold and stares inimically at Lettice and Laurence. A blast of cold air comes in with her, raising the papers on the table, the hairs on their arms. Slowly their heads rise: they look back at her, unsmilingly. What have they to do with her, or she with them. So, she spewed them out into the world: baby fish into the stream of life: that was her compulsion, her event, not theirs.
Do they catch her indifference, or she theirs? Momentarily, it is mutual. Do they see her as some disagreeable, not altogether well-intentioned stranger, standing on their doorstep? Yes. Self-interest rules them. Thus they said in their tender years, if she dies, who’d look after us? Gran? An orphanage? Good. They have the colour telly there. Die, mother, we don’t care. Or tenderer, angrier still: die, mother, you’re horrible. We’ll cut you up like the cat’s dinner and put you in the dustbin.
Thus, through fair thoughts and foul, we all achieve our independence: swim off, like the cold fish we are.
Ordinary life!
The doctor’s cat slips in between Margot’s legs, then turns his rusty head, his round green eyes, to stare at her, and arches his back, and yowls and spits and retreats back into the dark again.
‘What’s the matter with the cat?’ enquires Lettice. ‘He’s acting the way I feel.’
‘Perhaps Mum’s possessed,’ says Laurence, ‘and that’s why she’s late home.’
‘Don’t talk about me as she,’ says Margot in her nasty harsh voice, ‘I’m not the cat’s mother.’
‘Do you think she could turn her head through 180°?’ enquires Lettice coldly, of her brother.
‘I hope she doesn’t try,’ says Laurence. ‘She’d only be sick with green vomit.’
