by Fay Weldon
Their talk does not amuse their mother: nor was it intended to. She stands where she is, and sways, hollow-eyed, her left hand beating and beating against her chest. Her children become frightened.
‘We were only joking,’ says Laurence. ‘You’re not really possessed.’
‘Bastard,’ she says. ‘Little bastard.’
Poor Laurence’s crimson cheeks grow darker still.
‘I’ll fetch Dad,’ says Lettice. ‘I don’t know what’s got into her today.’
Or as Lettice says afterwards to Andrew Monk, a boy in her class, who, though under age, possesses a motorbike, ‘It must have been the menopause. She’s changed completely. She was like a different person.’
‘She ought to have oestrogen therapy,’ says Andrew. ‘It makes all the difference, I believe.’
Ordinary life!
Jarvis and Lily sit in the Casualty Department of the hospital and wait. Their car is parked on double yellow lines and is quite likely to incur a parking fine, which is now Jarvis’s main concern. So far as he can see there is nothing wrong with Jonathon, who sleeps peacefully in his father’s arms. Lily, however, is convinced that Jonathon is in a coma. There is no one available to reassure her. The department is busy. Lily and Jarvis, having registered their presence at the reception desk, must now wait. Nurses come and go, out of one door, into another: no one bothers to attend to Jonathon. Jarvis drowses, dreams of scarlet Poppy.
Lily is frightened. Lily, who cannot remember, as a child, a girl, a woman, ever wanting her mother, now wants her mother.
Ida, help me.
Ida, who married beneath her, married a butcher. Night of the long knives. Night after night. Until she took herself and Lily and newborn Rose off to Long Bay, Coromandel, and the Kiwi Tea House, and the truckloads of American servicemen.
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli and don’t forget the Tea House, that little wooden shack perched on top of a sand dune, vibrating like a drum when wind and rain bounced upon its corrugated iron roof, and don’t forget the tea lady’s pale little daughter Lily, first shrinking, then beckoning, behind the white sand dunes and the bleached and stinking piles of driftwood.
One moonlit winter night, here at the very edge of the world, Baby Rose wandered off into the dark, and was found next morning floating face downwards in the rock pool Lily loved the best, where the crimson sea-anemones grew.
After the funeral (Lily didn’t go) Lily’s father reappeared, striding lopsided over the dunes, and took Lily and Ida home.
Did Lily push the misbegotten Rose into the rock pool, to be clutched and sucked at by the crimson anemones, as the long-toothed servicemen had clutched and sucked at her? Of course not.
Though had Lily thought of it, had Lily dared, Lily would have. And if the imagining is as bad as the doing, then Lily was to blame.
Well, Rose’s death solved so very many problems. Rose’s very life was an act of hostility against her family; her birth a declaration of war upon her mother. Love me, lose everything, cried Baby Rose, stretching up her tiny arms. There are such children. Lose me, gain everything.
Lily got her father back. Alas, so did Ida, rather spoiling things. Well, two’s better than three, and at least Baby Rose was out of the way, dead as a doornail, using up no more love and attention. And presently Lily could push Ida out, more or less, surpassing her mother, as daughters do. Mothers grow old.
Lily got Jarvis from Madeleine. Or almost. At least it was a good try. Now Madeleine’s out of the way, dead as a doornail.
Lily’s got what she always wanted. Sole possession.
Why now does Lily sit upon the hospital bench, in a frenzy of silent terror, calling upon Ida in her heart?
Ida, forgive me, help me, don’t punish me.
Madeleine, forgive me, help me, don’t punish me.
But Jonathon’s little foot slips out from beneath the blanket. It is piteously red and raw as if sucked at by a myriad acid tendrils.
Even Jarvis can see it now.
‘I say,’ says Jarvis in surprise, ‘it is rather a mess.’
‘Do something,’ begs Lily of Jarvis but Jarvis seems paralysed by the atmosphere, the institution, his own medical ignorance and his lack of trust in Lily’s panic, in Lily’s version of events.
‘You have to expect to wait,’ says Jarvis, ‘this is an emergency hospital.’
‘But supposing he loses his foot,’ she implores. ‘Look at it!’
And indeed, Jonathon’s entire foot seems to be swelling beneath their eyes. Lily wrenches her child out of Jarvis’s arms and carries him over to the nurse behind the reception desk.
‘Please,’ she begs. ‘Look at his foot. He must see somebody at once.’
The nurse looks puzzled.
‘It’s nothing much, mother,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid you are going to have to wait for half an hour or so. The doctors are busy. We have all the intensive care units in operation. Please sit down and wait quietly. The little boy is sleeping nicely: he isn’t in pain.’
But Jonathon tosses and moans in Lily’s arms. The nurse is clearly lying.
Oh, I am Lily, Jonathon’s mother, as I’ve never felt it before. The world in conspiracy against me. Is this what it’s like to be a mother? Was this what you felt like, Ida, when you found Baby Rose missing from her bed, and there were no neighbours, no one to help, and you ran the length of the lonely beach, up and down, up and down, looking, and when the dawn came, what did you find?
Poor mother, poor Ida, poor Baby Rose. I’m sorry. So sorry. Poor me.
Lily cries. Jarvis pats Lily’s hand.
‘It’s all right, Lily,’ he says. ‘Jonathon’s all right. He just needs some kind of injection.’
‘It’s Madeleine,’ says Lily. ‘She’s doing it to him. I know she is.’
‘We none of us behaved very well,’ says Jarvis.
Madeleine, I’m sorry.
Good behaviour? What’s that?
Not an activity much reckoned by those in the grip of incestuous passion, certainly. To those not involved, good behaviour may well be not leaving your wife for your partner’s young secretary. (But how great the temptation, the renewal of youth!) Nor may it be going to bed, after long and romantic delays, with your boss’s married partner. (But what vigorous young woman, erotically inclined towards her father, can resist a married man?)
‘Lily’s been turned out of her flat by a mad landlady,’ says Jarvis to Madeleine one evening. ‘She’ll have to come here, and use the spare room. It’s no use getting hysterical. You’ve always told me sexual jealousy was degrading—now’s the time to practice what you preach. Besides, she’s pregnant.’
Does Lily tremble as she approaches Madeleine’s territory? Does she hesitate as she goes up the linoed stairs to the spare room, with the ugly red roses on the peeling fawn wallpaper?
No.
That wallpaper will have to go, is what Lily thinks. And Jarvis is mine, and mine alone, thinks Lily, if she thinks, by virtue of my love for him.
‘The next few days won’t be pleasant,’ Lily tells her best friend Alice, who sits open-mouthed and marvelling. ‘But I’ve got to do it. His wife is so thick-skinned and insensitive, she just won’t budge, otherwise.’
Madeleine budges. Madeleine does. Madeleine takes some good towels and the best tablecloths with her, grabbing what she can, breaking a few windows as she goes, spilling ink into Lily’s suitcases—and all in front of poor little Hilary.
Madeleine’s quite mad. Jarvis and Lily agree.
Poor Lily, Jarvis comforts her. What she has to put up with!
Later there’s the restraining order, to stop Madeleine pushing, punching and snatching Lily, as Lily walks up Madeleine’s path to Madeleine’s front door.
Well, Madeleine shouldn’t have left. All the lawyers agree. Lily’s path. Lily’s front door.
Oh, punishment!
Lily rocks to and fro with Jonathon against her pretty brown-tipped breast. Nurses go
to and fro, not bothering. Jarvis takes Lily’s hand. She shakes it off.
‘If I didn’t behave very well,’ says Lily, evilly, ‘I’m paying for it now, aren’t I?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m landed with Hilary,’ says Lily. It’s an easier thought than that she’s going to lose Jonathon.
‘I thought you wanted her,’ says Jarvis, baffled.
‘I didn’t ever want her; I just wanted to be better than Madeleine at bringing her up,’ cries Lily, into the antiseptic silence. Jarvis does not reply.
Jonathon’s foot throbs. He moans and tosses.
‘You’re so useless,’ says Lily to Jarvis, ‘I’m never going to have another child, not with you as a father.’
Lily’s own first pregnancy, the cause of her moving into the spare room, evaporated after two nights spent with Jarvis beneath the peeling, splodgy roses. Whether the bleeding started as the result of his ardour or because the pregnancy had only existed in her imagination, Lily never knew. She had dreadful period pains that month, anyway.
Jonathon, child brought to fruition, moans. He is in pain.
Oh, punishment! Madeleine, I’m sorry. Ida, forgive me. I’ll write to you tomorrow.
All this, for what? For Jarvis?
To have a husband is nothing. To be a wife is nothing. Sex is an idle pastime. To be a mother is all that counts. Lily recognises it now, and the shock of the discovery numbs her for a moment to the anxiety and distress which accompanies the state of motherhood. Then it surges back.
Jonathon, little Jonathon, don’t die. What will become of me if you do? I will have nothing. I will be nothing.
Jarvis, you don’t count.
Oh, punishment!
25
PHILIP, PUZZLED, REGARDS HIS drumming, tapping, scowling wife.
‘Is it the menopause?’ enquires Lettice, taking her revenge upon Margot, remembering her mother’s callousness of the morning, how she savagely stripped the blood-spotted sheets from the bed. Be as unkind as you like, mother. See, I grow up. You grow old. If I start bleeding, you’ll have to stop. ‘Do go away, Lettice,’ says Philip. Laurence has already gone, sidling out after the cat into the dark to seek out friends and the more ordinary aspect of life, in households not (for the time being, at any rate) in the throes of that black convulsive tumult of discontent and resentment, which will overwhelm the most calm and pleasant home from time to time, so that the plants wilt, the children stay out, and the cat leaves home—until it’s some other family’s turn, and ordinary life returns.
‘But I’m doing my homework,’ protests Lettice. ‘Do it upstairs,’ says Philip, and Lettice capitulates. ‘I should try oestrogen therapy,’ she says, as she leaves: not so much pert, as terrified. Her mother’s hands seem unfamiliar; taut and tense, and curved almost into claws.
Mother, I’m sorry. What would I do without you?
Oh, punishment!
‘Margot,’ says Philip, when Lettice has gone, in the soft voice he used during their courtship, and regards her—how? lovingly, soulfully, or in the manner of some deceitful spaniel, droopy eyes, licking his lips after the lamb chop, cowering under the kitchen table, trying to avoid retribution.
Margot, peering at her husband through a mania of suspicion and resentment, clearly thinks it is the latter.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘it’s you, is it,’ as if she were some rich and famous lady, and he a debt collector, or a despised ex-husband, who dared to approach her at a party at which she was having a good time.
‘You’re behaving very oddly, Margot,’ he remarks mildly.
‘Me?’ she is outraged. ‘You’re trying to drive me mad. But you’re the one who’s mad.’
It is quite normal in any marital quarrel for both parties to consider the other mad, and more, to be incensed at the insult of an accusation which both are quite happily making about the other. But Margot seems to have drummed this quarrel up out of nothing: Philip says as much, and declines to take offence. His very mildness inflates her fury.
‘Go back to your surgery,’ says the doctor’s wife. ‘Go on sticking your hands up the lady patients.’ At which the doctor blinks.
‘That’s the only reason you’re a doctor,’ says the doctor’s wife, ‘so you can stick your hands up young girls and get them to undress for you.’ Still the doctor just smiles, as if about to prescribe a tranquilliser. ‘You killed my baby,’ says the doctor’s wife. ‘How many other abortions have you done?’ But nothing seems to move the doctor. He smiles.
‘Answer me,’ she shrieks.
‘Do be quiet, Margot,’ he murmurs. ‘Don’t upset the children. I know you’re very upset yourself.’
The words are quiet and reasonable; but is there pleasure in his eyes, as he watches, from the cool heights of his aloofness, his wife’s distressed and murderous writhings? Yes. Or at any rate she sees it there, through glazed eyes which in their lifetime saw little else but the disagreeable underside of things: the mould and mess behind the refrigerator, the rot under the floorboards, the mice droppings at the back of the cupboard: the malice behind kind words.
Oh, punishment!
‘You don’t care about the children,’ whispers Margot/Madeleine, in her dusty dead voice. ‘You don’t care about me. The only person you ever cared for was your sister Jill, and you killed her. As good as. First you stripped her, then you killed her. That’s what you do to women. Or want to.’
The doctor frowns. His face stiffens: the cracks in his façade deepen. She has made him angry now. He looks what he knows he is—his sister’s murderer—an old, old man, his true face, his true nature, at last revealed. It is a skeletal face, grinning animosity. His father’s face, his own as well.
Oh, punishment!
Margot smiles, in triumph. She sees him now for what he is.
‘I never loved you,’ she says.
‘Then why did you marry me?’
‘Because I was pregnant.’
‘I loved you,’ he says.
Ah, love. So long ago, and in the past, in both their true voices. A great grief overwhelms Margot.
‘Thank you,’ says Margot/Madeleine harshly thrusting back grief with anger. ‘And your deigning to love me is supposed to compensate for a lifetime of servitude? What a con it all is. I love you; you wash my socks.’
The room is very cold. The doctor’s wife bites and bites her yellow hand with her long teeth, as if to stop herself speaking the words her mouth utters.
‘Can there be anything left for you to say,’ he enquires, ‘anything left to hurt me and damage you? Take your time.’
‘It’s all been worth nothing,’ she says. ‘My life wasted,’ and she believes it.
‘You have more than most women,’ he reiterates. ‘A house, a garden, a husband. We have a car, two children—’
‘I have two children, you have one.’ And her long jaws clamp into her hand, too late, to stop the words.
Philip laughs.
‘Which of them isn’t mine?’
‘Laurence.’
He laughs again. Blood flows from the wound from her hand.
‘I hate this home, this prison. I hate you,’ she shrieks.
He shivers. So his sister Jill once spoke to him. Why is it so cold? The back door is open, wasting the central heating. Her strong, bleeding hands move towards his throat. They will clearly kill him if they can. He catches them in his own. She screams. It is a strange distant sound, as if there was not enough breath left in her body to give it proper strength.
‘Margot,’ says the doctor, in desperation, ‘you are not Madeleine. You are my wife. Madeleine is dead. This is some kind of hysteria. Please stop it.’
Margot’s hands lose their strength. Her breath, coming in gasps, gradually quietens. She looks at him with her own eyes: her hands are familiar once again—small, powerless, unblemished.
‘All I can say,’ says the doctor, ‘is that if having Hilary here means so much to you, by all means go ahead.’
Oh, I am the doctor. I have seen the past resurrect and resurrect itself, in the lives of my patients. I thought I was immune but I am not. The dead rise up and speak against us, with our own voices.
He looks at his wife, sadly and warily. The doctor’s wife is puzzled: she had forgotten all about Hilary; the sense of her own grievances drowning all ordinary, everyday compassion. Why does the doctor mention her now? He smiles. The habit of acceptance, of subservience, is strong. She forgets the past: her wrongs are swept away in the relief of his forgiveness: she smiles; she stretches out her small plump hand and touches his cold, bony fingers, allowing them their secrets. She is the doctor’s wife again, mother of the doctor’s children, feeder of the doctor’s cat.
Habit triumphs, or is it love? What’s love?
Presently the cat creeps back, and Lettice with her homework, and Laurence from his friends. The doctor’s wife makes cocoa.
Yes, says Lettice. I’ll move over, I suppose; make room for Hilary. If I have to.
Yes, says Laurence. I did it once for Lettice. I’ll do it again, for Hilary. If I have to.
Making room!
In the Outpatients Department, still sitting on the shiny plastic sofa, Lily sits clasping Jonathon, who now lies completely still. His eyes are partly open; and as far as Lily can see, they are glazed over. She is in a frenzy of grief: she looks like some wild old woman: her hair in the harsh neon light has the greyness of age, not of artifice. So Ida looked, once. Lily believes that Jonathon is dead. Jarvis has gone looking for a doctor. Jonathon moans. It is not all over yet.
‘Lily.’
Lily looks up. There’s the familiar clatter, and here comes Hilary, loping in her ungainly fashion down the glaring length of the waiting room.
‘Lily, what’s the matter with Jonathon? You didn’t tell me you were here. I thought you were out.’
Hilary speaks reproachfully, more like mother than child, and takes Jonathon from his mother without so much as by your leave, and shakes him automatically to bring life and senses back into him.
‘He should be in bed,’ she cries. ‘Look at him. He’s exhausted.’ And Jonathon, no different from any other half-asleep child who does not care for his surroundings, grizzles feebly, and then, waking up sufficiently to perceive their full horror, buries his head in Hilary’s puffy bosom and begins to bawl, crimson in the face. Every now and then he lifts his head from the enveloping flesh to gain more breath to make more noise.
