Remember Me

by Fay Weldon

  The noise is indeed astounding. A doctor comes running. He is a fierce dark-eyed young man of Mediterranean complexion. He has a silky beard.

  ‘What’s the matter with this child?’ he demands. ‘Why is he making this dreadful noise?’

  ‘It’s his foot,’ says Lily.

  The doctor picks up the foot and inspects it disdainfully. ‘It’s only a little blister,’ he says. And so it is. ‘Any child who can make a noise like that is perfectly healthy.’ And it is true that thereafter, Jonathon, having learnt that it is better to protest than to endure, will set up such a volume of noise to get his own way that the people in Nos. 9, 13 and 11 Adelaide Row sometimes debate whether or not to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and report his callous mother.

  Making room!

  Lily takes Jonathon home. Jarvis follows. Hilary lumbers behind, limping where she has turned her foot in her absurd platform heels, in her hurry to get to the hospital and protect Jonathon from his past and her own.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ says Jarvis, ‘that you didn’t break your ankle.’

  Lucky Hilary!

  Jarvis has a parking ticket. He will have to pay. a £6 fine. He does not mind. He has got off lightly. He knows it.

  Lucky Jarvis.

  Hilary squeezes into the back of the car. She has been hurrying. Lily wishes that Hilary used a deodorant. Madeleine disapproved of them. Smell is natural, Madeleine would say. Only people who are afraid of sex are afraid of smelling. Well, Lily will soon bring Hilary round to better, nicer ways of living. Lily thinks.

  ‘I took the guinea pig round to the doctor’s house,’ says Hilary.

  ‘And they asked me if I’d like to stay. I said I would. Well, it’s nearer school. Would you mind?’

  ‘It’s as you want,’ says Jarvis, with a touch, the merest touch, of sadness. But enough.

  ‘If you’d be happy there,’ says Lily, dazzled by her good fortune.

  ‘I could come to you at weekends,’ says Hilary, kindly.

  ‘The same as usual. And look after Jonathon.’

  ‘I’ll make over the spare room into a proper bedroom for you,’ says Lily. ‘After all, it’s your house as well as mine. You were there before I ever was.’

  Stepping back, chastened, making room. Understanding what she’s done.

  ‘If Jonathon wakes in the night,’ says Lily, ‘I’ll go to him myself. I am his mother.’

  Lucky Lily, to have a child to go to, who wakes in the night.

  Lucky Lily, to have a child to go to.

  Lucky Lily, to have a child.

  Lucky Lily.

  Lucky Lily, thinks what remains of Madeleine, without envy and without regret. Lucky Lily. You are my sister too. Keep your child. Just don’t keep mine.

  Good night, goodbye.

  There is, after all, quite a respectable gathering around the grave, as the coffin is lowered on its canvas holders into a hole which is tactfully lined with sheets of plastic green grass. Not a worm in sight. Such burials in Mother earth, decently clothed, come expensive. Jarvis does not mind. The new stair carpet and the new roof will have to wait a while. He has told Lily so and she accepts it.

  ‘I worry about the paper in the spare room,’ says she, ‘that’s all. I don’t want the roof to leak and the paper start peeling, I want it to be nice for Hilary at weekends.’

  And so she does. Nice Lily.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it’s not for nothing I come from the Antipodes. As for the roof, I’ll get up there and mend it myself.’ And so Lily does. Good Lily.

  Hilary eventually chooses new wallpaper for her room at Adelaide Row. A twenties revival—splodgy red roses on a fawn ground. It is not to Lily’s liking but she allows Hilary her choice. Kind Lily.

  The doctor is at Madeleine’s graveside, and the doctor’s wife, and the doctor’s children, Laurence, Lettice and Hilary.

  Renee is there, with her friend Bonny, back from her husband for the fourth time. Renee smiles at Margot, and Margot smiles back. Each to her own taste.

  It is not a particularly tearful or dismal funeral. The cemetery is at Ruislip, in North London: a green and leafy place. The wind blows fresh and strong; the sun even shines.

  Lily is glad she came. Though she finds the decor and the plastic music of the chapel distasteful, and the presiding clergyman, though pleasant enough, quite hopeless when it comes to comprehending the sorrows of strangers—as how could he not be? At least the coffin is longer than Baby Rose’s must have been.

  Lily has had to bring Jonathon with her; she cannot find a baby-sitter. He totters off, confident, to play hide-and-seek amongst the tombstones. Thousands of them, stretching off far beyond the limits of his vision. His foot is completely healed, except for a small drying blister, which, on Margot’s instructions, Lily is leaving uncovered.

  Margot has handed in her notice. She will not be working with Jarvis any more. Nor will Jarvis replace her. Business is contracting to such an extent it is hardly sensible to do so, and Lily is pleased to observe he can be so realistic and sensible about his affairs.

  Mr Quincey is there, smelling strongly of tooth powder. Renee relented sufficiently to tell him the time and place of the funeral.

  Standing there watching the gold wood box lowered into the bright green fronds, he feels, if not part of the family, at least part of a greater humanity, and the living part of it at that. His ulcer has all but healed.

  Good night, Madeleine. Goodbye. Thank you.

  26

  RECOGNITION, REALISATION!

  To his nest the eagle flies O’er the hill the sunlight dies—

  sings Hilary a week later, walking through wet streets. The damp air, or the aura of tears in which she has been living, has undone the work of the hairdresser, and her shorn hair now curls tenderly around her face.

  Hush my darling have no fear For thy mother watches near—

  Oh, I am Hilary, daughter of a once-living mother, mother of children yet unknown. I shall never eat Sugar Puffs again. (How closely, inextricably, intertwine the sacred and the profane.) My mother’s death has set me free. My life, her death—that’s the sum of what she gave me. Dying was the best thing she could do for me—this was her good and final gift.

  Hilary turns into the doctor’s gate, goes down the side of the doctor’s house. The doctor’s cat uncurls, gets up, pads after her, as if he’d always done it, always would, and follows her through the kitchen door.

  Recognition, realisation.

  The guinea pig stares at Hilary, unblinking, through the meshes of his cage.

  ‘You’ll have to clean the cage out, Hilary,’ says Margot. ‘He’s beginning to smell. I’m not going to do it. I have quite enough to do.’

  Hilary sits at tea between Laurence and Lettice. She nods politely as Laurence tells her about the changing weather patterns of the Sahara—though how long such civility will last, who’s to say?

  Hilary’s hands are like Laurence’s, thinks Margot, tonight. They are red, cold, knobbly-knuckled, strong.

  When Philip comes in from surgery and sits at the head of the table, there they are again: serving the salad, dissecting the ham, with the efficiency of indifference.

  Recognition, realisation.

  Margot sits in shock. Where was Madeleine, fifteen years ago, when Margot was with Jarvis, in the shadow of the peeling pink roses? Where was Philip? Did he come looking for his Margot through the haze of boiling punch and candlelight, and find Madeleine instead? In the garden, in the bathroom, on the dark stairs where Jarvis so lately sat and wept; in heaven, hell, anywhere? Before or after Madeleine discovered Jarvis and the dumpy nurse entwined? Her shock, his disappointment? Which? Or both?

  Hilary is home. Next to Laurence, her half-brother, and to Philip, her father. Gazing at her, and not through her.

  ‘I can’t imagine you with long hair,’ says Philip. ‘Madeleine’s was always short.’

  Margot goes to fetch the bottled mayonnaise. Th
en she gets up and fetches the mango chutney, which she’d forgotten to put on the table.

  Enid comes on Wednesday for the last time, setting Margot free to help Philip with his VAT. She is moving to a little flat the other side of London.

  ‘I can’t have the baby and Sam,’ says Enid. ‘I just don’t have the time. I’d rather have the baby. It offers me a future, and Sam doesn’t, just more of the same. He doesn’t seem capable of change. He can only go on looking at things in the same old way.’

  ‘What about your job?’ asks Margot.

  ‘I’ll manage both somehow,’ says Enid, and no doubt she will. She has been crying. It is not easy thus to change the patterns of the past: to forego the reassuring pleasures of servitude, to face the unknown. Don’t think it doesn’t hurt. The first sea animals, crawling up on to dry land, must have had an agonising time: struggling for breath, burning in the primaeval sun.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s all about,’ says Laurence to his mother, lifting his head from his O-level astronomy text book. ‘Do you? You can find out any number of Facts, but they don’t seem to get you anywhere. And we’re all so infinitesimal … First you’re born and then you die. Why?’

  ‘I can only suppose,’ says Margot, ‘that we are here to consider the ways of the Creator, and be, amazed.’

  Does Margot speak with her own voice, or does it still have the resonance that came with Madeleine’s death: an afternote, like the aftertaste of a good claret, gravelly, with the flavour of churchyards? Margot thinks perhaps it does. Her eyes, she sometimes thinks, are less shallow, less buttony, less doll-like than they used to be. Or is that just age, creeping on; and the pain of experience recognised at last?

  I am Margot, the doctor’s wife, no longer young. I shall be happier, now that I have acknowledged grief, and loss, and the damage done to me by time, and other people, and events; and the damage that I did. I am Laurence’s mother, and I can tell him nothing; none of us learn from another’s experience: and besides, he is male and I am female. He is the doctor’s son. Hilary is the doctor’s daughter. I am Margot and Madeleine in one, and always was. She was my sister, after all, and she was right: her child was mine, and mine was hers.

  Madeleine lies in the cemetery; in three months’ time the earth will have settled and Jarvis’s money will provide a stone to take its place amongst the thousands already there. There her mortal remains will lie where the wind blows down from Hampstead Heights.

  As Laurence said, somewhat desperately, at the funeral ‘Did you know that in the last ice age the glaciers stopped at Hendon Central? Hampstead Heath is the scree. That’s why nothing much has ever grown there, and it’s been left open ground.’ He cried, all the same, briefly and painfully, for a total stranger, Hilary’s mother.

  ‘Oh my sisters,’ whispers the memory of Madeleine to the still troubled air, ‘and my brothers too, soon you will be dead. Is this the way you want to live?’

  Which at least seemed to create some kind of consensus, for or against, because after that there was nothing but the wind to ruffle the grasses, and disturb the little gay pots of dried flowers on the more recent graves, and whatever trouble there was dispersed, and there was peace.

  About the Author

  Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Fay Weldon was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, and returned to the United Kingdom when she was fifteen. She studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up her career in advertising, and began to write fulltime. Her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke, was published in 1967. She was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1983, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in 1990. In 2001, she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

  Weldon’s work includes more than twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children’s books, nonfiction books, magazine articles, and a number of plays written for television, radio, and the stage, including the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs. She-Devil, the film adaption of her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, starred Meryl Streep in a Golden Globe–winning role.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1976 by Fay Weldon

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  978-1-4804-1253-8

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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