REMEMBER ME

FAY WELDON

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Monday morning, six o’clock.

Who’s asleep?

The doctor, the doctor’s wife, the doctor’s children (alleged) but not the doctor’s cat, who sits waiting on the bathroom windowsill for the family’s awakening, and his own sliced ox-liver, comfort and repose.

Two blocks away, in his tall terrace home, Jarvis the architect sleeps, and so does his second wife Lily beside him, and so does their small son Jonathon in the adjacent room. Do Jarvis and Lily dream sweet dreams, or guilty dreams? Sweet dreams.

Jarvis Katkin is the doctor’s patient. The doctor’s wife is Jarvis’s employee, and a little else besides.

Who’s asleep?

Not Madeleine, Jarvis’s first wife; not at all. Four blocks farther on, in her sorry basement home, Madeleine lies awake on her lumpy mattress, as is her custom at this hour of the morning, and curses Jarvis, his second wife Lily and their son Jonathon; but the curses of the living are clouded and have little power. See how Jarvis, gently waking, turns to Lily and fondles her white, brown-tipped breasts, smooths her smiling lips with his coarse and capable finger. Their love is blessed, not cursed. So far.

Hilary the schoolgirl, Madeleine’s daughter, Jarvis’s firstborn, wakes at the stroke of six, feels alone and frightened, and climbs into her mother’s bed, and lies there sleepless, cold and lardy, against her mother’s hard and feverish side (there where once her father lay and slept). She remains uneasy and uncomforted, as well she might, like any usurper to an abdicated throne.

Seven o’clock. Good morning.

Margot, the doctor’s wife awakes, assuming this to be a day like any other. Why should she not? The bed is warm, deep and familiar – the doctor and his wife have slept in it for some fifteen years, and made love in it some 1,500 times, reserving this pleasure (by and large) for each other alone. Pleasant images frequent the dreams of the doctor’s wife. Why not? Since the advent of the doctor’s Emergency Service, nights in this suburban corner house, where leafy ways meet, have been peaceful and unplagued by nightmares, disturbed by nothing worse than the padding of the doctor’s cat, off on his inconsequential journeys into the black night. The doctor’s cat is a battered, randy tom, once black, now rusty, wormy within and flea-ridden without. The doctor doses his cat with free sample antibiotics and steroids, but to no avail. Margot regards him with admiration and abhorrence mixed. He is the doctor’s cat, not hers.

Good morning!

Margot, wife and mother, wakes from sleep refreshed, as befits her virtuous self. She is a little woman, smooth and plump, nicely bosomed, like some pet woodpigeon. Margot’s face is round and bland; her brown and curly hair is sensibly short. Margot’s sharp straight little nose still peels from August’s holiday in the sun. Margot stirs. Margot yawns. Margot’s teeth are white, small and even; Margot’s tonsils are healthy. Margot remains in good health not so much because of her husband’s care but in spite of the lack of it.

Those who care for all the world, as the doctor does, sometimes seem to have trouble caring for just one person. Or so Margot’s friend Enid once remarked, observing the neglected whitlow on Margot’s thumb. Enid finds fault with any husband other than her own. Once she started on him, where would she stop?

Enid makes trouble. Enid should keep her mouth shut. Enid’s words hurt more than any whitlow. She should reserve her opinion for inter-departmental memos. Enid is a civil servant.

Margot’s brown button eyes fly open. Margot sighs. Listen now as Margot eavesdrops on herself, upon the babel of consciousness within; those multitudinous inner voices which ceaselessly define the self by shift and change, as the shore defines the sea and the sea defines the shore.

Listen:

Oh, I am the doctor’s wife, waking. I am Margot, housewife, mother, waking to the world I have made; a warm and homely place, in which others grow if not myself. How nice! But something lingers after sleep, some sense of sorrow, apprehension. What is it? Am I in mourning for myself, lost somewhere long ago, drowned in the sea of other people’s demands, a family’s expectations? No, as the eyelids flutter, apprehension vanishes, sorrow, dissolves, reality sweeps in. I am Margot, wife and mother, folding in night thoughts before the day as a sailor folds in a sail before a rising wind. Beside me, sleeping too late, Philip. Downstairs, rising too early, the children, breakfasting no doubt on cereal and too much milk. Philip’s milk. Philip comes first. Husbands do.

Up gets Margot, the doctor’s wife, slipping her feet into sensible Marks and Spencer slippers, wrapping her body in a blue seersucker terylene-and-cotton dressing gown, which goes through the washing machine without damage and needs no ironing, and is so familiar to her family they would be at a loss to describe it. Up gets Margot, with her thick little body, wifely: her past unacknowledged, her future unquestioned, making herself useful as women do.

Up gets Margot to a day like no other, in which it is no different from any other day.

2

Bright and early.

Up gets Lily Katkin, the butcher’s daughter, Jarvis the architect’s second wife, to a day like no other before or since.

Up gets Lily bright and early, to prepare breakfast for Jarvis her husband and Jonathon her son.

Good Lily!

Lily squeezes fresh chilled oranges into the blender, adds honey, and blends for fifteen seconds. She has iced glasses waiting. She put them in the refrigerator the night before, as is her custom. Lily’s husband and Lily’s son wait obediently at the breakfast counter, their faces and hands washed, their hair combed, marvelling at such wifely and maternal excellence. The coffee is filtering, newly made from freshly ground, lately roasted beans: (low-calorie milk powder will be added to the cups, alas, and not cream, but never mind). Eggs from the health-food shop have been boiled for three and three-quarter minutes: the starch-reduced bread has been evenly toasted, shaken free of crumbs and placed in the little white china toast-rack. The tablecloth is white and clean: the china blue and white: knives and forks, carefully washed by hand and not in the machine, retain their strength and colour.

Jarvis Katkin sits, waits, watches, marvels. Lily is Jarvis’s lucky ticket in the lottery of life. (So Lily’s mother Ida wrote from New Zealand on the occasion of their marriage.) Jarvis has large pale blue eyes, heavily lidded, slightly bloodshot. He has thick, pale, dusty eyebrows. Jarvis’s skin is loose from dieting; folding either side of a bold, coarse-grained, handsome nose. Jarvis is not at his best this morning. Last night’s drink and this morning’s sex still fuddle his perceptions of the world. Jarvis breathes heavily as he waits for his egg in the pause between orange juice and coffee. The orange juice, so fresh and cold, trickled in a chilly stream down his throat and to his stomach, and now lies there, acid and uneasy. Jarvis does not like orange juice but scarcely cares to say so. Jarvis hiccups gently. Lily frowns (a pretty sight). Lily does not want anything to be out of control, least of all Jarvis’s digestion. Lily would have his insides on the outside if she could, the better to observe them, understand them, and control them. Lily cannot abide a mystery.

Lily has soft smooth hands which move confidently amongst the material objects of this world. Lily’s nails are almond-shaped and unbroken, and the translucent pink varnish remains unchipped, as now she delicately fishes in the clear washing-up water for Jonathon’s mislaid silver christening spoon. Jonathon needs it for his egg. Lily cleans the spoon with silver polish every single day. Lily’s mother sent it from New Zealand. The spoon is becoming very thin, almost sharp. If Lily carries on like this, Jonathon will cut his little mouth on its edges.

Lily’s arms are covered not with common hair but with a soft and silky down. Lily’s legs are long and full, tapering from rounded buttocks; Lily’s toenails are always manicured; Lily’s waist is small and her breasts are high and rounded, so although Lily goes bra-less she is assumed by those who do not much like her (and there are many such) to be boldly and old-fashionedly uplifted. Lily’s face has the crude regular beauty of some painted angel, colours washed out by the passing seasons, leaving, as it were, the faint echo of better days behind. It is the look of experience.

Lily’s skin is pale; Lily’s smile is slow and sweet; Lily’s long thick hair is a careful and expensive mixture of silver, gold and grey in careful disarray. Lily is twenty-eight. She was born with the moon rising in Leo, and the sun in Aquarius. Lily moves carefully, but with a certain stiffness and lack of grace. Lily is the butcher’s daughter. In the kitchen, in the house, she lacks abandon. It may be very different in bed, of course.

Does this jowly man, this husband, this Jarvis, whose waist when he married Madeleine was thirty-eight inches, and now is thirty inches, this Jarvis with his stubby fingers and powdery nails (he draws with charcoal, she cannot stop him: art triumphs here, as art must), his reddish, loose and freckly skin, his full lax mouth, breathing indigestion; does this Jarvis, erect, rouse this pale stiff lovely Lily to passion, flush her cool skin with intemperate desires?

Ah yes, he does.

And Jonathon, fruit of their passion, twenty-six months old? Jonathon is a stocky, yellow-haired child with bright cheeks and his father’s pale full eyes. Jonathon has a stoical and uncomplaining nature, and a surprisingly friendly manner. Jonathon’s mother Lily seldom picks Jonathon up, unless obliged to in the interests of hygiene or security, or good manners. Lily is not much given to embracing, crooning, cuddling or other pointless activities. Already Jonathon is adept at climbing into his highchair by himself, scaling its frail and slippery height with ease, waiting patiently for his regulation Muesli, his bread and butter, his properly boiled egg, his sharp silver spoon and his mother’s distant smiles of approval. He will never leave her, never have enough of her.

Jonathon’s father is more demonstrative. He kisses and cuddles his son when his wife is out of the room, and when she’s there he will frequently catch Jonathon up and toss him in the air. Jonathon laughs when this happens, though more from shock than pleasure.

‘Daddy,’ he croons now, waiting for his egg, or to find himself suddenly on his head and in the air? ‘Mummy.’ He bashes his dish of Muesli with his spoon. Flakes of raw porridge oats and withered currants fly about the room.

‘Don’t,’ says Lily mildly, in her refined, careful, loving voice. Oh, I am the butcher’s daughter, but who would know it now? ‘Don’t, Jonathon.’

Jonathon doesn’t.

Jarvis, with memories of the infant Hilary, child of his first marriage, smearing the tables with sugary porridge and the walls with excreta, marvels at his second wife the more. Jarvis’s lucky ticket in the lottery of life. At the second draw, not the first.

But how early the Katkins rise, and take breakfast! It’s still only eight fifteen.

3

Up gets Madeleine, Jarvis’s first wife, Lily’s enemy, Hilary’s mother, not so bright and not so early.

Up gets Madeleine, putting chilly chapped feet on to brown broken lino. Up gets Madeleine, pulling on her old woollen dressing gown which smells (like the room) of damp and cigarette smoke mixed; up gets Madeleine, prompted by a sense of duty, not of inclination, to at best organise and at worse acknowledge her daughter Hilary’s departure for the local comprehensive school.

Monday morning: not a good one.

Hilary’s tights are torn; Hilary’s blouse has lost its button and Hilary’s skirt has shrunk in the wash so the waistband won’t close, and safety pins have to be found. Hilary does not care about any of these details, so Madeleine has to cling the more carefully to her own maternal concern, lest it evaporate altogether in the general depression of the morning.

Hilary is fourteen and weighs eleven stone: she has size eight feet and a thirty-eight C bust, so the missing button is important. Hilary eats Sugar Puffs as she gathers her homework together, every now and then sprinkling more spoonfuls of sugar on the already sweetened cereal. Madeleine hasn’t the energy, indeed the desire, to stop her daughter destroying her looks. Why should she? Hilary is walking witness to Madeleine’s wrongs, Madeleine’s ruin. See, says Madeleine in her heart, regarding Hilary, see what has become of me. See what Jarvis has done?

And Hilary stuffs and puffs, shovelling in fuel: for what? Resentment, boredom, anxiety, despair? Or gathering her reserves against the onslaught of the next weekend?

During the week Hilary lives with her mother. At weekends she lives with her father Jarvis and her stepmother Lily, sleeping not in the spare room (which is kept for guests) but on a camp bed in Jonathon’s room. Lily means to slim Hilary down. It is her earnest desire. On Saturdays and Sundays Lily gives Hilary a breakfast of lemon tea with artificial sweetener, two boiled eggs and one slice of starch-reduced toast spread with low-calorie margarine. But such a breakfast, followed by equally austere lunches and dinners, cannot, alas, undo the damage done by Madeleine on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

During recent months Hilary’s bosom has expanded alarmingly. Puffed wheat has become her favourite food; yes, she is altogether puffed out. Hilary stares out of pale eyes: has her mother’s sallow complexion, a puffy face, a double chin, a stodgy body, beautiful thick and golden hair tumbling on to graceless shoulders, and a sharp, sad mind.

Madeleine is forty-four, and gaunt. Madeleine is like her daughter; she eats and eats Sugar Puffs by the jumbo-size packet, and tinned milk (cheaper than fresh) by the dozen cans – but Madeleine just gets thinner and thinner. Unlike her daughter, Madeleine is vain. Her ragged jeans, her old brown matted sweater, torn beneath the arm, proclaim her with a fine exactitude to the world. This is me, Madeleine, what I am, what I have become, what I have been driven to. By Jarvis.

Wicked Jarvis. Madeleine goes to jumble sales, elbowing and stamping in order to achieve a yet more ragged pair of jeans, a yet more matted jersey by way of illustration. Madeleine will examine herself carefully in the mirror before leaving the flat: adjusting the armpit hole just nicely, so it hides the wisp of underarm hair, but not for long. Madeleine has a yellowing complexion and thick, rusty, vigorous hair, which tears teeth from combs. Madeleine’s cheeks are hollow; her huge brown eyes stare reproachfully from deep sockets. Madeleine’s voice is husky. Madeleine looks mean and hungry, which is what she feels.

Madeleine and Hilary make their home in two basement rooms in a terrace house. It is all Madeleine can afford – or rather, all that Jarvis will afford. The front room has a barred window which looks out on to a white-painted basement area. This room is the kitchen. That is, there is a sink beneath the window, with a damply rotten brown wooden draining board and an electric hotplate with two burners, which stands on top of a hospital locker. Thanks to Hilary, who has saved and scraped and stolen the loose change which lies about her father’s house in order to buy her mother this splendid present, Madeleine also has the use of a rotisserie-and-grill. This appliance has not been fixed to the wall because the plaster will clearly not stand its weight, and so it stands, perforce, on the small pre-war refrigerator, bought second-hand in the market (on Hilary’s insistence). Madeleine does not much care for cooking, which in any case is an expensive and time-wasting occupation. Why have toast when bread and butter will do? But Hilary likes a kitchen to look like a kitchen.

Poor Jarvis.

A brown guinea pig in a cage on the table, staring and snuffling, eats every morning what Sugar Puffs Madeleine and Hilary leave. Hilary picks up old cabbage leaves and vegetation from the street market on her way home from school to provide his evening meal: so the pig can be said not just to cost little, but to save waste on a national level.

Madeleine’s back room looks out on to a damp and sunless London garden, to which only the top floor tenants have access. In this room are Madeleine’s double bed and Hilary’s camp bed, and their wardrobe and their piles and piles of washing. Madeleine and Hilary are the recipients of countless articles of cast-off clothing, which they neither care to wear, let alone wash, or can bear to throw away.

So they lie about in heaps ankle deep.

Madeleine pays £5.23 a week rent (a sum fixed by the Rent Officer) and receives from Jarvis maintenance of £20 a week for herself and Hilary. Once this sum seemed lavish. Now inflation makes it a dubious means of support, although it still looms large enough in Lily’s mind. (Twenty pounds? Lily’s father the butcher brought home fifteen and that was at the height of his career as the best butcher in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.) Madeleine should go out to work; Madeleine will not for ever be able to put off doing so. But why should she earn? To salve Jarvis’s conscience? To enable Lily to buy even more expensive little pairs of white French socks for baby Jonathon’s tender, much resented feet? No. And how can she earn? Hilary comes home from school, and needs a mother. Hilary’s school holidays last for four months of every year. Fathers such as Jarvis don’t stop work on a child’s account. Mothers such as Madeleine are expected to.

Listen now, carefully, to their conversation. Madeleine and Hilary talk in riddles, as families do, even families as small and circumscribed as this one, using the everyday objects of life as symbols of their discontent.

1 HILARY: Mum, I can’t find my shoes again.

2 MADELEINE: (looking) They’ll be where you took them off. (Finding) Here they are.

3 HILARY: Not those old brown things. My new red ones.

4 MADELEINE: You can’t possibly wear these to school. They’re ridiculous. They’ll cripple your feet.

5 HILARY: No they won’t. Everyone else wears platforms.

6 MADELEINE: In that case, everyone else will be going round in plaster casts, and serve them right.

7 HILARY: You only don’t like them because Lily bought them for me.

8 MADELEINE: I don’t like them because they’re ugly and ridiculous.

9 HILARY: I can’t find the other ones, and I’m late. Please, mum. They’re my feet.

Which, being translated, is—

1 HILARY: Why is this place always such a mess?

2 MADELEINE: Why are you such a baby?

3 HILARY: You know nothing about me.

4 MADELEINE: I know everything about you.

5 HILARY: I want to be like other people.

6 MADELEINE: Other people aren’t worth being like.

7 HILARY: I know all about you, don’t think I don’t.

8 MADELEINE: You force me to tell the truth. Our whole situation is ugly and ridiculous and I despair of it.

9 HILARY: Then let me find my own way out of it, please.

So Hilary defeats her mother, as the children of guilty mothers do, and goes off to school wearing the red shoes with platform heels; she trips over them in the Humanities lesson and cricks her ankle, and pulls a video tape machine from a shelf to the floor in so doing, and does £115 worth of damage. The headmistress subsequently attempts to ban all platform heels from the school, and fails.

Once Hilary has left, Madeleine goes back to bed, and half sleeps until half past ten, when she gets up, makes herself some instant coffee, sweeps the floors vaguely and washes up badly; and peers up through the area bars into the dusty brightness of the streets, wondering what there is in the outside world that others find so animating, and that keeps them so ceaselessly busy.

Madeleine, sweeping and dusting, thinks, feels, hurts, tries. Listen. Madeleine’s inner voices cajole, comfort, complain, encourage, in equal measure.

Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife. I am the victim. I have right on my side. It makes me strong. I feed on misery. But I no longer have the strength to be unhappy, not all the time. It has been going on too long. Days drift into weeks, and weeks into months. Three years since Jarvis married Lily, two since she had her brat. Even so, every morning for an hour or so, this sick and angry misery. It tenses my muscles; this, or something, gives me fibrositis. Bile rises in my mouth and burns my throat. I keep myself still and silent by an act of will, when the only thing to give me peace would be to search out Jarvis, waylay him, attack him, mutilate him; shriek and scream and by the very dread-fulness of my behaviour, flying in the face of my own nature, which he knows so well, so well, demonstrate how much, how very much, he has hurt me, damaged me, destroyed me. I want Jarvis to acknowledge the wrong he has done me. I want him to love me again. I want to burn down Jarvis’s home, my home, and Lily and Jonathon with it. Jonathon, the son I should have had; never will have. And that would be an end to them and it and me and everything, and thank God for his eternal mercy.

Courage, Madeleine!

If I wait, if I lie quite still, warding off, fending, pretending that these attacks of what? Of hate? Madness? come from outside me, have been sent by the devil or his equivalent, and do not arise (as I know they must) from within me, being as they are the sum of every fear and sorrow, rage and despair I have ever felt, ever known; if I forbid myself to move, to act, to pick up the telephone; then the rage passes. I breathe more easily. The pain in my shoulder disperses. Then the rest of the day is mine. The devil is off tormenting someone else; he won’t be back until tomorrow, with a fresh set of mirrors, to tease, exalt and magnify my wrongs. Alas, the devil, once departed, leaves me not so much unhappy as dazed, and worn out, and fit for nothing. My vision still looks inward, not outward. I can wash and dry the dishes, but not get them back on to the shelves. I can sweep the dirt from the floor into a heap, but not get the dust into the pan. The gardens are full of late roses, Hilary tells me, and beautiful. I cannot see them.

The doorbell rings.

Good morning!

Madeleine cranes up through the basement bars to see who’s at the door, sees familiar broken shoes, stocky, wide-apart legs, a thin uneven hem, a basket of flowers, shaking as does the red hand which holds it. Madeleine draws back into the gloom, hiding. It’s the gipsy.

Good morning!

Madeleine’s flat is stuck with withered sprigs of heather, held in twists of tinfoil, bought weekly from the gipsy’s basket. Ten pence the sprig. Dried heather flowers drift into cups of tea, settle in hair, cluster like dead insects in the corners of the room. No one wants to keep them. No one likes to throw them away, in case they’re throwing away luck.

What luck?

Good morning! The bell goes again, harsh and reproachful. ‘I know you’re in there, hiding.’ Madeleine gives up, emerges into the light, goes upstairs, answers the bell. The gipsy’s plump round face is purple with cold, exhaustion and ill health. Her teeth are black and broken. A coat strains across her overfed body. Sweet tea and sugar buns. She has tears in her eyes, and not, as Madeleine prays, from conjunctivitis, or as a result of the cold wind, but because she has indeed been crying. Her husband has a bad heart; the hospital has sent her son-in-law home to die; her nephew has lost a leg from TB of the bone. The fares from Epping, where she lives, to Muswell Hill, where the habit of years, rather than common sense, still leads her, now exceed her takings.

‘Help me out, dear. Daffs at fifty, heather at ten. Lucky heather from bonny Scotland.’

Madeleine takes two sprigs of heather and parts with twenty pence out of the milk money.

‘Never mind,’ says Madeleine from her heart. ‘Never mind. Good times will come again. Or at any rate we had them once.’

And so they will, and so she did. Once Madeleine woke up singing. When she was pregnant with Hilary she even sang in her sleep. Jarvis heard her. Once Jarvis loved Madeleine, drew back chairs for her, brought her tea when she was tired; held her hand in the cinema: scowled at her admirers: brought her yellow daffodils fifty at a time.

Bad times come, but can’t undo the past. Mostly they come when we are ill, and old, and dying. Few of us die with dignity, or without pain. But how we once lived; when we were young! How we laughed!

‘I’ll tell your fortune,’ says the gipsy, drawing Madeleine’s strong, worn hand into her own red, dirty one, but Madeleine pulls it back.

‘I’ll do it cheap,’ says the gipsy. ‘You’re a kind lady. You’ve got a lucky face.’

‘No,’ says Madeleine. She is frightened. She looked into her own future, at the gipsy’s touch, and saw nothing but blackness. Well, she is depressed. That is what depression is, Madeleine thinks. The looking forward to blackness. Surely.

Good morning!

The gipsy goes. Madeleine goes down to her room to stand beside the sink, motionless, unable to make order out of the chaos of chipped and dirty china.

I am Madeleine, first wife of Jarvis, Hilary’s mother. I am Madeleine, thorn in Lily’s white soft flesh.

Lily, the second wife, Margot’s employer.

4

The doctor wakes, late. Margot is up: he can hear the sound of breakfast. The doctor closes his eyes again. These are the moments of the day he most values, when he is most himself and least the doctor. It is in these minutes, the doctor knows, these minutes between waking and sleeping, that the events of the past, of infancy and childhood, churned to the surface by the fragmented memory of dreams, lose their haphazard nature and make some kind of pattern; effecting, with luck, some small improvement in our nature, loosening the grip of resentment, altering expectation, refocusing obsession. Thus, building on the impacted rubble of the past, we construct the delicate filaments of the present. Or so the doctor thinks.

The doctor’s breathing becomes ragged, anxious. Eavesdrop: listen.

Oh, I am the doctor. There is no one to help me. All night the insomniacs have held me in their thoughts. Now, as the minutes advance, it is the waking sick who direct their thoughts towards me. I can feel them. See, doctor, my fingernail is septic: my throat is sore; I am feverish: my eye is blacked and you, doctor, must witness my wrongs. I have cancer, VD, psittacosis, anything, everything. It is Monday, day after Sunday, family day.

I am the doctor, little father to all the world, busiest of all on Mondays, the day after Sunday.

Up gets the doctor, Philip Bailey, Margot’s husband. He puts on a suit. He has to; he is the doctor. Once he was twenty-eight inches about the waist, now, with the passage of time and the arrival of the metric system, he is ninety-eight centimetres.

The doctor is forty-five years old. He has the stocky build and freckled face of some cheerful summer child. In the last couple of years the doctor’s skin, once so soft and pliable, has seemed to toughen and harden, lines are etching deep into his flesh and will go deeper still.

As Enid’s husband Sam, the estate agent, unkindly observed at a party, Philip is like a stale French cheese, growing old before it has matured, hardening inside, cracking round the edges.

All the same, on a good day Philip looks fifteen years younger than he is. It would be unreasonable to suppose Philip stopped growing older the day he married Margot, but Margot likes to suppose it. Margot is a good wife: she allows her husband to sap her energy and youth, and tax her good nature, and feels no resentment; or thinks she does not.

Philip stretches and bends his fingers, limbering them up for the day. Margot does not like her husband’s hands.

They express something his face and body do not; some stony, hidden aspiration away from her, Margot, his wife. The doctor’s hands are stiff, knuckly and red: their palms are bloodless and lightly lined. But his patients seem to trust them, which is just as well. With these hands the doctor manipulates their joints, presses into their vital organs, searches into their orifices, their dark and secret parts, judging them ill or well, good or bad, worthy of life or deserving death. With these hands, pulling down magic from the air, the doctor writes his runes, his indecipherable prescriptions for health.

Dislike his hands at your peril. You will not get better if you do.

5

Breakfast! Bon appétit! If you can.

The manner of the breakfast declares the aspiration of the family. Some breakfast standing, some sitting, some united in silence, some fragmented in noisiness and some, as in a television commercial, seeming to have all the time and money and goodwill in the world; and some in gloomy isolation. It is the meal at which we betray ourselves, being still more our sleeping than our waking selves.

Picture now the doctor’s household this Monday morning, breakfasting according to ritual in the large back kitchen. Philip, the father, bathed, shaved, dressed, apparently benign, eats bacon and eggs delicately prepared by Margot, reads the Guardian she has placed beside his plate, and ignores the other members of his family as best he can. At eight forty-five his receptionist Lilac will arrive, and open his mail, and prepare his appointment cards. At nine the doctor will rise, put down his paper, peck his wife, nod to his children and go through to the surgery to attend to the needs of the world. Lettice and Laurence sit opposite each other. Lettice is thirteen, neat, pretty, and precise, with her mother’s build and round, regular face, but without her mother’s overwhelming amiability. If the mother were unexpectedly to bare a breast, it would surely be in the interests of some cosmic medical examination. If the daughter did so, who would doubt her erotic intent? Laurence is a dark and looming boy of fourteen, with a bloodless, troubled complexion and a bony body, as if his father’s hands had at last found expression in a whole person. There is little other resemblance between them.

Listen now to their outer voices, their conversations, their riddles, comprehended only by themselves, the secret society that composes the family.

1 LETTICE: Dad, can I have the middle of the paper?

2 DAD: What for?

3 LETTICE: To read.

4 DAD: You are a nuisance.

5 LAURENCE: Mum, I haven’t got a fork.

6 MARGOT: Sorry, dear. I’ll get one … But why do you need a fork, if you’re only eating cereal?

7 LAURENCE: Sorry. So I am.

8 LETTICE: Why don’t we ever have unsweetened cereal?

9 MARGOT: Because no one eats it.

10 LETTICE: I do. The sweetened is fattening, anyway, and not worth the extra money. It said so in Which. I think we should have unsweetened and add our own sugar.

11 LAURENCE: Lettice, you are not the centre of the universe.

12 LETTICE: I know that. The sun is.

13 LAURENCE: You are wrong. The sun is a star of average size which is itself revolving, with thousands of millions of other stars, in one galaxy among millions in a universe that might well be boundless. If you travelled at the speed of light – 186,300 miles a second, that is – it would take 6,000 million years – about 20,000 times the total period that life has existed on earth, to travel only to the limits of what we can observe from earth with our very limited technology.

14 LETTICE: So what?

15 LAURENCE: So nothing matters.

And Laurence helps himself to the last of the honey-coated wheat puffs, the creamy top of the milk, and adds the last scrape of the marmalade in the jar for good measure.

These domestic riddles can be thus translated:

1 LETTICE: Dad, take notice of me and my changing needs.

2 DAD: (cautious) What kind of need?

3 LETTICE: Don’t worry. Merely intellectual. All the same, I am growing up.

4 DAD: Oh dear. More change.

5 LAURENCE: Father is taking notice of Lettice again. Mother, will you please take some notice of me? My needs are not being properly met.

6 MARGOT: Perhaps I have been rather remiss. On the other hand, I don’t actually want to have to get to my feet on your behalf. Do you insist, my dear? We have a good relationship, you and I.

7 LAURENCE: Quite. It’s the thought that counts. Thank you.

8 LETTICE: Mother, father cares for me but I’m not so sure about you.

9 MARGOT: I have so very many people to look after.

10 LETTICE: I knew it. You want me to be plain and ugly and fat; and what’s more I’m a better housekeeper than you, so there.

11 LAURENCE: Don’t be rude to my mother, just because she’s yours as well. There are more important people in the world than you.

12 LETTICE: Father is important. You’re not.

13 LAURENCE: Father is not as important as you think. Enough of all this emotional nonsense, anyway. Facts are interesting, important, reassuring, and what’s more, I know more of them than father, for all his air of maturity.

14 LETTICE: Who cares about facts? They’re meaningless.

15 LAURENCE: All right then. We’ll all go on as we have before, sparring for position over the breakfast table. God give me strength.

The day has begun.

6

Breakfast time! Bon appétit! If you can manage it.

Jarvis and Lily can. They breakfast in companionable silence. At ten Jarvis will go to his office. He wears a Chairman-Mao blue jacket, bought for him by Lily from an expensive shop. Jarvis would prefer to wear a shirt, tie and jacket, but Lily plans otherwise; and she is, he acknowledges, quite right to do so. Those now leapfrogging over his talented head towards senior partnerships wear jeans, beards, and show their navels on hot days.

At ten to ten, Jarvis puts down The Times and smiles at his wife. Jonathon, wiped and cleaned, has already been set in his playpen to play with his educational toys; which, obligingly enough, he seems prepared to do: posting bright plastic shapes into a plastic letter box with supercilious ease. He is an advanced child, and seems to know it. He begins to sing tunelessly to himself, moved by a spirit of self-congratulation. Lily, observing him, cannot understand how it is that she, being so feminine, has produced so male a child. Is his dexterity, his musical sense, perhaps symptomatic of homosexuality? She feels restless, agitated. Jarvis and Lily speak. Few riddles in this household, which is barely three years old, and contains one non-speaking member, but let us examine such as there are, and note how quickly pleasantries, before morning coffee, can degenerate into animosity.

1 LILY: Margot Bailey is late. She’s always late. I shall have to speak to her.

2 JARVIS: She’s not the maid. She’s our doctor’s wife.

3 LILY: She’s an employee during office hours. It’s what was agreed.

4 JARVIS: Yes. But we have to be tactful.

5 LILY: She knows I’ve got people coming tonight; I need her to take Jonathon to playgroup. She’s late on purpose.

6 JARVIS: Margot is supposed to be looking after my office, not your child.

7 LILY: Our child. And if, as you claim, your business is twenty per cent down this year, then presumably the doctor’s wife has twenty per cent more time on her hands. I want to take Hilary to the hairdresser to get her hair cut. I can’t possibly take Jonathon. He swarms over everything.

8 JARVIS: Does it need cutting? It always seems the only good thing about her. Still, I suppose you know best. Is it all right with Madeleine?

9 LILY: Nothing is ever right with Madeleine. But I can’t even get a comb through Hilary’s hair, and I am paying, and it’s a very good hairdresser. Today’s the only day I could get an appointment.

10 JARVIS: Expensive?

11 LILY: I hope you don’t grudge your own daughter a haircut.

12 JARVIS: Couldn’t you do it?

13 LILY: If you worry so much about money, why not spend less on whisky?

Which being translated is:

1 LILY: Am I to be left all alone with this child? I cannot take the responsibility.

2 JARVIS: Other wives can cope, why not you?

3 LILY: Because I enjoy a superior social status in the world, and deserve to do so.

4 JARVIS: In this household, I am the one with tact.

5 LILY: Everyone’s against me.

6 JARVIS: My needs are more vital than yours.

7 LILY: You’re twenty per cent less important than when I married you. However, I love you and am even looking after your daughter by your first marriage.

8 JARVIS: I did not intend to deny Madeleine altogether.

9 LILY: Your first marriage spoils my life. I have to make the best of what’s left.

10 JARVIS: You’re extravagant with my money.

11 LILY: You’re mean.

12 JARVIS: You’re not earning your keep.

13 JARVIS: You’re a drunk.

At which Jarvis kisses his wife, hastily, before worse befalls and does a quick farewell soft-shoe shuffle for Jonathon, who half-sneers, half-smiles in response, and departs for the office.

And the day begins.

7

Listen now, to Lily’s inner voice, welling up into the moral silence of her busy after-breakfast home. Jonathon playing good as gold, sunlight streaming, radio singing.

Oh, I am no longer the butcher’s daughter; I am the architect’s wife, waiting for the arrival of Margot the part-time secretary, stacking well-rinsed plates in serried rows in the dishwasher (soundproofed) reserving the wooden-handled knives and forks for a warm soapy hand rinse in the plastic bowl. (Lily’s mother, Ida, on her wild Australasian shore, taught Lily how to care so well for possessions, both material and human, there being so little of either about.) How pleasant everything is, since I became the architect’s wife. All things around me ordained, considered, under control. The house is well converted, the plasterwork is sound, the polished floor blocks on the ground floor are both practical and attractive; the carpets upstairs are both luxurious and hard-wearing. Is this not what Jarvis has worked for; what I myself have made possible for him? How happy we are – like children. Surely nothing can go wrong?

Lily and Jarvis! What games they play, in bed and out of it. Their pleasure, out of doors, is to rummage through the builders’ rubble skips which line the streets, and acquire the treasure, within, and jeer at the philistines who flung them out. Their house at No. 12 Adelaide Row is a treasure home of trophies – here a carved Jacobean chest, once horribly painted green; there a pretty rosewood bureau, once broken and abandoned, now beautifully restored; a Coalbrookdale footscraper, once flaky with rust, now sandblasted and splendid; even the watercolour landscapes which line the hall were found in a folder in the middle of a bundle of old comics (in themselves items of value and interest) and have been valued at £500; and the stripped doors in the stripped doorframes, such an elegant contrast to the coffee colour of the walls, once lay in a demolition yard waiting for the bonfire.

Nothing wrong with such restitutions. On the contrary. We must rescue the nation’s past, if we wish to rescue our own. Jarvis says so. Jarvis knows. In this wisdom Jarvis has educated Lily.

Lily and Jarvis.

When Madeleine and Jarvis lived at 12 Adelaide Row it had no such social, aesthetic and emotional distinction. It was an ordinary house, practical and ugly. In Madeleine’s day, Jarvis’s talents never bloomed. How could they? Madeleine made no concessions to the beauties of the material world. Tat and junk, she’d say, trendy rubbish, vicious Victoriana, and millions starving in Ethiopia, or burning in Vietnam, wherever the season’s human ulcer happened to manifest itself; can’t you, Jarvis, turn your mind to anything more serious than a rotten old sampler badly embroidered by some miserable child in 1825? If you want to throw your money away, give it to Shelter and help house the homeless.

Because you are unhappy, Madeleine, shall there be no small delights for Jarvis?

No, there shan’t.

And Jarvis earned £5,000 a year as an architect, at a time when the sum meant something, but even this Madeleine could not approve. Shouldn’t you be a council architect, she’d ask? Shouldn’t you be turning your undoubted talent to some useful end? Instead of designing ridiculous modern villas on insanitary sunny slopes for ex-whores, property developers and other social criminals?

And so of course Jarvis should, and he knew it, which made matters worse. Madeleine was always right.

Nonetheless, as Lily later pointed out, Madeleine used the money Jarvis earned at his immoral tasks. Madeleine went on countless coach holidays with little Hilary, leaving Jarvis behind at the office, earning; and believing (as they both did; well, at any rate, she did) in the immorality of sexual possessiveness, Madeleine passed many a stopover night (or so it was imagined by Jarvis, and later Lily) in bed with the current courier; exercising her sexual rights in bleak bedrooms overlooking the teeming roads of Europe and the East. Madeleine even went as far as Turkey once, and heaven knows what oriental sexual athleticism that didn’t lead to! And what happened to little Hilary, alone (or so one hopes) in the next bedroom? How did little Hilary regard her mother’s quest for fun and self-expression; returning from abroad, as she would, even yet sulkier, blanker, and snottier than when she left? Hilary’s mind not so much broadened, as stunned.

Poor Jarvis, poor father.

Oh, I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I want Jarvis to be happy, to be himself, to be with me. I even want Hilary, Jarvis’s child. I want Hilary to be happy too, to make up for all the things she’s lost, all the things Madeleine has taken from her. I want to show everyone what a truly successful person I am: wife, daughter, mother, stepmother. Sister? No, don’t think of that.

Lily waits for Margot to arrive. Lily, waiting, telephones the hairdresser, and makes an appointment for that very morning, to have her own and Hilary’s done. It had not, until now, been her firm intention to do so, more a speculation for Jarvis’s benefit. Margot’s lateness, and the irritation it causes, drives Lily to action. Once done, she regrets it; how is she going to fit everything in? Too late now.

The milk, forgotten, would have boiled over if it hadn’t been prudently placed to heat (if slowly) on the simmer plate. Lily always puts the milk on the simmer plate.

Good Lily!

And here we are at last. The Victorian doorbell rings and here is Margot the doctor’s wife; she is late; she is breathless, but she is here. She has no key. Lily is very retentive of front-door keys. And her coffee is ready.

See, how hospitable, how tolerant, how understanding of the needs of others am I? Lily the architect’s wife! The servant is late and I’m giving her coffee!

Alas, the milk has turned in the pan. The coffee is undrinkable. Lily and Margot unite in deploring a world now so crassly run that the very milk is delivered to the door half-sour, or what passes for sour in these days of homogenisation, sterilisation and so on. A new cup of coffee is made, with different milk.

‘I was wondering,’ asks Lily, at last, ‘if you could possibly take Jonathon to playgroup today?’

These two women do not compose a family: they are not a secret society: there is little need for riddles. Lily (in her white cheesecloth Laura Ashley dress, unspotted by breakfast) can ask Margot (in her navy C & A skirt and pink fluffy M & S jumper) a straight question and get a straight reply.

‘Of course,’ says Margot. ‘Since it’s Monday. Invoice day. I’ll get those done with no trouble.’ There are, this month, some twenty per cent fewer invoices than there were in the same month a year ago. Lily is quite right to assume that Jarvis and his partners in architecture are in difficulties. There has been a twenty per cent redundancy in their staff, a twenty per cent inflation during the year, and twenty per cent drop in business. Lily lies awake at night, just occasionally worrying about it all, but Jarvis does not.

Jarvis has an inheritance; private means. How exotic, Lily used to feel, when first she met him, this simple fact. Jarvis’s inheritance. Later she came to see it as something which stood between Jarvis and the proper acceptance of reality – by which she meant, of course, herself. Once or twice she has even complained of having been seduced by his past. No one in New Zealand had inheritances. It seemed to be symptomatic of the English.

‘I’m going to take Hilary to have her hair cut,’ Lily announces. ‘It’s such a mess.’

‘Is she off school?’ enquires Margot. Margot feels tenderly protective towards Hilary, this ugly duckling in a household of swans.

‘I’ll take her out of school,’ says Lily. ‘No hassle. She only has swimming this morning and I’m sure she’s forgotten her things anyway. I’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s going to the dentist. But they won’t ask. They won’t know and even if they did they won’t care. Hilary is totally anonymous in that place. Two thousand five hundred children in a school; what madness! Comprehensive! My husband was quite prepared to send Hilary to a private school, but of course Madeleine has her principles, for which poor little Hilary has to pay the price.’

Lily likes to emphasise, when she can, the fact of Jarvis’s basic generosity towards his first family. Jarvis rashly leaves letters from his ex-wife’s solicitors for Margot to open and deal with; Lily wishes he wouldn’t.

‘I may be delayed,’ Lily murmurs. ‘You know what hairdressers are like. Do you have to leave sharp at twelve thirty? I was wondering whether you could possibly collect Jonathon at twelve forty-five?’

Margot, the implication is, has arrived late and so in all fairness should surely stay late.

‘The children come home for lunch,’ says Margot. ‘I must have it ready.’

‘Don’t they have school dinner?’

‘They don’t care for them.’

Silence. What, children thus unregulated and untramelled? Jonathon, better brought up, always eats what is set before him.

‘Personally, I never eat lunch,’ says Lily, blandly. ‘So bad for the figure.’

I live a good and useful life, murmurs stocky Margot in her heart. I would be ashamed to go hungry in order to be beautiful. Is there something wrong with me? No. I am a good and serviceable person, wife and mother. My reward is in my children’s love of me, and mine in them; and my soft, familiar, permanent bed. I am a nice person. Your husband, yes your husband, told me so many years ago. He has forgotten – at least I hope he has – but I have not, and true he was drunk at the time, and married to Madeleine, which may have distorted his judgment, but Jarvis told me then that he preferred nice girls to beautiful girls! and what’s more that my nipples were pale and blunt and pink and that’s what he liked, he couldn’t bear the harsh brown aggressive kind, and that, I’m sorry to say, is what yours are, slim hungry wife of my employer; I can see them through your dress.

Margot knows she is being unfair. Who of us can help the texture of our nipples? A momentary surge of irritation, no doubt, of guilt about Jarvis, for which she will now pay penance.

‘I’ll take Jonathon home to lunch with me,’ she says. ‘And drop him back this afternoon.’

Guilt, about Jarvis?

Guilt, surely, is too strong a word. What, for something that happened fifteen years ago, when the world was young, and still full of causes and few effects? Surely not. Margot did no wrong, or none that she could recognise. She was not married at the time. True, Jarvis was, but could Margot fairly be expected to take responsibility for, let alone stand in the way of, the imperatives of male desire? And it can’t have been a good marriage anyway, or why would Jarvis have wanted to sweep her out of a party, up the linoed stairs, and into the spare room? A one night stand, no more, no less.

True, Margot was disappointed the next day (whoever isn’t) when the next day came, and the next, and there was no telephone call from Jarvis, no declaration of true love; no such magic, apparently, discovered in her body as would transfigure his life.

But it was a disappointment muted not by experience (and experience indicates that in nine out of ten of these passing sexual encounters, no particular magic is discovered, no great alliances made – but on the tenth – ah! happiness, fulfilment! Love enough to make up for the pain of the nine? Well, more or less) not muted by any such experience, any such calculating promiscuity in the interests of eventual respectability, but by a general apprehension of herself, a thorough muted expectation of life and the part she was to play in it.

Margot, born to be useful; daughter, wife, mother. This excursion into the erotic, this placing of her on him, for that was where he placed her, the better to admire her sweet pink nipples, scarcely seemed a proper part of her nature.

The activity, she felt, contained its own punishment: if virtue carries its own reward, so does sin carry with it a cosmic slapping of the hand, a down, you naughty girl, you presume: when lust fades, the sense of looking silly remains; and some slight knowledge of a door having opened and closed on the fringes of the memory.

Poor Margot, only too happy, after a silent day or two, to forget.

Later, when Jarvis and Lily became Philip’s patients, and baby Jonathon too, and Jarvis was overworked and underslept, and the strain of Jonathon’s early feeding problems telling upon him, not to mention Lily, it was Philip who suggested that Margot could go and work as Jarvis’s part-time secretary – thus killing three birds with one stone, his wife’s restlessness (well, the children were now increasingly busy with their own lives), his patient’s declared need for tranquillisers, and his own monetary difficulties – the latter admittedly too great and hefty a bird to be brought down by such a tiny shaft, but winging the creature nonetheless. A step in the right direction.

Philip always had the feeling, lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, unspoken, that Margot was ungrateful when it came to money, and did not quite recognise the difficulty with which it was earned, nor her good fortune in being allowed to spend what was by rights his and his alone.

Margot, meeting Jarvis for the second time, going to a house which she only dimly remembered, and now found altogether changed, thirteen years after that passionate, private (or so she believes) encounter, recognised Jarvis at once. He did not recognise her. How could he? It had been a dimly-lit party, in the days when most people smoked, and the smell of hot punch had filled the air, and one girl had been much like another, tight-waisted and teetering around on stiletto heels. But one man, then as now, not much like another at all. Poor Margot. Lucky Jarvis.

Margot accepted the offer of a job with alacrity. Why should she not? The advantages were, on the surface, so many. Namely:

(a) Ease of access

The Katkins lived within walking distance. Six and a half minutes (fast) or nine minutes (slow). She would not have to stand about in all weathers at bus-stops, as did Enid.

(b) Good pay and conditions

The pay was generous, and the work easy. Twelve pounds a week for ten hours light secretarial duties in pleasant surroundings, architect designed.

(c) Independence

Margot, at last, would be able to buy clothes without first having to persuade Philip that she needed them. (And Philip believed, profoundly, that the purpose of clothes was to keep the cold out.) She would no longer have to account for every penny which left her purse. Not that she had ever really objected to so doing – and indeed had become adept at covering the cost of unallowed frivolities such as bars of chocolate or cartons of hot tomato soup from vending machines, under the cover of increased expenditure on washing powder, dishcloths, and mango chutney (Philip’s favourite). It wasn’t, as Margot observed to Enid, that Philip was mean. (Look how he never grudged a penny on household necessities.) Just that she, Margot, was extravagant, and he, as the breadwinner, had every right to say just how much butter and how much jam would be spread on each particular slice. What’s more, she would say to Enid, she found the sense of her husband’s control comforting, and even his censure satisfactory. What she did not say, however, and what made her vaguely uneasy, was her awareness that this particular comfort and satisfaction contained a languorous, almost erotic, quality, as if the financial strictures within which her husband held her, had their counterpart in the bonds and whips of her (rare) sexual fantasies. Well, all that would have to stop. Employment, as Enid would say, was the answer to housewifely broodings and fantasies. Satan finds work for idle hands to do, and dreams for idle minds, while fingers play.

(d) Work interest

Proximity to a new baby. Jonathon. Sprung from Jarvis’s lean loins and Lily’s shapely ones. Margot, a lover of infants, finding her own children now too old for handling but still too young to provide her with grandchildren, had begun to crave babies as some people, finding themselves inland, will crave for the sea; or in the middle of a plain, feel they cannot live without a glimpse of hills. Margot would have had a dozen babies if she had had her way. But fortunately she didn’t. Philip felt that to have two children was both sensible and social, as indeed it was. (One must consider the quality, rather more than the quantity, of the human race.) Margot, as a doctor’s wife, was one of the first women in London to have a contraceptive coil fitted. After the initial heavy bleeding and stomach pains she settled down to it well. Again, the sense of her husband’s coital interest, the gratification of his nonprocreative wishes, the very carrying around, inside her, foetus-like, of something she felt so strongly to be his, not hers, caused in her the same languor, the same erotic debility, as did his weekly checking of the household accounts; the shrinking of the weak from the moral blows of the strong. The presence of the coil, moreover, added a sense of dishonesty, even of sin, to their marital embraces and enhanced them, she rather thought, the more. She would not, now, be without her coil. Though sometimes she feared, vaguely, it might be going rusty within, or flaking away in the face of her internal secretions.

Well, her employer’s wife’s baby would do instead of her own. Would stop her, as she put it to Enid, going all broody. She’d have all the pleasure, the pride, the cooing and cuddling, and none of the nappies.

(e) Job satisfaction

The undercurrent of excitement she feels in Jarvis’s presence: of deceit in Lily’s: the sense of secret knowledge, of power withheld: all these entranced her. She did not mention this to Enid. How could she? She barely knew herself, as she barely remembered that other lost side of her, which was neither passive nor debilitated, but which long ago lured first Philip into seducing her, and then did the same to Jarvis.

At any rate, taking all these sensible considerations, as best she could, in mind, Margot accepted Jarvis’s offer of a job; and the only query she made was as to whether she would be expected to do any childminding. Not that she minded if she did.

‘Of course not,’ says Jarvis. ‘Lily wants to look after the baby herself.’

So Lily said. But Lily lied. Though how was Lily to know? That was when Jonathon was just a helpless, grateful bundle, easily passed from enfolding arms to enfolding arms – a time when mothers will say anything and hope for everything.

Margot now says, ‘I’ll take Jonathon home to lunch with me, and drop him back this afternoon.’

‘That would be darling of you,’ says pale Lily. ‘I’ll take Hilary out to lunch somewhere grand. Her mother only ever takes her to Wimpy Bars. No wonder she’s so spotty. Don’t worry about bringing him back. I’ll send Hilary round, before three.’

And Lily wraps a navy belt about her waist, puts on some ancient fisherman’s hat, for the day is sunny and the skin of her nose delicate, and thus girded, pecks Jonathon goodbye, and is off.

Jonathon leans against the front door, watching the retreating back of his pretty mother, torn between tears and the pleasures of exercising his latest skill, his newly acquired courage. Margot picks him up before the tears win. He is a heavy, comfortable child, who allows himself to trust the arms which enfold him, and will relax into them. So, she remembers now, though hastily putting the memory from her, was his father, Jarvis. Laurence as a baby was much the same. Whereas Lettice, a sinewy, nervous baby and a sinewy nervous little girl, felt lighter in the arms than her actual weight might suggest: as if, untrusting, she was as self-supporting as she could contrive, and maintained by the vigour of her own nervous energy.

Margot and Jonathon set out for the playgroup.

8

The world!

Be bold, but not too bold. Have courage, but not too much.

Cross the road when you see Alsatians coming, don’t walk under ladders, keep a civil tongue in your head when dealing with policemen, youths, civil servants, shopkeepers, and you may return home unscathed. And keep your home, whatever you do. You need somewhere to get back to. Poor Madeleine lost hers.

Laurence, in the graffitied playground of Woodside Comprehensive, is too bold. He intercedes in a fight between two small boys, and is for his pains karate-chopped with a flying pair of Dr. Martens boots (a brand much favoured by mountaineers, and schoolboys) which bruises his right hand badly. He would like to go home, but cannot. His father is a doctor, and does not like his children to complain.

Lettice, in the Art room of the same school, paints a waterfall, and is pleased with herself. As an afterthought, she adds a skeleton tumbling to a second death. She likes painting skeletons. All her friends have their periods. She has not. She would like to ask the doctor if everything’s all right inside her, but since the doctor is her father, she feels she can’t. All her mother Margot ever says is, ‘Wait, what’s your hurry? You’ll be burdened soon enough,’ which is no help.

Hilary, summoned over the tannoy to the Head of Year’s office, afflicted by the terror which dogs her footsteps, falls over her crimson platform shoes and brings down the videotape equipment. Not bold enough, not by any manner of means. The teachers scowl, the children laugh: it is the pattern of her school life.

Philip sees his last patient of the morning; dotty old Mrs Maguire, who calls every Monday to ask him to give her back her freedom. Philip does not know what she means. If she called towards the end of the week, he might have time to find out; in fact he has asked her to do so, but she will not. No. Every Monday morning at eleven thirty-five, the busiest day of the week, five minutes after the surgery door is locked, there she is, rapping on the door once again with her impatient, insistent knock. The question, once she is admitted, is always the same. ‘Will you give me my freedom?’ And though Philip hopefully varies the manner of his answering from yes through maybe to no, she is never satisfied: but only cries a little from rheumy eyes (and tears glistening on wrinkled cheeks are far more sad, the doctor thinks, than those that fall on young, still hopeful flesh) and then departs, leaving the doctor, as no doubt is Mrs Maguire’s intention, sadder but no wiser.

Madeleine, calling at the school some half-hour later at the Head of Year’s office with Hilary’s swimming things, left behind (as Lily had predicted) in the morning’s rush and quarrel, finds that her daughter is gone, is allegedly at the dentist, taken away by a pale beautiful lady with wild silver hair under a fisherman’s hat, dressed in white cheesecloth with brown nipples showing, navy-blue belted.

Lily the butcher’s daughter, from her wild antipodean shore: once turned brown by the cruel sun, now parched and bleached, the colour of bone.

Lily the thief, the stepmother, taker and giver supreme, robbing wife of husband, daughter of mother: giving herself in return, as if this made up for everything.

Madeleine leaves the school and makes for the house where once she lived, where now her supplanter dwells. Madeleine means to make trouble. Madeleine has not been to 12 Adelaide Row for three whole years. It has been too bitter a place to contemplate, until today. See how Madeleine stretches forward with courage, common sense, acceptance? The step from depression into anger is always good!

‘Would you like your hair cut?’ enquires Lily of Hilary in the yellow and gold world of the hairdresser. ‘Or just washed? They’re very good stylists here. I’m sure short hair would suit you. It curls so prettily.’

‘Cut,’ says Hilary, with desperate courage.

Too bold!

Hilary’s hair is washed; the shampooer, a tiny, pale, exhausted child, made bitter by a daily life of insults and the detergent dermatitis on her hands, presses the back of Hilary’s neck into the rim of the basin, and does not care. Hilary says nothing. Discomfort, when inflicted by others, is best ignored. Protest achieves little, in Hilary’s experience; all it does is change practical discomfort into emotional distress, or emotional discomfort into practical difficulty.

Margot’s friend Enid, happily at work, opens a supplementary pay slip which lands in her in-tray. It contains a cheque for £543.72, a backdated pay rise. Enid is a senior civil servant in the Department of Education and Technology, although in the interests of domestic peace she tells her husband she is a secretary there. Enid has £12,583 in a building society, about which her husband knows nothing.

Enid’s husband, Sam, the estate agent, sits dismally in his office. Business is at a standstill: how will he pay the bills, keep Enid in the style to which she is accustomed? The telephone rings all the time: any number of customers want to sell their houses. But to whom? To all those others pretending to want to buy, but without the means to do so, until their own houses have been sold? For a month now not a single property has actually changed hands, although Sam has been kept busy to the point of exhaustion.

Sam’s secretary Philippa, long-legged, bends and shows her knickers. She knows she shows them. She does not care. Enid, and Sam is glad to think of it, is the kind of middle-aged industrious secretary men keep to actually get the work done: and not the kind of secretary that Philippa clearly is, which may give the organisation a good virile name, but seldom actually gets a letter into a letter box. Perhaps one day Philippa will forget her knickers; and then Sam, having privy knowledge of her, will be better able to withstand her lack of interest in him. The slut.

Hilary’s hair is cut. Snip snip snip by a bored young man, to the house style. On the floor lie the damp tresses that Madeleine took such trouble to encourage, attempting to disguise her daughter from a hostile world. Hilary’s puffy face emerges with dreadful clarity. Even the young man pauses; but style is all. Either people can carry it off or they can’t. If they can’t, they shouldn’t come here.

‘What about cutting yours, Lady Katkin,’ he asks, ‘or is it just colour today?’

‘Just colour,’ says Lily, eyeing Hilary’s hair with increasing nervousness. She is always taken aback by the products of her own malice. ‘We’ll leave the length for today.’ Lily always gives her name at the desk as Lady Katkin. Thus she is assured of quick service and good manners. Everyone else does it, anyway, she is quite sure.

I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I am a Princess by right. Didn’t my father always tell me so?

At his playgroup, Jonathon, too bold, falls off the climbing frame but is soon comforted: and climbs again, too bold, and falls again. Many children break their limbs on climbing frames, but Jonathon falls easily, and is lucky. He is young to be at playgroup but Lily pleaded his sociable nature, and the organisation were persuaded. He does not climb the frame again. He makes a puddle on the floor instead. Lily has persuaded herself that Jonathon is dry and no longer needs nappies, but Jonathon and the playgroup organisers know better. Now they put nappies on him. When Lily collects him she will take them off and find them dry. I really don’t understand them, she will complain to Jarvis.

‘Nappies? They want Jonathon to conform to their image of a two and a half year old, that’s all. Poor lamb! What an indignity!’

Jarvis finishes reading The Times, and turns to The Telegraph. He should, he knows, use his increasing amount of free time to study, or learn a language, or even sculpt, as once it was his talent, his privilege, his pleasure to do; but, of course, he does none of these things. He reads the newspapers instead. Lunchtime approaches; and with it the encouragement of the daily bottle of wine which Lily does not know that Jarvis drinks. It is Jarvis’s secret knowledge that wine is not fattening. On the contrary, by stirring up the metabolism, it somehow consumes its own calories. Jarvis has lost forty-two pounds in weight in the last two years; Jarvis begins to fear for the roots of his being. If the surface is so depleted, can the core be left untouched? Jarvis might die. And what would happen to Lily then?

And why does she want so little of him, anyway? Sometimes Jarvis suspects Lily’s motives towards him. His stepfather, the stockbroker, frequently accused his mother of trying to poison him for his inheritance – or was it the insurance? It was said as a joke, when the stockbroker put spoon to mouth, and it contained his least favourite celery soup, but nevertheless, the spirit of the remark made sense enough to the assembled children.

Margot types a letter, on Jarvis’s behalf, in Jarvis’s home, at Jarvis’s desk. He picked up the desk at an auction for only £2.10, in the days when the ten meant 50p; it is massive, oak, Germanic, and elaborately carved, so that Margot’s knees are imprinted with the shapes of leaves and birds and foxes, and would now fetch some £400, Jarvis had been reliably informed by an antique dealer, who nevertheless will only give him £75 for the same. Margot is an excellent typist, being sensitive to the needs of others. When she has finished, she will pick up Jonathon from playgroup. Most of the letters are on the same theme:

Dear Jerry, How are things? I am sorry to bother you at a time like this but if you could see your way to even part payment—

Too bold!

Jarvis, who in the past, was frequently employed by his friends, no longer seems to have many friends left.

—and the doorbell rings.

9

Madeleine stands on the doorstep of the house which was once her home.

Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife, the real wife, standing once again at my own front door. Look! Double glazing and window boxes: pretentious. The plaster in fresh two-toned beige: revolting. A giant gold K upon the stripped pine door. K for Katkin. Jokey. But the age of jokes has passed – do neither Mr K nor the new Mrs K realise that? The gap is narrowing between them and me, between the blessed and the damned. Long live the revolution. Long live me.

Once this was a proper home: a place where Jarvis, Madeleine and Hilary Katkin lived: it was then a place of safety, the suitable background to their lives. Workaday and practical. Now look at it! It is a monument of sickly self-esteem. And see, they’re growing ivy over the dustbin alcove: why bother? What a waste of time and life. My dustbins were of battered, honest, rusty tin, much impacted with old food along the bottom seams; hers are plastic, clean and lined with polythene. She’d move house if she saw a maggot. I rather liked to see them squirming there, monument to our essential corruption.

And where is she, sickly Lily, the bitch? What has she done with my daughter? I am Madeleine, first wife, come to give the second wife what-for.

Margot opens the door. Madeleine steps inside, brushing past her. Madeleine smells oddly sweet, as if to compensate for the sourness of her mind.

Oh, I am sour, I am Madeleine, the first wife to Jarvis. This is my house, if there were any justice in the world, which there is not, only solicitors, and his are better than mine. What has the second wife done to my ordinary front hall with ordinary lino on the floor and stairs? Lined it with mirrors and hung it with plants; built out the back, lost the broom cupboard, gained a patio? Does Jarvis the man walk into this decorator’s absurdity of an evening? Does he remain a man? Or does he pace like a poodle? How far, how disastrously, we have progressed from the hunter’s cave, and to what? To nonsense?

‘What a dreadful place,’ says Madeleine to the stolid little body who opens the door. ‘I know now why I haven’t bothered to see it before. No wonder Hilary gets sick every Friday. It’s the thought of Saturday and Sunday.’

Madeleine! thinks Margot. Madeleine the ogre, the vampire, looking not so much dangerous as dirty and depressed. Madeleine, whom Margot once wronged, or would have done, in a world where women felt a sense of sisterhood, and not of competition. Madeleine brought down, reduced, humbled by life and Lily.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ says Margot mildly. ‘You should have seen it before.’

‘I did,’ says Madeleine sourly. Yes, of course. Madeleine once lived here. And here, under this very roof, Jarvis betrayed her. ‘Of course when I was with Jarvis he wouldn’t spend a penny on a new electric fire. Mean! Well, you’ll know what he’s like. You’re the secretary. Where’s Hilary? I know Lily’s taken Hilary. I’ve been to the school. What does she mean to do? Take out her white teeth and put in gold?’

‘They’ve gone to the hairdresser,’ says Margot unwisely, ‘not the dentist.’

Madeleine’s anger is mitigated by the gratification of finding Lily in the wrong, but she is nonetheless angry. ‘She took my daughter out of school to take her to the hairdresser? She told my daughter’s teachers lies?’ Madeleine sits down. Her toenails are dirty: her sandal-strap repaired with a nappy pin. Madeleine’s next sentences ought to be: ‘I’ll go to my solicitor. I’ll claim custody, care and control. Hilary shall never come to this house again.’ But Madeleine values her peaceful weekends: her Saturday and her Sunday, minus Hilary, marked by nothing more demanding than the change of programme on the radio. So Madeleine’s indignation loses its force.

‘I don’t want my daughter’s hair done by some poofy hairdresser,’ is all she says. ‘I want her to have her hair washed and combed like any other girl of her age. You don’t think Lily’s going to have it cut? She wouldn’t dare. I’d strangle her if she did.’

‘It’s a very good hairdresser,’ says Margot. What else can she say?

‘I doubt very much that it’s a good one,’ says Madeleine, ‘though I dare say it’s expensive.’

Margot smiles unwillingly. Is there a complicity between the two women? Yes. They are united in something not very nice: a dislike of Lily for being what they would hate to be, yet want to be. And besides, Jarvis wronged Margot: Jarvis wronged Madeleine. They are sisters in rejection, if nothing else.

‘At least,’ says Madeleine, ‘Hilary’s not been used to babysit for the snotty brat.’ Madeleine slipped a disc the week Jonathon was born, and lay on her back, in hospital and out of it, for some three months after the birth. The pain was intense, overwhelming even grief and jealousy. These days she contents herself with referring to Jonathon as the snotty brat. Jonathon should think himself lucky it’s no worse.

‘No,’ says Margot, oh, wicked Margot, ‘I’m doing that today.’ Madeleine smiles.

‘Fancy finding a human being in this shit-house,’ says Madeleine. ‘But you’re the doctor’s wife, aren’t you? Hilary told me about you.’

There Margot sits, in another woman’s house, on that woman’s enemy’s side. Oh, Margot feels pleasure in it. A manic malice, momentary but there: felt like a contraction in her private parts. Was it malice, or desire, which led her up the stairs with Jarvis, Madeleine’s husband? Love of the male, or spite against the female?

‘Jonathon isn’t a snotty brat,’ says Margot, in the interests of truth and kindness, recalled to sanity by her fondness for Jonathon. ‘He’s a very nice child.’

‘Then I can’t think who he takes after. Can you?’

‘Hilary is very fond of him. So am I.’

‘Yes, but you’re very nice,’ says Madeleine. ‘The mother we should all have had.’ And then, the words issuing out of some blackness in her head. ‘If anything happens to me I don’t want them to have Hilary. I’d like you to take her.’

Margot is startled. Madeleine sits on the edge of the white woolly sofa, her jeans limp with age yet stiffened by grease, dirty toe tapping. But Madeleine’s face, downcast, is beautiful: her voice seems to come out of the future, or the past, to have been heard by Margot over and over again: and her very words have the ring of familiarity.

‘What should happen to you?’ says Margot eventually.

‘I don’t know,’ says Madeleine. ‘I look forward into the future and it’s black. It’s my only real worry: what would happen to Hilary if I died? And all kinds of things happen to people. You put all your eggs into one basket and the handle breaks. Look at me. Yolk and mess everywhere. Now look!’

Now look indeed. What a handsome girl she’d been; up from the sticks, bright as a button. A father lost to another woman, true: a mother half blind, suffering from epilepsy (a war-wound really; struck on the head by an aircraft propeller when a young WRAC, though she must have been half-daft, to begin with, to have been standing in its way, as Madeleine kept remarking, entertaining her student friends with funny tales from family history – well, how else to deal with it?) – but never mind, for a time, at any rate, for lovely lively Madeleine, youth, energy and hope seemed to be winning over the disappointment of childhood, and idealism over anger, and her own griefs sublimating nicely, even creatively, into understanding and compassion. But then what happened? What does happen? The scar tissue of the past, as youth fades, hardening, coruscating, making itself more and more felt; or perhaps the prognosis was just too optimistic in the first place? Madeleine, linked to Jarvis – a man amiable enough, surely: without malice (much) and an inheritance to boot – abandoning her studies, her life, herself, in the interests of art (oh Art, Art, what deeds are not committed in thy name?). Madeleine, linked to Jarvis, suffered some kind of dismal change. Principle degenerated into self-righteousness. The sense of shared sorrow into self-pity.

As to love, after thirteen years of marriage Madeleine has all but forgotten what the word means. Jarvis, of course, has not. Sex is good enough for Madeleine, not for Jarvis. Jarvis falls in love with Lily. Who’s to blame him? His solicitors hurried the divorce through three months before the Married Woman’s Property Act came into effect. (Madeleine’s solicitors, of course, had not even heard of it.)

Who will take responsibility for Madeleine’s situation?

No one.

Madeleine must shoulder it herself. Madeleine means to do so. Something in Madeleine, something somewhere, perhaps her sleeping, not her waking self, doesn’t give up: intends eventually to return – perhaps after the menopause, when she can be her wombless, uncyclical self again – to the glory and cheerfulness of her youth.

Madeleine should get a move on, if that’s the case.

‘Be careful,’ says Madeleine to Margot now, ‘it could happen to you.’

Margot smiles, embarrassed. She feels threatened. Philip fall in love, run off, leave, abandon her? Is this what Madeleine is wishing on her, in return for that passing complicity? One should leave misfortune alone: stand well clear. Bad luck is as catching as the measles.

‘You may think I’m a neurotic bore,’ says Madeleine, ‘but it seems to me to be the least I can do for my sex to set myself up an object lesson. The world being what it is (not to mention me). I’m not the kind of person of whom people say, what a lot of friends she has, how truly gay and popular – using gay in either sense, though I’ve tried that too – and the upshot being, I’m all Hilary has. That’s where it all leads one. Mother and daughter. How it starts, how it ends.’

‘She has her father,’ says Margot.

‘Jarvis? He’s no kind of father to her. And what kind of man is he? A nothing. Jarvis had a little talent once: but he was too trivial to sustain it. He drank it all away. And then, of course, Lily got hold of him. All he’s got left is his business and that’s failing, and of course his cock, but who could sustain an interest in that? I couldn’t, I’m sure.’

Jarvis’s cock. Margot shivers not just at the crudity of the words, but at the shame of the memory.

The sense of complicity has gone. Margot is alienated, as perhaps Madeleine intended. But the complicity was there, for long enough. Some connection has been made; some fragile cogs have interlinked. Malice is a powerful force. Margot’s malice, unacknowledged, welling up, spilling over, perhaps more powerful than most. The flicker of an unkind smile, returned: the sly look, amusingly exchanged, and more travels between two people than you might suppose; the very devil floating, as you might say, on the beam of interpersonal communication.

10

Be bold!

Madeleine, returning home, finds a letter from a computer-dating firm, giving the name and telephone number of a Mr Arthur Quincey of Cambridge as a possible marital contact. (See how Madeleine, clinging to the past, still scrabbles for a future?) Mr Quincey is described in the letter as being forty-three years old, tall, slim, dark, Anglo-Saxon, well-educated, owning own house and having no objection to slim dark lady under forty with own child. Madeleine rings the Cambridge number: a landlady fetches Mr Quincey; Madeleine finds she has agreed to be in Cambridge, yes, Cambridge, at seven thirty that evening in order to be taken to the pictures. Mr Quincey’s voice has a quiet, wheedling insistence; she recognises it as the voice of the male in the grip of sexual desperation, whose determination it is to bring fantasy down to the realms of reality. It is hard to resist.

‘It’s like being a girl again,’ she complains to Renee, who lives above Madeleine, on the ground floor. Renee has left her husband, and had her children taken from her. It is a house full of women without men, and children without fathers. As you begin, so you end. To-ing and fro-ing to the snap of male fingers. Only in the old days one did it in hope, now it’s in terror.’

‘Terror of what?’ Renee is a delicate, wide-eyed young woman, fresh, long-legged and clear-complexioned, like some outdoor girl on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Renee has two equally pretty little daughters, sometimes with her. Renee claims to be bitter; Renee was abandoned by her father, and then abandoned her husband. Renee has, she says, renounced men. Renee has her girlfriends instead, from whom, physically and emotionally, she extracts comfort, company and solace. From time to time Renee kindly offers the same to Madeleine, in the shape of a warm and companionable bed, but Madeleine is too conscious of her own raggedy body and troubled mind to be able to offer herself on such simple terms. Although, as Renee complains, she seems perfectly well able to offer herself to any passing man.

‘Terror of loneliness,’ says Madeleine. ‘And being rejected, and of loss of status, and the general humiliation of being a woman without a man. Isn’t that terror enough?’

‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ says Renee. ‘You think life for a woman has to revolve round a man.’

‘I can’t help it,’ says Madeleine, old Madeleine, to this silky young woman. ‘I feel it does, though I know it doesn’t. Without a man to revolve around, I scarcely seem to exist. Yet when I had one, I was brave enough.’

So she was. Bold, too bold! Neglecting the washing-up on the grounds that it was trivial, housework humiliating, cooking a waste of human energy and world resources. Taught within a year of marriage that sexual fidelity was meaningless, Madeleine learnt the lesson well. Once having discovered Jarvis, disappeared at his own twenty-ninth birthday party to the (comparative) privacy of the spare room, interrupted him in mid-intercourse with a dumpy nurse, on the spare bed amongst the guests’ coats, and having retreated unseen, too distressed to speak or make her presence known, too shocked for action, then recovered quickly and set about using the incident to her own advantage.

‘Jealousy,’ Madeleine would say, returning home to Jarvis from God knows where but suspiciously late, smelling of drink and sex, ‘is such a low, disgusting emotion! Don’t you think so? Surely we’re above that, you and me? We agreed before we were married that we would never be sexually possessive.’ And though no such agreement had ever been made, though Jarvis had no idea that Madeleine had discovered him and the transient Margot (for Margot it was, though Madeleine never knew her name, never saw her face) together on the bed that rainy birthday night amongst the damp coats, something in Jarvis, amounting perhaps to sheer forgetfulness, but no doubt bolstered up by some weakness, some guilt, some meanness learnt from his stepfather, prevented him from finding the energy to contradict her. Easier, for a time, to admire her.

Madeleine was brave, oh yes she was, with the courage of anger: what an angry little girl she’d been, smearing the walls with far worse than puffed wheat, swearing at her mother, arms clutched round her father’s pillar legs (in the process of being dislodged, she’d once had her thumb broken, so possessive, so determined, so desperate was her grasp).

‘Someone’s chalked a sentence on a wall in Shepherd’s Bush,’ says Renee now. ‘It says – a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ But Renee offers Madeleine the loan of her new white silk shirt for the evening, though it is much against her principles. Pandering to heterosexual vanities! Madeleine accepts, with pleasure. Quincey is a nice name, Madeleine thinks. Madeleine Quincey.

The afternoon proceeds.

Hilary, horrified by her appearance, leaves the hairdresser in tears. Lily is irritated by this display of ingratitude, and what is more, is landed with Hilary for the rest of the day. For Hilary refuses to return to school: not only will it be quite obvious to everyone that she has been to the hairdresser, and not to the dentist, but how can she face her classmates looking such a freak?

Margot collects Jonathon from playgroup, takes him home with her and serves veal-and-ham pie and salad for lunch. She bandages Laurence’s bruised hand, assuming, rightly, that Philip will not have the time to do so. Lettice declines to have Jonathon sit upon her knee. Lettice always appears fearful of the demands of babies and small children.

Laurence tells Lettice that in the last 600,000 years some 74,000,000,000 people have been born and died. ‘So what,’ says Lettice. The children return to school. Philip returns to his rounds. Three flu’s, one pneumonia, one tonsillitis, one manic depression, and one terminal cancer.

Miss Maguire, muttering up and down the High Street, calls a black man a stinking nigger. He offers her his card and suggests she sees a doctor. He is a psychiatrist. Miss Maguire says she’s under the doctor. The psychiatrist, relieved of responsibility, pats her kindly and proceeds.

Lily goes to Selfridges Food Store and there buys a crown roast, some mangetout, some Jersey potatoes, some lump-fish roe, double cream, French loaves, cheese and six lemons.

A shorn, sulky, tearful Hilary helps Lily carry the provisions home. Let us not suppose that the excursion to the hairdresser was organised totally with the image of Hilary as beast of burden in mind. Not totally.

When Lily returns home, she finds a message on the answering machine. The Bridges cannot come to dinner after all. Harvey Bridge has flu, or so Moira alleges, in a voice brimming over, Lily thinks, with insincerity. It may be the quality of the tape, of course, but Lily doubts it.

Lily throws the Brie across the room, in petulance, and Hilary stops to wipe up the spatters before finally going round to Margot’s to pick up Jonathon. She wears a headscarf. It is by now three fifteen.

Madeleine uses Renee’s phone to telephone Lily, and reverses the charges as is her custom. Madeleine speaks coldly but politely, finding it difficult to abuse or insult Lily to her face. Though once it was very different! These days Madeleine suffers from the general paralysis of the defeated. Madeleine ignores the matter of the hairdresser and requests merely that Lily will keep Hilary for the night, as she, Madeleine, is going out: and will Lily ask Hilary to ring her at Renee’s between four and four thirty. Lily acquiesces to both requests, charmingly, with the sweet chilliness she reserves for her enemies. Madeleine has the vision of some biting summer drink, served in a thin glass with a frosted rim. Typical, thinks Lily, putting the phone down. Mad Madeleine using Lily as a dumping ground for Hilary. Not in the least grateful.

Hilary returns home with Jonathon, saying that Margot is annoyed at having had to keep him so long. It is not strictly true, but Hilary will have her revenge. What’s more, Hilary says, Madeleine was round at Adelaide Row, looking for Hilary and furious because she wasn’t at school. Lily is horrified. Is the persecution going to begin again? Is she never to be free of Jarvis’s past?

Lily forgets to ask Hilary to ring her mother.

Lily, instead, anxious to undo any damage Madeleine may have done to Jarvis’s image, not to mention her own, telephones Margot and asks if she and her husband would care to come to dinner that evening? A spur of the moment affair, she claims. A panicky action, born of general upset, Lily knows as soon as she has done it.

And done it is. Margot accepts the invitation; and then dances round the kitchen like an excited child, relieved of the necessity of cooking this, the 5,323rd dinner of her married life.

Lily actually cries.

11

Everything has meaning. Nothing is wasted. Only the young believe that they can stand alone in the world, for good or bad, their own master, independent of the past – will cross the very globe, from south to north, like Lily, in the blithe belief that she will thus put her past behind her.

As we grow older we sense more and more that human beings make connections in much the same manner as the basic materials of matter: that we cluster, in fact, as do those complex molecular structures which we see as models in physical laboratories. The linkages are unexpected: they can be of objects, plants, places, events, anything. It is perhaps why we should take good care to polish furniture, water plants, telephone friends with whom we have nothing (apparently) in common, pay attention to coincidence, and in general help the linkages along, instead of opposing them – as sometimes, in our panic at our very unaloneness, we are moved to do.

Consider now these linkages: these interconnections:

Miss Maguire, now fifty-seven, was at the age of twenty the general maid at No. 12 Adelaide Row where Lily now lives. Her employers were a Mr and Mrs Karl Kominski.

Mr Karl Kominski’s sister Renate, in 1942 a refugee from Poland living in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, bought half a pound of pressed ham from Lily’s father Matthew. That was the day before Matthew was called up and had to leave his pretty young English wife Ida behind to run the business, which she declined to do.

Margot’s friend Enid, now living at 24 Kafka Rise (which incidentally lies parallel to a Thomas Mann Crescent, at right angles to a Goethe Avenue, and is bisected by Balsac Street) has a pot plant which originated, as a cutting, from a plant which once flourished in Hamburg in the thirties, and belonged to old Mrs Kominski, Renate and Karl’s mother.

Enid’s husband Sam is an estate agent. In the golden days when money meant something and a house was a place you lived in and not the focal point of the occupier’s monetary, social and emotional fears, Sam’s first sale was of 12 Adelaide Row to Madeleine and Jarvis Katkin. That was in July, 1960, six months before Madeleine had discovered Jarvis copulating amongst the furs with a passing party guest.

Both Madeleine and Jarvis were overjoyed by the condition of the house, which had not been repaired, let alone painted, inside or out, since 1939. But whereas Jarvis saw the house as a challenge to his architectural skill, his ability to make something new and glorious out of the wreckage of the past, Madeleine’s pleasure found its source in the delapidation itself. She did not wish anything changed. Even in those days her suspicion of prosperity and comfort ran deep, though she chose to blame her circumstances rather than herself for the bleak discomfort in which she always lived. Madeleine declined Jarvis’s offer of joint ownership. No, she wished to be free, to have no ties. No dogs, no cats, no budgies, no carpets, no pot plants, no copper-bottomed saucepans. No Jarvis, one would almost have thought. The sink, later the launderette, when one finally opened in the new shopping precinct round the corner, was quite adequate to wash the clothes in.

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