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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 (#ulink_59f4ef0a-7fa9-5705-83d7-62738e988621)
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 havecancer, 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.
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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 (#ulink_bef42f19-9442-5c8b-add8-1d39e6786ea7)
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?
