by Fay Weldon
JAMIE: I apologise for Judy. She’s been drinking. It’s the depressed housewife syndrome.
JUDY: If only it were a house. You’ve no idea how pokey a penthouse can be. Especially when it’s not even yours, and you never know where you’re going to be living from one week to the next.
LILY: Do both come in. No, Judy, you’re not bleeding, not that I can see.
JAMIE: Of course she’s not bleeding. I had to slap her. If I hadn’t stopped her nagging there would have been an accident. Judy has simply not caught up with one-ways. She lives in the past. Women do, over a certain age.
JUDY: Shall we just stop all this? It’s very boring for everyone.
JAMIE: I didn’t start it. It’s not surprising we never get asked anywhere. Lily darling, you look angelic. The pallor amazes. Jarvis is the luckiest man alive. You and Judy scarcely seem to belong to the same species. Look at you both!
Poor little grey, badly-behaved Judy. Poor smarting Jamie.
There are few riddles left in such exchanges. Resentment, fear, rejection; the desire to hurt, the craving to be hurt; the tangle of love me in spite of me, see how you’ve wounded me, offered up and opened up for all the world to see. A cry for help, seldom answered. Lily, good kind Lily, makes the attempt to do so. Her own armour is not so well made as she would like it to be. Chinks keep opening up in her carapace of conventionality, letting in shafts of understanding and compassion.
LILY: Judy and Jamie, do stop it, whatever it is. You do love each other. You always have. You’ll never part, so you might as well be happy together. Do forget it, whatever it was. Kiss and make up.
Bon appetit!
Judy catches Jamie’s hand. But Jamie’s hand remains cold and hostile. Tears start to Judy’s eyes. Jamie’s hand relaxes just in time. For the rest of the evening they sit together when they can, touching flesh to flesh, as they did when their love was still illicit, and so much more satisfactory.
‘Where are the Bridges?’ asks Judy now, looking round hopefully. Harvey Bridge, the (quite) famous architect; Moira Bridge, the lady TV director. ‘I thought they were coming.’
‘They’ve got the ‘flu,’ says Lily. ‘But do meet the Baileys. Philip is our noble GP. And Margot helps Jarvis out. Between them they know more about us than anyone else in the world. I’m surprised they came.’
The shadow of the missing guests, of possible excitements and elusive good times, hovers over the rest of the evening: though Jamie does, between the jellied consommé and the crown roast, ask Philip for a diagnosis of a recurring pain under his right ribs: and Judy complains about service in the Casualty Department of the local hospital as if it were all Philip’s fault.
Margot sits and smiles and speaks when she is spoken to. She may appear bland, benign and dull—but she is serviceable, as a guest, and sops up aggression and tempers the general nervousness in much the same way as Lily’s yellow curtains are also serviceable, absorbing noise and shutting out light.
After the crown roast, presented on a splendid blue and white venison dish (picked up for five shillings on a market stall by Madeleine, in the old days, when such things were plentiful and cheap; neither liking nor wanting it, she gave it to Jarvis on his thirty-second birthday) and served on to crazed blue and white plates, each one older than the century by far; and after the Brie; and after wine, and more wine; Lily leads the way to the drawing room.
What is it that Margot is whispering in Lily’s ear? Lily is confused. The little girl’s room? She can’t be asking for the bathroom, surely: Margot works here. But no, Margot wants to pop up to Hilary’s room to say good night. A little girl? Is Hilary really a little girl? Hilary looms enormous in Lily’s mind—a giantess, rather than a child.
‘Pop up, by all means,’ says Lily in her husky voice. The word, repeated, sounds foolish as Lily had supposed it would. ‘She’s dying to show someone her new haircut. Such a relief, after all that bushy doormat! One can actually see her face.’
‘If that’s a desirable end,’ says Jarvis, in the disparaging tone fathers often adopt towards their daughters, as if the better to ward off incestuous notions, but in Jarvis’s case it is more sincere than most. Jarvis has had more than enough to drink. So has Jamie. Philip has not. He fidgets: he looks at his watch surreptitiously. Lamb gives him indigestion. The vinaigrette in the salad made him cough and splutter.
Margot goes up to Hilary: up the pale carpeted stairs. Does she remember going up them once, long ago, with Jarvis? No.
Hilary sleeps on a camp-bed in Jonathon’s room. The spare room, after all, is kept for guests, and if Jonathon is wakeful, it is simple and easy for Hilary, sleeping next to him, to soothe, change and comfort him; and means that Lily doesn’t have to disturb Jarvis’s essential, money-making sleep by waking herself.
Hilary is awake when Margot opens the door; she is leafing through Jonathon’s ABC books, by the ineffectual light of a pink bulb in a little pottery night-light. Jonathon sleeps with his head cradled in his arms and his bottom in the air. Margot and Hilary whisper.
‘Have they left any pudding?’ demands Hilary.
‘Lemon mousse? Yes. Why, will you have it for breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘How’s your hair?’ enquires Margot.
‘Don’t look at it. It’s horrible,’ says Hilary. ‘I can’t go out of the house for at least six weeks.’
‘You’ll feel better about it in the morning,’ says Margot.
‘I’ll have to, won’t I. Mum will hate it. Her hating it is going to be worse than me hating it. I’ll have both to put up with: it’s always the way. You’d think mothers would be a help, but they’re not.’
‘She might think it suited you short. She might be quite pleased.’
‘How can she be? It was Lily’s idea. Mum rang Lily this afternoon and asked me to phone back before five. Lily didn’t give me the message until half past. So when I rang she wasn’t there. Lily forgot. Well, she was busy. She had to stuff wodges of mince and herbs into the middle of that bit of meat. Did Mum say where she was going? She never goes out.’ Hilary sounded anxious.
‘No, she didn’t,’ says Margot.
‘Renee says she took the car,’ goes on Hilary. ‘I hate her driving that thing. It isn’t safe. And where did she go? Why didn’t she tell me? I don’t like sudden things.’
Jonathon stirs and whimpers in his sleep. Sleeping, he makes the same noises as does Hilary’s guinea pig, awake.
‘Doesn’t Jonathon look nice when he’s asleep?’ says Hilary, fondly. ‘Mum doesn’t like Jonathon. Not that she’s ever seen him. She says he sounds spoilt to her. So one way and another I don’t say much about here, when I’m there, if you see what I mean. You do look nice, Mrs Bailey.’
‘I thought I looked rather ordinary.’
‘That’s what’s nice. I have a great craving for ordinary things in my life.’
‘You’d better go to sleep now,’ says Margot.
‘Thank you for coming,’ says Hilary, as Margot goes. ‘I am glad someone did.’
But whether or not Margot hears her Hilary does not know.
And where is Hilary’s mother, the while? Out having a good time.
Oh, yes.
Madeleine arrives in Cambridge at seven forty-five, her little Mini having lost its fan-belt on the way. The Mini is fifteen years old, and always losing something—exhaust system, door, oil, power, clutch, petrol cap. But it is loved by Madeleine. It cost £50 eight years ago, patiently saved. The car is Madeleine’s freedom, Madeleine’s pride. Lily doesn’t drive. Mind you, Lily doesn’t have to. There seems always to be someone waiting to take lovely Lily from place to place.
By the time Madeleine has found the cinema and parked the car, it is past eight o’clock. Madeleine’s computer date, rather to Madeleine’s disappointment, for the journey seemed pleasure and event enough, is still waiting for her in the foyer of the cinema, his pale eyes darting from side to side, distressed. Mr Quincey is a short, pale, plump m
an in his middle forties. He has a nervous manner, and smells strongly of acetone. Some liver disorder, Madeleine wonders? His tones are precise and careful: he comes from the Midlands. His hands are white and pudgy. He pulls at his fingers incessantly. And what does he think of me, Madeleine wonders? How will he describe me to his friends? Does he have friends? No, he blinks and twitches too much. Madeleine is sorry for him. One of the world’s rejects, she thinks. As I am. Is this a good reason for us to get together?
No.
After the film, a lengthy tale of handsome spies and beautiful unerotic girls, sparsely attended, Mr Quincey takes Madeleine to a Chinese meal. He talks of Loneliness over the sweet-and-sour. ‘I feel the same,’ she says, munching her spring roll, and so she does. Madeleine goes back with him to his bed-sitting room.
The house smells of cabbage. His room smells of tooth powder. He is careful, as he lets her in, in case the landlady sees.
Madeleine lies upon the bed, without ado, and lets him make love to her. Mr Quincey thinks he offers sex, but in fact it is love; he has books of poetry upon his shelves; he talks; he would rather talk than have sex, but feels he needs the latter as an excuse for the former; he works as a computer programmer: he was brought up in foster homes; he has been in a mental home twice: his erection is difficult to achieve, but good enough.
Madeleine feigns excitement, pleasure. She does not know why she bothers, nor why she came so far to this purpose, to perform what in the end is an act of kindness. Well, it is easy enough to be kind to strangers.
She says little about herself. He does not seem to notice. Madeleine says she is going away soon, leaving the country: she cannot see him again much as she would like to. He is relieved; it is the best possible ending to the evening. She presumed it would be.
‘I’ve had a wonderful time. An evening to remember. Some enchanted evening …’ he murmurs. ‘You begin to feel left out of things, sometimes. Those girls in that film, those men—are there really people like that?’ He seems to think that Madeleine, from London, is some kind of link with the outside world. He asks questions as a little boy asks questions of his mother.
Madeleine starts the journey back to London at twelve twenty-five. Her car smells of acetone, tooth powder, sex, and old Chanel No. 5, from a bottle given to her in 1959 by a friend returning from a trip to France.
Those were the days, the good old days, of friends, holidays, youth, possibilities. The night is clear. The motorway is deserted. The moon shines. The car rattles. It is a homely, familiar sound. Is the back left wheel wobbling? No. Too bad if it is.
13
GOOD NIGHT!
Hilary shuts her eyes and prepares for sleep. Hilary thinks, defining her being, naming herself to herself, preparing for her drift from consciousness, the better to awake:
I am Hilary. I am the daughter of. two houses, at home in neither. I am the girl who should have been born a boy, forcing my parents apart by the disappointment. Well, something made this separation, something came between them, entered in, and pierced, and tore apart. Me? In all probability. My fault, but not my doing.
I am frightened of the dark. Jonathon stirs and dreams. Of what? In my mother’s house, I can sleep with my mother: she allows me in sometimes.
And my father sleeps beside Lily, and is a stranger to me. He embarrasses me. I know I disappoint him. Once when I was little I used to hold his hand. But something happened to change all that.
I am Hilary. A fourteen-year-old girl with spots and short hair, a fat face and piano legs.
Hilary sings drowsily,
To his nest the eagle flies,
O’er the hill the sunlight dies.
What comes next? She can’t remember or she never knew.
Mother, calls out Hilary, in her heart, in the few last moments before she sleeps. Mother, do you hear me? I need your help. I am growing stunted, I know I am. If you don’t do something soon, I’ll fall apart like some dried-up walnut, and you’ll find me withered in my shell inside.
It is the sharp peremptory call of the child, bent on survival, demanding, not pleading. Mother, do you hear?
Hilary sleeps.
Mother hears something. Mother does. Blackness wells up in Madeleine’s breast. Jarvis! All Madeleine can do for Hilary, all she knows how to do, is despise Jarvis, and hate Lily. And what kind of help is that to Hilary?
Madeleine, driving, swears under her breath. Jarvis’s fault. Everything. Lily is hateful but Jarvis is to blame. Jarvis has used Madeleine, abused Madeleine, thrown Madeleine out. Jarvis has destroyed Madeleine’s life, and Madeleine’s child’s life, and what for? For sex? For the pitiful act she has just performed with a pudgy half-person, smelling of tooth powder, on grey sheets? For sex with Lily, whose highest aspiration is to have her drawing room photographed by House and Garden?
Is sex-with-Lily worth the ruin of so many lives?
Jarvis thinks so. Madeleine doesn’t.
Sex-with-Iris, Madeleine’s mother: pretty, brain-damaged Iris Bates, hopeless with money, helpless without it; half-mad all the time but who was to know it; sex-with-Iris ruined lives, ruined Madeleine’s, drove Iris’s husband into the arms of a mistress, left Madeleine fatherless, presently motherless. Husbandless, all but childless. For what is there left of Madeleine, without her titles? Daughter, wife and mother?
Better to believe all that, at any rate, than that Madeleine’s father walked out because his wife was losing her sight and foaming at the mouth in public.
Oh, I am Madeleine, I am the first wife, I am the rightful one. My house, my home, my life, gone with my marriage. Myself left walking about the world, stripped of my identity. I am Madeleine: I am Hilary’s mother. I cannot give her what she needs. But what am I to do? I cannot take pleasure in her; as Iris took no pleasure in me. There is a mist over my eyes: the weariness of hating too much, too silently. Hilary will wither in spite of my love, because of it, like a dried-up walnut in its shell: she can take no nourishment from me. I consume myself; there is nothing left over.
Another minute, another mile. Sixty miles an hour. Is it safe? No. How beautiful the night. How trivial my complaints, beneath the immensity of the sky.
I must change, thinks Madeleine. I must be Madeleine, again, myself. Neither daughter nor wife, but myself. I see a kind of glimmer ahead: a hope of change. Could I change? Am I still young enough? Or is anger now etched so deep into me that to change would be to break? That is my fear: break my habit, break me.
Courage. Change.
Madeleine, her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife, her daughter’s mother; Madeleine, herself, feels happier; Madeleine begins to sing a snatch of a lullaby out of some forgotten time, some happy moment, some barely recollected memory. Thus Iris once sang to little Madeleine; mother Iris all dressed up in silk and satins, mad-eyed, beautiful—longing, as usual, to go out, get out of the house—away from her husband’s gloomy glance—but Iris delayed for a moment by the happiness, the pride, reflected back in little Madeleine’s brown eyes, and glad, for once, to linger by her bed. September 7th, 1934:
To his nest the eagle flies, O’er the hill the sunlight dies. Hush my darling, have no fear, For thy mother watches near—
Madeleine sings. So Iris sang. Seventy miles an hour.
14
IN THE EARLIER DECADES of the century, they say, the dinner guest could expect from his evening nothing more disturbing than good food and good company.
These days the dinner guest must sing for his supper, must be prepared to accept and provide personal revelations, to acknowledge distress, his own as well as other people’s, and to wake up next morning not only liverish but throbbing with personal pain. It is no doubt an improvement.
Listen to the conversation now, at No. 12 Adelaide Row. The dining room, in disarray, has been abandoned. The guests sit in the drawing room. Jarvis, Jamie, Judy and Lily drink brandy. Margot drinks Cointreau: Philip drinks nothing, to Jarvis’s irritation. (Those who drink heavily suspect
the motives of the abstemious.) It isn’t, Jarvis thinks, as if he were on call, or likely to be asked to perform an operation. He has a Night Service to do the first, and a hospital to do the second. So why doesn’t he drink?
Judy helps herself to more brandy. She is at the stage of her marriage where she drinks to keep her husband company. Presently she will stop so doing, preferring the risk of disaffection to that of hangovers, social shame, and a veined complexion. But tonight she has drunk just enough to have the courage of her resentments. She eyes her husband, more like an angry child than a grown woman. He speaks unwisely. He knows he is unwise. He does not care.
JAMIE: What a lucky man you are, Jarvis. To have a wife who looks like an angel and cooks like a demon.
JUDY: If you wanted cooking, Jamie, you should have stayed with Albertine.
Albertine, Jamie’s ex-wife, who once played the wife in Cosy Nook, and now plays wife to Judy’s ex-husband.
JAMIE: I’m afraid my present wife is looking for trouble.
JUDY: Don’t get at me in public, Jamie, I don’t like it.
JAMIE: Lily, do me a favour and pour me some coffee.
LILY: But you already have some.
JAMIE: Yes, but just top it up. It’s so delightful when you bend over.
JUDY: I know I’m flat-chested. I’m so sorry. There’s no pleasing Jamie tit-wise. Albertine had a front like a shelf and wore corsets, and he couldn’t seem to fancy that, either. What it is to be a woman. You say anything about a man’s cock in public and they feel entitled to murder you; but they feel at perfect liberty to complain about your tits.
Oh, I am Margot, the doctor’s wife. I cannot get used to these new people, their new manners. Boobs is bad enough, descriptive of clumsiness and distress. Tits? A throwaway word for throwaway things. My own honest breasts scarcely looked at, scarcely considered, except when of use to others, feeding the babies or as a source of pleasure to my husband. My breasts are for other people, not for me. They are my offering to my family. Tit-wise! Oh, I am the doctor’s wife. I am staid. I am dull. But I am better than these others. My children are happy, and ordinary. By our children, you shall know us.