by Fay Weldon
All the same, I want to go home. I want to be safe I am frightened. Philip, look after me. It is a quarter to one. How long since we’ve been out this late?
But Lily is talking. And now Philip is alert and watching her, woken from his trance. Lily is excited, liberated. Her little white teeth gleam: her head is thrown back: silvery hair thick and wild: neck white, marked by little bruises Jarvis made.
LILY: I am tired of being nice about Madeleine. Madeleine is a neurotic bitch. Madeleine has her claws in Jarvis and she won’t let go. She takes our money. I want new curtains and why can’t I have them? Because of Madeleine. Madeleine sits about on her arse waiting to be fed and clothed, and the law says Jarvis has to do it. The world’s full of women like that, and the law’s always on their side. He never wanted to marry her in the first place: but he won’t fight her: he’s soft. Jarvis looks after Madeleine’s interests: what about mine? What about Jonathon’s? Three years since the divorce and she still keeps acting as if he were out on some kind of loan to me. If her fuses blow, who does she ring up? Jarvis. She burns electricity night and day, just for spite, so Jarvis will have to pay. And Jarvis won’t cut down his wine bills, nothing like that, so really it all comes out of my housekeeping. Why should I have to pay for Jarvis’s past mistakes? And tit-wise, Judy, Madeleine is flat as a board, and twice as boring and six times as miserable, and she had the nerve to come whining round here this morning because I’d taken her precious Hilary to have her beastly hair cut. And as for Hilary, great fat creature, she has no sense of gratitude at all. You know my only hope? That Madeleine will find some other poor bastard and torment him, instead of me. But who’d look at her? Dreadful scrawny creature.
Lily pauses for breath. Philip speaks.
PHILIP: It might work out cheaper to hire a gigolo: had you thought of that?
Margot blinks. Philip, her Philip, said that? And Lily turns to smile at Margot’s Philip, happy and relieved to be understood, to be forgiven so much sudden, bitter self-revelation. Jarvis is on his feet, burly and blurred.
JARVIS: A toast! I offer a toast. Death and damnation to all ex-wives. Down with the leeches, the succubi, the old women of the world who suck men’s blood, destroy their life force, make them old before their time—(and he sings) ‘Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness goes to the bone, the bone—’
The moon shines. It is ten to one. The hills lie silent under a clear sky: the road is a magic ribbon.
Oh, I am Madeleine, returning home. My pants are wet. Am I defiled? Perhaps Renee, whose white shirt I’m wearing, is right. Perhaps sex with her, gentle, companionable, kind, the conjunction of like to like, would be preferable to this feeling of having used and being used. But is Renee kind? Or does Renee hate the world and all its men with such ferocity, such bitterness, that it produces this love for women as its kind of side effect? I don’t hate men. I don’t. I hate Jarvis, but then he’s damaged me and my child. I didn’t hate my father. I loved him. I hate Lily because she is evil. My gorge rises. There is a black mist in front of my eyes. The smell of tooth powder lingers: makes me sick. Jarvis’s fault, all Jarvis’s fault. Jarvis, I hate you. Can’t you feel it?
Does Jarvis feel it? Is that why he stands now, wishing death upon inconvenient women? Listen to Jarvis, poor Jarvis.
Oh, I am Jarvis: child of love and shame. I am Jarvis, husband of Lily, child of Poppy. Poor Poppy, pretty mother, all short skirts and long legs, slippery almond eyes, kohled, and crimson mouthed.
Who’s for adventure? Who’s for a fling?
Oh, deary darling!
Poppy, decadent and doomed, hitch-hiked north one giddy Mayfair night in 1929, and lay with a lorry driver, rough trade, all muscle, sweat and grime, in the long summer grass in a layby south of Grantham, and found herself overwhelmed by what? Love? (or was it only the pleasure of being defiled?) Orgasm, hitherto unknown? But off, in any case, goes Poppy, to live, yes to live, with Harry the lorry driver in Wolverhampton, not even married to him, leaving friends shocked, envious and excited, drooping round galleries, discreetly sniffing heroin, dancing cheek to cheek, while Poppy, pregnant, swelling, makes her wild, nightly journeys up and down the old A1. There’s an adventure! Except Harry, noticing her tightening waistband, turns her out of the cab one rainy night, just north of Doncaster. Harry won’t marry Poppy, wouldn’t think of it. Harry wants a decent girl; someone who is not defiled by him. Who wouldn’t?
And there Poppy is, presently, alone with Jarvis her baby, her passion, her pride: the old world lost to her, the new one disowning her, and just as well, for the stench of reality, of poverty, is up her flaring nostrils at last.
Back comes Poppy to London, Jarvis tucked up under her arm, illegitimate. No social security then: no dole for unmarried mothers (whores): no pill: no family planning clinics, just don’t forget: you fornicate at your peril. Poppy is lucky. Poppy marries Hector, spindly stockbroker, her own sort, who accepts Jarvis as his own. But Jarvis is not; never will be. Jarvis has broad shoulders: good God, Jarvis has a chin. Hector and Poppy together make plump children with pop eyes and receding chins. Poppy loves them dutifully; but loves her Jarvis with a mixture of passion and despair.
Hector loves little Jarvis not at all. Neither do his brothers and sisters. Jarvis looks strange, acts oddly, paints, draws (what an ungentlemanly activity) in the formality of this Home Counties house, on the edge of the golf course.
And Poppy looks wistfully out over the green of the unnatural landscape, sipping (later knocking back) the gin, mouth sweetly smiling, knees kept tight together except in the course of distasteful wifely duty, lamenting the courage she should have had, and never did, and the sweet smell of the long grass this side of Grantham.
Oh, I am Jarvis, Lily’s husband, the lorry driver’s son. I am Jarvis, Poppy’s baby, in that time of her life when she was truly alive. Years pass: nothing is resolved, little is understood. Only now I have Lily, and I am big bad Jarvis, my father’s son; I am Harry to her Poppy. I will never abandon her, or send her away. I will keep her, love her, recompense her. What I am doing is entirely necessary, entirely good, everyone’s salvation.
Why can’t Madeleine recognise this, understand it, accept it, and be happy?
Madeleine is like Jarvis’s half-sister Ruth. ‘Art?’ cried Ruth. ‘Beauty? Rot!’ and off she gallops on a horse’s back, pop-eyed and chinless, legs like a piano’s, thwacking the horse’s flanks, supremely confident, infinitely superior, her father’s daughter—and Ruth was the kindest, nicest one of all.
Madeleine and Hilary have to be sacrificed. Jarvis has no choice. But why won’t they lie down decently and gladly, as other sacrificial victims do? The slab is cool, clean, waiting. Not unpleasant. Their reluctance, their strugglings, are indecent. All this was decreed so long ago, the near side of Grantham, the far side of Doncaster. Lovely Poppy, defiled, defiant, delighting, baby Jarvis nibbling at her white unmarried breast.
Madeleine, I hate you. Lily, I love you. Lily, you are Poppy to my Harry. Nightly I defile, delight, re-live.
Madeleine die.
Ten to one. All decent folk are asleep; life-wishing, death-wishing in their dreams.
Nine minutes to one. The back left tyre of Madeleine’s car, worn thin, finally worn through, deflates. The car veers off through the central reservation, hits a post, carries on, crumbling as it goes, hits another. A twisting piece of metal from the bonnet sheers off Madeleine’s right leg above the knee: the steering wheel impacts itself into her chest; large or small, her tits, her boobs, her breasts, will not help her now. The car comes to a stop. In the total silence that ensues, in the few seconds left of life, Madeleine can hear her heart still beating. It is open to the air. Madeleine is not in pain: not as she remembers pain: splitting and tearing to press out baby Hilary, as the sun split and tore to give birth to the world.
Hilary, thinks Madeleine. Hilary my child. What will become of Hilary? What have I been thinking of, these years, these times? Thinking myself Ja
rvis’s wife, when all I was was Hilary’s mother? What have I done to Hilary?
Lily shall not have Hilary. Must not.
Who then?
Madeleine’s heart stops. In the distance, now, the sound of sirens. But Madeleine’s world is silence. Madeleine is dead.
No, thinks Madeleine, with some spurt of power coming from God knows where; some dart of spite and compassion mixed, hate and love struggling for supremacy, as if the struggle, rather than the emotions, which heaven knows are common enough, provided more than enough energy to transcend a perfectly common-place death.
No.
Who?
I am Margot, doctor’s wife, in inner turmoil, smiling sweetly, sipping Cointreau.
The doctor sits up straighter, accepts brandy—Philip? Accepting brandy at twelve fifty-four a.m., knowing that it gives him acid indigestion, that it makes him disagreeable to his patients, not to mention his family? Philip watches Lily, Lily smiling not sweetly, smiling with pleasure at her own depravity. And Philip smiles, Margot knows, at the vision of Lily abandoned not to spite, but to sexual excess. Betraying Philip. Evil, evil Lily.
Margot feels cold, she feels horrified. The wind blows through the open window. Margot puts her hand to her head. Margot shrieks. Margot falls upon the floor. ‘My leg,’ cries Margot. Margot writhes.
The others stare. This, the best-behaved of the lady guests?
Margot’s breath comes in gasps: she pulls herself up and leans against the sofa. One hand slaps at her right leg with a curious waving, banging movement, as if the leg has no business to be there; the other hand hits and hits and hits her chest. Philip stares at his wife, bemused. Apart from anything else, the movements seem out of conjunction, like the limb movements of Siamese twins.
‘Shall I call a doctor?’ says Jarvis, hopelessly, helplessly.
Philip turns irritated eyes away from his wife towards his host.
‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help,’ he observes, and pulls his wife to her feet, so she can no longer hit and slap in such a disturbing fashion.
‘Margot,’ he says sharply, ‘stop all this.’
Margot does. She moans and sways instead.
Judy and Jamie, the while, though fascinated by the lady guest’s hysteria, still have eyes only for each other. Though not very nice eyes. For Jamie breathes down the back of Lily’s neck and mutters ‘You shouldn’t have flirted with the lady’s husband. See what happens?’
And Judy says, ‘Jamie, stop feeling up Lily. You don’t annoy me in the least. You merely betray your age.’ And Judy, approaching from behind, tips a little of her brandy down between Jamie’s collar and his shirt.
Lily wishes she didn’t give dinner parties.
‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ says Jamie to Judy, and one could almost believe him.
Lily half shivers, half shudders, both from Jamie’s hot breath and Judy’s malice, and because a sudden gust of cold wind from the open window slams the kitchen door and seems to wake Jonathon upstairs. At any rate he sets up a piercing yell of fright and rage.
What an evening! Whose fault? Jarvis’s, without a doubt, so Lily thinks.
‘Why in God’s name did you open the window?’ It’s all she can think of for the moment, while she listens to see if Hilary will quieten Jonathon. Philip has lain Margot down on the sofa, and is busy loosening her what? Her stays, Lily fears. Supposing Margot is sick? What will happen to the watered-silk covers?
‘I didn’t open the window,’ retorts Jarvis, over the babel, ‘why do you automatically blame me for everything?’
And before Lily can compose her reply there’s a thump thump down the stairs and Hilary stands in the living room doorway, apparently unconscious of the fact that her white nightie is undone and her puffed-up bosom plainly visible, and Jonathon still yelling upstairs.
‘There’s something the matter with Jonathon,’ says Hilary, ‘I can’t quiet him.’
‘Perhaps you pinched him,’ says Jarvis, watching the movement of his wife’s buttocks as she pushes past Hilary and runs to her child. A real emergency would sober him: these current events merely make him feel dizzy.
‘Of course, I didn’t pinch him,’ says Hilary, with the straight-forwardness of one fresh from sleep, ‘I love him.’
And the window bangs and rattles until Jarvis shuts it. Lily must have opened it. But why blame him?
‘This house is falling to bits,’ says Jarvis. ‘One day we’ll have to move. Go back to bed, Hilary. You’re indecent.’
Hilary blushes, clutches her open nightie together, and goes, not without a curious look at Margot, who is now sitting upright on the sofa, pink in the face and with the buttons of her dress undone and her brassière clearly unfastened, but otherwise composed. ‘I’m quite all right,’ says Margot. ‘I’m sorry, everyone. I’m really quite all right.’
I am Margot the doctor’s wife, fresh from public humiliation; what will they think of me? How will I face them again? Little Margot, all of five, wetting her pants at a party. Medium Margot, all of eleven, interrupting her parents’ lovemaking in the bath: big Margot, all of sixteen, bloodstains on the back of her dress, unnoticed, all day. Of such stuff are nightmares made; of deeds that cannot be undone: sights that cannot be unseen; neither time nor laughter can erase. Margot on the floor, writhing from a pain that went as quickly as it came, leaving not a trace behind, except the look in Lily’s eye, and Jarvis’s, and Jamie’s, and Judy’s, and Hilary’s even; and the tired pressure of Philip’s hand. When he is angry his face goes grey, heavy, like a stone. So it is now.
Philip smiles, talks, but his face is stone.
‘I think I’d better take you home,’ says Philip.
‘I don’t want to break up the party,’ says Margot.
Jonathon’s shrieks subside as Lily reaches his door: he is asleep again by the time she is by his bed: the only sign of his distress is a damp forehead and a tear left on his cheek.
Oh, I am Lily the second wife, mother of the first real child. Why am I frightened? I have done nothing wrong. Only what I had to, and all in the name of love. See how quietly he sleeps—my son, my dearest inconvenience. Why did he wake? Does Hilary love him? Or does she only pretend; was it hatred of him, her jealousy, that swept through the house like a whirlwind just now, flapping curtains, banging doors, frightening us all? What does Hilary plan, my stepdaughter, as she bounces my son, her rival, on her pudgy knees? She could so easily harm him; he is her rival, her replacement, usurper to her rightful throne. Push him too high on a swing, let his pushchair run into the road? No, she wouldn’t dare. I have shown her my strength: I have made my mark on her: I have cut her hair, her pretty hair.
By the time Hilary has climbed back into her bed, and Lily can go downstairs again, Margot and Philip are preparing to leave. The evening is over.
Or as Jarvis says to Lily later, ‘Let’s never give another dinner party, ever.’
Jamie and Judy depart, as quarrelsome as they came. That night Judy, on Jamie’s insistence, rides Jamie like a horse, taut neck stretched, head flung back, lean thighs gripping. It is not what she wants. She wants her boring husband back again, boringly on top of her, indifferent to her pleasure, quiet on account of the children sleeping in the room beside. She wants to be a housewife again, despised by the world, at peace with herself.
‘I love you,’ says Jamie.
‘I love you,’ says Judy.
Do they? Does she? Not to want is not not to love. There are as many different kinds of wanting, surely, as there are of loving, and there are as many kinds of loving as there are of conversations. Take the population of the world and divide by two, or if you must, three, and that’s how many kinds there are. Or so says Enid to her junior secretary (who is much impressed) but not, of course, to her husband Sam, who likes to be the one of the family to know about these things.
Enid sleeps uneasily that night, and waking, has to go down to the bathroom to spend a penny. Is she pregnant? Sur
ely not. Enid has been taking the pill for fifteen years though Sam never wanted her to; but that was crazy, since he didn’t want children either. What were they supposed to do—live in fear? Lately the reason for taking it seemed largely to have evaporated, so she had stopped mid-month, for no reason she could really think of.
Sam sleeps heavily, without dreaming. He has drunk his usual nightly four whiskies and a bottle of good wine. Such a high consumption of alcohol—as Enid keeps observing—inhibits the normal dreaming function. ‘Dream deprivation,’ she keeps telling him, ‘does a man no good. You end up with DTs.’
But Sam takes no notice.
‘It’s sex deprivation,’ he says bitterly, ‘that’s all that’s the matter with me,’ and promptly falls asleep beside his resigned wife, Margot’s friend, who composes herself for sleep. What else can she do? In the morning, if all else fails, she gets up and pleasures herself with a cucumber, while Sam is in the bathroom. She doesn’t mind, and he doesn’t know. Well, they’re all getting older.
Miss Maguire, the doctor’s Monday patient, stirs in the heap of old blankets and coats, urine stiffened and cat-hair whitened, which makes up her bed. She dreams of 12 Adelaide Row, and the days of her youth, when she and Philippa Cutts were in service together. Poor Philippa died, in an influenza epidemic. Who remembers her now?
On the motorway, beneath the moon, ambulance men, policemen and wreckage crews work around the remains of Madeleine’s car. The motorway has to be closed; wreckage has been flung across the tarmac. The ambulance men remove the body, not forgetting the severed leg, which is wrapped in a plastic bag and placed next to its owner. When they tilt the stretcher to get it into the ambulance the sheet falls away from Madeleine’s face. It is the face of a living person in a deep sleep, thinks the attendant, although the state of the body is such that life cannot possibly be present. All the same, in the ambulance, he finds himself taking the pulse of the corpse, and even being anxious as his delicate fingers fail to find a response in the wrist.