by Fay Weldon
Bonjour!
Margot arrives at the Katkin household in command of herself, and cheerful, her earlier breakfast behaviour all but forgotten, so little does it accord with her normal experience of herself. In much the same way will a virtuous woman expunge from her mind the memory of an untoward sexual adventure, attributing it, if she thinks of it at all, to some split-off part of her personality, for which she can hardly be expected to accept responsibility.
Margot is let in through the stripped pine door, and there, staring and distraught is Lily. Lily’s face is paler than ever, and her lipstick more scarlet, more clearly-edged than usual. Lily wears the same dress she was wearing the day before. Lily’s finger is bleeding.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ says Margot, feeling that perhaps an apology might help. ‘You know what family breakfasts are.’ It is not the kind of remark she usually makes.
‘I do indeed,’ says Lily, and continues to stare unflinchingly at Margot.
‘It was a lovely evening we had last night,’ says Margot. ‘I’m sorry I was taken ill.’
‘You’re quite better now?’ enquires Lily, politely.
‘Perfectly,’ says Margot. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘No,’ says Lily, ‘it isn’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Margot. ‘Why not?’
‘My husband is drunk,’ observes Lily. ‘He is drinking whisky with his bacon and eggs, and seems disinclined to go to the office. Madeleine is dead. She was killed in a car crash last night. It was to be expected—she drank very heavily, as you know, and she kept her car—Jarvis’s car—in a dreadful condition. In fact, the only surprising thing is that she only managed to kill herself, and not a dozen other people as well.’
‘Where’s Hilary?’ asks Margot, a reaction well within character. In times of stress the doctor’s wife always thinks first of the children.
‘Gone to school,’ says Lily. ‘The thing to do is to carry on as usual. Well, isn’t it? Was I wrong?’
Margot says nothing. She is conscious of a spasm of rage. She limps into the kitchen, and there sits Jarvis slouched over the table like an old man.
‘I’m sorry, Jarvis,’ says Margot, ‘I’m really sorry.’
Lily snorts behind her: a mad bull’s snort through delicately flaring nostrils.
‘Jonathon bit very deep,’ Lily complains, waving her hand, ‘do you think I ought to have a tetanus injection? God knows what’s got into the child.’
‘Can’t you think of anyone except yourself?’ Jarvis demands. ‘You are a callous, selfish, monstrous bitch.’
Margot retreats to the study, to nurse her sense of shock. Hilary. What’s to become of Hilary?
‘Nicely spoken,’ Lily remarks to Jarvis, cool as a cucumber, ‘and in front of witnesses too. However, you did marry me. You did prefer me to Madeleine. If you feel like joining her, please feel free. I shan’t stand in your way.’
‘Lily,’ groans Jarvis ‘for God’s sake allow me to be just a little upset. She was my wife for thirteen years.’
‘Twelve years,’ his wife corrects, ‘and very miserable years they were, too.’
‘Leave her alone, she’s dead,’ says Jarvis, but his wife’s refusal to allow him to mourn is having its effect. He’s beginning to feel better already.
‘Dead she may be, but her spirit’s going to hang round for some considerable time,’ observes Lily, with more truth than she knows, ‘at least it will if you go on behaving like this. The truth of the matter is, some people are better dead, and Madeleine is one of them.’
What can Jarvis say to this? He does his best.
‘When you first went out with me, Lily, you knew I was a married man. In fact, you only ever went with married men; you boasted of it. How are you going to get on with me, now I’m a widower?’
And with that Jarvis goes off back to bed.
Oh Jarvis, old-fashioned Jarvis, with your public-school tie at the bottom of your drawer, tucked away beneath the Mao-blue shirts, Jarvis, last of a long line of English gentlemen, revering women yet fearing them, flying to the bottle for comfort, consolation, to fan the tiny female spark of creativity to flame: finding there the strength to insult, combat, and defy the female principle in its crude and cuntish form. Jarvis, born of woman, fashioned by man, yearning yet despising: full of talent on a good day, full of rubbish on a bad: terrified of stridency, of the raising of a female voice and yet embracing it: showing your love in bed but seldom out of it.
When Madeleine saw through you, raised her voice to crush and crucify, it was time to go.
And what are you to do with Hilary, Jarvis? She is not beautiful, but she is a woman. Jarvis is confused. Poor Jarvis.
Poor Jarvis, Madeleine sometimes felt, sometimes feels: Madeleine leaves Jarvis alone, as latterly in her life she left him, reserving her spleen for Lily, her sweet betraying sister, and innocent Jonathon, who had no business to be born.
Madeleine’s spleen burst. Even had she been wearing a seat belt, Madeleine would have died, would have been lost to Hilary, who needed a mother and never had a proper one; though she might have found one, breathing, living, happy, and recovered from a lifetime’s desolation—given just five minutes more down the motorway, and a phone-call or two from Mr Quincey.
Poor Mr Quincey, rising with Madeleine’s sweet breath still warm upon his nostrils, strong and eternal in his memory, as his tooth powder is in hers.
Bonjour!
Margot starts work on the invoices.
And so the morning proceeds.
Hilary is sent home from school; she was sick in the Art room. When asked if there’s anyone at home to look after her, she says ‘Yes, my mother,’ and is then sick again. Hilary ate quite a lot of lemon mousse, it becomes apparent, between hearing of her mother’s death and going off to school. Had Lily kept Sugar Puffs in the house, Hilary would have eaten those. As it is, the lemon mousse sits uneasily on her troubled stomach, and is finally ejected, to the great inconvenience of pupils and staff.
When Hilary gets to her basement house, she feeds the guinea pig on a couple of withered carrots left at the bottom of the vegetable box, and automatically tidies away the jumble of clothes Madeleine left out in her hurry to get to Cambridge and Mr Quincey, her Dial-a-Date. Then Hilary lies down on her mother’s bed and goes to sleep.
It is the heavy dreamless sleep that comes after shock, or great mental distress, as near to death as anything.
Jarvis sleeps.
Jonathon sleeps, as the doctor had predicted he would. Lily worries. Perhaps Jonathon has suffered some kind of alcohol-inflicted brain damage?
Bonjour!
Bonjour! The French teacher moves on to take Laurence’s class. Last year Laurence came twentieth in French, and only twenty-two in the class. He prefers the sciences.
The police arrange for formal identification from the deceased’s husband, and for an inquest. Again, a formality. The car wasn’t fit to be on a side road, let alone a motorway. Women drivers, the policeman in charge snorts. Arthur snorts too, in sympathy. There are three other traffic fatalities, all male, in the mortuary, but safely shut away.
Madeleine sleeps.
Arthur worries about her: he put her away in the cool but now he keeps opening up the hatch to make sure she’s still there and still dead. Once, in Arthur’s youth, an apparently dead woman sat up on the trolley, threw back the sheet, and demanded to see her daughter. And the cremation only hours away. Of such stuff are nightmares made.
Of course, clinical tests determining death are more refined now than ever they were in Arthur’s youth, and there is no logical possibility that Madeleine’s corpse can retain any vestige of life. All the same Arthur will feel happier when Katkin, Mrs M., with her sweet, sad face, is properly identified, inquested, taken to the undertaker’s and safely buried.
No one, in her lifetime, could have described Madeleine’s face as sweet.
Bonjour!
Lily telephones Judy to tell her she is an
only wife at last. Judy bursts into tears and says she knows her ex-husband Billy wants her dead, and she has a thrush infection of the vagina from taking the pill, and she wants her children back, but Jamie won’t have them. He says they have each other. At the same time she has recently overheard Jamie making a secret assignation with his ex-wife Albertine, Everyone wants Albertine back, it appears; even the Amateur Dramatic Society she left in mid-production is willing to forgive her. No one seems willing to forgive Judy anything. Why is that? Lily gives up trying to talk to Judy about Madeleine.
Enid faints at work, whilst chairing a meeting on the implementation of the Anti-discrimination (female) Bill. The assembled Trade Unionist and Management delegates look at each other in dismay. Is this the stuff of which the future is made?
Mr Quincey telephones Renee from Cambridge and asks to speak to Mrs Katkin. The warmth of their encounter is still fresh upon his flesh, and he feels he cannot rest until he has at least spoken to her, and at best slept with her again. He is disappointed to hear she is out.
Where, he wonders jealously.
Philippa, Sam’s secretary, makes this the day to come to work without her knickers. Sam, observing, thinks longingly of Enid. Sam is not altogether happy in the permissive age. Nakedness, he fears, is becoming clinical rather than erotic. The hairy redness of Philippa, revealed, is too reminiscent of the many images of women in childbirth, that he has seen on television, to be exciting. Dear Enid, thinks Sam. She is such a good and uncomplaining wife: unexciting, true, but always reliable, not very bright but restful; perhaps it is unfair of him to require so much from Enid whilst lusting so desperately after younger, sexier women? But how can he help it? It’s the way he is made, after all; and in the meantime two phone calls from reasonably serious clients indicate that the property market is looking up. The trouble with Philippa, Sam concludes, feeling more himself again, is that she’s not as young as she was. Pushing thirty, if she’s a day.
Quelle horreur!
Lettice, ever obliging, helps the caretaker sprinkle sand over the yellowish slime left by Hilary on the Art room floor, and shovel the resultant sludge into a bucket. ‘What can she have been eating?’ Lettice remarks. Lettice has recovered from her morning’s despair: she bought Tampax on the way to school, and discarded her belt and towel in the girls’ loo.
‘I am a doctor’s daughter,’ Lettice says to herself, scraping away with a will, ‘and neither disgusted nor disturbed by the by-products of the body.’ Though this resilience may in fact come from her mother’s side—Lettice’s great-grandmother, Alice, Winifred’s mother, Margot’s grandmother, wore a bracelet composed of her own gallstones, polished to perfection. When old Alice rattled and shook her bracelet and chomped her husband’s teeth, how she defied her own mortality!
Lily’s sulking.
Well, why not? It’s a perfectly horrible day and none of it her doing.
Lily looks at her sleeping husband, and feels a pang of horror at his sudden, apparent decrepitude. He seems inappropriate to her life and times. The bedroom is so young, so clean, so fresh, in its muted pinks and greys, the bed itself so delicately wrought in brass; her little jars of cosmetics (Lily’s mother Ida contented herself with sensible tubes of sheep lanolin) so expensive and so pretty on the pine dressing table—and here in broad daylight, gross, unshaven and snoring, lies this man, this husband, this creature, surely of the night, from whom admittedly all money flows, but on whose absence during the day she totally relies.
Lily shakes Jarvis awake. Lily tells Jarvis it is time he went to work.
‘Do stop telling me what to do,’ grunts Jarvis.
Lily sulks the more. How can you help anyone if they abuse you for trying?
‘Where’s Hilary?’ enquires Jarvis, remembering his daughter.
‘She went to school,’ says Lily.
‘She what?’ demands Jarvis, angry.
‘She wanted to, so I let her.’ Bad-tempered men must expect to be lied to. Jarvis does not altogether accept Lily’s version of events, but cannot find the emotional energy to query it.
‘She doesn’t seem to have any proper feelings,’ laments Jarvis.
‘No,’ says Lily. ‘She finished up every scrap of lemon mousse before she went, and there was a whole lot of cigarette ash blown into it from somewhere. I’m sure if my mother died the last thing I could do would be eat.’
‘Perhaps I’d better meet her out of school,’ says Jarvis.
‘You’d never find her,’ says Lily. ‘Two thousand children all let out at once. It’s mayhem.’
Downstairs, Jonathon misses his mother and begins to cry. Margot, typing letters, hears him perfectly well, but for once does not go to his rescue. Spoilt brat, she thinks. Jonathon starts up the stairs.
Jarvis pulls Lily down upon the bed: he embraces her. Her resistances disperse.
‘I shouldn’t drink so much,’ he says. ‘Then I could cope better.’
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘All right. Of course you’re upset. I’m sorry I was so nasty before.’
‘I suppose it will be a relief to you,’ he says, ‘not having Madeleine on the other end of the telephone all the time.’
‘That’s right,’ says Lily.
‘You’ll be a full-time stepmother now,’ he warns. ‘Will you mind?’
‘Of course not,’ says Lily, but she lies in her little white teeth. Her little sister Rose’s hair, blonde, thick and curly, was not unlike Hilary’s. Hilary’s hair on the hairdresser’s floor; Rose’s hair on a sandy bare-wood floor, while mother Ida grumbled and whinnied, and snipped and snipped—so much hair on such a tiny thing! Hair everywhere! What makes me think of that now, wonders Lily.
I am Lily, the butcher’s daughter, Rose’s big sister, fled ten thousand miles, but still the memories come back. My husband lies on top of me, my dress pushed up, everything rucked and rumpled. Never mind, never mind; despoiling is what it’s all about. My mother never understood it; the cycle of cleaning in order to dirty, dirtying in order to clean. I am an advance on my mother, and that’s something surely. Socially, sexually, I am one step forward. And that’s the meaning of my life.
So thinks Lily, sly eyes shining, sly lips slippery beneath Jarvis’s own. Coitus is what we owe the dead, thinks Jarvis. The only answer to death is life, and more life.
Jonathon stands in the doorway observing his parents with no little wonder. He is pale.
Hangover, thinks Lily, disengaging herself, straightening herself; all that whisky before breakfast. Just like his father.
Downstairs the doorbell rings. Margot stops typing, and answers it.
Miss Maguire has come visiting, her smell strong upon the wind, asking for Mr Kominski.
‘Mr Kominski moved away fifteen years ago,’ says Margot, ‘when Mr and Mrs Katkin bought the house. Can I help?’
Ah, the doctor’s wife, always helping! But you have nothing to offer this poor old lady, with her swollen, ulcerated legs and her trembling hands. Your husband has, perhaps; not you.
Miss Maguire shuffles off, confused. Margot closes the door, but something seems to have slipped into the house while the door was open: at any rate Madeleine’s presence seems strong in the room: or is Margot only now emerging from the shock of hearing Madeleine is dead? Here she stood yesterday, thinks Margot, poor wronged soul: and now she’s dead, and what was all that struggle, all that anger for?
I never said I’d take her child, thinks Margot. I never actually said I’d look after Hilary. She asked me but I didn’t reply. I am excused. It would be impossible, in any case. I have my own family to look after. Your child, Madeleine, not mine. Nothing to do with me. Nothing.
I am Margot the doctor’s wife, Winifred’s daughter Alice’s granddaughter. Let me hold on to that. By our titles you shall know us.
Yes, I came to this house once, years ago, so long ago it doesn’t matter. You were queen here then, Madeleine, and a sorry queen you were. You should have looked after your kingdom be
tter. But I don’t remember you at all. I remember no glints from the jewels on your crown. I remember feeling sick from too much gin: I remember following Jarvis up the stairs, giggling and stumbling. He led the way, I followed. I can hardly be blamed for following: it’s in a woman’s nature. I owed you nothing: I never met you.
Margot feels again the tightness of her chest, and gasps for breath; I’m ill, thinks Margot. I must leave, I must go home. Margot gets up and goes to the door and calls up the stairs in a hoaky old voice scarcely her own, more like her grandmother Alice’s—
‘Where’s Hilary? What have you done with Hilary?’
But no adult hears, which is just as well. Only Jonathon, who comes tottering to the top of the stairs, unattended. He stares at Margot, unblinking and unsmiling, and then wavers and almost loses his footing, and Margot/Madeleine, instead of rushing to protect him, stays exactly where she is and hopes to see him fall.
Jonathon does without the witch’s help, regains his balance and saves himself. But his face puckers. Jonathon changes his mind about coming downstairs, and goes back instead to stand silently on guard outside his parents’ door, where it’s safer.
16
‘SHE KNEW SHE WAS GOING to die,’ says Margot to Philip at lunch. She serves veal-and-ham pie and salad. Laurence and Lettice are relieved to see the familiar slices and to know that their mother is herself again. Philip reads The Lancet and the BMJ while he eats. He smiled at his wife when he came in so she knows their breakfast quarrel is forgotten, or at any rate that she is forgiven.
‘People who say they’re going to die frequently do,’ remarks Philip, ‘but there’s nothing magic about it. They say they’re going to die because they want to, and if they want to die, they usually do. One way or another.’
‘It was an accident,’ Margot protests.
‘Bad tyres aren’t an accident,’ says Philip. ‘They’re negligence. If you want to live, you don’t travel the motorways in old cars.’