by Fay Weldon
Margot does not reply. Philip knows best.
Philip discovers and laments the existence of a new crack in the salad bowl.
Lettice dissects the pie crust from the veal-and-ham pie (in the interests of her figure) and queries the necessity of its existence.
Laurence helps himself to her discarded crust and discourses on the existence of charm quarks.
Philip asks for tomato ketchup, Lettice for pickled walnuts, Laurence finds that the salt cellar is empty. Margot gets to her feet, during the first ten minutes of the meal, some five times. ‘If I dropped dead from overwork,’ says Margot/Madeleine to her family, on the fifth occasion, ‘I don’t suppose any of you would bother to come to the funeral.’
Fortunately neither Philip, Laurence nor Lettice hears, either because Margot/Madeleine’s voice does not have much power (so far) or because they are too busy with their own lives to pay attention to Margot’s.
‘Look,’ says Lettice. ‘Greenfly. Never mind,’ and with the coarseness consequent upon her new status, her arrival at the menarche, she actually devours a couple of the green translucent creatures, to her brother’s horror.
‘Six people a year in this country are killed by cows,’ he announces, for no particular reason. ‘And four are blinded by champagne corks.’
‘Someone was sick in the Art room,’ says Lettice. ‘I helped clean that up.’
Margot limps as she goes to fetch a fresh bottle of Heinz salad cream, and turning says to her husband in Margot/Madeleine’s voice:
‘I think we should have Hilary to live with us.’
‘You must be mad,’ is all Philip says, and goes back to his paper and the pain in Margot’s leg gets worse and worse, and her breath comes in gasps, and she wonders why she ever married her husband, and remembers, because she was pregnant.
In the afternoon she irons her husband’s shirts.
Seven o’clock. Bonsoir! Supper time. Shepherd’s pie, and the tomato sauce has run out and all the shops are shut.
Bonsoir!
Clarence starts the second half of his shift. The air inside the mortuary is still and close: the tile and formica surfaces seem not so much hygienic as grubby. Arthur, unusually for him, has not cleared away his tea things. Everything seems to Clarence to be in need of sweeping and wiping, as it seemed to in his mother’s house, after her death. Dead spiders and crumpled daddy-longlegs are swept up in corners: rust flakes fall from the rows of empty trolleys: the shrouds, which should be neatly folded, white and crisp upon the shelves, lie in grey untidy heaps upon the floor. How did they get there? Clarence picks one up and starts to fold it. But it is too large to be folded by one person: the width beyond the reach of his arms. Clarence leaves the shrouds where they are. Someone else’s job, he thinks, not mine. I am here as guardian of the dead, not as a cleaner.
Clarence opens his work on the works of Bishop Berkeley, but cannot concentrate. There is a smell of something—what? Toothpaste? Tooth powder? He sniffs around like some shaggy, untidy dog, but cannot trace the smell to its source. Clarence does not clean his teeth. He has been heard to say to his girlfriend that if God had meant us to clean our teeth he would have made us with bristles on our fingers. Clarence’s teeth are filmed over with plaque and have a yellowish greenish colour, but are in perfect condition. Clarence’s girlfriend cleans her teeth after every meal, goes to a dental hygienist who regularly picks away at the build-up of plaque, and uses both dental floss and tooth sticks daily, and has very painful, very sensitive, very rotten teeth. The smell of tooth powder reminds Clarence of his girl-friend. Clarence feels a stab of painful lust.
New identity forms, properly completed, must now be attached to Madeleine’s body. Clarence performs this distasteful task. He prefers dealing with the bodies of men. Madeleine’s eyes are closed. She appears to listen. When her eyes fall open, on their easy hinges, she appears to watch. Still, thinks Clarence, listening is better than watching.
Clarence’s father lost a leg in the Second World War: Clarence’s mother grew cross and sluttish in his absence. Clarence was born in the satisfaction of his father’s inordinate (according to Clarence’s mother) demands. Clarence’s father groaned long and loud in the face of his misfortunes. Clarence’s mother reproached Clarence’s father until the day she died.
Clarence, like Goliath, is accustomed to the complaints and reproaches of women.
‘How can I manage on the money you give me? How can I cope with a growing boy with you out at work all day? Of course the place is untidy: I’m at my wits’ end coping with the mess you make. If you’d ever played football with the lad, his hair wouldn’t be the length it is. Just because your peg leg hurts and you’re too mean to get a new one, stainless steel, articulated, and with toes that even wiggle? How you ill treat me, monster! Villain! Going off to war with two legs, coming back with one, and not even hurrying home, either. Beast! What kind of husband is that? What kind of fate? Oh my heart, my poor heart
Shut your ears, Clarence. The chorus is at it again. ‘Who killed this woman? This poor woman, with her crushed chest, and her perfect face?’ Mother, sleeping, silent while her eyes are closed. ‘Who killed her? Or failing that, who drove her to her death? Someone must have. Some man, some devil, some monster. Who? Was it you? Clarence? Your guilt, by virtue of your maleness, your beard, your yellow teeth (how she begged you to brush them!), your hair, grown long in order to annoy?’
Clarence closes Madeleine away again, in her little chilled cupboard in the wall.
Lie still, Madeleine. Lie quiet. Don’t think about Lily. Was it really her fault? People do the best they can: only steal what they have to. Husbands, lovers, children.
No. Not Hilary. Not my child. Never.
Bon appetit!
Lily pours herself a pink drink in a frosted glass. Madeleine can touch her not at all. Is there something already dead about Lily: so that the touch of the dead on her mind seems nothing untoward?
It was Lily’s father the butcher who made a lady of Lily in the end, and not Lily’s mother, the Home-County miss. It was Lily’s father who rescued Lily from the white sands and randy servicemen of wartime New Zealand; who sent her to a good school and paid for a course in flower-arrangement. How did he do it? With money lent him, long ago, by Karl Kominski’s sister Renate. It was Lily’s father who paid for the fare to England, home and safety. It was Lily’s father who told her she was a princess, and made her one, so that in the end she outstripped him, passed him, all but forgot him. Lily writes to her mother, the expatriate Englishwoman, not to her father the retired butcher, with the tops of his two forefingers missing, and two phallic stumps left behind.
Bon appetit!
Margot heats up the water for the frozen peas, to serve with the Shepherd’s pie, Philip’s, Laurence’s and Lettice’s favourite dish. The curtains are drawn and it’s cosy and nice.
You sly bitch Margot, cries Madeleine now; you hypocrite, with your secret knowledge, and your self-satisfied wifedom, your smug motherhood—it was you who started the whole thing off. I remember you now. Beneath the coats with Jarvis. It was you. You owe me something. Look after Hilary now.
Margot winces, suffers, sighs: and feels such a wave of spite and anger against all the world that Hilary, poor Hilary, quite gets forgotten in the wash of it.
It is left to Renee that evening, child-loving, man-hating Renee, to take Hilary in her arms, fold her bosom against her own, and gently swaying, gently murmuring, to offer the child comfort and a place for her tears.
‘All right,’ says Madeleine in their ears. Is she passing by? ‘All right for the moment, but not for long.’ At any rate Hilary cheers up, and Renee wonders whether the landlord will let her have Madeleine’s two basement rooms in addition to her own. In which case she could then re-apply for custody of her daughters. The judge rejected her last application on the grounds that Renee could not provide the girls with proper accommodation, though Renee herself believes that the real reason is her avowed bi
sexuality. My husband’s heterosexuality, she wished to say, has been more damaging to our marriage than my homosexuality, but no one seemed interested. He has custody of the girls, employs a succession of au-pair girls to look after them, and sleeps with them if he can. Renee’s friend Bonny drifts between Renee and her own husband, unable to make up her mind as to whom she prefers, finding Renee more consoling but her husband more exciting. Bonny is only just eighteen.
Renee sends Hilary back to Jarvis and Lily, and offers to feed the guinea pig until a decision concerning its future can be made.
Some deaths move us: others don’t. One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most; until the passage of time—or indeed, the visiting of the dead, dissolves these unholy linkages and we can let the dead alone at last.
We are all part of one another. Separation is bound to come painfully.
Renee is not much grieved by Madeleine’s death, and that is that. Renee thinks perhaps Madeleine had it coming. Renee wishes she had not lent Madeleine her new white blouse (the remains of which, as Renee rightly fears now mingle with Madeleine’s torn flesh, discreetly covered by the white mortuary shroud). Renee feels the same kind of impatient, companionable sympathy for Madeleine, dead, as she did for Madeleine living.
So much, thinks Renee, for vanity. Madeleine punished at last for her assorted, dismal heterosexual cravings, which did her, in the end, so little good.
Madeleine adorned for the delectation of the predatory male, dressed up like a lamb, dead as mutton.
Bon appetit!
‘Onward Christian soldiers,’ sings Clarence, loudly and valiantly, as his shift ends, and the murmurings in his ears subside.
17
GOOD MORNING AGAIN.
Or so they say.
Is this all, thinks Margot, waking, hollow-eyed, is this all my life is to be? My children growing older, my husband growing fatter, myself more bored and boring day by day.
Disloyal, discontented Margot! She wants to pinch her husband: instead she caresses him, a timid, unexpected flutter of her hands upon his inner thigh, but he sleeps deeply, heavily, and does not respond.
Up gets Margot, furious.
All this bad temper, she thinks, peering at herself in the mirror, is wreaking havoc with my complexion. It seems to her that her skin is yellowish, instead of its usual nutty, freckly, healthy self.
The telephone rings. She is alarmed. Bad news travels unduly early, or unduly late. But it is only Enid, Margot’s friend, ringing before Sam gets up. Enid thinks she’s pregnant. Does Margot, the doctor’s wife, think it’s possible.
‘I thought you were on the pill,’ says Margot. ‘I gave it up a month back,’ says Enid. ‘It hardly seemed worth while. Only once or twice a month, the way things have been lately, and it’s not as if I’m a young woman any more. Thirty-nine, after all.’
‘Young enough,’ says Margot, and feels such a stab of jealousy as quite confounds her. Is Enid to have husband, career, and now a baby too? ‘What does Sam say?’ she enquires.
‘I haven’t told Sam,’ says Enid, in disparaging tones, such as Margot has never before heard Enid use of her husband.
‘You’d better come and see Philip,’ Margot says. ‘He’s quite good about that kind of thing. So long as you’re not married to him, of course.’
And Enid has never heard Margot speak of Philip in such tones before.
‘I’d rather do a test,’ Enid says. ‘You see them advertised. It just might be an early menopause. I’d rather it was. Can you see Sam with a baby?’
Good morning!
‘It’s no use moping round the house,’ says Lily briskly to Hilary. ‘You really should have gone to school. You can’t take days off just because you feel like it.’
Well, look what happens when you do! Lily snatched Hilary out of school to have her hair cut, and what ensued?
Madeleine was lured back to her one-time home: an unholy bond sprang up between her and the doctor’s wife: and now look. It did not go unnoticed, after all, that Hilary’s lovely hair lay in piles upon the hairdresser’s floor. Better she’d stayed safely at school—or as safe as her platform heels would let her be.
Lily feels it, too late.
This morning Jarvis has gone to Custerley to identify the body. Hilary wanted to go with him, but it was not allowed. Hilary stayed in bed, instead, until it was too late to go to school. Lily actually had to go out and buy Sugar Puffs to entice her tearful stepdaughter down to breakfast. Lily the tea-lady’s daughter, showing culinary kindness, at which she excels.
‘I don’t believe she’s dead at all,’ says Hilary now, stuffing and puffing. ‘There’s some mistake. She doesn’t feel dead to me.’
‘We have to face facts,’ says Lily. Facts? Lily’s little sister Baby Rose, face downwards in a rock pool, drowned, long long ago, was that a fact? Ah yes, and a fact to be faced fearlessly, even joyfully. Even her mother’s sorrow muted by the usefulness of the event. After Baby Rose died, Lily’s mother, duly punished, could go back to Lily’s father, and to his fleshy overpowering love, crude as the knives he wielded, tough as the flesh he pierced, and delicate as his hands, as he so elegantly deftly, jointed, rolled and strung—Ida’s husband was the best butcher in New Zealand, everyone knew. Poor Ida! She who should have married a solicitor, a scientist, an art historian, bound by the flesh to a Bay of Islands butcher. And decades later, here is Lily, succeeding where her mother failed. Married to an English architect. But all Lily feels for her mother is a kind of proud, harsh anger.
‘Daddy might not know it’s Mummy,’ says Hilary, ‘it’s so long since he saw her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Lily.
‘He didn’t even like her,’ his daughter persists. ‘He might make a mistake.’
‘Of course he liked her,’ says Lily, angry as she always is in her lies. ‘He was married to her.’
She has never said it before, never quite admitted it. The marriage between Jarvis and Madeleine was real, real as her own, though in a different time. Or if not quite that, real as her mother’s and father’s was real. The acceptance makes her softer. ‘Poor Hilary,’ she says, and stretches out her cool hand to touch the flushed and dumpy Hilary, but all Hilary says is, moving away, ‘I wish I hadn’t had my hair cut. Everyone pointed and stared and laughed.’
‘I’m sure they didn’t,’ says Lily, but she knows quite well, of course, they had.
‘Anyway,’ says Hilary, cheering up, ‘there’s always Jonathon, isn’t there. Can I take him for a walk?’
‘Better not,’ says Lily, fearing she knows not what.
‘Why not?’ Hilary persists. ‘He’d love to go to the swings.’
‘No,’ says Lily sharply, and that is that.
So Hilary plays patience instead, and waits for time to stretch itself between her sense of now and the occasion of her loss. She imagines it will have to stretch itself to the very ends of her life before this day can join the others, and fit neatly and painlessly into the receding patterns of the past. When she is eighty or ninety perhaps, she will be able to say, ‘Oh yes. When I was a girl of fourteen I lost my mother. She was killed in a car accident,’ and feel no pain.
Madeleine is wheeled out, ready for inspection by her next of kin. Jolt and jump. Her eyes fly open.
Hi there!
Jonathon develops a little fever. His nose is running. His eyes are bleary. Perhaps he would have done better over at the swings, with Hilary standing (as was her custom) between her half-brother and her mother.
Lily does a little gardening, a little pruning. Snip snip amongst the thorns. She wears white gloves. She does not like the notion of Jarvis having to visit Madeleine, dead or alive. She thought she’d put an end to all that, years ago.
Oh, I am Lily the tea-lady’s daughter, th
e tired U.S. serviceman’s delight. Little bleached girl amongst piles of spiky white driftwood, seen by nobody, missed by none; them so large with their bold exploring hands, and me so small; skinny thighed, tiny breasted. No older than Hilary in years.
Hilary has no instincts, thinks Lily, despising her: though what good Lily’s early instincts did Lily, is not in the long run too apparent. Lily did what she wanted, at the time, what Lily needed. At least Lily was too young, too small, too unformed to get pregnant. Hilary will get pregnant at the first opportunity, thinks Lily; she is the type—generally messy, over-flowing and prone to emotional demonstration.
I must get Hilary on the pill, thinks Lily. At least I’ll have control of that aspect of her upbringing from now on.
Jarvis, where are you?
Jarvis the absentee father! Can he not protect his daughter at all from the ravages of his wife? Any more than the butcher could protect his daughter, stolen away from him as she was?
So there you are, Jarvis.
Jarvis looks at Madeleine’s face. He had not known quite what to expect of the faces of the dead. But here is Madeleine, and looking, moreover, as he would most like to remember her—on the point of saying something nice and not something nasty. A frame frozen, at a singularly fortunate time. The trouble is, that living with, as one might say, Madeleine’s successor, as he does, Jarvis has trained himself in the remembrance of bad times.
‘I thought the dead looked more dead than that,’ he observes to Arthur.
‘Most do,’ says Arthur. His legs are troubling him. He has spent a lifetime standing about on cold floors, with hard surfaces, the better to be washed and purified of putrefaction of the dead.
Jarvis reaches out his hand to touch Madeleine’s cheek.
‘Don’t,’ says Arthur sharply. ‘Please don’t touch the corpses.’
But Jarvis had already done so.
‘She’s warm,’ says Jarvis. And then, as if relieved; ‘No. My fingers have been resting on cold metal, that’s all. She feels warm by comparison. Well, that must be it.’