by Fay Weldon
Does Jarvis want Madeleine dead or alive? Does the possibility of her resurrection gladden him, or disappoint him? Alas, it seems he would prefer her safely dead: his relief as her skin grows cold—or his fingers grow warm—demonstrates the truth of the matter. Although it cannot be denied—nor would he wish to—that he was shocked and saddened by the manner of Madeleine’s dying, and his own part in it.
Jarvis fills in the necessary forms. Arthur recommends an undertaker. The inquest will be a formality, and will take place on the following day. The deceased has no near relatives. Even Hilary is not Madeleine’s any more—not since the divorce courts made Jarvis her guardian.
How sadly depleted Madeleine leaves this world.
And how richly Jarvis, looking forward, will leave it; by virtue of his temperament, his masculinity, his will to life and sex, his attachment to domesticity and the trivial trappings of this world. All those things which Madeleine, in her pride and in her youth, rejected.
And how unfair it all is! How little is virtue rewarded. In the white-painted room, with its cold floors and colder occupants, its green-tiled walls and the dead daddy-longlegs swept up in corners, the air is alive again with a confluence of comment, indignation and argument. It is as if Madeleine’s body, so little regarded in life, has in death become the focal point of some kind of group energy, some social concentration, some common search for consensus; of the kind which sends our communities lurching in one direction or another towards their gradual betterment.
Unfair!
Jarvis will have a grand and well-peopled funeral; it is his very proper ambition. He hesitates to consider the solitary glumness that will be Madeleine’s. Will Jarvis be there to watch? Will anyone? Or will Jarvis allow the disposal of Madeleine’s body to be attended to in the same spirit as the inquest—as a formality, symptoms of society’s determination to acknowledge the quantity of its members, everyone: to number them, list them, and record their beginnings, their middles, their ends, births, marriages, and deaths, while yet ignoring the quality of these events?
Jarvis cannot decide. He is upset. He has a cold in his nose. He goes back to London, eyeing all the dents and breaks in the motorway’s central barrier with morbid fascination. Was it here, or there, that Madeleine met her death? He leaves the motorway to find a pub, and has two double whiskies and a pork pie. He feels better. He is putting on weight.
Unfair!
Some people, like Madeleine, like Lily, can eat and eat and stay slim. Others, like Jarvis, eat a pork pie and develop a paunch.
Arthur plods over to the window to shut it yet again. The daddy-longlegs have whirled from the sill in a gust of turbulence, and disintegrated. Someone, Arthur thinks, must keep coming and opening the window. He feels they don’t, but knows they must. He will be glad when Madeleine’s body is gone. He has felt similar unease about perhaps three other bodies in all his years as mortuary attendant, but prefers not to let the feelings harden into opinions, let alone conclusions. Dead is dead, or else his work becomes impossible.
Unfair!
The Dial-a-Date agency try to locate Madeleine on Mr Quincey’s behalf; get hold of Renee: and phone Mr Quincey back to say unfortunately his date is dead. Mr Quincey cries, and is comforted. It is something, in a lonely life, to have someone to mourn. Presently he telephones Renee and tries to ascertain from her the time and place of the funeral. He would like to come, he says. But Renee is chilly and evasive. She does not know: she has not heard: she herself does not believe in funerals. Neither did Madeleine. Dead is dead. Bodies should be carted off by the council. She’d heard Madeleine say as much, many times.
In any case, in what possible capacity could Mr Quincey attend Madeleine’s funeral? Besides if Madeleine hadn’t gone to Cambridge, she’d still be alive and there wouldn’t be any need for a funeral.
A point which had already occurred to Mr Quincey.
Unfair!
When Mr Quincey puts the phone down he is gripped by a fierce pain in his stomach, so fierce that he collapses, groaning on the floor of the hall. The landlady calls the doctor: the doctor the ambulance: at the hospital they diagnose a peptic ulcer, allay his pain, and keep him in for tests. He likes the hospital: it is warm, friendly and crowded. He sleeps better that night than ever he did at home; the constant murmurings, outbreaks of coughing and variety of breathings in the ward remind him of the companionable dormitories of his orphanage childhood. The night sister reminds him of Madeleine.
Unfair! Miss a pill and see what happens!
Enid has bought a Pregnancy Home Testing Kit. It is a pretty transparent box lidded with magnifying glass, in which is inserted a yet prettier test tube, containing a mix of this chemical and that, to be combined with a drop of early morning urine. If, once the urine is added and stirred, the contents of the tube settle down within two hours to look like the sun in eclipse, a dark circle lined with a ring of fire, why then, Enid will be pregnant.
Enid sets up the test when she gets out of bed. Even by seven o’clock there is no doubt about it. The sun is in eclipse: the corona leaps from its dark circumference with fiery beauty. Enid is pregnant.
Enid takes Sam his breakfast tray. Enid’s parents never wished Enid to marry Sam, for reasons never quite specified, beyond the fact that Enid’s father didn’t trust him. But then he trusted no one. Enid is an only child. Her father was fifty and her mother forty-one when she was born. Enid was a quiet, good, competent little girl, much in the habit of carrying trays. Here and there, up and down, in and out of the kitchen—breakfast, tea, late-night cocoa. Thank you darling. No poison, I suppose? Ha-ha!
‘You’re a good girl, Enid,’ says Sam, waking, not unwillingly, from dreams of Philippa in which that knickerless girl took tea with his mother.
‘Thank you, Sam,’ says Enid, pleased.
On the way to work Sam notices the glass box on the mantelpiece. ‘That’s pretty,’ he says. ‘What is it?’
‘A table decoration,’ says Enid, and Sam looks slightly puzzled, but lets it pass.
Sam and Enid decided years ago to have no children. Sam has a generalised horror of pregnant women; of stretch marks on bellies, of figures lost beyond redemption, of curlers and nappies and toys on the floor; he finds the notion of breast-feeding grotesque. And watching, as he does, the end result of all this reproductive misery, the schoolchildren sauntering past his office, swearing, smoking, jostling; long-haired, scruffy, of assorted race and creed, Sam is the more thankful not to have exposed himself and Enid to the messiness and inconvenience of parenthood.
As for Enid, she realised long ago that she hasn’t the time, the energy, or the inclination to look after a baby. There isn’t a spare moment in her day, as it is.
Already she begrudges the minutes she has to spend in the bathroom, being sick. Well, she will talk to her friend Margot, the doctor’s wife, and ask her what to do.
Good evening!
Wednesday evening. Sam’s night for playing poker, Enid’s for visiting Margot, Lettice’s for a piano lesson, Laurence’s for shaking out the cat basket and spraying for fleas, Philip’s for doing his VAT accounts, Philippa’s for washing her hair, Hilary’s for cleaning out the guinea-pig cage, Renee’s for visiting her two daughters in the presence of a third party, and Jarvis’s for taking Lily to the cinema. Once it had been Madeleine’s night for telephoning Jarvis to complain of some domestic difficulty or unfairness to Hilary, or if none such could be found, for making anonymous and abusive phone calls to Lily.
Which was why Jarvis and Lily presently made it their weekly night out.
Good evening! Wednesday evening round again. How quickly time passes! Madeleine’s lips are dead, cold and dry. The guinea pig is hungry. Renee has forgotten to feed him. His cage, however, uncleaned by Hilary, is rich and cosy with his own dung. Jarvis has taken Hilary to the pictures to cheer her up. Lily has been obliged to stay home to baby-sit for Jonathon, who is developing quite a nasty fever. Lily was prepared to leave him with a stra
nge baby-sitter from an agency, but Jarvis wouldn’t hear of it.
Jonathon had clearly been sickening for something or other during the day. Lily left him with Margot while she shopped, as was her custom, but poor little Jonathon cried from the moment his mother left until the moment she came home, shrieked whenever Margot approached, and even bit Margot’s hand when she attempted to lay it upon his infant brow to gauge his degree of fever.
‘I’m afraid we’re all rather upset,’ as Margot observed to Lily, attempting to excuse the child to the mother. ‘I daresay that’s all it is. Children are so sensitive to atmosphere.’
‘Upset?’ enquired Lily, coolly. She’d bought a charming little brown and white woolly hat and matching scarf. ‘Why should we be upset? Do you think this suits me?’
It did, of course. Her colour was good that day. Her period was over; her normal relations with Jarvis were enhanced, if anything, by the shadow of death. But when Jarvis took Hilary to the pictures and it became apparent that she, Lily, would have to stay home and baby-sit, her face became quite pale and pinched again.
Wednesday evening!
Sam loses heavily at poker. In the morning he will wake bleary-eyed, hung-over and heavy with a remorse so extreme as to be almost pleasurable. ‘What have I done!’ he will cry, as on so many Thursday mornings. ‘What a fool I am! Lost! Everything lost!’ Though whether it’s tens, hundreds, or thousands of pounds he’s referring to Enid has no means of knowing and does not ask. ‘Everything lost!’ It is a cry of cosmic, not financial, agony, she knows quite well.
Good evening!
Enid brings her own cry of distress to Margot. They sit alone in the kitchen. Philip, Lettice and Laurence absent themselves on Enid’s arrival. No one dislikes Enid, but no one seeks her company. Plain, obliging, respectable women, beyond their first youth, may be good enough company for each other, but not for the rest of the world.
Unfair!
‘What shall I do?’ cries Enid. ‘What shall I do? At my age! I can’t possibly have it. Sam doesn’t like babies. And what about my job? I shall have to have an abortion. Philip will just have to write me a note to the hospital. He can’t refuse.’
‘Philip has rather complicated views on abortion,’ murmurs Margot. She is feeling tired and her chest hurts.
‘What do you mean, complicated?’ enquires Enid, crossly. ‘You mean he’s old-fashioned and reactionary?’
‘Women do get rather depressed afterwards,’ says Margot, tentatively. ‘He’s not in favour of abortion on demand. And, of course, it can reduce one’s fertility.’
‘I can hardly be more depressed than I am now; I don’t want to be fertile. I think Philip is being very hypocritical. He talked you into an abortion once, I know very well.’
Had he? Was that what happened? Margot puts on the kettle for tea.
‘It was the only sensible thing to do,’ she says presently. ‘It was a long time ago.’
So it had been. Back in the late fifties, when abortion was ‘illegal’, and even a nurse—as she had been—had trouble finding (at best) a rogue doctor or (at worst) some enthusiastic amateur willing to terminate a pregnancy. Margot’s best friend Katriona had nearly died of septicaemia following an abortion, and had woken up one night in hospital with the police at her bedside and a criminal prosecution to follow.
Good evening!
‘What possible difference can it being a long time ago make?’ enquires Enid, persistently. The same somewhat petulant persistence has made many a colleague concede a point to Enid at the conference table.
‘Just that I can hardly remember that time of my life,’ says Margot.
‘But you did have an abortion?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was Philip’s baby?’
Philip’s baby; yes certainly she can remember it was Philip’s baby. Philip was a medical student, on the same ward as herself. The maternity ward; she clearly remembers that too. Philip was too young, too boyish, to really attract her; but it was Christmas Eve and she’d had too much of the patients’ sherry to drink. So had Philip. He’d come into the sluice room; she’d turned into his arms: one thing had (presumably) led to another, because there they were, rolling around together on the floor behind the stacked piles and linen, in a confusion of new experiences her hymen had been broken—what a strange, sudden pang—and the Labour Room bell meanwhile blaring unheard in their ears, while a baby all but strangled in its own umbilical cord. That had been a lesson to them: and then again when she found she was pregnant.
Life in those days had seemed all lessons.
‘Yes, it was Philip’s baby,’ says Margot now to Enid.
‘And he did talk you into having an abortion.’
‘It wasn’t him so much as his parents.’
Philip’s parents had high ambitions for him, socially. After all that, why shouldn’t they have? He was a doctor at last—what an attainment! A nurse, a nobody—for a wife? Never! Surely he could marry some young deb, or failing that, at least some girl with a family, an education, or an unearned income to her name. There were plenty of girls around in London at that time who would answer to his parents’ requirements; nice virtuous girls only too happy to salve their social consciences by marrying some young doctor and devoting their lives (and their education, income and background) to him and humanity.
But Margot? That ordinary, bustling, plain little nurse with nothing to recommend her but a pleasant-nature—and not even a virgin any more.
And Philip’s mother didn’t have forever to live; and Philip’s father had his ambitions centred in his son; and Philip’s sister Jill had her heart set on a grand white wedding for her brother’s eventual bride, since she couldn’t have one herself. A lace train streaming out behind a wheelchair? No thanks. Even worse than walking up the aisle with a bride clearly pregnant, dressed in white.
Since there was to be no marriage, it was left to Philip’s parents to arrange an abortion. An unsavoury business, they felt, but necessary, since Philip wasn’t prepared to take the only other sensible course open to him—namely, to deny paternity and abandon the girl. He was, they felt, being rather naive. If Margot would with Philip she would with anyone; just because she said it was his baby didn’t mean it was: she was a girl of low moral fibre, and quite capable of pinning paternity on Philip in order to catch him as a husband. And so on.
Well, Margot did as Philip’s parents said. She had her abortion. Margot was a nice girl. She didn’t want to marry Philip if it meant ruining his career, and apparently it did. Of course, Margot’s career was at an end in any case. Her inspired union with Philip in the sluice room had become publicly known in the course of the enquiry into the unanswered Labour Ward bell—but why didn’t you hear the bell, Nurse Armitage?—and although male medical students were allowed, even expected to be sexually active, nurses were not. Nurses had to be responsible. Margot would have to be dismissed for negligence and behaviour unbecoming to the noble calling of nursing.
And so she was, creeping back to her mother Winifred ashamed and in disgrace. Winifred was not too upset. She never expected anything except disaster, in any case, and found it quite comforting to have her worst fears realised and her view of the universe reinforced. Besides, Winifred had always, in her heart, wanted Margot to be a secretary: for then, if she played her cards right, she could marry some rich business man or stockbroker who could afford to keep his mother-in-law in comfort. It wasn’t that Winifred was mercenary, just practical. How else was a woman to live, but off men?
Looking back over the generations, how else indeed?
Philip felt badly about Margot losing her job. It was hardly fair. He even quarrelled with his parents and Jill on her account, and that took some doing. Quarrelling with one distraught father, one mother with cancer, and one sister in a wheelchair. Good God, he might have said, don’t you think we need a nurse in the family?
But everyone knew (as Winifred had warned Margot) that nurses were a hard and worldly lot
: and rarely virginal, certainly not in mind if occasionally in body, having seen too much with their girlish eyes and touched God knows what with their pretty fingers.
No, the Baileys certainly did not want a nurse in the family. They felt in need of raising, not lowering.
As indeed did Winifred, pinning her hopes on stockbrokers.
Philip and Margot agreed not to see each other any more.
The forced parting added poignancy to their relationship: added the overtones of love to what started, really, as a state of having nothing whatever to say to each other.
Sex, of course, does instead of conversation. Just as conversation does, for those beyond it or before it, instead of sex.
Good evening!
‘I’m sure Sam will come round to the idea of your having a baby,’ says Margot, cosily to Enid.
‘Supposing you got pregnant,’ says Enid, dangerously, ‘what would Philip do?’
‘I can’t get pregnant,’ says Margot, ‘I wear a coil.’
‘Whose idea is that? His or yours?’
‘His,’ says Margot. She coughs and coughs. She wishes Enid would go. She does not like this conversation. The telephone rings.
‘Good evening.’ It is Lily.
‘Margot,’ says Lily, ‘could I speak to Philip, please? It’s Jonathon. He’s so terribly hot and he just lies there panting, and Jarvis is at the pictures with Hilary.’
‘What are they seeing?’ enquires Margot.
‘Jaws,’ says Lily ‘but that’s not the point—’
‘Jaws?’ Margot feels a spasm of anger. It seems a tactless choice for a girl who has just lost her mother in a road accident. ‘I shouldn’t worry about Jonathon,’ says Margot.
‘Children do run high temperatures, you know. Keep him warm and give him half an Aspirin, and I’m sure he’ll be better in the morning.’
‘You don’t think he ought to see Philip?’
‘I’m afraid Philip is out,’ says Margot.
‘I hate making a fuss,’ says Lily, ‘but Jonathon looks so strange—’