by Fay Weldon
Margot was not exactly asked to Philip’s mother’s funeral, and did not attend. She went to Jill’s, however, the following year. Well, Jill had been to Margot’s wedding, and taken some lovely photographs, which now stand on the bedside table.
Margot’s younger, sweeter self smiles down on Margot’s cold, grey, unconsciousness.
If you come to my wedding, I’ll go to your funeral.
18
AH, POSSESSIONS!
‘Someone’s got to go through her belongings,’ says Lily.
Jarvis does not reply. Jarvis the architect and Lily the architect’s one and only wife are watching television. Their dinner (lamb cutlets, salad and Camembert), is digesting, and their comforts are around them. Their chairs are designed for maximum viewing comfort and their distance from the screen for minimum eyestrain. They sit side by side, hand in hand, their drinks beside them. Hilary is in bed, reading; Jonathon is asleep. ‘There is nothing wrong,’ Lily keeps telling herself. ‘Nothing to be anxious about.’ But she cannot concentrate. Events in Ulster seem to have even less to do with her than usual; she cannot feel enthusiastic about the plans of the Young Conservatives. She wishes Jarvis would pay less attention to the screen and more to her. And she is worried about Jonathon.
Earlier in the evening she quite panicked about Jonathon. He was clearly ill and very feverish—his forehead burned to her touch. He lay in his cot, whining and grizzling, slapping at his leg with his hand. His eyes were cloudy, like the eyes of fish on a watery marble slab. She rang Philip Bailey, but could only get through to his Night Service, which with some reluctance agreed to send out a locum.
The locum, a sallow and disagreeable young man, unmoved by either Lily’s beauty or her distress, protests at having been called out unnecessarily. The child’s temperature is normal. Or so the thermometer says.
‘But you can see he’s ill,’ says Lily. The locum shakes his head: he can’t see it at all. All he appears to think is that Lily, though beautiful, is an over-protective, hysterical nuisance of a mother. And it is certainly true that the minute the doctor walks into the room, Jonathon stops his grizzling and tossing, and the turning up of his glazed eyes, and becomes a perfectly ordinary, plump small boy, with a cold in the nose, and eyes red from crying, who doesn’t want to go to bed.
But after the doctor has gone the dreadful keening and tossing starts again, and only stops when Hilary, in desperation, takes him into the camp bed with her.
Lily hates to see them thus so entwined, so comforted the one by the other; her golden boy enclosed, suffocated, trapped, by Madeleine’s lumpy, puffy, sulky girl.
Supposing, Lily thinks with horror, anyone thinks Hilary is mine?
Ah, possessions. Some reflect credit on us, others don’t.
Lily turns off the television. She’ll have Jarvis’s attention, through fair means or foul. ‘Someone’s got to go through her belongings. Do try and face facts.’
‘Let Oxfam take them,’ says Jarvis. ‘Clear the place out. Sell what it can and throw away what it can’t.’
‘But everything there is ours,’ says Lily. ‘After all, you supported her. Everything she ever owned comes from you.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s much there,’ says Jarvis. ‘Do you mind if I watch television?’
And he turns the set on again, so Lily has to speak over the voice of Our Man in Israel. ‘What about all the things she took from here?’ she demands.
Some six months after Lily moved in and Madeleine moved out, Madeleine returned one day with furniture removers, in Lily’s absence, breaking the law, defying the injunction not to molest, and took away the brass bed which she and Jarvis had once shared, but which now was Lily’s own, by custom and convention.
What a lovely bed it was, too—not one with ordinary coarse bold bars at head and foot, but delicately filigreed into a glittering pattern of flowers and peacocks. Madeleine, Lily knew, didn’t really want the bed, could hardly have had pleasant memories of it, couldn’t even get it into her little flat—but had simply had it removed and sold, motivated by nothing other than spite. Not by sentiment—her sexual relationship with Jarvis had been totally miserable, almost non-existent, or so Jarvis assured Lily—merely by a dog-in-the-manger attitude. Spite.
Jarvis, you see, had at one time to have a restraining order taken out against Madeleine, who in the early days would lie in wait outside the house for poor Lily (who’d be returning tired from the ante-natal clinic, as like as not) and spring out at her and abuse her and pull her hair, poor mad soul—even Lily, her victim, could feel sorry for her, so awful and dreadful did Madeleine look.
And then Madeleine started making obscene telephone calls in the middle of the night, so that the number had to be changed: and then Madeleine started breaking the window, and pulling up the flowers (leaving poor little Hilary without a baby-sitter the while, no doubt, just as she’d left her alone on all those coach journeys whilst having it off with the courier—poor Jarvis!). And damage to persons and feelings is one thing, damage to property is quite another. So Jarvis and Lily were obliged to go to law; and the threat of prison if she persisted quietened Madeleine down considerably, and after the theft of the bed, the visitations stopped altogether.
Madeleine, taking to visitations, once again. The Visitings of the Dead.
But the day Madeleine and Hilary left Jarvis in that taxi (what extravagance! Wouldn’t public transport have done?), she took with her not just her and Hilary’s personal belongings, but some very nice fluffy towels and some hand-embroidered table linen to which Lily had taken an instant liking, in the few days she and Madeleine were under the same roof. Well, Lily under the spare-room roof, waiting. Madeleine under the bedroom roof, hesitating.
Possessions! Who cared? Lily, certainly. And Madeleine, rather more than she thought.
For Madeleine had no right to take them: they belonged to Jarvis, who’d paid for them. Jarvis paid for everything, after all. It all belonged to Jarvis.
Jarvis, Lily thought, was altogether too neglectful of his own interests.
‘Let’s hope the tablecloths aren’t too ruined,’ says Lily now, as the tanks rumble over Sinai, in retrospect. ‘I don’t suppose there’s much hope she did them by hand: just bunged everything in together in the launderette, I expect. At least, that’s what Hilary’s clothes always looked as if she did. We could get the poor child some new ones, now we know they won’t instantly be damaged by Madeleine. You must admit, Jarvis, there must be a lot in the flat worth salvaging. I know it’s distasteful, but I’m afraid that’s the other thing about people dying. There’s just a lot of work to be done.’
When Baby Rose had died, drowned, what a clearing up, a packing, a throwing away there’d been! ‘You’re such a good little worker,’ Ida had said, tears in her troubled eyes. ‘My only little daughter.’
Lily wears steel grey tonight—a slippery, shiny, shapeless dress. Her pretty feet are bare: her toenails scarlet.
Lily’s big toe is not altogether straight: in fact it all but folds itself over the adjacent toe. She has difficulty buying shoes.
Jarvis does not reply.
‘And apart from anything else, all Hilary’s shoes are there,’ says Lily. ‘We have to have those. She says the red ones hurt her. Well of course they do; those heels are absurd. I don’t know what Madeleine was thinking of.’
‘Can’t she have new ones?’
‘We’re not so rich we can afford to throw money away, Jarvis. Besides, I hate buying shoes.’
‘If you want to go down and loot,’ says Jarvis, ‘go ahead.’
Jarvis is worn and frayed. Identifying a dead body is not pleasant. Lily seems to have no idea of it. And he’s hungry. Cutlets, salad and Camembert may keep a man thin, but they do not keep him content. All he wants to do today is eat, drink, sleep, suffer in peace. But Lily keeps to her rules. Food as consolation? Never. Look how fat it made you before!
‘It is not looting,’ says Lily, ‘it is common sense. And I’m not su
ggesting for a moment that I do it. Why should I? It’s not my fault Madeleine killed herself in that ridiculous car she couldn’t afford, and ran at your expense, while I don’t even have a car at all but have to go everywhere by taxi or public transport: all I do is slave my guts out running this house, carrying your child, looking after a stepchild with no help let alone gratitude from you, putting up with your moods, your drinking and your abuse; and now poor little Jonathon is ill, but you don’t care, you go off to the pictures with Hilary leaving me alone to cope with the doctors, and I have to take responsibility for absolutely everything and I’m sick of it, and what’s more, you don’t even seem to like me any more.’
And off Lily goes to bed.
Jarvis drinks half a bottle of whisky, and goes to the kitchen and eats half a loaf (Jonathon’s) with a lot of butter and some plum preserve (Lily’s make, for displaying rather than eating), before coming to bed and telling Lily he is paying for Madeleine’s funeral. When she opens her mouth to protest he slaps her.
It is Jarvis’s way to meet attack by attack. He rarely responds to the detail of accusation, only to the spirit behind it. It makes him difficult to live with, Lily thinks, and Madeleine knew. He and Lily are either totally happy together, or completely miserable.
This evening they are completely miserable, and hate each other. They have both been unforgivable. They sleep on far sides of the bed, not touching. It is the same filigreed brass bed as once Jarvis and Madeleine shared, but neither of them think of that now.
Lily found it for sale in an antique shop on the Portobello Road a year before, and had to pay ninety pounds in order to get hold of it. But it was worth it, she felt, so as not to let Madeleine have her own way.
Ah, possessions!
19
PROPERTY, POSSESSIONS!
‘I wonder,’ says sweet Lily to mad Margot the next morning, ‘if you could possibly take Hilary round to Madeleine’s and bring back some of her things? In particular some decent shoes, so she doesn’t go on making the rest of us feel like dwarfs?’
Or as Philip says to his wife at lunchtime, over bacon-and-egg pie and baked beans, ‘What is the matter with that woman? Why should you have to go riffling through the relics of the dead? Tell her you won’t do any such thing.’
But Margot has already said she will.
‘You get yourself too involved,’ says Philip, over peach slices and custard. ‘You’re not a friend of the family, only an employee. Margot, this meal tastes remarkably like the school dinners of my past.’
Is it a complaint or a compliment? Margot decides it is the latter. Philip liked his school. His winning of a national photography competition, and with a nude photograph, had made him something of a hero.
‘I had to sieve the custard,’ she remarks. ‘There’s something strange about the powder. It keeps going into lumps.’
‘Why doesn’t Lily do it herself?’ persists Philip. ‘She’s rather upset.’
‘That’s obvious,’ says Philip. ‘Calling out a doctor in the middle of the night to a perfectly healthy child. I wonder what she’s been up to?’
‘Up to? Why should she have been up to anything?’
‘Heaven knows. It’s just my experience of over-anxious mothers,’ says the doctor, ‘that they’ve been having a bit on the side, and expect lightning to strike.’
‘Lily and Jarvis have eyes only for each other,’ says Margot, in the language of the films of her youth. And all the doctor’s wife can offer the doctor, in the way of temptation, is sliced tinned peaches and custard, however smooth, however lovingly sieved, preceded by egg-and-bacon pie and baked beans. No time, no life, no emotion left for anything more adventurous.
And Margot, quite suddenly, quite painfully, feels such a stab of envy, that her hand slips as she makes the instant coffee, and she splashes her fingers with boiling water, and has to hold them under the cold tap until the pain abates.
‘Jonathon’s not himself,’ says Margot, ‘Lily’s worried. He cries if I go near him, and he’s usually so good with me. He only seems happy with Hilary so Lily’s kept her off school again.’
‘You complain if Lily sends her to school, and you complain if she doesn’t,’ says Philip. ‘You don’t seem to like her very much. I don’t know why you envy her. You have just as good a life as she does. Don’t you?’
Yes, of course Margot does. A good life.
Does the doctor’s wife envy the architect’s wife as the doctor claims?
Yes, she does. He’s right And why not? Well, none of our lives are so perfect that we wouldn’t want to change them—or at any rate some part of them—with some other person of our choice. Only when we are in love, and loved in return, does the pleasant singularity of being oneself fill the heart with joy; when we are the recipient of that insane love that on occasion comes from another, by-passing all defects, ignoring all faults of appearance, age, history, conduct, character and humour. Such love would alter, if it improvement found; so at such times we can be reconciled, for once, to our imperfect selves.
Margot envies the architect’s wife—but it is the talent of the architect’s wife (for she is in love with herself) to envy Margot hardly at all, except in so far as she imagines that to have a doctor for a husband would be useful when one had an ailing child. If Lily envies anyone, it is Judy, not because of Jamie, but for Judy’s courage, Judy’s ability to follow her own rash inclinations to their bitter, stylish end. Judy in her penthouse is not suburban. Sometimes Lily fears she is suburban. She has journeyed the length of the globe, but can never quite reach the centre of things.
Property, possessions! Quality or quantity?
The undertaker arrives to measure Madeleine. Five foot three in death, five foot four in life. Some jolting at his hand makes the corpse’s eyes fly open.
‘Funny eyelids,’ says the undertaker.
‘Very,’ says Clarence. Arthur is at the hospital, having his varicose veins injected. Clarence wishes Arthur would come back. His own feet feel cold. The shrouds, which he and Goliath folded earlier, are in heaps on the floor again. The cleaner, perhaps, being careless. Except there is no cleaner. Or did Arthur sweep them all to the floor again in anger, perhaps because they were not perfectly folded? Goliath was good at folding, being accustomed to helping his mother with the sheets off the line, and Clarence soon got the knack of it—only the shrouds were not evenly shaped, and no sooner had you got one edge to meet another, than everything else was out of true. Difficulties.
The eyes close again, like the hinged eyes on the more expensive kind of kewpie doll when laid on its back, with a strictly mechanical motion.
20
SPACES, PLACES! SOME PLACES we approach with dread: they carry the burden of our anxieties, if we have failed to shoulder them ourselves.
I am Hilary, daughter of a dead mother, scuffling through a pile of shoes at the bottom of a wardrobe. This is my home, no longer a home; it’s below ground level: I never thought of that. It was as if we lived in a hole, and a hole was all we were fit for. When I looked up to heaven, all I could see was the feet of strangers, passing behind bars. But here my mother lived for years, slept and woke, and ate and cried and sometimes laughed. Here, every Saturday night, we played Monopoly for my sake, to keep me happy: and every Saturday night I bent the rules (which only I remembered) so she could nearly win but let me do so in the end. We were kind to each other, my mother and I, quite apart from what she felt she owed me for having brought me into the world she made; and what I owed her for having given me life, to make of what I could. I shall remember my mother with love, when I have my own children. If I ever do. If I stay with Lily I never will: I will shrivel up completely in my shell, in the glare of something far too strong for me.
I am Hilary, daughter of a dead mother, child of a lost father: I am Hilary, Jonathon’s friend. I am Hilary, Lily’s obligation, Lily’s servant; Lily, spinning through the universe, a brilliant star, and me, a poor dead planet, revolving hopelessly arou
nd her. I am Hilary, lost to Lily. Almost.
‘Have you found them, dear?’ enquires Margot, as bright and brisk as she can manage. She and Hilary are sorting through the jumble in the bottom of Madeleine’s wardrobe, searching for Hilary’s sensible brown shoes. So far only one has been found.
Lily sent her, in the end, as one sends a servant on an errand. ‘Margot, be a dear. Poor Hilary! Stumbling about in those ridiculous shoes! Too dismal for her to go alone.’
‘Yes,’ said Margot. ‘She’ll need something quieter for the funeral.’
‘The funeral?’ said Lily, as if mystified. ‘Oh, she won’t be going to the funeral. It wouldn’t be suitable for a child. Is there going to be much of a funeral? Jarvis said something, but surely he was joking. The expense! And for what. Who would go? Madeleine has no family. Surely they’ll just bury her, cremate her, whatever it is that people do to corpses. It’s not as if she was religious. What a dreadful subject for so early in the morning. I’ve never been to a funeral. Have you?’
Lily is herself again: wild and wan in washed-out jeans, brown nipples bold through a white shirt, crimson belted. Jarvis relented at six forty-five. They made love—ah yes, and love it was. He to her and she to him. So many kinds of sexual congress! As many as there are of conversations. Sex with love, and sex without it, sex hostile, sex friendly, sex perfunctory, sex enjoyable, boring, disgusting, sanctified, disquieting, destructive; as many kinds as there are partners; as many with the same partner as that partner has frames of mind. This morning, between Jarvis and Lily, there is sex with love, and in the silence of mutual forgiveness.
Breakfast is on time this morning. Kippers for a change, boiled in a plastic bag. Lily enjoys dissecting the flakes of flesh from the flimsy bones. And Jonathon seems much, much better, although he has a nasty little blister on his heel which Lily has just discovered. It looks to her rather like a cigarette burn. Perhaps that was what was hurting and making him grizzle and keen, and why he didn’t want to be picked up? But how could he possibly have a cigarette burn? Lily doesn’t smoke, and Jarvis stopped when they were first married. When he was with Madeleine he smoked at least sixty a day: and of course Madeleine smoked like a chimney, then and afterwards. It was ridiculous, the way Madeleine kept pleading poverty while wasting all her (Jarvis’s) money on cigarettes. Everyone thought so.