by Fay Weldon
Lily puts antiseptic cream and a plaster-dressing on Jonathon’s heel. Margot, watching, is about to suggest, from the strength of her position as doctor’s wife, that the burn would be better left uncovered, or at any rate with a simple dry dressing upon it, but she holds her tongue. Why? What new meanness is this?
‘I can’t think how it came to be there,’ Lily persists. ‘You don’t suppose Hilary’s a secret smoker, and brushed his heel with her cigarette, or something, and didn’t like to tell me? I wouldn’t put it past her … She’s so guilty about everything. Poor little Jonathon.’
And she hands Margot Jonathon to hold, as she has done a hundred times before, but Jonathon’s face puckers, so she sets him down instead, and Jonathon totters off towards the door, in his haste banging his head on the edge of the table, as not infrequently occurs, but this time stoically refusing to mind, just so long, it seems, as he can put as much distance between himself and Margot as possible.
‘When you’re there, Margot,’ Lily goes on, in the fluty tones she uses when she’s in an organising mood, ‘just have a look round. See if there’s anything of value.’
‘What do you mean by value?’ enquires Margot. ‘There is the guinea pig, I suppose.’
Lily looks blank.
‘In the sense that anything alive is of value.’
‘I certainly don’t want the guinea pig round here,’ says Lily, aghast. ‘No way. I hate small animals, don’t you? They’re dreadfully dangerous for small children. They carry any number of germs.’
‘What’s to become of it?’ enquires Margot. ‘Hilary’s very fond of it.’
‘Oh Hilary …’ sighs Lily. Margot, she notices, is limping.
Perhaps she is in pain: perhaps this explains her unusual sharpness.
This plump, soft, little body, the doctor’s wife, or so it seems to Lily, with her pouter-pigeon chest, and her warm brown eyes, and her brave little smile, is today all sharp edges and disapproval. What’s more, her tights are laddered. Amazing, to achieve ladders in tights made of such tough and sensible stuff, ladder-proof to the point of total if shagged opaqueness. Still, there it is. There they are. Laddered unladderable tights. The doctor’s wife looks a mess, thinks Lily. Not just boring, as she usually does, but dismal.
‘Isn’t your leg properly better yet?’ enquires Lily.
‘It still aches.’
‘What does your husband say?’
‘He doesn’t.’
‘Oh,’ Lily is nonplussed. If Lily has a broken fingernail, Jarvis is all anxiety and concern: Lily, his most precious possession, damaged!
‘He’s very busy—’ apologises Margot, after the fashion of wives.
‘I know a marvellous osteopath—’ Well, Lily would. What a kind and handsome man! It hurts? Poor thing, of course it does. Here, let me help. And a twist and a stretch and a snap, and there we are, some kind of violent muscular orgasm, and ah yes, that’s better, pain is passed, and a dull ache remains, like the memory of a sorry love affair, but how much better than the sharp nagging of desire. Ah yes, Lily knows an osteopath—Jarvis hates her going.
‘By something of value,’ murmurs Lily, ‘I meant, well, antiques, good towels, tablecloths, anything one wouldn’t want to go to Oxfam. Just have a look.’
So off Margot limps to Madeleine’s flat with Hilary lurching and looming beside her. Hilary is going to be as tall as her father, Lily fears. She already is, come to think of it, in the red platform heels.
And here they are now, as evening falls, in this dismal place; Hilary crouched in front of the wardrobe, scuffling through the rubbish left by the partly living. Her head is bent in a way as to remind Margot of someone. Whom? Lettice? No, little neat Lettice has nothing in common with this lumpy, overflowing creature. Something of Laurence, perhaps? Hilary’s hands. Yes, Hilary’s hands are like Laurence’s hands. They are large and red, and chilly knuckled. But that can only be coincidence: Laurence inherits his hands from Philip. Surely.
Hilary’s father’s hands? Jarvis’s fingers? Margot gasps at some sharp pang of memory: there is an indecent fluttering, an awful plucking at her private parts: gone, almost before she’s conscious of it.
Jarvis fifteen years ago had young man’s fingers, forceful, charming: drunken, certainly, but with the nice, the altogether legitimate, inquisitiveness of the young, and whose touch is not, as in an old man’s fingerings, merely to remember.
Oh, I have wasted my life, cries Margot in her heart. I am nearly old and I have known nothing. Only two men in all my life, Jarvis and Philip. I have wasted my youth, the body God gave me, I have muffled it up with respectability and the terror of experience. I have given myself away, for the sake of my children, my husband, my home: I have been the doctor’s wife, mother to the doctor’s children: I have been daughter to Winifred. Is there nothing left of me?
She moans. Hilary turns to look at her, curiously.
‘Don’t you like it down here?’ Hilary enquires. ‘It is rather spooky. Do you think mother’s haunting it? I am a bit frightened. Though why one should be frightened of one’s own mother … We had awful rows sometimes. She’d get angry with me and I’d get angry with her, and that was fine except I’d stop being angry and then I’d feel dreadful, as if there was nothing beneath me to walk on, only a kind of nothingness. I feel a bit like that now. There’s black all around.’
Hilary raises her voice.
‘Mother, mother do you hear me. You had no business dying. Leaving me alone like this.’
‘Quiet,’ begs Margot. ‘Hush.’
‘Leaving me to Lily,’ shrieks Hilary, into the blackness. Then her anger ebbs and she cries instead. ‘It was awful at the pictures last night,’ she complains through her sobs. ‘I couldn’t think of anything to say to Jarvis. I never can. It’s so embarrassing.’
Margot is dizzy. Her breath comes in gasps. Objects round her lose definition. Piles of clothing lie around her like hills in a night landscape.
‘If you want to come and live with me,’ she says, ‘you can.’ And instantly feels better, except for panic fear that Hilary might accept, and then what would she do? What would Philip say? Lettice, Laurence?
‘With you?’ Hilary is bewildered. She stops crying. ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t leave Jonathon. He needs me.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ she adds. ‘You could take the guinea pig. Renee comes in and feeds him, but he needs company.’
The guinea pig stares at Margot with brown button eyes which remind her of her own, and whickers.
‘Of course,’ says Margot. The room is cold and dank. Both of them feel it. Shoes lie littered round her feet. There are the laceups which Madeleine wore for everyday—their laces worn and knotted. There are the sandals with the broken straps, which Margot last saw on Madeleine’s knobbly, ageing, but still living feet.
Madeleine seems not far away.
‘Let’s go,’ says Hilary, standing up. ‘Please let’s go. It’s horrible down here, all of a sudden. It’s not like it used to be one bit. We were quite happy here, really we were.’
‘You go back to Adelaide Row,’ says Margot. ‘I’ll stay here and clear up.’ Though it’s the last thing she wants to do. For once.
Clearing up!
Is it Margot’s instinct, or Margot’s destiny, that leads her always to be Martha to other women’s Mary? Little Margot, sweeping up under Gran’s heavy chair, sifting with tiny deft fingers through the litter of horsehair, apple-cores, orange-peel and sweet papers which lay beneath, while Alice cackled, entertained and ruminated above, jangled gallstones and chumped ill-fitting teeth: was Margot born to it, or led to it? Little Margot, later, clearing up after Winifred’s long scented bath (‘remember, darling, men love a girl to smell sweet’) diving with skinny arms to remove the plug, retrieve the soap, replacing the shampoo top, refolding the towels, mopping up the water.
Was it love she felt, or hate?
Later Winifred would introduce Margot to her men friends as ‘my
little orphaned sister’: well, they felt like sisters: Winifred the pretty one, Margot the plain one: though how, as sisters, Margot could be orphaned and Winifred not, Winifred never explained. But, after all, Winifred was only sixteen when Margot was born: it had always been ridiculous for a girl of Winifred’s age to have a daughter Margot’s age, and the older they both became, the more ridiculous it got. So they settled for sisterhood. Or at any rate Winifred did, and if Margot resented the demotion, the diminutive in title, she did not say so.
Margot’s father was a Battle of Britain pilot, shot down in flames over Sussex Fields, when Margot was just a very little girl. Or so Winifred says, and there was certainly a war widow’s pension to prove it, and a special scholarship for Margot, £5 a term for the clever children of fighting men, killed in action. Otherwise Margot might not have believed it, so much of what Winifred said being so very often untrue.
Margot always tries to tell the exact truth, make up for her mother, in the general scheme of things. Margot, as a child, had the feeling she was born by parthenogenesis: she has no sense at all of having had a father. He is seldom talked about, and if he is, she feels it is nothing to do with her.
Winifred, for all her scented baths, her lying and scheming, her powdered cheeks, brilliant lips, and pointed falsies, did not marry again. She remained husbandless, with all the loneliness and humiliation that that entailed, and Margot remained fatherless; making herself useful, clearing up.
Winifred, mind you, never much cared for sex, and the cause of her enduring widowhood may have lain more in herself than in the callousness of men: though Winifred, in Margot’s memory, brought three suits for breach of promise (and threatened many more) and lost them, every one. Her appearance told against her. Try how she would to look like Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver, she never really managed to look anything other than, at worst, her chomping, clicking, randy old mother’s daughter, or, at best, Margaret Lockwood in The Scarlet Lady.
Now she is nearing sixty; she works in a bookie’s office on the South Coast, powdered and rouged, making out betting slips, and flirting happily with the male customers from behind security bars. Her vision of a leisured old age, supported by a rich son-in-law, has evaporated. She has a vague sense of grievance against Margot, and by and large prefers to forget her existence. Though once a year, over the Easter holiday, Margot takes the children to stay with her, and does Winifred’s spring-cleaning and gives the flat a general going over and cleaning up; and Winifred smiles at Margot, and approves her usefulness.
Clearing up! How gratefully Margot clears up after Philip, Laurence and Lettice. It is her privilege to do so. To have a man, a husband of her own, and children too? Margot never thought it could happen to her. Such riches! She lives in fear lest they evaporate like phantasmagoria, and she finds herself once again living with mother, and gran, and her happiness only a dream, and all her clearing up concerned again with the debris of the past, and not making way for the future.
Oh, backache!
Margot, clearing up, cleaning up, picking up, bending down and putting back. Philip’s dirty socks and Philip’s shoes; Philip’s wallet, always lost: Philip’s memos, here and there; Philip’s tissues, nail-parings, hair-clippings. Well, someone has to do it. He’s a busy man, about more important business than Margot will ever know. Laurence’s dirty socks (earlier, nappies) and Laurence’s ironed shirts: Laurence’s homework, gerbils, pencil-sharpenings, badges, spilt cocoa, sportsgear, shoes. Lettice’s discarded tights (earlier nappies) and Lettice’s pressed blouses, Lettice’s homework, letters, diaries, ointments, drawings, shoes. Well, someone has to do it. Those who are grown must serve those who are growing. And what else has Margot got to do all day, in any case?
And what will she do when they have gone?
Her job? More clearing up, though mostly on a typewriter, and not so hard on the small of the back. Tidying up Jarvis’s assorted notions, and muddled demands on the outside world, translating them into his financial benefit.
Clearing up. It is the task of mothers after children have departed. Now Hilary flees from gloom and inconvenience, leaving Margot behind, ankle-deep in discarded shoes and old clothes. Margot stands by the barred window, until Hilary’s platform heels and solid legs have passed.
And still she stands, and does not bend, her back to the open door, staring out of the window, thinking of she knows not what, out of this world, this time, and then she is conscious of a sound behind her, an intake of breath, and she whirls, expecting to see Madeleine, back to do her own clearing up—but it is Renee, pale and open-mouthed. Curly-haired, pretty, proud. Mary to Margot’s Martha.
‘I thought,’ says Renee, ‘I thought for a moment it was Madeleine. I thought there’d been a mistake, after all. She wasn’t dead.’
‘I don’t look like Madeleine,’ says Margot, the doctor’s wife.
‘You do in this light,’ says Renee. ‘It’s always so dark down here.’
I am Renee, mother of two stolen children. I sort through my days as best I may, vitalised by anger, enriched by hate. I have youth on my side, and beauty, and a vision of a world not yet too old and too tired to change. Not quite. I have my women friends, my pride, my dignity. I walk down the street with my head held high, and my jeans stretched tight; I look over my shoulder, and yes, there they are, the men, sniffing after me, slavering, coarse-jowled, flabby lipped, bald-pated. I spit, I slam the door in their stupid faces; I laugh; one day I’ll get my children back. I am Renee, mother of two, wife to no man, disgusted by men, full of love, passion, generosity: the feel of other women’s breasts upon my fingertips.
I am Renee. Who is this stranger, standing silent in dead Madeleine’s room? I don’t like her. She’s against me. I can always tell. In her navy and white spotted suit from Marks and Spencer, her smug little smile, her neat little hands: she is man’s slavey, she is the enemy. If I stretch out my hand to her, she will recoil. But I am her sister. I will try.
Renee stretches out her hand.
Something happens; oh, events!
Something of Madeleine bursts free from the restraining discourse that surrounds her body, now encoffined and on its way through discreet back streets to lie at the undertaker’s office until the funeral.
Something happens.
A cyclist swerves under the hearse’s wheel; the driver slams on the brakes; the hearse skids into a bollard, turns over, lies on its side like some great black stranded creature: the glass sides shatter, the back doors fly open, Madeleine’s coffin slides out, on to the ground, beneath the wheels of a braking Mini-van: the wood splits, and there Madeleine lies, face upturned to the open sky, eyes open yet again, glittering in street light reflected off the Mini-van’s wing mirror. Well, that must be it. Such dull brown eyes by now, in reality; glassed over like fish for dinner not too freshly caught.
Well, accidents do beget accidents, everyone knows. Ambulances crash on their way to hospital. Fall off a ladder and under a falling tree. While lightning strikes, the milk boils over. So, that week Madeleine was in two road accidents. It’s the way the cookie crumbles.
The cyclist is unhurt, but gives his bicycle away thereafter. Of such occurrences are nightmares made. The driver of the hearse suffers backache for some months after the accident—the whiplash effect compressing the vertebrae of his spine—and presently seeks relief, and finds it, at that same osteopath which Lily recommended to Margot.
An ambulance takes Madeleine back to the mortuary, where Arthur, Clarence and Goliath welcome the body back, with a kind of gloomy pride.
After the injection of his varicose veins, Arthur is supposed to walk at least two miles a day. He spends much time pacing the length of the mortuary, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, until his slippers are quite worn down at heel. No doubt it is the vibration which causes the shrouds to fall yet again from the shelves, and set Clarence and Goliath to their folding and refolding once more.
‘Out visiting,’ observes Clarence to the
shaken Goliath, on Madeleine’s return. ‘You can tell. Close the poor lady’s eyes, Goliath.’
Goliath does so. They spring open again. Goliath turns his back on Madeleine thereafter. He’d rather not see.
At any rate, something happens. Margot sees Renee’s hand, outstretched, with Madeleine’s eyes. The doctor’s wife, Hilary’s mother, does not recoil. She comes closer, takes Renee’s hand and places it on her bosom.
‘I’m clearing up,’ she says in her new gravelly voice, profound as a very good claret. ‘Such a mess.’ Then a feeling of sickness wells up inside her, of suffocation rising up her throat: reality recedes out of colour, into sinking black and white, and then to black and nothingness. Margot faints.
Something happens!
Jonathon whines and plucks at his plaster. Lily removes the dressing and is horrified to see that the affected area has enlarged: it is now not a neat blister, but a big round flat red sore, peeling back at the edges, revealing more flaky layers of skin than Lily knew a child could have, covering the entire side of his heel, from flat of foot to ankle. Lily hastily smothers it with more cream, covers it with the largest plaster she possesses and tries not to think about it.
Of such stuff are many mothers made. Do not blame them.
Something happens!
Enid is at Philip’s evening surgery, demanding an abortion.
I am Enid, Sam’s wife: that’s all I want to be. All the rest is playing games: offices, careers, affairs of state …
‘Babies born late are often the best,’ says Philip. ‘The most beautiful: the best loved.’ What does he know about it?
‘I was a late child myself,’ says Enid. Still am, she thinks. A naughty child. Marrying without permission. Not a real marriage at all: that’s why I have to work so hard at it.