by Fay Weldon
Enid’s executive case is in the waiting room. It contains Ministry files. She hopes it will be safe.
‘You’re a secretary, aren’t you?’ says Philip. ‘You can pick that up again easily enough when the child’s old enough for school.’
‘Yes,’ says Enid.
In five years, thinks Enid, all going well, I’ll be an Undersecretary of State. Sam’s bound to find out. Then what? When I am finally revealed as better than he is? He’ll take up with some dolly bird, I know he will, who never argues, never questions, just lies there and admires.
Panic surges in Enid’s bosom—too small for Sam’s liking. He has a fondness for large breasts. A tit-man, is how he refers to himself. Enid suffers from feelings (she knows) of inadequacy: that is, she endures torments of jealousy: of fear of abandonment, dread lest Sam should have the affair he threatens, and go off, even for a one-night stand, with someone better equipped sexually (in Sam’s terms) than she.
Affairs of state, she wishes to say to Philip, are child’s play compared to the affairs of the home, of Sam, of the intricacies of a marriage and the marriage bed, site for Enid not so much of sex as sleep, but none the less compelling for that; ah, the difference between the man asleep, silent, warm, source of strength and comfort; and the man awake, abusive, demanding, damaging; and yet protective: the sleeping man impossible to abandon: the waking one always on the verge of abandoning.
Do you know all this, she wonders of Philip, her doctor, her friend Margot’s husband, whom she does not particularly like, or do you keep yourself too busy? And if you don’t know, how can I begin to tell you?
‘I want an abortion,’ says Enid. Enid knows Sam. Sam is the child of the household. If deposed, he will fight, sulk, scream, threaten and finally run away.
And I will be left, thinks Enid; Undersecretary of State, abandoned, lonely and bereft, and my parents will be right after all. My mother, with her arthritic hip, in too much pain to garden any more: my father, with his fits of paranoia, his suspicions of the milkman, the gasman, the taxman, my mother, Sam, me. The wrong man for you, they said. How many years? They will not have Sam in the house. I spend my Christmas with them in restless nervousness, turkey and stuffing dry in my mouth—in fear that Sam is with another woman. And knowing this, Sam does nothing to reassure me that he’s not. On the contrary. ‘If you’re going home for Christmas, I’ll just have to console myself as best I can. Well, there’ll be parties.’
Cut my baby out, please, doctor. I can’t stand any more. Just let me get back to work.
Dear God, dear father. I know it’s murder; but it’s murder in self-defence. Please accept my plea. If you were only dear mother, not dear father, you would surely have more compassion.
‘Well,’ says the doctor, ‘I can see you’re upset about it. I’ll send you on for a second opinion. We have to have your husband’s consent, you know, before anyone can do anything for you.’
21
LOOK, WHAT HAVE WE here?
Margot, who should be at home slicing veal-and-ham pie for the children’s tea, sits instead in Renee’s living room, sipping ginger wine from Biba’s, and cries and sobs, with Renee’s smooth bare arms around her. Or rather, Margot reclines, on an ethnic bed of Ethiopian splendour, for there are no chairs in the room, only mattresses and cushions. Margot’s short little legs seem ill-suited here. She touches them under her skirt, and wishes that she was altogether longer, silkier and more sensuous.
Renee’s room, though square and dank in actuality, looking out as it does over grey walls and boilers, is in spirit bright and beautiful. It is a room full of satin cushions, striped silkiness and multi-coloured fringes, scented with incense.
‘What’s the matter?’ implores Renee. ‘Don’t cry. I can’t bear to see women cry. Madeleine wouldn’t want anyone to cry.’
‘She had such a struggle,’ protests Margot, ‘and at the end of it all, nothing.’
‘It’s all any of us get,’ observes Renee, filling up Margot’s glass with ginger wine. Seventy-one pence at Biba’s closing down sale. ‘Nothing. Well, death. If that’s something.’
‘But some of us have a better time on the way.’
‘She could have had,’ says Renee, ‘if she’d wanted. So much of it with Madeleine was wouldn’t; rather than couldn’t. She’d only ever get angry for herself. She didn’t see she had a duty to get angry on everyone else’s behalf. She had no sense of sisterhood. It diminished her as a person.’
‘She was your friend,’ Margot is shocked.
‘I said worse about her when she was alive. And to her face.
‘Dial-a-Date! What a humiliation! If she hadn’t gone whoring off to Cambridge after some man she’d never even seen, she’d be alive now.’
‘It’s hard for a woman to live without a man,’ says Margot.
‘I manage,’ says Renee. ‘A good deal better without one than with one. Are you happy with your husband?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Margot, and the truth is she doesn’t. What’s happiness? Or is she saying it to oblige Renee, that pretty, forceful, laughing girl of principle and moral fibre, whose youthful finger now caresses Margot’s ageing cheek.
Happiness! Margot can’t remember ever feeling she had a right to it.
‘I’ll have to go,’ she says, ‘the children will be wanting supper.’
‘But what do you want?’ enquires Renee. ‘Or don’t you have any wants any more?’
‘I want to stay here,’ says Margot, and so she does.
‘Madeleine would never come to bed with me,’ complains Renee. ‘She wanted to, I know she did; she kept putting it off, and now it’s too late. I don’t know why she kept hankering after men. I would have made her feel warm and happy, and loved. Why didn’t she just buy herself a vibrator?’
‘Vibrators cost money,’ says Margot/Madeleine, and Renee looks startled.
‘You said that just like Madeleine,’ says Renee, and then, hopefully murmuring, as she would to Madeleine, ‘come to bed and you’ll feel better.’
Feel better?
So Margot would, she knows she would; she’d feel much better.
Loved and loving. Margot marvels. The union of like to like, she now perceives would be so serene, so comforting, so unlike the clash of opposites which is all she has ever known; the male-female union which creates new life but nothing much beside, or so Renee would maintain, excepting trouble.
But if her own body is so forbidden, always was, to touch, to see, to know—how much more forbidden must another woman’s be? No, no; she could not, must not. To feel soft female lips against her own? There is too much danger in it. If sensuous pleasure is so easily come by after all; if sexual fulfilment can be so gracefully, privately, gently arrived at, between woman and woman; if love can be without war, without struggle, without the conflict of non-identical interests—this sly, slippery primrose path to happiness is so dangerous, so monstrous, the very sun might hide its face in horror, and the light of the world go out.
Margot hesitates. Madeleine hesitated too, at this juncture, on this bed, where her longer, leaner more contemporary legs were at least better suited. Margot looks at her own neat little feet, her thick-tighted legs, and wonders why she is wearing sandals with a broken strap.
‘I can’t,’ Margot/Madeleine says, and then, with Margot’s reason surging into her and now, with, the spontaneity of newly perceived veracity—‘I’m too ashamed.’
‘Ashamed? Of what?’
‘Of me,’ says Margot. ‘I’m not young any more. My body is fat and flabby. I’m ashamed to let anyone see it.’
Otherwise, would she be the doctor’s wife, content with her seersucker dressing gown? No, she’d be a whore, a courtesan: it was her ambition, as a girl. She told Katriona, no one else.
See! How fear and shame have crippled you. Made you first a nurse and then a wife. Fit to clean up, but not to live. Oh, Margot!
‘If your body’s good enough to receive pleasure,’ says Renee, di
dactic even on her Ethiopian bed, ‘it’s good enough to give it. But I’ll shut my eyes, if you like. I’ll turn out the light. This isn’t war, this is peace. I’m not a man: I don’t get roused by defying my own disgust. I don’t have to be roused, come to that. I just decide what I want to do, to give pleasure. I’m not a man. I don’t want to plunder or loot: I want to love.’
But Margot is longing for the safety of her warm matrimonial bed, sagging in the middle from over-use, thus inclining her husband to herself, from habit and usage, if nothing else.
‘You’re not going to stay, are you,’ complains Renee, her pretty face delicately flushed with passion, her wide blue eyes swimming with tears, ‘I’ve presented myself to you all wrong. I’ve frightened you away, the way I did Madeleine.’
‘Don’t cry,’ says Margot, sadly, ‘don’t cry.’ She knew it was all too good to last: she is in charge again. This child is her junior by some fifteen years. What right did Margot even have to demand comfort from Renee, or to be disappointed now it is no longer forthcoming?
‘I get so lonely and frightened by myself,’ says Renee. ‘It’s all right while the kids are well, and doing all right at school, but if anything goes wrong with them I feel so alone and helpless, I really do. It was something having Madeleine downstairs; she was very strong; and now she’s had to go and get herself killed, and my friend’s gone back to her husband, and I’ve got nobody again. My family don’t like me being gay. They won’t even talk to me, let alone help me. My husband went and told them—he didn’t have to. It’s not that I’m ashamed, but it’s my business, isn’t it? It was all right for him—off at his Rugby Club night and day—but for me it’s meant to be something disgusting, making me so dreadful I’m not even fit to look after my own children?’
Oh, I am Renee, making the most of things. Offering love, receiving love as best I may. I am Renee, my parents’ daughter, disappointed in the world and in myself.
‘If there was something I could do,’ says Renee, her head in Margot’s bosom, like Lettice when she has a pain. ‘Write or paint or sculpt, or something. But there’s not. I’m too stupid. All I can do is love. You have such a beautiful face,’ says Renee, her little fingers moving over Margot’s surprised mouth, eyes, temples. ‘You shouldn’t have died and left me alone. I offered you something and you turned away. You hurt me very much, you don’t know how much.’
‘Never mind,’ says Margot/Madeleine, ‘never mind,’ and lets Renee’s timorous yet insistent fingers unbutton the sturdy Marks and Spencer buttons, and the sleek C & A zips.
Does Renee, in the warm half dark, see, feel Madeleine’s face, breasts, body? Margot, her eyes shut, unclothed, warm and at peace, pleasured by Renee’s familiar, practised hands, has at any rate the confidence of the body which was Madeleine’s—which, though worn and tired, believed until the end that it had some gift to offer.
Margot’s hands reach out to embrace, explore, and offer understanding. Or are they Madeleine’s hands?
Margot the doctor’s wife, mother of the doctor’s children, lying with the doctor in the familiar warmth of the doctor’s bed, will wait patiently for the doctor to turn to her. Yes, she would say, if asked, ‘the doctor and I have a good sex life’. And so they have. If doctors can’t, who can?
But this drowsy, seductive activity, this fringed and slippery, scented room, all this is no real part of Margot’s desire. She can put up with the expectation of orgasm, but not its reality. The sudden upsurge of fulfilment, so banal in retrospect, upsets her vision of herself, and what her purposes in life should be.
‘I must go home,’ she says. ‘I really must, I want to.’
And so she does.
‘Will I see you again?’ asks Renee, like the little girl she is.
‘Please can I come to tea next week?’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Margot, wondering what she’s been doing, who she’s been, why she’s here, how she ever had the courage to do what she has done.
‘Never mind,’ says Renee, who seems quite cheerful again, wandering around the room naked, in the confidence of her physical perfection (much as Lettice will in the privacy of her bedroom) lighting joss sticks, brewing jasmine tea. ‘It was a kind of celebration of Madeleine, that was all. We did it for her.’
And so it was, and so they did.
22
ORDINARY LIFE!
Philip, Lettice and Laurence. Think of them, gain strength from them. Widowed Winifred, Margot’s mother. The doctor’s cat, pacing through the undergrowth. Veal-and-ham pie. Piles of ironing, piles of dishes. Backache. Her own face in the mirror, friendly and familiar. Margot’s face.
Not so ordinary death!
Madeleine is transported once again to the undertakers. Clarence waves her corpse goodbye, to Arthur’s disapproval.
‘See you soon, darling,’ calls Clarence. ‘Bon voyage.’ And then, turning to Arthur, ‘What a lively lady! I hope she has fun at the undertakers.’ And Arthur says dourly, ‘I don’t know what they teach you at school nowadays, but it’s certainly not respect for the dead. Help me with the shrouds, will you. You’ve left them lying about again.’
And so he has, or someone has.
Ordinary life!
I don’t think there’s anything in the flat worth saving,’ says Margot to Lily, the next day. ‘I think it should all go to Oxfam.’
‘No sheets or blankets? Towels, tablecloths? You know what a price they are.’
‘Lily,’ says Margot, suddenly and firmly. ‘You can’t possibly use Madeleine’s sheets. It would be indecent. Jarvis would never stand it.’
‘He wouldn’t know,’ says Lily, defiantly. ‘Look, I’m just trying to be practical and save my housekeeping money. Everyone gets so stupid about death. It always seems to me it was perfectly all right to be the dead person, just fairly awful for the ones left behind. And I don’t see that death is any excuse for waste. Well, I give up. Oxfam can clear the lot. Who cares, anyway?’
But she does, deeply. She wants everything of Madeleine’s she can get hold of, now as always.
Margot is limping again. Hilary has shut herself in Jonathon’s room, and is crying. Jonathon’s heel is red and sore. Jarvis’s shares are dropping fast.
Madeleine lies with her eyes open, in a rather expensive yew-wood coffin, to be paid for by Jarvis, out of money set aside for Lily’s new stair carpet. Her dull eyes glitter in light reflected from God knows where.
Ordinary life. Extraordinary death.
23
LILY TAKES JONATHON DOWN to the clinic to have his poor little foot looked at. The ankle is quite swollen now, or so Lily swears. Though it looks much like his other ankle, both to Jarvis and to Margot.
Margot, bending over Jonathon’s foot, brushes against Jarvis by mistake. And a kind of electric shock runs through her from her head to her toe. Does he really not remember her? No. And she has so patiently worked here and waited, hardly knowing what she was doing. Plump Margot, the doctor’s wife, bearing secret grudges?
Oh, spite.
Jarvis walks his house and thinks of Madeleine.
Here she sat, and there she talked, and now she’s gone.
Death makes a firm dividing line between the present and the past. Then they were, and now they aren’t. And the knife slides firmly into the home-baked cake, dividing. This side, that side, then and now. There, see—isn’t that real enough for you? And you were beginning to think, weren’t you, that experience slipped along in some kind of continual stream, more or less under your control, at your behest. That’ll teach you. Before death, after death. Now you see them, now you don’t.
Life’s still one long lesson, it turns out. With a slap and a cuff every now and then, to help you keep your wits about you.
Jarvis prowls his elegant home. What he wanted, and yet not so. This house makes demands; it’s querulous. ‘What next?’ it asks. The old one sulked and muttered, ‘That’s enough. That’s all. Let me alone.’
Perhaps the old
one was preferable.
Here in the bathroom is the mirror in which Madeleine once stared. Then the mirror hung from a cup hook screwed into the plaster—to the great detriment of the wall—above a crazed washbasin. Now the mirror is set neatly in blue and white tiles; its frame is properly gilded; and Lily’s neat teeth, not Madeleine’s long, yellowy ones, are bared in its reflection.
Madeleine’s mirror, all the same. Once, one morning, when she stood looking into it, her lean body outlined beneath her thin nightie, young Jarvis, twenty-nine that day, came up behind her and took her, standing up, to her surprise. He remembers now the look on her face, watching it in the mirror for his own satisfaction—the mouth parted, the eyes closed and trembling slightly beneath the lids; Madeleine lost to herself; more herself than ever before or since.
Good deeds, harsh words.
What happened next? What next? Jarvis cannot remember. They were giving a party: he remembers that. He planned to make punch over four gas rings in the basement. Madeleine said punch should not be boiled: Jarvis said it made no difference. Of such ridiculous differences are dreadful quarrels made. Then Jarvis wanted Madeleine to dress up (as she described it) and more, to wear a bracelet he had bought her. Madeleine said that was ridiculous. She didn’t like going to parties; she didn’t know why she was giving this one. Parties! What was the point? The only point there’d ever been was to attract other men. And all that belonged to her past. Perhaps it was different for him? Perhaps he wasn’t satisfied with her? Jarvis, irritated, said what was marriage anyway? Prison? How could he have said it, with the look of her face in the mirror so freshly with him: his wife, Madeleine, still wet and slippery from Jarvis’s so pleasantly and suddenly fulfilled desire?
Easily, easily said, and easily done, by Jarvis, Poppy’s son. Jarvis, with his young man’s fear of commitment and most especially to his wife, mother of his child.