Fay Weldon - Remember Me

Poor Jarvis.

A brown guinea pig in a cage on the table, staring and snuffling, eats every morning what Sugar Puffs Madeleine and Hilary leave. Hilary picks up old cabbage leaves and vegetation from the street market on her way home from school to provide his evening meal: so the pig can be said not just to cost little, but to save waste on a national level.

Madeleine’s back room looks out on to a damp and sunless London garden, to which only the top floor tenants have access. In this room are Madeleine’s double bed and Hilary’s camp bed, and their wardrobe and their piles and piles of washing. Madeleine and Hilary are the recipients of countless articles of cast-off clothing, which they neither care to wear, let alone wash, or can bear to throw away.

So they lie about in heaps ankle deep.

Madeleine pays £5.23 a week rent (a sum fixed by the Rent Officer) and receives from Jarvis maintenance of £20 a week for herself and Hilary. Once this sum seemed lavish. Now inflation makes it a dubious means of support, although it still looms large enough in Lily’s mind. (Twenty pounds? Lily’s father the butcher brought home fifteen and that was at the height of his career as the best butcher in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand.) Madeleine should go out to work; Madeleine will not for ever be able to put off doing so. But why should she earn? To salve Jarvis’s conscience? To enable Lily to buy even more expensive little pairs of white French socks for baby Jonathon’s tender, much resented feet? No. And how can she earn? Hilary comes home from school, and needs a mother. Hilary’s school holidays last for four months of every year. Fathers such as Jarvis don’t stop work on a child’s account. Mothers such as Madeleine are expected to.

Listen now, carefully, to their conversation. Madeleine and Hilary talk in riddles, as families do, even families as small and circumscribed as this one, using the everyday objects of life as symbols of their discontent.

1 HILARY: Mum, I can’t find my shoes again.

2 MADELEINE: ( looking ) They’ll be where you took them off. ( Finding ) Here they are.

3 HILARY: Not those old brown things. My new red ones.

4 MADELEINE: You can’t possibly wear these to school. They’re ridiculous. They’ll cripple your feet.

5 HILARY: No they won’t. Everyone else wears platforms.

6 MADELEINE: In that case, everyone else will be going round in plaster casts, and serve them right.

7 HILARY: You only don’t like them because Lily bought them for me.

8 MADELEINE: I don’t like them because they’re ugly and ridiculous.

9 HILARY: I can’t find the other ones, and I’m late. Please, mum. They’re my feet.

Which, being translated, is—

1 HILARY: Why is this place always such a mess?

2 MADELEINE: Why are you such a baby?

3 HILARY: You know nothing about me.

4 MADELEINE: I know everything about you.

5 HILARY: I want to be like other people.

6 MADELEINE: Other people aren’t worth being like.

7 HILARY: I know all about you, don’t think I don’t.

8 MADELEINE: You force me to tell the truth. Our whole situation is ugly and ridiculous and I despair of it.

9 HILARY: Then let me find my own way out of it, please.

So Hilary defeats her mother, as the children of guilty mothers do, and goes off to school wearing the red shoes with platform heels; she trips over them in the Humanities lesson and cricks her ankle, and pulls a video tape machine from a shelf to the floor in so doing, and does £115 worth of damage. The headmistress subsequently attempts to ban all platform heels from the school, and fails.

Once Hilary has left, Madeleine goes back to bed, and half sleeps until half past ten, when she gets up, makes herself some instant coffee, sweeps the floors vaguely and washes up badly; and peers up through the area bars into the dusty brightness of the streets, wondering what there is in the outside world that others find so animating, and that keeps them so ceaselessly busy.

Madeleine, sweeping and dusting, thinks, feels, hurts, tries. Listen. Madeleine’s inner voices cajole, comfort, complain, encourage, in equal measure.

Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife. I am the victim. I have right on my side. It makes me strong. I feed on misery. But I no longer have the strength to be unhappy, not all the time. It has been going on too long. Days drift into weeks, and weeks into months. Three years since Jarvis married Lily, two since she had her brat. Even so, every morning for an hour or so, this sick and angry misery. It tenses my muscles; this, or something, gives me fibrositis. Bile rises in my mouth and burns my throat. I keep myself still and silent by an act of will, when the only thing to give me peace would be to search out Jarvis, waylay him, attack him, mutilate him; shriek and scream and by the very dread-fulness of my behaviour, flying in the face of my own nature, which he knows so well, so well, demonstrate how much, how very much, he has hurt me, damaged me, destroyed me. I want Jarvis to acknowledge the wrong he has done me. I want him to love me again. I want to burn down Jarvis’s home, my home, and Lily and Jonathon with it. Jonathon, the son I should have had; never will have. And that would be an end to them and it and me and everything, and thank God for his eternal mercy.

Courage, Madeleine!

If I wait, if I lie quite still, warding off, fending, pretending that these attacks of what? Of hate? Madness? come from outside me, have been sent by the devil or his equivalent, and do not arise (as I know they must) from within me, being as they are the sum of every fear and sorrow, rage and despair I have ever felt, ever known; if I forbid myself to move, to act, to pick up the telephone; then the rage passes. I breathe more easily. The pain in my shoulder disperses. Then the rest of the day is mine. The devil is off tormenting someone else; he won’t be back until tomorrow, with a fresh set of mirrors, to tease, exalt and magnify my wrongs. Alas, the devil, once departed, leaves me not so much unhappy as dazed, and worn out, and fit for nothing. My vision still looks inward, not outward. I can wash and dry the dishes, but not get them back on to the shelves. I can sweep the dirt from the floor into a heap, but not get the dust into the pan. The gardens are full of late roses, Hilary tells me, and beautiful. I cannot see them.

The doorbell rings.

Good morning!

Madeleine cranes up through the basement bars to see who’s at the door, sees familiar broken shoes, stocky, wide-apart legs, a thin uneven hem, a basket of flowers, shaking as does the red hand which holds it. Madeleine draws back into the gloom, hiding. It’s the gipsy.

Good morning!

Madeleine’s flat is stuck with withered sprigs of heather, held in twists of tinfoil, bought weekly from the gipsy’s basket. Ten pence the sprig. Dried heather flowers drift into cups of tea, settle in hair, cluster like dead insects in the corners of the room. No one wants to keep them. No one likes to throw them away, in case they’re throwing away luck.

What luck?

Good morning! The bell goes again, harsh and reproachful. ‘I know you’re in there, hiding.’ Madeleine gives up, emerges into the light, goes upstairs, answers the bell. The gipsy’s plump round face is purple with cold, exhaustion and ill health. Her teeth are black and broken. A coat strains across her overfed body. Sweet tea and sugar buns. She has tears in her eyes, and not, as Madeleine prays, from conjunctivitis, or as a result of the cold wind, but because she has indeed been crying. Her husband has a bad heart; the hospital has sent her son-in-law home to die; her nephew has lost a leg from TB of the bone. The fares from Epping, where she lives, to Muswell Hill, where the habit of years, rather than common sense, still leads her, now exceed her takings.