Hilary’s hair is cut. Snip snip snip by a bored young man, to the house style. On the floor lie the damp tresses that Madeleine took such trouble to encourage, attempting to disguise her daughter from a hostile world. Hilary’s puffy face emerges with dreadful clarity. Even the young man pauses; but style is all. Either people can carry it off or they can’t. If they can’t, they shouldn’t come here.
‘What about cutting yours, Lady Katkin,’ he asks, ‘or is it just colour today?’
‘Just colour,’ says Lily, eyeing Hilary’s hair with increasing nervousness. She is always taken aback by the products of her own malice. ‘We’ll leave the length for today.’ Lily always gives her name at the desk as Lady Katkin. Thus she is assured of quick service and good manners. Everyone else does it, anyway, she is quite sure.
I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I am a Princess by right. Didn’t my father always tell me so?
At his playgroup, Jonathon, too bold, falls off the climbing frame but is soon comforted: and climbs again, too bold, and falls again. Many children break their limbs on climbing frames, but Jonathon falls easily, and is lucky. He is young to be at playgroup but Lily pleaded his sociable nature, and the organisation were persuaded. He does not climb the frame again. He makes a puddle on the floor instead. Lily has persuaded herself that Jonathon is dry and no longer needs nappies, but Jonathon and the playgroup organisers know better. Now they put nappies on him. When Lily collects him she will take them off and find them dry. I really don’t understand them, she will complain to Jarvis.
‘Nappies? They want Jonathon to conform to their image of a two and a half year old, that’s all. Poor lamb! What an indignity!’
Jarvis finishes reading The Times, and turns to The Telegraph. He should, he knows, use his increasing amount of free time to study, or learn a language, or even sculpt, as once it was his talent, his privilege, his pleasure to do; but, of course, he does none of these things. He reads the newspapers instead. Lunchtime approaches; and with it the encouragement of the daily bottle of wine which Lily does not know that Jarvis drinks. It is Jarvis’s secret knowledge that wine is not fattening. On the contrary, by stirring up the metabolism, it somehow consumes its own calories. Jarvis has lost forty-two pounds in weight in the last two years; Jarvis begins to fear for the roots of his being. If the surface is so depleted, can the core be left untouched? Jarvis might die. And what would happen to Lily then?
And why does she want so little of him, anyway? Sometimes Jarvis suspects Lily’s motives towards him. His stepfather, the stockbroker, frequently accused his mother of trying to poison him for his inheritance – or was it the insurance? It was said as a joke, when the stockbroker put spoon to mouth, and it contained his least favourite celery soup, but nevertheless, the spirit of the remark made sense enough to the assembled children.
Margot types a letter, on Jarvis’s behalf, in Jarvis’s home, at Jarvis’s desk. He picked up the desk at an auction for only £2.10, in the days when the ten meant 50p; it is massive, oak, Germanic, and elaborately carved, so that Margot’s knees are imprinted with the shapes of leaves and birds and foxes, and would now fetch some £400, Jarvis had been reliably informed by an antique dealer, who nevertheless will only give him £75 for the same. Margot is an excellent typist, being sensitive to the needs of others. When she has finished, she will pick up Jonathon from playgroup. Most of the letters are on the same theme:
Dear Jerry, How are things? I am sorry to bother you at a time like this but if you could see your way to even part payment—
Too bold!
Jarvis, who in the past, was frequently employed by his friends, no longer seems to have many friends left.
—and the doorbell rings.
Madeleine stands on the doorstep of the house which was once her home.
Oh, I am Madeleine, the first wife, the real wife, standing once again at my own front door. Look! Double glazing and window boxes: pretentious. The plaster in fresh two-toned beige: revolting. A giant gold K upon the stripped pine door. K for Katkin. Jokey. But the age of jokes has passed – do neither Mr K nor the new Mrs K realise that? The gap is narrowing between them and me, between the blessed and the damned. Long live the revolution. Long live me.
Once this was a proper home: a place where Jarvis, Madeleine and Hilary Katkin lived: it was then a place of safety, the suitable background to their lives. Workaday and practical. Now look at it! It is a monument of sickly self-esteem. And see, they’re growing ivy over the dustbin alcove: why bother? What a waste of time and life. My dustbins were of battered, honest, rusty tin, much impacted with old food along the bottom seams; hers are plastic, clean and lined with polythene. She’d move house if she saw a maggot. I rather liked to see them squirming there, monument to our essential corruption.
And where is she, sickly Lily, the bitch? What has she done with my daughter? I am Madeleine, first wife, come to give the second wife what-for.
Margot opens the door. Madeleine steps inside, brushing past her. Madeleine smells oddly sweet, as if to compensate for the sourness of her mind.
Oh, I am sour, I am Madeleine, the first wife to Jarvis. This is my house, if there were any justice in the world, which there is not, only solicitors, and his are better than mine. What has the second wife done to my ordinary front hall with ordinary lino on the floor and stairs? Lined it with mirrors and hung it with plants; built out the back, lost the broom cupboard, gained a patio? Does Jarvis the man walk into this decorator’s absurdity of an evening? Does he remain a man? Or does he pace like a poodle? How far, how disastrously, we have progressed from the hunter’s cave, and to what? To nonsense?
‘What a dreadful place,’ says Madeleine to the stolid little body who opens the door. ‘I know now why I haven’t bothered to see it before. No wonder Hilary gets sick every Friday. It’s the thought of Saturday and Sunday.’
Madeleine! thinks Margot. Madeleine the ogre, the vampire, looking not so much dangerous as dirty and depressed. Madeleine, whom Margot once wronged, or would have done, in a world where women felt a sense of sisterhood, and not of competition. Madeleine brought down, reduced, humbled by life and Lily.
‘It’s quite pretty,’ says Margot mildly. ‘You should have seen it before.’
‘I did,’ says Madeleine sourly. Yes, of course. Madeleine once lived here. And here, under this very roof, Jarvis betrayed her. ‘Of course when I was with Jarvis he wouldn’t spend a penny on a new electric fire. Mean! Well, you’ll know what he’s like. You’re the secretary. Where’s Hilary? I know Lily’s taken Hilary. I’ve been to the school. What does she mean to do? Take out her white teeth and put in gold?’
‘They’ve gone to the hairdresser,’ says Margot unwisely, ‘not the dentist.’
Madeleine’s anger is mitigated by the gratification of finding Lily in the wrong, but she is nonetheless angry. ‘She took my daughter out of school to take her to the hairdresser? She told my daughter’s teachers lies?’ Madeleine sits down. Her toenails are dirty: her sandal-strap repaired with a nappy pin. Madeleine’s next sentences ought to be: ‘I’ll go to my solicitor. I’ll claim custody, care and control. Hilary shall never come to this house again.’ But Madeleine values her peaceful weekends: her Saturday and her Sunday, minus Hilary, marked
