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.
‘Help me out, dear. Daffs at fifty, heather at ten. Lucky heather from bonny Scotland.’
Madeleine takes two sprigs of heather and parts with twenty pence out of the milk money.
‘Never mind,’ says Madeleine from her heart. ‘Never mind. Good times will come again. Or at any rate we had them once.’
And so they will, and so she did. Once Madeleine woke up singing. When she was pregnant with Hilary she even sang in her sleep. Jarvis heard her. Once Jarvis loved Madeleine, drew back chairs for her, brought her tea when she was tired; held her hand in the cinema: scowled at her admirers: brought her yellow daffodils fifty at a time.
Bad times come, but can’t undo the past. Mostly they come when we are ill, and old, and dying. Few of us die with dignity, or without pain. But how we once lived; when we were young! How we laughed!
‘I’ll tell your fortune,’ says the gipsy, drawing Madeleine’s strong, worn hand into her own red, dirty one, but Madeleine pulls it back.
‘I’ll do it cheap,’ says the gipsy. ‘You’re a kind lady. You’ve got a lucky face.’
‘No,’ says Madeleine. She is frightened. She looked into her own future, at the gipsy’s touch, and saw nothing but blackness. Well, she is depressed. That is what depression is, Madeleine thinks. The looking forward to blackness. Surely.
Good morning!
The gipsy goes. Madeleine goes down to her room to stand beside the sink, motionless, unable to make order out of the chaos of chipped and dirty china.
I am Madeleine, first wife of Jarvis, Hilary’s mother. I am Madeleine, thorn in Lily’s white soft flesh.
Lily, the second wife, Margot’s employer.
The doctor wakes, late. Margot is up: he can hear the sound of breakfast. The doctor closes his eyes again. These are the moments of the day he most values, when he is most himself and least the doctor. It is in these minutes, the doctor knows, these minutes between waking and sleeping, that the events of the past, of infancy and childhood, churned to the surface by the fragmented memory of dreams, lose their haphazard nature and make some kind of pattern; effecting, with luck, some small improvement in our nature, loosening the grip of resentment,
