building on the impacted rubble of the past, we construct the delicate filaments of the present. Or so the doctor thinks.
The doctor’s breathing becomes ragged, anxious. Eavesdrop: listen.
Oh, I am the doctor. There is no one to help me. All night the insomniacs have held me in their thoughts. Now, as the minutes advance, it is the waking sick who direct their thoughts towards me. I can feel them. See, doctor, my fingernail is septic: my throat is sore; I am feverish: my eye is blacked and you, doctor, must witness my wrongs. I have cancer, VD, psittacosis, anything, everything. It is Monday, day after Sunday, family day.
I am the doctor, little father to all the world, busiest of all on Mondays, the day after Sunday.
Up gets the doctor, Philip Bailey, Margot’s husband. He puts on a suit. He has to; he is the doctor. Once he was twenty-eight inches about the waist, now, with the passage of time and the arrival of the metric system, he is ninety-eight centimetres.
The doctor is forty-five years old. He has the stocky build and freckled face of some cheerful summer child. In the last couple of years the doctor’s skin, once so soft and pliable, has seemed to toughen and harden, lines are etching deep into his flesh and will go deeper still.
As Enid’s husband Sam, the estate agent, unkindly observed at a party, Philip is like a stale French cheese, growing old before it has matured, hardening inside, cracking round the edges.
All the same, on a good day Philip looks fifteen years younger than he is. It would be unreasonable to suppose Philip stopped growing older the day he married Margot, but Margot likes to suppose it. Margot is a good wife: she allows her husband to sap her energy and youth, and tax her good nature, and feels no resentment; or thinks she does not.
Philip stretches and bends his fingers, limbering them up for the day. Margot does not like her husband’s hands.
They express something his face and body do not; some stony, hidden aspiration away from her, Margot, his wife. The doctor’s hands are stiff, knuckly and red: their palms are bloodless and lightly lined. But his patients seem to trust them, which is just as well. With these hands the doctor manipulates their joints, presses into their vital organs, searches into their orifices, their dark and secret parts, judging them ill or well, good or bad, worthy of life or deserving death. With these hands, pulling down magic from the air, the doctor writes his runes, his indecipherable prescriptions for health.
Dislike his hands at your peril. You will not get better if you do.
Breakfast! Bon appétit! If you can.
The manner of the breakfast declares the aspiration of the family. Some breakfast standing, some sitting, some united in silence, some fragmented in noisiness and some, as in a television commercial, seeming to have all the time and money and goodwill in the world; and some in gloomy isolation. It is the meal at which we betray ourselves, being still more our sleeping than our waking selves.
Picture now the doctor’s household this Monday morning, breakfasting according to ritual in the large back kitchen. Philip, the father, bathed, shaved, dressed, apparently benign, eats bacon and eggs delicately prepared by Margot, reads the Guardian she has placed beside his plate, and ignores the other members of his family as best he can. At eight forty-five his receptionist Lilac will arrive, and open his mail, and prepare his appointment cards. At nine the doctor will rise, put down his paper, peck his wife, nod to his children and go through to the surgery to attend to the needs of the world. Lettice and Laurence sit opposite each other. Lettice is thirteen, neat, pretty, and precise, with her mother’s build and round, regular face, but without her mother’s overwhelming amiability. If the mother were unexpectedly to bare a breast, it would surely be in the interests of some cosmic medical examination. If the daughter did so, who would doubt her erotic intent? Laurence is a dark and looming boy of fourteen, with a bloodless, troubled complexion and a bony body, as if his father’s hands had at last found expression in a whole person. There is little other resemblance between them.
Listen now to their outer voices, their conversations, their riddles, comprehended only by themselves, the secret society that composes the family.
1 LETTICE: Dad, can I have the middle of the paper?
2 DAD: What for?
3 LETTICE: To read.
4 DAD: You are a nuisance.
5 LAURENCE: Mum, I haven’t got a fork.
6 MARGOT: Sorry, dear. I’ll get one … But why do you need a fork, if you’re only eating cereal?
7 LAURENCE: Sorry. So I am.
8 LETTICE: Why don’t we ever have unsweetened cereal?
9 MARGOT: Because no one eats it.
10 LETTICE: I do. The sweetened is fattening, anyway, and not worth the extra money. It said so in Which. I think we should have unsweetened and add our own sugar.
11 LAURENCE: Lettice, you are not the centre of the universe.
12 LETTICE: I know that. The sun is.
13 LAURENCE: You are wrong. The sun is a star of average size which is itself revolving, with thousands of millions of other stars, in one galaxy among millions in a universe that might well be boundless. If you travelled at the speed of light – 186,300 miles a second, that is – it would take 6,000 million years – about 20,000 times the total period that life has existed on earth, to travel only to the limits of what we can observe from earth with our very limited technology.
14 LETTICE: So what?
15 LAURENCE: So nothing matters.
And Laurence helps himself to the last of the honey-coated wheat puffs, the creamy top of the milk, and adds the last scrape of the marmalade in the jar for good measure.
These domestic riddles can be thus translated:
1 LETTICE: Dad, take notice of me and my changing needs.
2 DAD: (cautious) What kind of need?
3 LETTICE: Don’t worry. Merely intellectual. All the same, I am growing up.
4 DAD: Oh dear. More change.
5 LAURENCE: Father is taking notice of Lettice again. Mother, will you please take some notice of me? My needs are not being properly met.
6 MARGOT: Perhaps I have been rather remiss. On the other hand, I don’t actually want to have to get to my feet on your behalf. Do you insist, my dear? We have a good relationship, you and I.
7 LAURENCE: Quite. It’s the thought that counts. Thank you.
8 LETTICE: Mother, father cares for me but I’m not so sure about you.
9 MARGOT: I have so very many people to look after.
10 LETTICE: I knew it. You want me to be plain and ugly and fat; and what’s more I’m a better housekeeper than you, so there.
