When Madeleine and Jarvis lived at 12 Adelaide Row it had no such social, aesthetic and emotional distinction. It was an ordinary house, practical and ugly. In Madeleine’s day, Jarvis’s talents never bloomed. How could they? Madeleine made no concessions to the beauties of the material world. Tat and junk, she’d say, trendy rubbish, vicious Victoriana, and millions starving in Ethiopia, or burning in Vietnam, wherever the season’s human ulcer happened to manifest itself; can’t you, Jarvis, turn your mind to anything more serious than a rotten old sampler badly embroidered by some miserable child in 1825? If you want to throw your money away, give it to Shelter and help house the homeless.
Because you are unhappy, Madeleine, shall there be no small delights for Jarvis?
No, there shan’t.
And Jarvis earned £5,000 a year as an architect, at a time when the sum meant something, but even this Madeleine could not approve. Shouldn’t you be a council architect, she’d ask? Shouldn’t you be turning your undoubted talent to some useful end? Instead of designing ridiculous modern villas on insanitary sunny slopes for ex-whores, property developers and other social criminals?
And so of course Jarvis should, and he knew it, which made matters worse. Madeleine was always right.
Nonetheless, as Lily later pointed out, Madeleine used the money Jarvis earned at his immoral tasks. Madeleine went on countless coach holidays with little Hilary, leaving Jarvis behind at the office, earning; and believing (as they both did; well, at any rate, she did) in the immorality of sexual possessiveness, Madeleine passed many a stopover night (or so it was imagined by Jarvis, and later Lily) in bed with the current courier; exercising her sexual rights in bleak bedrooms overlooking the teeming roads of Europe and the East. Madeleine even went as far as Turkey once, and heaven knows what oriental sexual athleticism that didn’t lead to! And what happened to little Hilary, alone (or so one hopes) in the next bedroom? How did little Hilary regard her mother’s quest for fun and self-expression; returning from abroad, as she would, even yet sulkier, blanker, and snottier than when she left? Hilary’s mind not so much broadened, as stunned.
Poor Jarvis, poor father.
Oh, I am Lily, the architect’s wife. I want Jarvis to be happy, to be himself, to be with me. I even want Hilary, Jarvis’s child. I want Hilary to be happy too, to make up for all the things she’s lost, all the things Madeleine has taken from her. I want to show everyone what a truly successful person I am: wife, daughter, mother, stepmother. Sister? No, don’t think of that.
Lily waits for Margot to arrive. Lily, waiting, telephones the hairdresser, and makes an appointment for that very morning, to have her own and Hilary’s done. It had not, until now, been her firm intention to do so, more a speculation for Jarvis’s benefit. Margot’s lateness, and the irritation it causes, drives Lily to action. Once done, she regrets it; how is she going to fit everything in? Too late now.
The milk, forgotten, would have boiled over if it hadn’t been prudently placed to heat (if slowly) on the simmer plate. Lily always puts the milk on the simmer plate.
Good Lily!
And here we are at last. The Victorian doorbell rings and here is Margot the doctor’s wife; she is late; she is breathless, but she is here. She has no key. Lily is very retentive of front-door keys. And her coffee is ready.
See, how hospitable, how tolerant, how understanding of the needs of others am I? Lily the architect’s wife! The servant is late and I’m giving her coffee!
Alas, the milk has turned in the pan. The coffee is undrinkable. Lily and Margot unite in deploring a world now so crassly run that the very milk is delivered to the door half-sour, or what passes for sour in these days of homogenisation, sterilisation and so on. A new cup of coffee is made, with different milk.
‘I was wondering,’ asks Lily, at last, ‘if you could possibly take Jonathon to playgroup today?’
These two women do not compose a family: they are not a secret society: there is little need for riddles. Lily (in her white cheesecloth Laura Ashley dress, unspotted by breakfast) can ask Margot (in her navy C & A skirt and pink fluffy M & S jumper) a straight question and get a straight reply.
‘Of course,’ says Margot. ‘Since it’s Monday. Invoice day. I’ll get those done with no trouble.’ There are, this month, some twenty per cent fewer invoices than there were in the same month a year ago. Lily is quite right to assume that Jarvis and his partners in architecture are in difficulties. There has been a twenty per cent redundancy in their staff, a twenty per cent inflation during the year, and twenty per cent drop in business. Lily lies awake at night, just occasionally worrying about it all, but Jarvis does not.
Jarvis has an inheritance; private means. How exotic, Lily used to feel, when first she met him, this simple fact. Jarvis’s inheritance. Later she came to see it as something which stood between Jarvis and the proper acceptance of reality – by which she meant, of course, herself. Once or twice she has even complained of having been seduced by his past. No one in New Zealand had inheritances. It seemed to be symptomatic of the English.
‘I’m going to take Hilary to have her hair cut,’ Lily announces. ‘It’s such a mess.’
‘Is she off school?’ enquires Margot. Margot feels tenderly protective towards Hilary, this ugly duckling in a household of swans.
‘I’ll take her out of school,’ says Lily. ‘No hassle. She only has swimming this morning and I’m sure she’s forgotten her things anyway. I’ll tell anyone who asks that she’s going to the dentist. But they won’t ask. They won’t know and even if they did they won’t care. Hilary is totally anonymous in that place. Two thousand five hundred children in a school; what madness! Comprehensive! My husband was quite prepared to send Hilary to a private school, but of course Madeleine has her principles, for which poor little Hilary has to pay the price.’
Lily likes to emphasise, when she can, the fact of Jarvis’s basic generosity towards his first family. Jarvis rashly leaves letters from his ex-wife’s solicitors for Margot to open and deal with; Lily wishes he wouldn’t.
‘I may be delayed,’ Lily murmurs. ‘You know what hairdressers are like. Do you have to leave sharp at twelve thirty? I was wondering whether you could possibly collect Jonathon at twelve forty-five?’
Margot, the implication is, has arrived late and so in all fairness should surely stay late.
‘The children come home for lunch,’ says Margot. ‘I must have it ready.’
‘Don’t they have school dinner?’
‘They don’t care for them.’
Silence. What, children thus unregulated and untramelled? Jonathon, better brought up, always eats what is set before him.
‘Personally, I never eat lunch,’ says Lily, blandly. ‘So bad for the figure.’
I live a good and useful life, murmurs stocky Margot in her heart. I would be ashamed to go hungry in order to be beautiful. Is there something wrong with me? No. I am a good and serviceable person, wife and mother. My reward is in my children’s love of me, and mine in them; and my soft, familiar, permanent bed. I am a nice person. Your husband, yes your husband, told me so many years ago. He has forgotten – at least I hope he has – but I have not, and true he was drunk at the time, and married to Madeleine, which may have distorted his judgment, but Jarvis told me then that he preferred nice girls to
