LITMIR.BIZ

       10

      Be bold!

      Madeleine, returning home, finds a letter from a computer-dating firm, giving the name and telephone number of a Mr Arthur Quincey of Cambridge as a possible marital contact. (See how Madeleine, clinging to the past, still scrabbles for a future?) Mr Quincey is described in the letter as being forty-three years old, tall, slim, dark, Anglo-Saxon, well-educated, owning own house and having no objection to slim dark lady under forty with own child. Madeleine rings the Cambridge number: a landlady fetches Mr Quincey; Madeleine finds she has agreed to be in Cambridge, yes, Cambridge, at seven thirty that evening in order to be taken to the pictures. Mr Quincey’s voice has a quiet, wheedling insistence; she recognises it as the voice of the male in the grip of sexual desperation, whose determination it is to bring fantasy down to the realms of reality. It is hard to resist.

      ‘It’s like being a girl again,’ she complains to Renee, who lives above Madeleine, on the ground floor. Renee has left her husband, and had her children taken from her. It is a house full of women without men, and children without fathers. As you begin, so you end. To-ing and fro-ing to the snap of male fingers. Only in the old days one did it in hope, now it’s in terror.’

      ‘Terror of what?’ Renee is a delicate, wide-eyed young woman, fresh, long-legged and clear-complexioned, like some outdoor girl on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Renee has two equally pretty little daughters, sometimes with her. Renee claims to be bitter; Renee was abandoned by her father, and then abandoned her husband. Renee has, she says, renounced men. Renee has her girlfriends instead, from whom, physically and emotionally, she extracts comfort, company and solace. From time to time Renee kindly offers the same to Madeleine, in the shape of a warm and companionable bed, but Madeleine is too conscious of her own raggedy body and troubled mind to be able to offer herself on such simple terms. Although, as Renee complains, she seems perfectly well able to offer herself to any passing man.

      ‘Terror of loneliness,’ says Madeleine. ‘And being rejected, and of loss of status, and the general humiliation of being a woman without a man. Isn’t that terror enough?’

      ‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ says Renee. ‘You think life for a woman has to revolve round a man.’

      ‘I can’t help it,’ says Madeleine, old Madeleine, to this silky young woman. ‘I feel it does, though I know it doesn’t. Without a man to revolve around, I scarcely seem to exist. Yet when I had one, I was brave enough.’

      So she was. Bold, too bold! Neglecting the washing-up on the grounds that it was trivial, housework humiliating, cooking a waste of human energy and world resources. Taught within a year of marriage that sexual fidelity was meaningless, Madeleine learnt the lesson well. Once having discovered Jarvis, disappeared at his own twenty-ninth birthday party to the (comparative) privacy of the spare room, interrupted him in mid-intercourse with a dumpy nurse, on the spare bed amongst the guests’ coats, and having retreated unseen, too distressed to speak or make her presence known, too shocked for action, then recovered quickly and set about using the incident to her own advantage.

      ‘Jealousy,’ Madeleine would say, returning home to Jarvis from God knows where but suspiciously late, smelling of drink and sex, ‘is such a low, disgusting emotion! Don’t you think so? Surely we’re above that, you and me? We agreed before we were married that we would never be sexually possessive.’ And though no such agreement had ever been made, though Jarvis had no idea that Madeleine had discovered him and the transient Margot (for Margot it was, though Madeleine never knew her name, never saw her face) together on the bed that rainy birthday night amongst the damp coats, something in Jarvis, amounting perhaps to sheer forgetfulness, but no doubt bolstered up by some weakness, some guilt, some meanness learnt from his stepfather, prevented him from finding the energy to contradict her. Easier, for a time, to admire her.

      Madeleine was brave, oh yes she was, with the courage of anger: what an angry little girl she’d been, smearing the walls with far worse than puffed wheat, swearing at her mother, arms clutched round her father’s pillar legs (in the process of being dislodged, she’d once had her thumb broken, so possessive, so determined, so desperate was her grasp).

      ‘Someone’s chalked a sentence on a wall in Shepherd’s Bush,’ says Renee now. ‘It says – a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ But Renee offers Madeleine the loan of her new white silk shirt for the evening, though it is much against her principles. Pandering to heterosexual vanities! Madeleine accepts, with pleasure. Quincey is a nice name, Madeleine thinks. Madeleine Quincey.

      The afternoon proceeds.

      Hilary, horrified by her appearance, leaves the hairdresser in tears. Lily is irritated by this display of ingratitude, and what is more, is landed with Hilary for the rest of the day. For Hilary refuses to return to school: not only will it be quite obvious to everyone that she has been to the hairdresser, and not to the dentist, but how can she face her classmates looking such a freak?

      Margot collects Jonathon from playgroup, takes him home with her and serves veal-and-ham pie and salad for lunch. She bandages Laurence’s bruised hand, assuming, rightly, that Philip will not have the time to do so. Lettice declines to have Jonathon sit upon her knee. Lettice always appears fearful of the demands of babies and small children.

      Laurence tells Lettice that in the last 600,000 years some 74,000,000,000 people have been born and died. ‘So what,’ says Lettice. The children return to school. Philip returns to his rounds. Three flu’s, one pneumonia, one tonsillitis, one manic depression, and one terminal cancer.

      Miss Maguire, muttering up and down the High Street, calls a black man a stinking nigger. He offers her his card and suggests she sees a doctor. He is a psychiatrist. Miss Maguire says she’s under the doctor. The psychiatrist, relieved of responsibility, pats her kindly and proceeds.

      Lily goes to Selfridges Food Store and there buys a crown roast, some mangetout, some Jersey potatoes, some lump-fish roe, double cream, French loaves, cheese and six lemons.

      A shorn, sulky, tearful Hilary helps Lily carry the provisions home. Let us not suppose that the excursion to the hairdresser was organised totally with the image of Hilary as beast of burden in mind. Not totally.

      When Lily returns home, she finds a message on the answering machine. The Bridges cannot come to dinner after all. Harvey Bridge has flu, or so Moira alleges, in a voice brimming over, Lily thinks, with insincerity. It may be the quality of the tape, of course, but Lily doubts it.

      Lily throws the Brie across the room, in petulance, and Hilary stops to wipe up the spatters before finally going round to Margot’s to pick up Jonathon. She wears a headscarf. It is by now three fifteen.

      Madeleine uses Renee’s phone to telephone Lily, and reverses the charges as is her custom. Madeleine speaks coldly but politely, finding it difficult to abuse or insult Lily to her face. Though once it was very different! These days Madeleine suffers from the general paralysis of the defeated. Madeleine ignores the matter of the hairdresser and requests merely that Lily will keep Hilary for the night, as she, Madeleine, is going out: and will Lily ask Hilary to ring her at Renee’s between four and four thirty. Lily acquiesces to both requests, charmingly, with the sweet chilliness she reserves for her enemies. Madeleine has the vision of some biting summer drink, served in a thin glass with a frosted rim. Typical, thinks Lily, putting the phone down. Mad Madeleine using Lily as a dumping ground for Hilary. Not in the

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