LITMIR.BIZ

       7

      Listen now, to Lily’s inner voice, welling up into the moral silence of her busy after-breakfast home. Jonathon playing good as gold, sunlight streaming, radio singing.

       Oh, I am no longer the butcher’s daughter; I am the architect’s wife, waiting for the arrival of Margot the part-time secretary, stacking well-rinsed plates in serried rows in the dishwasher (soundproofed) reserving the wooden-handled knives and forks for a warm soapy hand rinse in the plastic bowl. (Lily’s mother, Ida, on her wild Australasian shore, taught Lily how to care so well for possessions, both material and human, there being so little of either about.) How pleasant everything is, since I became the architect’s wife. All things around me ordained, considered, under control. The house is well converted, the plasterwork is sound, the polished floor blocks on the ground floor are both practical and attractive; the carpets upstairs are both luxurious and hard-wearing. Is this not what Jarvis has worked for; what I myself have made possible for him? How happy we are – like children. Surely nothing can go wrong?

      Lily and Jarvis! What games they play, in bed and out of it. Their pleasure, out of doors, is to rummage through the builders’ rubble skips which line the streets, and acquire the treasure, within, and jeer at the philistines who flung them out. Their house at No. 12 Adelaide Row is a treasure home of trophies – here a carved Jacobean chest, once horribly painted green; there a pretty rosewood bureau, once broken and abandoned, now beautifully restored; a Coalbrookdale footscraper, once flaky with rust, now sandblasted and splendid; even the watercolour landscapes which line the hall were found in a folder in the middle of a bundle of old comics (in themselves items of value and interest) and have been valued at £500; and the stripped doors in the stripped doorframes, such an elegant contrast to the coffee colour of the walls, once lay in a demolition yard waiting for the bonfire.

      Nothing wrong with such restitutions. On the contrary. We must rescue the nation’s past, if we wish to rescue our own. Jarvis says so. Jarvis knows. In this wisdom Jarvis has educated Lily.

      Lily and Jarvis.

      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

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