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, altering expectation, refocusing obsession. Thus, 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.
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