‘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 beautiful girls! and what’s more that my nipples were pale and blunt and pink and that’s what he liked, he couldn’t bear the harsh brown aggressive kind, and that, I’m sorry to say, is what yours are, slim hungry wife of my employer; I can see them through your dress.
Margot knows she is being unfair. Who of us can help the texture of our nipples? A momentary surge of irritation, no doubt, of guilt about Jarvis, for which she will now pay penance.
‘I’ll take Jonathon home to lunch with me,’ she says. ‘And drop him back this afternoon.’
Guilt, about Jarvis?
Guilt, surely, is too strong a word. What, for something that happened fifteen years ago, when the world was young, and still full of causes and few effects? Surely not. Margot did no wrong, or none that she could recognise. She was not married at the time. True, Jarvis was, but could Margot fairly be expected to take responsibility for, let alone stand in the way of, the imperatives of male desire? And it can’t have been a good marriage anyway, or why would Jarvis have wanted to sweep her out of a party, up the linoed stairs, and into the spare room? A one night stand, no more, no less.
True, Margot was disappointed the next day (whoever isn’t) when the next day came, and the next, and there was no telephone call from Jarvis, no declaration of true love; no such magic, apparently, discovered in her body as would transfigure his life.
But it was a disappointment muted not by experience (and experience indicates that in nine out of ten of these passing sexual encounters, no particular magic is discovered, no great alliances made – but on the tenth – ah! happiness, fulfilment! Love enough to make up for the pain of the nine? Well, more or less) not muted by any such experience, any such calculating promiscuity in the interests of eventual respectability, but by a general apprehension of herself, a thorough muted expectation of life and the part she was to play in it.
Margot, born to be useful; daughter, wife, mother. This excursion into the erotic, this placing of her on him, for that was where he placed her, the better to admire her sweet pink nipples, scarcely seemed a proper part of her nature.
The activity, she felt, contained its own punishment: if virtue carries its own reward, so does sin carry with it a cosmic slapping of the hand, a down, you naughty girl, you presume: when lust fades, the sense of looking silly remains; and some slight knowledge of a door having opened and closed on the fringes of the memory.
Poor Margot, only too happy, after a silent day or two, to forget.
Later, when Jarvis and Lily became Philip’s patients, and baby Jonathon too, and Jarvis was overworked and underslept, and the strain of Jonathon’s early feeding problems telling upon him, not to mention Lily, it was Philip who suggested that Margot could go and work as Jarvis’s part-time secretary – thus killing three birds with one stone, his wife’s restlessness (well, the children were now increasingly busy with their own lives), his patient’s declared need for tranquillisers, and his own monetary difficulties – the latter admittedly too great and hefty a bird to be brought down by such a tiny shaft, but winging the creature nonetheless. A step in the right direction.
Philip always had the feeling, lurking somewhere in the back of his mind, unspoken, that Margot was ungrateful when it came to money, and did not quite recognise the difficulty with which it was earned, nor her good fortune in being allowed to spend what was by rights his and his alone.
Margot, meeting Jarvis for the second time, going to a house which she only dimly remembered, and now found altogether changed, thirteen years after that passionate, private (or so she believes) encounter, recognised Jarvis at once. He did not recognise her. How could he? It had been a dimly-lit party, in the days when most people smoked, and the smell of hot punch had filled the air, and one girl had been much like another, tight-waisted and teetering around on stiletto heels. But one man, then as now, not much like another at all. Poor Margot. Lucky Jarvis.
Margot accepted the offer of a job with alacrity. Why should she not? The advantages were, on the surface, so many. Namely:
(a) Ease of access
The Katkins lived within walking distance. Six and a half minutes (fast) or nine minutes (slow). She would not have to stand about in all weathers at bus-stops, as did Enid.
(b) Good pay and conditions
The pay was generous, and the work easy. Twelve pounds a week for ten hours light secretarial duties in pleasant surroundings, architect designed.
(c) Independence
Margot, at last, would be able to buy clothes without first having to persuade Philip that she needed them. (And Philip believed, profoundly, that the purpose of clothes was to keep the cold out.) She would no longer have to account for every penny which left her purse. Not that she had ever really objected to so doing – and