Read Online Remember Me by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Fay Weldon
Tags: General Fiction
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lamentable making love. As in those days the act was so innocently known.
Poor Margot, to be so forgotten.
Poor Jarvis, in those early married days with Madeleine! It is very sad to have overwhelming bourgeois ambitions and yet know in your heart that they are trivial. Madeleine was right; that was the dreadful truth of the matter. She was right about everything. Morally, Madeleine was more refined, more sensitive than Jarvis, and he knew it. Jarvis, heading through the fifties and sixties towards a goal of aesthetic truth and material nobility, shutting his eyes the while to the mayhem and madness of the outside world, seeing only pureness of line, curve and design, has now run up against a bizarre dead end. Decoration is back. Frills and squiggles and nonsense, and vulgar disposability. The squatters are in next door. They light fires with pieces of fifties’ furniture which would make at least a fiver down the Portobello Road, except they haven’t the energy or interest to take them there. Madeleine, torn and worn and honest, is at least in keeping with the spirit of the times. They have finally caught up with her, and passed Jarvis by.
And Jarvis, these days, for all this is happy. Jarvis has Lily. She does not need design. Lily, Jarvis sometimes fears, is conventional, trivial, selfish, unmaternal and manipulative. He is better than her, as Madeleine was better than him. He can be himself. They suit each other. Oh, they love each other. They do.
The week after Jarvis married Lily he found a model steam engine in the long grass of the garden of No. 12. A hired gardener, employed by Lily, had started making sense out of the jungle tangle Madeleine favoured, and there it was. The engine was made out of a shell case brought home from France as a souvenir by (as it happened) Philip’s father. That was in 1917.
Philip’s father, Alan, had for a time courted a certain Philippa Cutts, who lived in Adelaide Row: One summer evening in 1919 after lying in the long grass of the garden with Philippa (as if he were a romantic lad of seventeen and not a shell-shocked veteran of twenty-seven) he had left the engine behind in the grass. He had brought it along to show her as an item of interest, a token of experience, but finding himself the interest, himself the experience, had never got round to reclaiming it. Why should he bother? Are not most of our treasures, in any case, offerings to romance, and well lost in its cause?
Now the model engine stands, restored, polished and admired, as centrepiece to the teak room divider on the ground floor where Margot, Alan’s daughter-in-law, types Jarvis Katkin’s invoices.
Alan lives in an old people’s home in Crouch End. It is his habit to disconcert the morning nurses by feigning death, lying grey, starey-eyed and open-mouthed when they come to wake him. It is not so much that he wants to upset them by this habit, or so he tells Philip on his weekly visit, as that he’s getting into practice. He never quite understood why he had been spared, he used to complain, one man out of the fifty lying lack-limbed and fly-blown in the mud around him, dead as doornails: but being spared, thought he might as well make himself useful. And so he was. So is Philip, after him.
The nursing home is in Heine Avenue, near where Enid lives. The chairman of the local Ways and Means Committee, back in the thirties, had been much shocked by Hitler’s burning of the books and had done his bit to compensate, to keep Europe’s culture alive, when the question of the renaming of streets in the district had arisen.
All things have meaning. Almost nothing is wasted. Old friends, encountered by chance: old enemies, reunited to hate again, old emotions, made sense of and transmuted into energy; old loves reappearing; all the material flotsam washed up by the storms of our experience—all these have implication, and all lead us to the comforting notion that almost nothing in this world goes unnoticed; and
Poor Margot, to be so forgotten.
Poor Jarvis, in those early married days with Madeleine! It is very sad to have overwhelming bourgeois ambitions and yet know in your heart that they are trivial. Madeleine was right; that was the dreadful truth of the matter. She was right about everything. Morally, Madeleine was more refined, more sensitive than Jarvis, and he knew it. Jarvis, heading through the fifties and sixties towards a goal of aesthetic truth and material nobility, shutting his eyes the while to the mayhem and madness of the outside world, seeing only pureness of line, curve and design, has now run up against a bizarre dead end. Decoration is back. Frills and squiggles and nonsense, and vulgar disposability. The squatters are in next door. They light fires with pieces of fifties’ furniture which would make at least a fiver down the Portobello Road, except they haven’t the energy or interest to take them there. Madeleine, torn and worn and honest, is at least in keeping with the spirit of the times. They have finally caught up with her, and passed Jarvis by.
And Jarvis, these days, for all this is happy. Jarvis has Lily. She does not need design. Lily, Jarvis sometimes fears, is conventional, trivial, selfish, unmaternal and manipulative. He is better than her, as Madeleine was better than him. He can be himself. They suit each other. Oh, they love each other. They do.
The week after Jarvis married Lily he found a model steam engine in the long grass of the garden of No. 12. A hired gardener, employed by Lily, had started making sense out of the jungle tangle Madeleine favoured, and there it was. The engine was made out of a shell case brought home from France as a souvenir by (as it happened) Philip’s father. That was in 1917.
Philip’s father, Alan, had for a time courted a certain Philippa Cutts, who lived in Adelaide Row: One summer evening in 1919 after lying in the long grass of the garden with Philippa (as if he were a romantic lad of seventeen and not a shell-shocked veteran of twenty-seven) he had left the engine behind in the grass. He had brought it along to show her as an item of interest, a token of experience, but finding himself the interest, himself the experience, had never got round to reclaiming it. Why should he bother? Are not most of our treasures, in any case, offerings to romance, and well lost in its cause?
Now the model engine stands, restored, polished and admired, as centrepiece to the teak room divider on the ground floor where Margot, Alan’s daughter-in-law, types Jarvis Katkin’s invoices.
Alan lives in an old people’s home in Crouch End. It is his habit to disconcert the morning nurses by feigning death, lying grey, starey-eyed and open-mouthed when they come to wake him. It is not so much that he wants to upset them by this habit, or so he tells Philip on his weekly visit, as that he’s getting into practice. He never quite understood why he had been spared, he used to complain, one man out of the fifty lying lack-limbed and fly-blown in the mud around him, dead as doornails: but being spared, thought he might as well make himself useful. And so he was. So is Philip, after him.
The nursing home is in Heine Avenue, near where Enid lives. The chairman of the local Ways and Means Committee, back in the thirties, had been much shocked by Hitler’s burning of the books and had done his bit to compensate, to keep Europe’s culture alive, when the question of the renaming of streets in the district had arisen.
All things have meaning. Almost nothing is wasted. Old friends, encountered by chance: old enemies, reunited to hate again, old emotions, made sense of and transmuted into energy; old loves reappearing; all the material flotsam washed up by the storms of our experience—all these have implication, and all lead us to the comforting notion that almost nothing in this world goes unnoticed; and
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