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 least grateful.
Hilary returns home with Jonathon, saying that Margot is annoyed at having had to keep him so long. It is not strictly true, but Hilary will have her revenge. What’s more, Hilary says, Madeleine was round at Adelaide Row, looking for Hilary and furious because she wasn’t at school. Lily is horrified. Is the persecution going to begin again? Is she never to be free of Jarvis’s past?
Lily forgets to ask Hilary to ring her mother.
Lily, instead, anxious to undo any damage Madeleine may have done to Jarvis’s image, not to mention her own, telephones Margot and asks if she and her husband would care to come to dinner that evening? A spur of the moment affair, she claims. A panicky action, born of general upset, Lily knows as soon as she has done it.
And done it is. Margot accepts the invitation; and then dances round the kitchen like an excited child, relieved of the necessity of cooking this, the 5,323rd dinner of her married life.
Lily actually cries.
11
E VERYTHING HAS MEANING. NOTHING is wasted. Only the young believe that they can stand alone in the world, for good or bad, their own master, independent of the past—will cross the very globe, from south to north, like Lily, in the blithe belief that she
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