A Loving Mistress Read online

  FOR

  SUSAN

  …there can be no companion more agreeable than a loving mistress.

  BERNARDIN DE SAINT PIERRE

  Dan Cupid hath a garden

  Where women are the flow’rs;

  And lovers’ laughs and lovers’ tears

  The sunshine and the show’rs

  And oh, the sweetest blossom

  That in his garden grows,

  The fairest queen, it is, I ween,

  The perfect English rose!

  Let others make a garland

  Of every flow’r that blows,

  But I will wait till I may pluck

  My dainty English rose!

  In perfume, grace, and beauty

  The rose doth stand apart –

  God grant that I, before I die,

  May wear one on my heart!

  BASIL HOOD

  from Edward German’s Merrie England

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Early Days

  The Second Part

  Epilogue

  Rosemary Friedman

  About the Author

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR ALL PUBLISHED AS EBOOKS FROM ARCADIA BOOKS

  Copyright

  Prologue

  They say the French invented mistresses, although most of the French men I have had anything to do with have been more concerned with their stomachs than l’amour. If they did they have a lot to answer for in terms of grief and anguish, disappointment and despair.

  The term itself is an anachronism conjuring up images of les grandes horizontales reclining on chaises longues waiting for their married lovers to arrive with orchids and champagne. These days it’s more likely to be half a bottle of gin although I can’t complain about Victor from whom I learned the difference between a claret and a burgundy and the seriousness of a great wine.

  Ours is an age of permissiveness and equality when a couple cohabiting without benefit of clergy is an accepted norm. If the man happens to be married the woman becomes a ‘mistress’. There should be some alternative designation, some more satisfactory title; especially after twenty-six years.

  What I needed and what I found in Victor were companionship, emotional and intellectual strengths and compatible sex. I chose my rôle and will not be pitied. That does not mean that I may not feel sorry for myself. I have that right and intend to exercise it. It is also a catharsis.

  When I was a child we played a game at parties. It was called ‘things on a tray’. The host would pile it with a number of miscellaneous items. We were given two minutes to look at it then had to make a list of as many as we could remember. I don’t even need the two minutes’ looking time. The collection in my sitting-room is imprinted on my mind. I don’t know whether it will prove too traumatic to keep everything or whether they will serve as talismen in my solitary old age.

  The print, near the door, of ‘Waggoner’s Wells’, goes back to the beginning although I didn’t get it until some years later. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. Moving round the room, which has been my home, our home, for so long, there are the ivory elephants trunks to tail, the soapstone knife, the Makonde figures, ebony black but catching the light, the Danish candle holders, like silver commas, the Rembrandt drawing, the books, too many to enumerate – although I think I could recite their titles and be word perfect – the Buddhas, almost a dozen of them in every size, the coral and the starfish and the framed photograph of Victor when he got his knighthood. There’s a lot more. Not only the presents, the souvenirs, from places where, for one reason or another, he could not take me. There is the sofa that we chose together, piled high with cushions that we’d arrange and re-arrange, sometimes in anger, often in love, made from early nineteenth-century fragments of Turkish curtains, squares and oblongs of Victorian needlework – each had its history on which we had superimposed our own – Victor’s armchair, in which he shed the cares of a business empire that spanned the world and a wife trapped in the snare of her own psyche. The chair should have been re-covered years ago but he would never let me. It had once been blue but now was a frayed, faded grey. Whoever bought it from the saleroom, where it would inevitably end up, would hasten to re-cover its shame, impervious to the happiness and heartache woven into its weak threads.

  I am not one to be sentimental about objects. Not one to be sentimental. I am a pathologist concerned with the cell and the microbe, and gut reaction has no place in my work. How little we know ourselves. I who had always prided myself on being impervious to my surroundings would rise up like Boadicea and bar the door if they came to take away my things. I would not let them; but they will not come. To the outward eye so little has changed. I will go to my laboratory. The microscope offering up its cold lenses will not know my eyes are swollen with recent weeping. The paving stones will not register the weakness of my legs. I will work. Speak on the telephone. See patients. Buy my lunch. Shop on the way home at the shops where I am known. I have been wound up. I will function. There is no reason why the clockwork should ever run down.

  We had often joked about it; in a serious way. What would happen, now that we were older, Victor was in his sixties, if he were to die? The situation that he feared was that he would have a heart attack in my arms; it had happened to others. We had discussed what I must do and I had promised Victor, not very willingly, that I would get him out of the house and into a taxi. Leave him. Just like that. The promise relieved him of the fear, never far from his mind, that our relationship would be disclosed, find its way into the newspapers, made public. He was not a public man except where business was concerned. There was frequent mention of him on the city pages but little gossip of his private life. There was the occasional picture in the Tatler, Sir Victor Pattison at the Summer Exhibition, the Albert Hall, but Private Eye had not, as yet, got hold of him. It was his one fear; it came near to an obsession, not only that he must not be found out but lest he be brought face to face with his own duplicity. It was not only because of Molly, although he would do anything to spare her any suffering, any pain – she suffered enough – but he would not come to terms with his own behaviour, could not examine it, take his head out of the sand; it went against the grain. He prided himself on his veracity and went on living a lie. Of such contradictions life is composed.

  In the event there was no need to put him into a taxi, to leave him sick and ill on the back seat in the night-time streets. There was no need for me to do anything, to know anything. It was as if I had not existed. Did not exist.

  I had to reassure myself.

  Early Days

  I had been working very hard. Newly qualified and in my first year on the wards, I had contracted to be on call one hundred and twenty hours each week but in actual fact I was lucky to get away with less than a hundred and forty-four. In those days that was how it was. If it is better today it is only marginally. It is still sweated labour, preparing one, ostensibly, for the disciplines that lay ahead. The work on the whole was routine. While my parents told the neighbours, with pride, of grossly exaggerated exploits in the operating theatre, I clerked patients, filled in forms for tests and X-rays, took blood and wrote prescriptions. True, I did assist in theatre two days a week but only to towel up the patient, prepare the skin, cut stitches and put in retractors. The rest of the time seemed to be occupied with trivia, the frustrations attendant upon a rigid hierarchy and the enforced realization of my own inadequacies.

  The nursing staff did little to help. The clash of female personalities leading them to summon you for trivialities, and neglect, perhaps unconsciously, to inform you of important changes in the condition of a patient. It was a thankless job, u
nnoticed and unsung except when anything went wrong and the brickbats came flying from all directions.

  I had two weeks’ leave coming to me and a pile of unopened travel brochures on my desk. I was too tired even to decide where to go let alone make the multiplicity of arrangements incumbent upon the journey. Spain with its beaches and Italy with its art, Switzerland with its lakes and Greece with its temples waited for me but all I wanted to do was sleep. Aged twenty-five.

  I had been brought up to no religion. My father believed that any ‘closed system’ of thought sharpened the faculties of the mind but invariably produced clever imbeciles who could prove everything they believed and believed everything they could prove. When there was a form to be filled in I put C of E as a sop to the demands of bureaucracy. Churches were for their beauty and architecture and, as far as I was concerned, God was not within their confines. Occupied as I was with the infinite complexity of the human body I had no doubt that he existed, and that ‘more things were wrought by prayer than this world dreamed of’, but the prayers, for me at any rate, had no need of formalization. It was all predestined.

  If I hadn’t, at four o’clock in the morning, let a yawn escape me while dealing with a recalcitrant drip in the Men’s Surgical Ward, I would never have gone to Shotmere. If I hadn’t gone to Shotmere I would not have met Victor. If I hadn’t met Victor I would not, I think, have known happiness for twenty-six years of my life. Not perfect happiness. There is no such thing. It is a far from perfect world and it’s better to come to terms with the fact that it will never sort itself out in anyone’s lifetime, that life will never be more than a series of downs with the occasional ups to keep you going, than to lust after the rainbow. I have always been a realist. It has made everything much easier to tolerate.

  It was Night Sister who woke me, rousing me from a sleep in which I was dreaming I was asleep.

  ‘Mr Clegg’s drip has come out…’

  I looked at my watch. My pillow beckoned but I reached for my clothes.

  There is always a sense of emptiness in a night-time ward; the sleepers, released from their pain, their discomfort, people the streets of another world. The curtains were drawn round Hubert Clegg. We had removed a section of his lower bowel but malignant cells were busily invading the healthy tissues all around his body. He would not get well. I liked Mr Clegg. He was on the board of Shotmere, a Naturopathy Clinic, forerunner of the Health Farm, which claimed to achieve remarkable cures, through diet and therapeutic treatment, in chronic conditions, such as migraine and arthritis, where traditional medicine had failed. He had given me the new Graham Greene which lay unopened by my bed. As I looked at his charts – fluid balance and temperature, pulse and blood pressure – he watched me, his eyes full of hope I never learned to reflect in my own.

  ‘Any pain?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Vomiting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Passing urine?’

  Night Sister nodded.

  ‘I’ll have to put the needle in your other arm,’ I yawned, ‘so that we can give you the fluid.’

  He did not speak, lying patiently until the infusion was ready and the drip running smoothly, then he looked at me, hollow eyed and pale.

  ‘You don’t get much sleep.’

  I had seen him last on my round, after midnight.

  ‘My job finishes tomorrow.’

  ‘Going away?’

  I thought of smooth sands and sparkling seas and that I would only make it as far as my bed.

  ‘Probably not. Can I have a look at the dressing?’

  Night Sister pulled down the sheet. There was no bleeding.

  ‘How would you like to go to Shotmere?’ Mr Clegg said. ‘As my guest.’

  It was a kind thought.

  ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  He buttoned his pyjamas.

  ‘Just a token of my gratitude.’

  It was the line of least resistance.

  Sophie laughed. I shared a flat with her although for the past six months I hadn’t seen much of it.

  ‘You must be joking,’ she said. ‘It’s not for you. Go to the Club Med. Enjoy yourself.’

  My drummer, to whom I listened, whispered insistently. Sophie shrugged and lent me her dressing gown.

  I took a taxi from the station.

  ‘Shotmere?’ the driver said.

  I wondered how he knew.

  It was a mansion of muted stone set in the countryside amid landscaped gardens and woodland. We approached it down a long, gravelled drive, narrowed by rhododendrons.

  A maroon Rolls – VIP 10 – stood out amongst the cars in the forecourt.

  The receptionist had the air of a headmistress. I was late, she said, and had missed my appointment with the Consultant.

  ‘Consultant? There’s nothing wrong with me. Mr Clegg…’

  ‘Everyone has to see the Consultant. It’s the rules. I’ll put you in at two o’clock…’ She wrote in her Day Book. ‘…downstairs, undressed, wait outside the door until you’re called.’

  I looked at my suitcase thinking Sophie had perhaps been right and that I should have gone to the Club Med. A porter picked it up and I followed him down the corridor taking the steps that were to shape my life.

  The bedroom was vast, high-ceilinged. I thought of my cell in the Doctors’ Residence at the hospital and smiled – to nobody. Everything had been thought of. Bed canopied in toile de Jouy; comfortable armchair; writing desk opened invitingly; skirted dressing-table on which was a vase of daffodils. There was a card amongst them. Hubert Clegg – hoping I’d enjoy my stay. I looked out on the grounds with their trimmed hedges, urns and statues and vine entwined balustrades. I had never been amongst such splendour and felt the tensions of the past months start to flow from me. I opened the window letting in air such as we had long forgotten about in London. It had substance and texture and was sweet. I filled my lungs with it letting the curtain blow in the breeze.

  Downstairs I stopped a lady, clutching a plate on which were two apples, and asked where I could get lunch.

  She looked horrified, as if I had made an obscene proposal and pointed the way she had come.

  ‘Light Diet,’ she said faintly.

  It was full of people in dressing-gowns helping themselves to slices of melon and grapefruit-halves from a counter. A rosy-faced girl in a white overall asked me my room number. She ran a finger down a chart.

  ‘There’s nothing down for you. Have you seen Matron?’

  ‘I’ve just arrived,’ I explained apologetically. ‘I’m a bit late.’

  ‘I can’t give you anything if you’re not down for anything.’

  She handed a bowl of soup over my shoulder.

  I looked longingly after it.

  ‘Better go into the dining-room while you’ve got the chance,’ a male voice said through a mouthful of grapes. ‘Next door.’

  There was a queue round a central table. I joined it feeling overdressed in my clothes among the déshabillés. They were laughing and joking – mostly about food. One of the women was saying, ‘…we used to have the most divine cook but when the war came of course she joined the WAAF…’

  I piled my plate from the colourful bowls of salads, pineapple and watercress, chicory and orange, dates and nuts. Coming from sausage and mash with waterlogged sprouts in the hospital canteen I felt like Alice in Wonderland. By the time I was ready to sit down all the tables around the room seemed to be full and I stood holding my plate feeling uncomfortable and agonized with indecision. There was one seat vacant at a table for two. A man was sitting at it, neither young nor old, nor remarkable in any way. It’s incredible how you can look at your destiny and not know. He was reading a newspaper.

  ‘May I sit here?’

  When there was no reply I assumed he was deaf and sat down.

  He was cutting open a baked potato, his eyes not leaving the newspaper, feeling his way. The smell of it tickled my nostrils. There had been no potatoes o
n the salad buffet.

  ‘Where can I get a baked potato?’ I asked.

  He looked up from the newspaper, obviously irritated at the intrusion.

  ‘Have you been written up for it?’

  ‘No. I’ve just arrived.’

  ‘Then you can’t.’

  Some have a song as their leitmotif, others a place, weaving a thread through the tapestry of their lives. Mine was a baked potato. I could not recall the number of times it reappeared – baked Idaho in Arizona, foil-wrapped among the smörgåsbord, barbecued on tropical beaches – pinpointing both time and location over the years. I could not eat one now if you paid me. The smell is enough to send me running from the room.

  I finished my lunch in silence. The salads were delicious and were followed by yoghourt – a novelty then – with a compôte of dried fruits. I was beginning to enjoy myself. It didn’t look as if Shotmere was going to be too much of a punishment.

  The ‘Consultant’, Mr Palmer, wore a white coat and seemed to take himself very seriously. He examined my chest and took my blood pressure and asked me if I had had any serious illnesses. He didn’t seem to have much in the way of qualifications, so I kept mine quiet – I was down as ‘Miss Banks’ – and listened while he read the riot act about the mandatory diet designed to rid the body of all its ‘poisons’. Three days on hot water and lemon would be followed by a few more on fruit juice before a gradual return to light meals with the emphasis on wholefood – at that time a revolutionary concept – and in the last days the ultimate reward of a baked potato. We settled on turkish baths and massage by way of ‘treatments’. I was, after all, on holiday, and refused to be bullied into any of the more drastic cures on offer. The routine for improving my health, about which I had no complaints, by non-toxic means, was set out precisely on a sheet of paper. Clutching it I was passed on to Matron in her terrifying starched cap.