A Second Wife Read online

  Rosemary Friedman

  A Second Wife

  FOR

  ILSA YARDLEY

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Epilogue

  Rosemary Friedman

  About the Author

  By the Same Author All Published as ebooks from Arcadia Books

  Copyright

  ‘The crow must have flown away, I think,’ said Alice. ‘I’m so glad it’s gone. I thought it was the night coming on.’

  ‘I wish I could manage to be glad!’ the Queen said. ‘Only I can never remember the rule. You must be very happy, living in this wood, and being glad whenever you like!’

  ‘Only it’s so very lonely here!’ Alice said in a melancholy voice: and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks.

  LEWIS CARROLL

  Through the Looking Glass

  ‘On s’engage, puis on voit.’

  MOTTO OF NAPOLEON

  Prologue

  If one is arrested in the middle of the night, removed from those one loves, given no information about what is going to happen to one, kept incommunicado or in solitary confinement, one becomes severely depressed. Anyone will tell you. Except that after Victor’s death, after the totally unexpected striking down of my life, my love, my lover of twenty-six years, that Christmas which would remain for ever in the mind, I did not have anyone. No. Not strictly true. There was my friend, Sophie, my sister, Jennie, my colleagues at work, but after the initial shock had dissipated I did not let them near.

  I was not a widow. Had I been married to Victor it might have been easier. It was Molly who had the comfort of the children, hers and Victor’s, Molly who was shown how best to heal herself, to make the most of her resources, to build a new life. I was left alone to come to terms with my grief, despair and anger, most of all the anger, in a society which is based upon the couple and in which death is unmentionable. Few people had known about Victor when he lived – except Sophie and Jennie – we hadn’t gone to many places, other than the opera, where we were likely to be seen. As far as self-esteem was concerned we had always been together, even if my complementary half was not always clearly visible.

  There were no problems about money. My Pathology Investigation Centre was riding on the crest of a wave which emanated from the shores of Kuwait and Dubai and peaked over London. I did not need money. I did not need anything. Anybody. For I was no longer Jean Banks, content, successful, but a dead and empty husk whose public image walked and talked and functioned, afraid that it would be found out for the hollow pastiche that it was. I lived in constant fear. That my paper-thin shell would be broken and it would become apparent, to my eternal shame, that there was nothing inside: not Sophie’s friend, not my father’s daughter (although in his senility, poor lamb, he no longer knew me), not Jennie’s sister, not even my own self whose facsimile discharged the obligations of the day and lived the terrors of the night, but did not exist.

  I thought I was ill. Physically I mean. Wearing my merry, coping mask, I conned my doctor into referring me for X-rays to establish a cause for the fatigue and chest pains, the cramps in my stomach, and the weight which I was losing. He prescribed alkalis to be taken before the meals I could not eat, when what I needed, although I did not know it then, was a sense, derived from loving and being loved, of my own worth.

  I was a classic case. I did not communicate except on the most superficial level. With no one to define me, to reassure me of my existence, I became a robot, with no sense of reality, and little grip on life. I was incapable of making the simplest decisions. Did not open my letters, let alone reply to them. I could not make up my mind what to put on in the mornings and when I did, changed it ten minutes later. It took me a lifetime to get dressed and I could not summon up the energy from my meagre resources to pick up my clothes from where, exhausted, I let them drop at night.

  Craftily, at work, unaware how I had managed to transport myself, I went through the motions required of me. I picked fights over the most minor aberrations of my staff, causing them to stare at me open mouthed in consternation. When they spoke I listened but their words stopped short of the nimbus which surrounded me, and I did not hear. I walked nowhere for my legs were weak. I told my doctor who tested my plantar reflexes, scratching the soles of my feet. There were times when I became so inert that I could not, I swear I could not, get out of my chair. I sat alone in my consulting-room with tears pouring down my face. Making telephone calls was a problem. Having mustered the energy to pick up the receiver, I would discover that I was unable to recall numbers I had thought engraved on my memory. When I did connect, my voice registered in apathetic whispers for which I blamed the line.

  In my brighter moments, for there were times when my cloud lifted, I instigated projects, but when the time came to implement them my interest had gone. I arranged for tests on patients but was indifferent to the results; luckily I did not harm them. On bad days, pleading a cold, flu, migraine, backache, a host of nebulous complaints, I stayed at home where, sometimes for days, I did not leave my bed. It could not go on. I could not.

  It was Bob who rescued me as I was going down for the third time, who threw the line which saved me. He came into my room with the results of a lumbar tap, to show me the leucocyte count. When he had finished he put the report in his pocket but did not leave. Dear Bob. We had known each other a long time. Grey haired – since Victor’s death I had not bothered tinting mine – we had watched the years make off with our youth.

  ‘Look, Jean, I don’t know how to say this…’

  Bob had never been articulate.

  ‘You’re not well.’

  ‘I’ve seen my doctor. Everything’s fine.’ I pinned on my smile.

  Bob stared at the carpet, a Persian, unique in composition and palette. Victor had bought it for me. I was staring, mesmerised, at its filigree Herati border when Bob said:

  ‘I’ve a friend at the Maudsley.’

  I wonder if he thought I was going mad.

  ‘You’ve been depressed since…Christmas.’

  I stared at him. I had never believed in illness which was not organic.

  ‘It’s a virus,’ I said. ‘I can’t seem to shake it off. It’ll be better when the weather…’

  ‘Will you see him?’

  Bob had always been determined. Half the success of the Path. Lab., which he had been in on from the start, was due to him.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

  Had he spoken then, had he tried to persuade me, I think I would not have broken. He said nothing, but took me in his arms. In his embrace I, a grown woman, more than middle-aged, became a child. He cradled me while I wept into his white coat. The dam had burst, and good, sensible Bob made no attempt to stop it. When I had finished with the weeping I huddled in my chair and did not protest when he picked up my phone to ring the Maudsley.

  What would have happened to me without Bob’s intervention I do not know. I did not know anything. Certainly not that before the year was out I would exchange the role of odalisque couchée, Victor’s indolent mistress, for that of odalisque with tambourine – a kind of whirling dervish – playing the parts of lover, housekeeper and mother (in my case surrogate), which in my innocence I had not realised came pre-packed with the wedding ring.

  But I run on too fast.

  Part One

  I was unfamiliar with psychiatric hospitals. My own medical training had virtually eschewed diseases of the mind. I did not need to read the journals but only the popular press, or listen to television – Horizon or World in Action – to know that the emphasis had shifted.
Depression – once a hidden disorder, its victims bewildered by their private hells and ashamed of their symptoms – was now the common cold of mental disturbance, the most prevalent of all psychic maladies, and much of the population was dependent for its courage to face each day on psychoactive drugs.

  The evidence stared at me, unequivocally, as I entered the hospital. The out-patients sat in rows, tranquillised, not reading the thumbed and tattered books. Beyond them a lady, radiant in her cerebral health, dispensed small treats and steaming sluice-coloured liquid in polystyrene cups. One man, more dishevelled than the rest, sat forward in his chair addressing a diatribe to the wrapper-littered floor. The words were indistinguishable, except for every now and then, when he raised his head and the volume to declaim in personal anguish: ‘…fucking Korea…!’ eliciting no more response from the shades which surrounded him than if he had not spoken.

  I was not as these, the melancholy women and the indifferent men, the youths clutching crash-helmets, the sad girls exhaling smoke, as if it were their life’s blood, into the stale air. If I was different it was not remarked, any more, I guessed, than the Emperor would have been had he walked through the doors in his new clothes.

  I thumped the bell on the reception desk.

  ‘I’m Dr Banks. I have an appointment. Dr Hartley Taylor.’

  I disliked him sight unseen. I could just as well have called myself Stevenson Banks, or Banks Stevenson, my mother’s maiden name.

  ‘Dr Anne or Dr Christopher?’

  I realised that the girl, in her neat skirt and blouse, was addressing me, and thought how cosy, wondering if the Hartley Taylors patient-swapped over the evening take-away.

  ‘Dr Christopher.’

  ‘Will you wait…’ Her words were submerged in a full-throated condemnation of ‘fucking Korea’ but her pencil indicated the stairs.

  I negotiated them to find an elitist sub-group sitting, as it were, in the upstairs lounge of a 747. A girl in trousers, beret and scarf, matching pink, paced back and forth, retracing her steps, from wall to fish tank; a youth, in soiled tennis shoes, slumped motionless. A brittle woman, her time of life written in the long-suffering face behind the bifocals, berated her despondent wraith of a daughter from a vinyl-covered chair.

  ‘I can’t cope, Deirdre. I told the doctor I couldn’t cope. You’ll have to go away…’

  I pictured them at war in their semi-detached, in the spotless kitchen with its bright tiles, in which a teenager with multi-coloured spiky hair and bitten nails was an affront.

  A young man, in jeans and denim jacket, appeared from a doorway and called the pacing girl.

  ‘Deirdre.’

  This was a doctor? Times had changed.

  They had changed. I had been too busy with my work, with Victor, with myself, to notice. I had let them mutate until the débâcle of Victor’s death had brought me up short.

  After the initial numbness, nature’s analgesic, had worn off, I had stood quite still and taken stock of my Victorless surroundings, starting with my sitting-room redolent with our possessions, our lares and penates, from which for the sake of my sanity I had to eradicate the sound of his voice. This did not mean I must eradicate Victor. He was there inside me, as he had been for twenty-six years, his place inviolable, where he would remain for the rest of my life – which seemed to stretch indefinitely and lustreless before me. I had cut myself off. Because of Victor. As his mistress I had had no need of any but the most superficial social life, in which I had a reputation for an icy hauteur which intimidated all but the most persistent of men. I did not know where to begin. To tell the world that part of me was available, needed distraction, when I had so sequestrated myself that it seemed no one knew of my existence.

  ‘Get yourself some new clothes,’ Sophie said. I knew what she meant. I had a wardrobe full of clothes but they reminded me of Victor. A dress the colour of the Seine: a loden coat, impervious to Highland cold and Irish mists; a cape, proffered by maîtres d’hôtel – whom Victor had as usual overcompensated – as if it were a matador’s. I shut the cupboard on their uplifted voices, their contented skirts and bodices, and clad the new Jean Banks with angry garments which protested her summary rejection, the unfairness of her sudden isolation. There was a skirt, black – Victor hated me in black now that I was older – with a slit up the side, beneath which I wore fishnet stockings, a satin blouse which plunged to my navel, and shoes, stiletto-heeled, which owing to his lack of inches I had never worn with Victor.

  I had never used my flat for entertaining. Restaurants, half a dozen London favourites, had been our dining-room, mine and Victor’s. When I realised that the world was going about its business, as it always had, while I was preoccupied with my lover, my married man, I tapped it on the shoulder and invited it in. It was not reluctant. I haunted the off-licence and held merry soirées for guests who drank too much and thought too little. When they had gone, taking the distraction with them, I sat among the ashtrays, overflowing, and the dirty glasses, listening to my aching heart which the evening had temporarily silenced, trying to hold back the walls, impregnated with my one-time happiness, before they closed in. I eked out the sleeping pills, prescribed after Victor to keep the night at bay, then asked for more.

  It was not enough. I grew phobic about my own company. Could not stand to be alone. One night, taking the line of least resistance, I allowed a lingering guest to stay. A systems analyst not averse to the proffered bed. In my flight from loneliness I discovered that the act of love could lead to a deceptive climax of togetherness, of momentary oblivion, but that it did not mitigate the pain. I planned my days and orchestrated my nights so that no moment, however brief, was allowed to escape unfilled. I saw more films and plays, more concerts and recitals, more Manets and Monets and Op and Pop, more friends and acquaintances, more nieces and nephews and remote echelons of my family than I had done in years. If there were no cure for my anguish I sought to destroy it and in doing so almost destroyed myself.

  ‘Doctor Banks?’

  A slim young man with a ginger beard and side-whiskers was addressing me. I followed him down the passage, the numbered doors of which gave onto the confessionals, and sat down in one of them opposite the bright tie. There was a fresh sheet of hospital notepaper on the pad and the old-fashioned fountain pen, which went oddly with the trendy gear, was poised.

  We went through the obligatory statistical routine. I had to think hard about my date of birth, it seemed so very long ago, but there was no time to dwell on the vanished years because my ginger-bearded doctor had asked me to tell him exactly how I felt, and was waiting.

  ‘Fragmented.’

  The room was no bigger than a cell and there was a wash-basin in the corner.

  ‘Part of me is standing still and the other walking and talking and eating and sleeping. Going through the motions.’

  The pen had a gold nib. Broad.

  ‘It’s hard to describe…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s as if I’m on the outside. As if I’m watching myself, this Jean Banks, live.’

  I tried to explain. About the routine tasks and the difficulties I encountered performing them. About the inertia, precipitated by the heavy sense of gloom and hopelessness, the guilt and self-loathing, which overwhelmed me. There was something else – the loudness of voices, the brightness of colours, the grotesque distortion of once familiar faces – for which I could not find the words.

  ‘How do you sleep?’

  Of course he knew. The inability to lose consciousness, the disturbed nights, the ghastly inevitability of the early-morning wakening.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I keep crying for no reason. The tears just come.’

  He nodded, as if the great aching lump of lead which lay inside my chest were visible.

  ‘I’m careless. I dent the car. Posts and things… I cross the road in front of the traffic. Deliberately. Last across. I used to play it as a child. I wouldn’t care…’ />
  The silence was expectant.

  ‘…if I were run over.’

  He waited. And I waited. The small charge of energy which I had generated for the interview had run down. I wondered how long was dedicated to each patient. I had lost interest, wondered why I was baring my soul to the ginger beard, the dazzling tie.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Since Victor…’

  ‘Victor?’

  I listened to myself define my lover, how I had lived for so long as mistress to a very much married man. It was like reciting the blurb from the dust-jacket of a novel, trying to encapsulate the anima of a Tolstoy, the vision of a Pasternak into a sentence. Without taking out my heart and laying it on the blotter, there was no way that I could give any credence to Victor.

  ‘And you’ve been feeling as you do now since Victor died?’

  ‘Oh no!’

  I told him about the original despair through which Sophie had nursed me, the ensuing anger which had welled up, huge and incontinent, my foreign behaviour, my promiscuity.

  ‘And your family?’

  ‘I don’t have any,’ I said irritably. I had explained about Victor and that there were no children. He had not listened.

  ‘I mean your childhood.’

  I would have to disappoint him. There was no broken home, no reprobate father, no battered wife, to nurture the roots of my condition. He would find nothing there.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  It was like the calm before the storm, my childhood in the dreaming suburb where our lives, mine and Jennie’s and our parents’, were governed by values that a cataclysm – of which we had no intimation in those myopic summer-garden days – would soon turn upside down.

  ‘It was happy.’

  So it was. We were a family. A solid, normal group of related couples and their offspring, in which I took for granted not only the fact that I belonged, but that when my turn came I would initiate my own dynasty with similar bountiful celebrations of Christmas and Easter and other exhibitions of togetherness rich with material rewards. My mother’s velvet-lined jewellery box had been piled with her ‘long-service’ medals. A harlequin brooch, his hat picked out in semiprecious stones, a gold fob-watch, pearls in rows of various lengths, corals and moonstones, appropriate to the number of years she had been married to my father, and the ultimate accolade before her sudden and untimely death, a ruby ring in the shape of a heart. She did not reward herself. It never occurred to her. Her bounty was directed towards her husband round whom she orbited – and whom she regarded as a cross between Old Moore’s Almanack and the Lord Chief Justice – and her daughters, Jennie and myself.