A Second Wife Read online

  Along with others in that false dawn, my mother was the angel in the house, toiling and moiling, regardless of her own needs, for her immediate and extended household. Her capacity for self-sacrifice, not in those days unusual, was put to good use in the war years with their civilian hardships. She ‘dug for Victory’ – planting cabbages where the lawn, my father’s pride and joy, had once lain green and weedless – made blouses for Jennie and myself from discarded shirts, and gave us, as if there were no other way, her weekly egg and butter ration. She belonged to a generation of women whose modus vivendi was determined by their spouses. She was by no means unintelligent, but in her anxiety not to make waves, was content, when my father was around, to let him take over. It was not that she was weak, but as if she were lacking in substance. She stopped thinking. Anything financial, political or mechanical she shut her eyes to. She was far from stupid.

  This became apparent when my father was called up for the army and she evacuated us to a dilapidated and cheerless cottage in the country. Assuming both parental roles as if to the manner born, she dealt – with an efficiency previously directed to domestic skills – with matters of taxation and allowances, and the tide of paperwork attendant upon the shortages of everything. She cut lengths of wood for battens, to which she nailed the blackout curtains, made furniture out of boxes – I can still see the word ‘Apples’ through the glaze on my bedside table – as naturally as she boiled the ends of soap to make the squelchy paste with which we washed, and curled our hair – Jennie’s and mine – with pipe-cleaners, which was all that was available.

  All this, it seemed to me, with the unseeing eye of childhood, without effort. Yet when my father came back, having vanquished Hitler, to resume his place behind the counter of his chemist’s shop, she slipped on her old role like a nightdress, screaming at the sight of bugs, snakes, mice and spiders, which she had cold-bloodedly murdered without hesitation, when she was alone. Looking back, I could see that she deliberately played down her own capabilities, her own intelligence, her own courage, while reinforcing my father’s masculine strengths and indispensability. She brainwashed herself.

  ‘How did your parents look on your…liaison?’

  The question annoyed me, interrupting the flood of reminiscences which Dr Hartley Taylor had undammed. The clock on his desk had jumped fifteen minutes while I had been reconstructing the past I did not often visit.

  ‘They did not know. About Victor.’

  The eyebrows shot up, and the gold nib, like a seismograph, made marks across the hospital notepaper.

  ‘They wouldn’t have understood.’

  Theirs was not an age of permissiveness, of cohabiting without benefit of clergy, certainly not with a married man, but of romance reflected in the songs ‘Some day my prince will come’ and ‘All of me, why not take all of me?’ – and marriage. Girls were not lauded for posing expressionless for cameras, for being pop singers or into designer jeans – even my own predilection for medicine was not viewed without misgiving: ‘You’ll have to give it up when the babies start coming, Jean’ – but for catching, ensnaring, or otherwise acquiring a desirable (to the outward eye) husband who, by assuming responsibility for you, would render the task, in preparing you for that moment, complete. Following the pattern of grandmas and grandpas, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers-in-law, two by two, you were expected to enter the ark of matrimony, at which point a sigh of relief would be heard. The life that I chose for myself with Victor was untidy and messy, and did not come within my parents’ preconceived parameters.

  ‘You never told them?’

  There was a minute to go. Like a train, leaving a station.

  It seemed strange now.

  My parents, until my mother’s death and my father’s retreat into the private world of dementia, had both thought of me as an old maid.

  Dr Hartley Taylor reached for his prescription pad.

  ‘I’d like to start you on some medication.’

  I had always prided myself on my self-sufficiency, despising the dependence upon drugs, of one kind of another, of my friends and colleagues. The pride of course was false, and my aplomb due to the fact that I had never been ill. It was mortifying to admit that I was as others. That events had caught up with me.

  ‘I don’t want to…’

  To become like the zombies who waited outside in their drugged twilight. There was no more fight in me.

  ‘We’ll start you on a tricyclic. They have the least side-effects. I’d like to see you again in a fortnight. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if anything bothers you.’

  He was closing his notes, capping his fountain pen. I was the twelve o’clock and it was a minute past one.

  I took the prescription, accepting my role as patient, and looked at the name of the drug which identified our age as unequivocally as did the nubile ladies who streaked, bare-breasted, over rugby pitches, and the machinations of the Arts Council.

  ‘How long will I have to take them for?’

  A stupid question.

  ‘Let’s get you going then we can discuss it again.’

  He held the door, but his mind was clearly on other things. His lunch, the next patient, the morning row with his wife, who sorted out people in the next room but was most probably as snarled up in her relationships as they. We were the sick generation. Tuberculosis of the mind and diphtheria of the soul. Marriage guidance counsellors, and social workers, and therapists (I always read the word ‘the rapists’) were cupped upon us and, like leeches, sucked the blood of our disappointment, our despair, fed on our tortured souls.

  I sat in the car, both of us immobilised, and tried to remember how to animate it, looking at the controls as I looked at my face each morning, willing to swear I had seen neither of them before. I was south of the river when I belonged north of it. By the alienation, the sense of foreignness I felt, as the huge lorries laboured up and coasted down the hill, with their cargoes of frozen foods and furniture, it could have been the Gobi desert. Victor had lived this side of the river, keeping me neatly filed away, as he filed everything, on the other bank. He was buried here. Since that first time when I had brought his favourite rose, I had not visited the churchyard. Slowly, laboriously, marvelling at the ensuing miracles I wrought with each motion, I brought the car to life and, on an impulse which was not – for there is no such thing – extricated myself from my parking place and drove towards where Victor was buried, although I was not going to visit his grave.

  I had not known loneliness. Being alone, yes – even at school I had elicited the comment ‘Jean is a bright little girl but she spends too much time on her own’ – but there had always been Victor, although he was not always there. Our ‘liaison’, as Dr Hartley Taylor had called it, while not by some standards an ideal arrangement, had suited me: a limited attachment in which I was able to avoid, as many of my married friends could not, being eaten alive. They had compensations: children, grandchildren now, loving caring families. In their eyes I was unchanged. I had not grown horns. I was ‘on my own’ as usual.

  My demeanour fooled them. Loneliness is not easily perceived by those who do not suffer it, and is not readily admitted by those who do. Unlike other disabilities – age and missing limbs – the acknowledgement of loneliness implies a guilt, a responsibility on the part of the other, to alleviate the condition, to come up with a bright panacea. ‘Get out.’ ‘Do something.’ ‘You’ll feel better if you do.’ Jennie suggested evening classes, but I could not see myself throwing pots, and Sophie, that I learn to play bridge. With Victor’s death I had joined the hidden army; of pensioners, young mothers incarcerated in high-rise flats, the unemployed, about whose fate nobody really cares. I was sorry for myself. Who else was there to be sorry for me? I was not without friends. It wasn’t the absence of the living which was responsible for my state but the aching void left by the one who had died.

  I took to watching television – the nepenthe of solitude – something I had not done when Victo
r was alive. I pressed the button, any button, before I shed my coat. It didn’t help. People on the small screen, even in the adverts, were almost never alone. I tried to think through my paradoxical situation, but my rationalisations went missing in a maelstrom of half-finished thoughts. The nearest I came to a conclusion was that although I had been on my own a great deal when Victor had been alive, now I minded. I didn’t want to go out by myself. I didn’t know what to do. I felt cut off, bored, hopeless, empty, sad, anxious, solitary; even in the midst of a crowd. What was to become of me?

  I had almost taken the solution into my own hands, scaring myself. It was, I think, why I had fallen in with Bob’s suggestion, that the problem was not one I was going to solve on my own. I had told no one. It was after an American soap opera on the box. They say that violence depraves. There had been no commission to study the effects of a sanitised Los Angeles saga, where everyone has sleek cars and decorator houses and lifted faces and shining hair and someone to go home to whether to scream at or to love. No one has ever measured the effect of these charmed lives upon despair.

  Consigning the drama to oblivion, switching it off, I had noticed my suddenly shabby sitting-room in which the carpet needed cleaning, piles of correspondence lay unattended, and Christmas cards, weeks after the event, collected the dust on the mantelpiece. Standing, desolate, in the middle of the room, I had the impression that I was derelict in a world from which I felt completely estranged; that if I opened the windows and called for help my voice would bounce back from the roof tops, mocking me; there would be no one there. It was the nadir of my life.

  I went into the bathroom and sat on the cork-topped stool, looking at my face in the mirror but seeing no image of my translucent self, for I had already disappeared. I opened the wall cabinet, knowing what I would do. I had not moved Victor’s things, his toothbrush, his razor. There was a blade which had already been used – I did not take a new one – it was important, as if there was to be a mingling of the blood, a final compact in death. I took it between my thumb and forefinger, slim and slippery, and turning on both taps held my wrists over the wash-basin not wanting to make a mess. I felt neither afraid nor sorry for myself. I did not feel anything. I had the blade across my radial artery, my fist clenched, hardly able to wait to see the scarlet fascination of my own life force, when the doorbell rang, accompanied by an urgent rattle on the letterbox.

  I need not have answered it, but my trance was broken, the moment over. There would be another. It was my downstairs neighbour. Her phone, she thought, was out of order. Could I be an angel and ring her number? Her choice of words amused me. She looked at me strangely. I think she thought I had been drinking.

  I knew where Victor lived. I had often been there in the early days, to watch the shuttered outside of the house while he was on holiday with Molly and the children. Virginia Water. As in a dream I drove through the High Street, purveyors of meat and provisions to Molly, when she didn’t pick up the phone for the grocery department of Fortnum’s or Harrods’ Food Hall. I parked opposite the house, its curtained windows seeming to jeer. On impulse I got out of the car and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates between the cared-for hedges, as if I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Victor, to discover that he was not really dead. As if by wishing it I would see him once more alive. Preoccupied with my fantasy I didn’t hear the Rolls draw up. Turned only to see Molly in a fur coat, leaning on two sticks, helped by the chauffeur in his grey uniform, come slowly towards me. I was caught. Red-handed. Later of course I realised that Molly, if she considered it at all, might have thought I was a passerby; admiring the house; walking the dog – although there was none. I was incapable of coherent thought. Any thought. As she drew near I looked into the blue eyes, only slightly faded. There was no recognition. How could there be? And yet we were united, had been for twenty-six years, in the sisterhood of belonging to the same man. Sharing him, although one of us did not know.

  ‘Molly.’

  It was out before I thought. Unthinking.

  She looked puzzled.

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  ‘I’m a friend,’ I said, ‘of Victor’s.’

  She looked at me. We stood in the cold. A little tableau with the chauffeur carrying the parcels.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’

  I watched myself nod, walk up the path behind her, admiring the sleek skins of her coat. I remembered her fiftieth birthday when Victor had bought it. I could have had one, half a dozen. I was for conservation in the days, remote now, when I had been actively for anything.

  A diminutive maid opened the door before we reached it, took Molly’s coat and scarf and gloves as though it were a privilege. An imposter, I did not leave mine. Molly, her progress slow over the polished floors, led the way to the drawing-room which overlooked the winter garden. ‘No!’ I almost cried, I knew she’d always hated the formality of the room, I wanted to see her sitting-room. Anything that was Molly’s. We sat on opposite sides of the fireplace. Tea, in a silver pot, appeared, although Molly had not asked for it.

  ‘Had you known Victor long?’

  I wondered what I was doing in Molly’s drawing-room balancing the gold-rimmed cup. I was suddenly appalled.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s been an awful mistake. I think I’d better go.’

  ‘Stay.’ It was a command issued gently. I knew why Victor, nobody, could refuse her. Lucy was the same.

  There were photographs of her children on the piano, Lucy in the days before the heroin had diminished her; the boys; Gavin’s wedding; William with Victor; Tristan on graduation day. I could not look.

  ‘Tell me,’ Molly said. Not in a hurrying or impatient way, but as if she had all the time in the world. Which she had. I realised suddenly that she too was alone. In the big hollow house. Only the servants. How was she managing, who needed Victor constantly at her side?

  ‘They said it might snow,’ Molly said. ‘It’s certainly cold enough.’ She sounded small, pathetic. There was not much of her. I had been thinking about myself but I could see that the elegant arrangements of dried flowers and the formal paintings on the stippled walls were not much company.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about Victor.’

  I had been devastated, floored, annihilated.

  ‘So very sad. At least he didn’t know, poor lamb.’

  ‘On Boxing Day?’

  I wanted her to tell me in her own words.

  ‘He went to the cellar. For the wine.’

  ‘Romilly told me.’ Didn’t you know, Victor’s friend had said. The funeral was on Friday…we couldn’t invite you.

  ‘The children have been marvellous. Everybody has been. People have their own lives.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘There’s not much choice. Gavin and Pamela have invited me to live with them. William has suggested a flat. I don’t want to leave this house.’ She glanced round the room as if the walls were papered with memories. ‘I didn’t know many of Victor’s friends.’

  She had been housebound until Victor’s death when her health had started to improve.

  A chasm lay between us. I put my cup down on the table.

  ‘Look, thank you for the tea.’

  Molly extended an arm as if she wanted to restrain me.

  ‘There’s a photograph,’ she said. ‘Of Victor. Romilly took it on Christmas Day. He thinks he’s quite an expert. Would you like to see it?’

  Does a starving man need food?

  I followed her painful progress up the stairs. Into her room where a fire burned in the grate and the pale sun floodlit the rich interior of Molly’s life. I had often imagined the room as Victor had described it. Nothing had prepared me for the warmth and beauty, which was more than the sum of the books – each one of which I knew immediately had been read – of the treasure trove of ornaments and pictures, small and intimate, of the glowing tapestries which covered the furnishings, on a half-finished one of which Molly was working.

  �
�Do you like it?’

  The photograph she held was of the Virginia Water Victor. The one that took over when he went home from me. He was wearing a scarlet sweater and his family smile, laughing at something beyond the camera.

  I don’t know how the tears came. Before I knew it they were running down my face and splashing onto Victor, onto the glass.

  ‘Of course I knew there must be someone,’ Molly said, looking out of the window. ‘There had to be.’

  Notwithstanding Dr Hartley Taylor, I think I would not have survived without Molly, nor, to be fair, she without me.

  She turned to look at the fire.

  ‘Won’t you take your coat off now?’

  We sat together on the sofa. Molly was so small, so frail, I wondered how I had ever hated her.

  ‘Don’t you hate me?’ I said.

  ‘I never knew about you. Until this moment.’

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘It came to me suddenly. Just now as you looked at Victor’s photo. Perhaps I knew all along. I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to know. Victor seemed happy. There was no…relationship. Not after Lucy. Not much before. Victor gave up asking. I should have realised. I loved him.’