A Second Wife Read online

  Molly looked at me. ‘You loved him too?’

  I nodded, drying my eyes.

  ‘I don’t know your name,’ Molly said.

  ‘Jean.’

  ‘Jean.’

  I never thought I would hear Molly say it. She took my hand. Hers was smooth and pink-tipped. A manicurist came to the house. It had always seemed to me the acme of decadence, of self-indulgence, but Molly wasn’t like that.

  ‘Were you with Victor in Mauritius…’

  It had been our last holiday. Victor’s last.

  ‘Did he tell you that he coughed up blood?’ I asked.

  ‘Only about the cyclone.’

  ‘I begged him to have his chest X-rayed.’

  ‘Victor was obstinate.’

  ‘You couldn’t get him to do anything he didn’t want to.’

  ‘What will you do,’ Molly said. ‘Now?’

  I shook my head and the tears started to flow again. The sooner I started Dr Hartley Taylor’s pills the better.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been rather depressed. I’ve just come from the hospital, as a matter of fact.’

  Molly was the first person to whom I had admitted my condition.

  ‘Poor Jean.’

  My handkerchief was wet. I stood up.

  ‘Look, I’d better go. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. Will you come again?’

  She was wearing a silk shirt, grey-blue like her eyes, and a pleated skirt. I wanted to take her in my arms for all the wrong that I’d done to her.

  ‘Please.’

  Perhaps in alleviating her loneliness I might manage to lessen mine.

  ‘If you really want me to.’

  ‘You live in London? I know it’s a long drive. Come for lunch…’

  I told her about the Pathology Centre, but not that Victor had bought it for me, and that I would try to come again.

  ‘I’ll give you my number. It’s not in the book…’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Of course you know it.’

  I knew so much about her. It wasn’t fair. I felt as if I was taking advantage of her and that I must see her again if only to make amends, to give her something in return. I looked at her two sticks.

  ‘Don’t come down.’

  ‘I’ll soon be able to do without them.’

  Going down the stairs, no one about, the heels of my boots sinking into the soft carpet, I imagined I was Victor and how he felt in the panelled hall of his other life, his real life, for was I not the other? The contemplation did nothing for my self-esteem, already at rock bottom. As I had wanted Victor to myself I wanted his house to be mine, yet I could not hate Molly.

  The least side-effects, Dr Hartley Taylor said. A strange jest. Where I had woken up at dawn I now had difficulty in waking up at all. When I did drag myself from my bed I could not wait to get back to it. My mouth was dry, and I could not focus upon the print of my morning paper. Not that it mattered. The news worried me. Fires claiming innocent lives and cars hitting people and trains hitting cars and bombs in airports and hijackers in planes and strikes and outbreaks of violence and sudden death. Even the arts page did not distract. There was too much on offer – plays, concerts, ballet, opera – it only confused me. The fashion and the city pages required both motivation and effort of which I was not capable. The print jumped up and down. At work the blood cells coalesced through the lenses of my microscope and I had to call upon Bob for help to isolate a malarial parasite. My hands shook and my speech slurred. At the time the cure seemed worse than the disease it aimed to alleviate. I persevered. Depression while it lasts, they say, is permanent. It certainly seemed so. It was the pestilence of our age which had replaced the natural world with artefacts, removed us from our roots, yet few people understood the nature of the beast.

  Sophie said: ‘I often get depressed.’ She meant miserable. The brief fluctuations in mood she encountered trailing a spell of dreary weather or the departure of a lover. ‘Have your hair done. It works wonders.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a holiday?’ Jennie suggested. ‘Paris or Rome.’

  They meant well. Neither of them had any idea. It was not a question of feeling low, dispirited, down-in-the-mouth. But of not feeling, of being out of touch with one’s inner self, out of sync. A new hairstyle, Paris or Rome, were equally inappropriate.

  I was ambivalent about keeping my second appointment with Dr Hartley Taylor. Although the side-effects of the drugs were marginally less, I was no better.

  ‘It takes time,’ Dr Hartley Taylor said.

  ‘It’s been two weeks.’

  I sounded like the worst sort of patient. Petulant. Aggressive. A spoiled child.

  ‘How have you been sleeping?’

  I admitted to my oblivious nights.

  ‘Appetite?’

  I did not bother to cook. To bring food into the house. It was too much effort. The butcher, where you had to state your requirements, loud and unequivocal, to engage in dialectic, be it about the liver or the weather, was out of the question. The supermarket was no better. I tried to explain how I had stood mesmerised before the display counter, blocking the path for other shoppers, trying to confer some sort of meaning onto quarters of chicken and pounds of mince. I had reached out for one of the film-covered plastic trays then put it back as furtively as any shoplifter; tried again with another, but unable to endow it with any edible status from the recipe book of my blank mind, similarly replaced it. The delicatessen section did not help. Rosy mountains of taramasalata – no longer caviare to the general – ready-made salads, cheeses in a variety of textures from a dozen countries, strings of preserves, sausages, olives small and large and stuffed with pimentoes and green and black, and cooked meats. It was too much. When I was hungry I boiled an egg from the half-dozen left weekly by the milkman. When he rang the bell for his money and overcharged, the other Jean Banks, the one who functioned, did not argue. I let it go.

  ‘Had you considered what you would do without Victor?’

  I had thought more in terms of Victor abandoning me – I had after all no hold on him, no rights – than his death.

  Dr Hartley Taylor looked at his notes, meticulous, painstaking.

  ‘You met Victor when you were…twenty-five. What about your previous history?’

  Before Victor there had been Richard.

  I told the tie, orange this week, in Mondrian-like sections, how I had reneged upon my vows to Richard and our wedding, disappointed my parents and compromised myself – eschewing the delights of a marital home and children – for what Richard had called a bêtise, although I had never heard of one which had lasted for so long.

  ‘It must have been a big decision.’

  It hadn’t seemed so at the time.

  ‘And before Richard?’

  So long ago. There had been medical students. Unconsummated passion, before the age of permissiveness. I considered, with difficulty, the past.

  ‘No other men?’

  My head was about to shake itself when my mind, which I had not engaged it to do, slipped film into its sprocket and rewound, with magical alacrity, the years.

  ‘I was fifteen.’

  So young. It was strange that in those days the dalliance, innocent as it was, had been permitted, but at the time everyone had been too preoccupied with more pressing matters, concerning a world at war – and the defeat of Germany for which we were all waiting – to pay too much attention.

  The country and my mother did not get on. Not only was she miserable without my father, but as a ‘townee’ was regarded by the locals as a foreigner and not included in the social life of the village. She was not alone in her dilemma. All over England women, accustomed to sharing lives across a suburban fence, found themselves among alien corn. She did not of course have time on her hands. Queueing for the weekly ounce of cheese and shillingsworth of meat, and devising ways to extend the allocation and make it palatable, kept her occupied. She made jam from hedgerow
blackberries with preserving sugar for which she stood in line, bottled plums in season in hoarded kilner jars, and pickled eggs in water-glass from which it was my job to retrieve them, the failures stinking of hydrogen sulphide. It could not have been easy, bringing us up on her own, but it was not that which worried her. It was the loneliness. She did not care for haystacks, and wanted to do something more positive to help the war effort than unpick my old jumpers, to reknit the wool for Jennie, or make parsnip marmalade and carrot jam.

  Our London house had not been sold. On one of his leaves my father agreed that we return to it, using the space under the stairs (where we kept the vacuum cleaner and which had always served as a popular cache for hide-and-seek) as an air-raid shelter, should the need arise. Leaving the village school where we had never felt at home and often cried – although we had not told our mother – had been no problem for Jennie and me. As children do, we took the war with its civilian deprivations – which seemed to us a matter of course – and the partings, both physical and geographical, in our stride. We helped our mother pack and, on the last, blacked-out country night, went to bed leaving our luggage, topped by the ubiquitous cardboard boxes with our gas masks, in the front room. That night a Heinkel dropped a bomb in our suburban street, toppling the chimney and blasting the glass from the windows of our house.

  Undeterred we returned to London and temporary accommodation in a guest house. My mother, who until then had professed total ignorance of the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, learned to drive an ambulance and I, now fifteen, looked after Jennie and began my breathtaking, earth-shattering, Mrs Miniver-style romance with Pilot Officer Jones.

  I had not beaten the clock. Dr Hartley Taylor was recapping his pen as he must have done a hundred times a day.

  ‘I’d like you to keep on with the same dose.’

  He opened his diary and uncapped the pen again to give me another appointment. There should be some improvement in my mood, he said, before my next visit. I could not share his optimism.

  The corridor was becoming familiar. At the far end of it a man waited politely, holding the swing door. With a shock of recognition I saw that it was Richard. I didn’t know that he worked at the Maudsley. He was as taken aback as I.

  ‘Jean!’

  My face flushed, as if I had been caught perpetrating some antisocial deed, instead of seeking appropriate help for the clinical depression of which I was still in the depths. I wished it hadn’t happened.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’ I lied brightly, and looked at my watch as if I was wanted urgently, elsewhere. ‘And you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Richard said. He had aged gracefully.

  ‘Nice seeing you.’ I passed in front of him.

  ‘And you.’

  It was all we could redeem from the sudden shock of the encounter.

  It seemed a day – lowering and wintery, no sign of the spring – of the past. I thought about it as I turned the car in the direction of Virginia Water. I was going to see Molly. It seemed natural now.

  Pilot Officer Jones, with four other Air Force officers, had been billetted at the guest house which my father had found for us. With teenage alacrity we had fallen in love. Love. We called it that, and it was as consuming and passionate as any I have experienced since, but looking back I can see that it was naïve and sentimental, based on false and romantic premises propagated by Anne Shelton and Vera Lynn. It was the age of the gramophone. Not the high-tech that we know today, but the wind-up job, with the steel needles which seemed always to need changing. While Mother was driving her ambulance and Jennie slept, we spent our time dancing, ‘cutting a rug’ we called it – Glenn Miller and the Ink Spots – Pilot Officer Jones and I. Locked in each others’ arms we circumvented the deserted residents’ lounge, wearing out the carpet. When we’d done with the dancing, we’d retire to the kitchen and experiment with kisses, at which neither of us was expert, but which persisted for an inordinate length of time and of which we never seemed to tire. His mates ribbed him about me but he didn’t care. Besotted, we thought only of each other.

  At school, sitting for lessons in the Anderson shelter whenever the air-raid sirens sounded, I day-dreamed about Gerald, waiting only for the night. Sometimes he wasn’t there when I got home. The four of them would vanish for weeks at a time, then reappear as suddenly as they had gone, in boots and flying jackets, with the eyes of old men. Gerald didn’t like flying. None of them did. There was no question of heroism when they came up against German flak – their bowels turned to water. One day, when Gerald had been away for some time, I walked home from school through the blackout and the dense winter fog, shining my torch, dimmed with its statutory three layers of tissue paper, down onto the pavement. Groping my way, I bumped into lamp-posts and other pedestrians searching – as in blind man’s buff – for familiar landmarks, the air thick with muttered imprecations. A shape loomed up and sidestepping to avoid a collision I recognised the blue-grey uniform, the white muffler. Gerald. Like babes in the wood, although we thought that we were so grown up, we clung together, forming an obstruction in the middle of the dark pavements.

  It was better than the country. I didn’t care about the nightly air-raid warnings, about the bombs. I had a tin hat, left by an air-raid warden, and putting it on at the first siren I’d turn over and go to sleep.

  When Gerald was posted abroad I lived for the postman and the pale blue envelopes which had been opened by the censor. It was one of the worst winters in history. Gerald froze, and sent me letters of undying love and a hand-painted handkerchief from Brussels. It wasn’t all war. More boredom really, reading between the lines: The Way Ahead and Ben Hur while they waited for action. He came home on leave and left again. At school we swapped love lives, boasting how far we had ‘gone’. One day I came home and found mother in her ambulance uniform with a telegram in her hand. Gerald’s family had passed it on. It was from the Air Ministry. ‘Regret to inform you that your son Pilot Officer Gerald Jones 286493 is now reported missing and believed to have lost his life.’ It was one month before the war ended.

  We had lunch in front of Molly’s fire. She’d greeted me with a kiss, like an old friend, and when we sat down on the sofa against the cushions she had stitched, I wondered stupidly if Victor could see us, and what he would think. Molly told me about her grandchildren and showed me pictures of them, a boy and a girl – Gavin and Pamela’s – tiny tots on a Greenpeace march, holding banners ‘Let the Earth Breathe’ and ‘Down with Acid Rain’. William, her eldest son (I recalled when his broken arm had prevented Victor taking me to Jamaica), was getting married to a divorcée five years his senior with three toddlers. Victor would not have approved.

  ‘They’ll live in Cambridge…’ Molly said.

  It was where William had his electronics business.

  ‘…they’ve bought an enormous house.’

  I imagined Molly going to visit, to stay, and grew angry because she still had Victor in her children while I had no living thing that I could call my own after twenty-six years with him. I had made the choice. My eyes had been open. I was not prepared for the sensation that I had been robbed, cheated. Molly told me about Lucy who had come home for Victor’s funeral. She showed me a picture of her only daughter, now a registered drug addict, cut from the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper, with her paramour – the lead guitarist in a pop group – in identical suits and bow ties, paper-white faces and scarlet lips.

  ‘I blame myself,’ Molly said. ‘I wasn’t a proper mother. I should never have had Lucy.’

  ‘Victor adored her.’

  ‘He so wanted a girl. I wasn’t always sick, Jean. I didn’t want to be.’

  I didn’t suppose she had. Her agoraphobia, the hysterical paralysis of her legs, now improving, could not have been pleasant.

  ‘At night I wonder what will become of me. I lie awake…’

  It was all very well for Molly who had her family.

  ‘I don’t wan
t to be a burden on my children,’ she said, as if she had read my thoughts.

  I realised suddenly that Molly was as lonely as I: that neither of us had Victor to define us, to tell us who we were. I knew from what Victor had let slip, and from the evidence of her pursuits – tapestry and reading – that Molly liked silence and her own company. We were alike in that. Looking round the room I had to smile, although at the time I would not have thought it funny; each souvenir that graced my sitting-room, the Buddhas, the Makondes, were duplicated in Molly’s. How we delude ourselves. Are duped.

  The fire, with its smokeless fuel, burned our legs, Molly’s frail from disuse. Staring into it, she told me about the boarding school to which she’d been evacuated during the war.

  ‘There was a French girl in my class. She was my friend. She went blind, suddenly, in one eye. They took her to hospital and I went to visit her. No one could find the cause. Years later I discovered that it happened on the day she heard that the body of her father, who was in the Resistance, had been found down a well. He’d been killed by the Gestapo.’

  Recounting the story, Molly stared at me in horror. It was as if she suddenly acknowledged the strange powers of the mind over the body. Had admitted to herself, and for the first time, the psychogenic origins of her disabled legs.

  On the morning of my third appointment with Dr Hartley Taylor I was woken by a bird. Its song marked the coming of the spring and the first shaft of light to pierce my gloom. It was gone almost immediately. I reported my progress, or lack of it, which was meticulously recorded. I told my ‘shrink’ about the momentary lifting of the pall in which, for one brief moment, I had glimpsed the old Jean Banks.

  ‘It’s an indication that positive changes are taking place. The healing process is working. We must give it time.’

  I had plenty. Outside my work there were no demands on it.

  ‘You were telling me about Gerald.’

  Gerald. My first loss. My first personal intimation that life could be anything other than nice times and happy families. I had come chirpily from school, and looked as usual on the table where our landlady put the mail, for a letter. My heart flipped at Gerald’s writing. I did not notice my mother in her dark uniform standing in the dark hall.