The days merged one into the other. It seems a lifetime ago now and of course it was. I have been to Shotmere many times since, and it is no longer a punitive and rather bizarre experience, but that first time, naturally, will always stick in my mind.
It wasn’t difficult to pass the days. Removed from the constant stimuli of work and life in London it seemed in the beginning that they would hang fire. I found it hard to relax. The masseuse, a country girl with arms like steel, bounced and pummelled in the cubicle where I lay, trying to rub away what she called the ‘tension’ in my back and shoulders. When she’d finished I rose in my towel and staggered into the turkish bath. Surrounded by perspiring bodies reminding me of outpatients, I sat with the other ladies listening to the tittle-tattle concerning lifestyles fragmented by the social upheaval of the past years – in particular the difficulties of managing without servants – and of course the eternal preoccupation of those who were doing without it – food.
Afterwards we lay, cocooned in our utility blankets like so many overgrown babies, watching the clock in the silent room while our heartbeats, stimulated by the heat, slowed, and our vital functions returned to normal.
Some mornings I walked. The surrounding countryside was burgeoning, others I slept again after the treatments. Sometimes I just sat and read in the silent drawing-room overlooking the gardens.
At times I wondered what I was going there, wasting my precious leave when I could have been hot-footing it on a beach, dragging myself, exhausted, round some ancient temple. By the end of the week I was thanking Mr Clegg nightly. I never knew that it was possible to be so busy doing nothing and how therapeutic it was.
I wasn’t terribly sociable. Nobody was. You could talk or not. Fraternize or not. I was not standoffish, merely enjoying the solicitude of my own company. I shared tables at mealtimes and at tea and exchanged gossip concerning our lives in the real world. In the evenings I read or joined in a game of gin rummy. By ten o’clock everyone was in bed or in their rooms after the vicissitudes of the day.
The man with whom I had shared a table at lunch that first day appeared rarely. When he did he spoke to no one. He wore a dark blue towelling robe with a monogram on the pocket and seemed never to move without the Financial Times. If he remembered that he had once spoken to me he did not acknowledge it. I wondered what he did all day.
For the first week the weather was so glorious I did not think to hanker after Mediterranean suns. At the beginning of the second I woke to lowering skies but since I had planned a long walk carried out my intention. It was never easy for me to change my mind.
I walked cross-country, elated by the new green leaves and the sight of primroses and bluebells nestling among the trees, and stood by the river rushing cleanly over the stones at Waggoner’s Wells. As I watched, the first drops of rain fell, like fine needles, slowly piercing the water. I had no umbrella and only a sweater over my trousers. I looked up at the sky to find no break in the grey cloud and thought I had better make for Shotmere as quickly as possible, this time by the road.
It did not rain, it deluged, the new drops augmented by the rivulets which had already collected in the trees. Before long I was soaked through, my hair was plastered to my face and my shoes squelched with every step I took. With every vehicle that passed I received a further gratuitous soaking.
The road was winding and narrow. I had walked along it for about a mile when I became aware that I was being followed; by a car. I could hear it purring. I stepped into the ditch. It was the maroon Rolls, VIP 10. At the wheel was the taciturn baked-potato eater, the Financial Times addict, the wearer of the monogrammed bathrobe.
He drew level with me and opened the door. It would not have surprised me had he driven right past. I looked at the cream upholstery and then down at my bedraggled condition.
‘Don’t worry.’
What the hell, I thought. It was better than walking back in the rain.
He reached across me for the handle. The door closed with a quiet clunk. I hadn’t been aware that the engine was still running. He put his foot on the accelerator. I was enveloped in the smell of new leather. It overcame the odour of wet dogs which emanated from my clothes.
‘I’m glad you stopped. I had no umbrella.’ I felt it incumbent upon me to offer the small change of conversation in lieu of the fare.
‘It was stupid to go so far. The forecast was for rain.’
‘I’m afraid I’m making your car wet. It’s a beautiful car.’ I had never been in one like it, everything handmade.
We turned into the main road with the sign pointing through the village to Shotmere.
‘It’ll dry.’
He looked different out of his bathrobe, in slacks and pullover, younger. He had brown hair and brown eyes and was of medium build. How do you describe somebody who has no particular distinguishing features but because of whom, ultimately, the course of your life will be changed?
They were the only words we exchanged until we came to a halt outside Shotmere yet I was prepared to swear that it was a quite different conversation that had taken place. Perhaps all the relaxation had made me go funny in the head.
He waited for me to get out, not opening the door. Money but no manners, I thought.
I thanked him for the lift and for rescuing me from the rain.
‘Victor Pattison,’ he said, looking at me full in the face for the first time. ‘I’m leaving this afternoon.’
‘Jean Banks.’
I got out and he shut the door quickly before the rain wet the inside of the car. I looked back and saw him take out his handkerchief to wipe away the few drops that had spotted the veneer, then he drove towards the parking place.
‘VIP.’ Victor Pattison.
I wondered what the ‘I’ stood for.
I didn’t see him again for two years.
I got on with my life. It was not a revolutionary one. I am not a revolutionary person. I was good at school but not outstanding, adequate at life but would never shine at it. Sometimes I wondered whether I could lay the blame for my mediocrity at my parents’ door for calling me Jean. Jean. The Scottish form of Jane or Joan. Neither of them had ever been north of the border.
I worked for my Membership and got it, much to my surprise. What with that and my hospital work I had never been so extended. I went home to tell them the good news and also that I had decided to get married.
They knew Richard because he was a childhood friend. My father used to give him a lift to school. He had just been appointed a consultant at the Tavvy.
My mother was in her seventh heaven. She had given me up as a bad job. My younger sister had been married for five years and had already given her two grandchildren. A son-in-law who was a psychiatrist! Jennie’s husband was in the timber construction business, nice but dull. Her cup was full.
I loved Richard. Everyone did. You couldn’t help it. He was good and kind and sweet and dear. I felt right with him and our social circles were concentric; there were no great adjustments to be made.
We were to be married at the end of the summer in a gap between jobs, in the local church.
My mother was busy; ivory satin and three tier cakes and sessions with ‘Apollo’, the High Street photographer. We let her get on with it. Jennie was pregnant again so Sophie, my friend and flatmate, was to attend me. Richard and I spent evenings and weekends looking at flats trying to find one which was not too depressing. We settled for one in West Hampstead not too far from the Tavvy. I was doing a pathology job at the Royal Free and had decided that therein lay my future. There was something in the impersonality of the laboratory that appealed to my natural reticence. I had never liked the physical contact with the patients, had no bedside manner to speak of, and preferred to do my work at one remove. It seemed the ideal speciality. I spent more time at my bench, cross-matching and grouping, than in the wards, an arrangement which suited me.
I was staining a blood film when Gordon, my consultant, crossed the corridor to sta
nd in the doorway of the lab.
‘Where’s Donald?’ He asked for the Senior Registrar.
‘In the ward. Doing a bone marrow.’
‘You’ll do then. I want you to take some blood for me. ESR and a white count. There’s a friend of mine in my room. He’s just back from the Far East and running a temperature.’
I collected up my syringe and bottles. It was three months before my wedding.
In Gordon’s room, next to the bookcase with its red bound volumes of the British Journal of Haematology and its blue bound volumes of the Journal of Clinical Pathology, a man in a grey flannel suit sat with his back to me. I recognized him at once. I had often thought of him. He did not look at me.
He rolled up his sleeve when I asked him and sat quite still watching the tourniquet as I tightened it.
I leaned over him to get the needle into the vein and his eyes were level with the label pinned to my white coat. ‘Dr Jean Banks’. I could almost hear the wheels turning. They were well oiled and it didn’t take long before he raised his eyes to mine.
If Gordon noticed that my face was red he probably thought that it was from bending down. When I’d got my two millilitres and given it a shake, he said: ‘Right, Victor, we don’t need to keep you any longer.’ And ‘Thank you, Jean, let me have the results as soon as you can.’
When I got back to the flat there were two dozen white carnations waiting for me with Sophie fluttering round them and no card. Richard wanted to know who sent them.
I told him I didn’t know, although I did. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me. It could, after all, have been any one of the patients. I knew it was not.
After that there were flowers every day, sometimes twice. Always white. We had no more vases and the flat was getting cluttered. Now that the novelty had worn off, Sophie was getting irritated and Richard was no longer amused.
‘This is ridiculous!’ he said, ‘you must have some idea!’
The siege, of white flowers – foxgloves and lilies, roses and stephanotis, gladioli and marguerites – became a river and the river a flood. It went on for two weeks then stopped abruptly.
‘Some lunatic!’ Sophie said.
The next day when I left the hospital the maroon Rolls was waiting outside taking me by surprise. I stood on the steps aware that my life lay before me. There has been much talk, much ridicule about a woman’s intuition but it exists. Ask any woman. There is no reason, no logic for many of our actions, most of our decisions. A woman knows because she knows.
The summer sun was in my eyes. It provided an excuse to put up my hand to shade them while I was thinking, although there was nothing to think about. It doesn’t matter how much you sidestep, eventually your destiny will catch up with you.
I walked slowly down the steps. He did not turn round. When I reached the last one he opened the passenger door so that it swung out over the kerb.
I got in and closed it behind me.
‘Your blood picture was normal,’ I said to fill the silence, although of course he already knew.
‘I’m fine now. Probably just ’flu. Gordon gets in a panic. I help him with his investments and he looks after my health. We play golf.’
I looked at the white carnation on the dashboard.
‘Why did you send me so many flowers?’
‘I wanted you to have them. I love flowers. My wife won’t have them in the house.’
My eyes went to his hand on the steering wheel. I had either not noticed, or noticed and denied, the wedding ring. It was there; gold and unequivocal.
‘How did you know where I live?’ I said and then thought what a stupid question, he must have found out from the hospital.
‘I made enquiries,’ he said, manoeuvring the car through the rush-hour streets, ‘from Shotmere.’
I looked at him. Shotmere had been two years ago.
‘You hardly spoke to me.’
‘I watched you. I saw you go out for your walk. I followed you. When I saw you at the hospital…’ He shrugged and we turned the corner, ‘…I decided it was fate.’
‘Do you do things like that too?’
‘All the time.’
He parked the car by the gold and black gates of Queen Mary’s Gardens and we walked in the evening park. I had never before been so conscious of my body, and the charged space between us.
I told him about Richard and how we were to be married and he spoke about Molly, telling me only as much that first time as he thought I should know.
Later I found out that they had been married for ten years and had three children, William, Tristan and Gavin. Molly had been eighteen when he married her and he’d put her dependence upon him, her absolute refusal to go anywhere without him, down to her extreme youth. At first he tolerated what he thought were her idiosyncrasies – her refusal to travel anywhere by plane, her insistence on aisle seats in a cinema or theatre, her dislike of crowded places. As the years went by her fears had increased, impinging more and more on their lives, until they became untenable and he insisted she have treatment.
Their world became infiltrated by doctors, none of them able to help Molly more than briefly. It seemed always to be one step forward and two steps back. Now she was unable to leave the house unaccompanied, scarcely went out at all.
Telling me, about Molly, was not easy. I could see that. I could see too that he loved her. You could never say I had any illusions about Victor.
We walked and talked. Sat down and talked. If there were other people I don’t remember. When Victor said it was seven o’clock I could not believe it.
It was as if he’d switched off. The light went out of him and I had the curious feeling that he’d detached himself like a snail withdrawing into its shell. It was a sensation I was to experience many times over the years.
Taking me home he seemed preoccupied. A strange man. The sun was going down when he dropped me off. He kept both hands on the wheel.
‘See you tomorrow. It will be a long night.’
Some words have more drift than poetry. Coming from Victor they were poetry.
Richard was in the flat dozing in the armchair.
‘I thought you had a meeting?’ I said.
‘Cancelled. Where on earth have you been?’
‘I went to the cinema.’
It was my first lie.
When Richard had gone and I was alone I stood in front of Sophie’s pier glass to see what he saw in me: Victor. There was a woman, slim, twenty-seven years old, with brown, shoulder-length hair restrained by slides and fringed in front, and dark blue eyes permanently circled with rings of fatigue. ‘Engadiner’ blue, Victor called them later. They were my best feature, my eyes, redeeming me from plainness; my eyes and my legs. I could dress from the chain stores but whatever money I had went on shoes.
I ran the bath, my thoughts on Victor. Engaged to be married, I was being stupid. I knew that I would go on being stupid. I tried to describe him to myself. He was shorter than I. His head seeming to have been stuck on to his shoulders very firmly indeed. Brown hair, brown eyes, not darting from side to side anxious to see everything, but focussing steadily, seeming to place the findings on permanent record in the ordered catalogue of his mind. His features were unremarkable. His face not especially memorable until he smiled, an expression he did not squander lightly. Perhaps because of its rarity his smile was especially appealing; it certainly was to me and I have since noted its effect on other people. It was wide, humorous, generous, showing white, uneven teeth; it puckered the corners of his mouth as far as his cheeks, and the corners of his eyes, creating a network of wrinkles. Its most unique feature was that it stayed on his face for some time, illuminating it, and only slowly, imperceptibly, died away leaving a warm residue. It was given neither lightly nor seductively, but as a genuine expression of delight which encompassed those around him, lighting up, while it lasted and for long after, the ether. It has ever failed, even in my most gloomy moments, to elevate my mood.
The most be
autiful thing about him (you could not by any measure call Victor beautiful) was his hands. I fell in love with them. I suspected the attentions of a manicurist but it was not the fact that they were so well kept that spoke to me. There was, at the same time, both a fluidity and a firmness about them, as if he rode a headstrong horse with a gentle mouth. He was economical in their use. When he did employ them it was to great effect. One had the impression they were capable of both tending and crushing and that they were a genuine expression of his soul. When he stood, it seemed to be almost on his toes, like a man poised for flight. I guessed him to be in his mid-thirties, some eight or nine years older than myself.
My analysis – assuming that the whole was nothing more than the sum of the parts – was unsatisfactory. It was like scraping the paint from the canvas to demonstrate the Last Supper. Victor was an essence, a quintessence, a being. And he had entered my soul.
He was there the next day sitting, not patiently, in the Rolls. I hadn’t been able to concentrate on my work wondering if he would be.
I didn’t get in when he opened the door.
‘I’m having dinner with Richard.’
‘Just a drink then. Please.’
I watched myself get into the car.
Outside the hotel the car was whisked away. Inside, the music of the palm court trio played gently. Victor was greeted by name. The drinks appeared, as if by magic, and no money, that I could see, changed hands. There seemed so much to say. I told him something of my day, the routine lab work, haemoglobin estimations and sedimentation rates – today of course it’s all done by computer – antenatal serology and platelet counts, and could swear that he was not only interested but could have recited, word for word, what I had told him. He spoke, his face softening, of William and Tristan and Gavin who was only two.
This time it was I who watched the clock, not wanting to have to lie again to Richard.
He dropped me at the bottom of my road.
A Loving Mistress Page 2