A Loving Mistress

by Rosemary Friedman

  And for what? Victor had promised me nothing. Neither agreed nor protested when I said I was not going to marry Richard. We both knew that I was not.

  My mother, in a sea of cream tulle which she had finally tracked down, took it as a personal affront. How could I, when the time for claiming back the deposit she had paid the caterer had long passed; when Apollo was waiting, shutter open; when the Dublin contingent had booked their flights and wedding presents filled the spare bedroom?

  She cried and through her tears said: ‘You never were an easy child.’

  I knew that she meant that in giving up Richard I was throwing away my chances. Unlike Jennie I had never been a candle around which the suitors constantly fluttered. I did not tell them about Victor. My father said: ‘Don’t worry about the presents,’ realizing there were more important things at stake, and ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  I hoped I did too. Sometimes, when Victor was not there, and usually he was not, I thought I must be mad, having a brainstorm or something, to throw up a good man like Richard to follow some will-o’-the-wisp that had blown into my life and was just as likely to blow out again. Another part of me, now that I had time to think, rejoiced in the fact that I would no longer be jeopardizing the freedom to which I had become accustomed, to be alone, please no one but myself, revolve in my own orbit. It was not a nice time. I had made everyone unhappy. I felt sorry for my mother who had the unpleasant task of telling the wedding guests and returning their presents – she viewed it as some kind of disgrace or failure – sorry for Richard who still did not believe I was not going to change my mind, that there hadn’t been merely some momentary aberration on my part.

  ‘You hardly know this fellow!’

  I could not argue.

  ‘He’s just turned your head.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘If only you didn’t damned well agree with me all the time.’

  I knew what he meant. He wanted me to cry, protest, acclaim my love for Victor. It would have made him feel better. How could I? I could not put into words what I felt. Only that I was prepared to wait, alone and lonely, until he raised a finger and I knew that I would come running; from the ends of the earth. If that was love it defied explanation. If the words were in the English language I did not know them. Only that I thought about nothing else. It affected my work. They gave me strange looks in the department, cancelled the party they had collected for, and put away the present for the next person to get married. I never did discover what it was.

  I had brought something else back from the Lake District; other than the fudge for Sophie.

  We were in our sitting-room with our supper on our laps.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ I said, picking up a chip in my fingers.

  ‘Jean!’ It was a reproach to a child who had been careless. ‘You of all people!’ She meant that I should have known better.

  A look of concern crossed her face.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’

  There was no point. What was the point? All Victor could do was pay and I did not want that. I made discreet enquiries and found out where I could go. Until the last moment I enjoyed the sensation of being with child – although I had always dismissed it as sentimental nonsense – knowing that my womb would never again fulfil its biological function.

  My views on children were mixed. I was not an earth mother, judging by my reaction to Jennie’s brood and how pleased I was to escape from the atmosphere of large print books – ‘Aunty read it!’ – and Marmite soldiers, and was not sufficiently egotistical to yearn for some miniature, walking talking facsimile of myself. True, I felt a special pain on hearing about the suffering of children, seeing red in particular when it was caused by the fruitless wars of the grown-ups. Names like Guernica, Auschwitz and Hiroshima made my blood boil with their registers of violence and bloodshed involving innocent children, but at that time I believed I had no strong desires for any family. I was more concerned with my own life than any I might live vicariously.

  I removed/murdered/sacrificed my child on the day that I was to have been married. On my wedding day.

  Physically it was nothing. I had had more discomfort having a tooth filled. Psychologically it demolished me. I cried for three days. Sophie, who looked after me, was in despair. From time to time she asked me what I was weeping for.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  And I didn’t.

  Or it was so many things. It sent me a bit crazy. At times I thought what a fool I’d been and that of course I should have married Richard and allowed myself the tender joys of motherhood. I could see myself in a room sorting tiny garments. Then the image faded and it was Jennie, and I, a dried up old stick of a woman, was looking on. I think I was delirious for a while, burning with the fever of a conscience I did not know I had. When I finally left my bed I saw only babies and children in the streets. Babies and children who would always belong to somebody else. Victor was in Hong Kong. It was the reason I had chosen that moment to dispose of our child. By the time he came back I had pulled myself together or thought I had, and was searching the columns in the Medical Journal for a new job.

  Who says that love is blind, lies. The minute he saw me Victor knew that something was the matter, had been the matter. I’d not been well, I said. A heavy cold. He was not fooled.

  ‘You’re different.’

  ‘No.’

  He was right of course. Every experience changes us. We never come out the same. He let it go and I was at the same time relieved and angry. Richard would have kept on, hammering away, wheedling, until he’d got it out of me. It was not Victor’s way. He respected the fact that I had a life of my own and that there were parts of it to which he did not have access. This was an aspect of our relationship which I liked. So many of my married friends seemed to have no personal privacy, no cerebral solitude. Victor wanted me to be there but not to possess me. He gave me some distance for which I was grateful. When I told him, years later, about the child, he said nothing and turned away but I’m sure that he shed some kind of tear for our dead son or daughter.

  I got a job at the Hammersmith. Registrar in Pathology, with a graded training scheme for diagnostic work and good research facilities. I was on the road to the Consultantship I was aiming for, although the bias was still strongly in favour of men.

  Until it started I saw Victor every day. What was to have been my honeymoon in Cornwall turned out to be two weeks in London with Victor. We spent every moment, that Victor was able to spare from the office, together; mainly in the flat while Sophie was at work. At night he went home to Molly.

  One day because I’d asked, he showed me a photograph of her. I was amazed. I held the square of cardboard in front of me and saw my own face staring back. Not the mirror image but an unmistakable likeness. The shape of the face was the same, a similarity of features, except the eyes. Hers were shallow and haunted, mine, when I looked at Victor, were deep with love.

  ‘She looks like me.’ I handed it back to him.

  ‘Not a bit.’ He returned it to his wallet.

  I didn’t argue, realizing that he was unable to see why he had been so attracted to me at Shotmere.

  I kept my relationship with Victor to myself. Sometimes, when he was away, I went out, for dinner or to a film, with other men. When they tried to get close I rejected them and got the reputation in my new department for being frigid. My appearance, cool and collected, confirmed the suspicion. Jean Banks. Behind my back they called me ‘Ice-Bank’, a kind of iceberg. It didn’t matter. I had no eyes for anyone but Victor.

  The hours on duty were long and erratic. Some nights I slept at the hospital. Victor and I had from five until seven whenever I was free – at seven he had to leave to get home to Molly in Virginia Water – and Wednesday evenings when she had her bridge game.

  I loved Wednesdays.

  Often we
went to the opera which was Victor’s passion. Before Victor my opera-going had been limited to an amateur performance of Carmen and an unforgettably tedious evening at Ariadne auf Naxos with a heavy going gastroenterologist who could not understand why I did not share his enthusiasm.

  Under Victor’s guidance I ceased to dismiss opera as articifial, silly stories, told in unintelligible words, and learned to make the imaginative leap from everyday life into a world where people sang of their emotions to an orchestral accompaniment.

  We tried to avoid fashionable and public places. The opera house, where Victor had his own seats, was the exception. If people greeted him he did not encourage them to stay and talk. At first I thought it was because of me. As I got to know him better I realized that he was an intensely shy man. He kept people at bay, feeling that behind their assumed friendship lay the desire for contracts for their firms, jobs for their relatives, donations for charity, his name on their notepaper or just to be able to say they had spoken to him. It was this shyness which had prevented him from making any but the most superficial approach to me at Shotmere.

  From time to time I too would run into an acquaintance and would introduce Victor as ‘just a friend’, wanting to say he is my life, my love.

  Rosenkavalier, which brought fame to its composer, and was a never failing source of delight to Victor, had a special significance for me.

  It was after an intoxicating evening with the Marschallin and Baron Ochs, that we came back to the flat still humming the arias.

  As usual, Victor had to get back to Molly and could not stay.

  In the sitting-room, where Sophie had left the paper pattern of the dress she was making, on the floor, he thrust a small box into my hand and told me not to open it until he’d gone.

  When he’d left I pushed aside the green lurex from the sofa and sat down to see what was inside. It was a ruby set in diamonds, sparkling in a symphony of light. I looked at my hands, plain and short-nailed. I rarely wore rings. I had a gold one from my grandmother and an opal which my parents gave me for my twenty-first birthday. I looked round as if to make sure that there was no one in the room. There was only Sophie’s dressmaking dummy, stuffed and headless. I put the ring on my right hand and then changed it to the fourth finger of my left and for a moment lived a fantasy of eradicating Molly and being engaged to marry Victor.

  I think I had not admitted to myself, until then, how jealous I was; that I, who had dismissed the need to have a man about me all the time when I gave up Richard, wanted Victor to myself.

  The ring brought home to me with a cracking clarity my invidious position. I was a ‘kept’ woman, needing to be recompensed for her favours. With part of me I realized that the ring was an expression of Victor’s feelings for me; with another I resented its implications. To accept it was to confirm my rôle, erode my independence.

  It was not the only thing that year which forced me to examine our relationship.

  Victor wanted us to have a place of our own; my own. He could not go on seeing me, he said, at the flat I shared with Sophie. He was tired of the chaos of Sophie’s dressmaking, of her general trail. He wanted to buy a flat for me although he tactfully insisted it would be his pied-à-terre. The fact that he had never had the need for one till now invalidated that part of it.

  I discussed it with Sophie.

  ‘You must be crazy,’ she said, her mouth full of pins, ‘I’d do anything to get out of this hole.’ She meant because we had permanent trouble with the plumbing and nobody bothered to clean the ‘common parts’.

  I looked into the gas-fire.

  ‘It’s a question of committing myself.’

  ‘You’ve never liked to do that.’

  She was right. I liked to leave my options open. It explained the relief I felt when I had made the decision about Richard.

  ‘I can’t see why it’s such a commitment anyway.’

  She bundled the green lurex towards her.

  ‘He wants it to be in my name.’

  ‘I’ll change places,’ Sophie said, ‘Nobody ever wants to buy me anything.’

  Her boyfriend was a playwright who lived off her aspirations. ‘You don’t know when you’re well off!’

  It was in a square behind Baker Street at the top of an old house. I loved it immediately.

  Victor sent his ‘people’ in and within a week it was ready for habitation and there were white flowers everywhere.

  I thought of the months I had spent with Sophie, shopping for the second-hand furniture and kitchen equipment for the basement flat; how I had painted it while Sophie made the curtains.

  Victor sent a van for my possessions.

  Sophie cried.

  I hung the watercolour of the Lake District over the bed.

  ‘Very nice, Jean,’ my mother said, on one of her rare visits to town. ‘You must be doing very well. I saw Richard the other day. He looked decidedly peaky.’

  We settled into a routine. It was both satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Whenever I was off duty Victor came to the flat on his way home. Occasionally we managed a lunch. Wednesday was our highspot. We did not always go out. Sometimes we didn’t make love.

  Something else had come into my life together with Victor. Music. We had a radiogram and a week rarely passed without him bringing an addition to the collection he insisted was mine. I wonder if, somewhere, he knew what solace it would bring me when he was gone. The therapeutic properties of music have, I think, never been fully exploited in diseases of the soul. Someone should write a paper on it.

  We spent precious hours together uplifted with joy at Schubert’s C Major, came close to tears when the strings announced the B flat theme in the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, close to each other, as the love of Leonora and Florestan winged its way from the dungeon into our sitting-room.

  We extended the shelves to encompass Mozart and Haydn, Brahms and Handel, Dvorák and Puccini, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Liszt. Looking back, I suppose you could say that our happiest hours were punctuated by music, upon which Victor, as I was to learn, was an authority. We shared together the glory of Brahms’ First, found peace in the last Beethoven piano sonata and in our lighter moments hummed the catchy melodies of Verdi. I came to appreciate them all, to love some more than others. Schubert alone, the spirit of song incarnate, could make me happy when I was sad.

  Those were the good times.

  Sometimes I dashed home, driving recklessly in my eagerness to see Victor, to hear the phone ringing in the flat.

  ‘Mrs Palmer?’

  We had kept our original pseudonyms.

  ‘Mr Pattison asked me to ring you to say that he’s been unavoidably delayed and cannot keep his appointment today.’

  The evening would stretch vacantly in front of me.

  At times he was unable to phone.

  When his father died we’d been going to The Marriage of Figaro. I remember I was wearing a new black velvet suit and had put on the ruby ring which I was still diffident about wearing. I wished my mother could see me: waiting for Victor.

  When it got past the time that he should have arrived I stood at the window, looking down onto the leafy square, waiting for the Rolls to turn the corner. He was both punctual and punctilious. I had never known him not to phone. Even if he was going to be only five minutes late. I stood there for half an hour, in my black suit, imagining a bizarre collection of accidents and catastrophes in all of which Victor was involved.

  When it grew dark and it was obvious he was not going to come I did not know what to do. Outside the family, not included among the circle of his friends, there was no one I could contact. For the first time the loneliness of my situation was brought home to me. The realization that I was out on a limb; by myself.

  I opened the refrigerator and stared at the illuminated scene inside but saw nothing. I closed it again, too agitated to eat. I wandered round the flat touching the things that were Victor’s, as if he would spring from his dressing-gown or toothbrush. The d
isasters I imagined became increasingly grotesque. I did not dare to go out, in case the telephone rang. Twice I picked it up to check that it was working. I began to imagine there was another woman. That Victor had tired of me and found somebody else. Had he taken her to the opera and was she sitting in my seat letting the overture wash over her? In the end I put the Marriage on the radiogram and fell asleep, exhausted by my torrent of emotions, staring at the ruby in my ring which winked enigmatically back at me.

  I sobbed in Victor’s arms. Tears of relief and of sadness for his father which mingled with his own. It was the only time I saw him cry.

  Victor’s father, a soldierly, upright, sprightly seventy-year-old, judging by his photograph, had collapsed, driving home from the office he still went to daily. A quick-witted woman in a basement, into which he had nearly driven his car, had seen him slumped over the wheel and called the ambulance men, who found him in acute cardiac arrest. They had managed to resuscitate him and by the time Victor got to the hospital, he was in intensive care. Victor had stayed with him until midnight when, seeming to have won the battle for his life, he had a massive coronary infarct to which he succumbed. Caught up in the grisly machinery of death, it wasn’t until he got home in the small hours that Victor remembered me. He never rang me from home in case Molly lifted the extension.

  That was the first occasion. Over the years I was to get used to the times when he could not let me know, terrible moments when my imagination would run riot with images of disasters, near misses, illness, burst tyres and accidents. Walking up the street I’d spot the newspaper headline. ‘Plane crash. No survivors.’ If Victor was away my fingers would tremble, my eyes refuse to focus on the print. I had chosen it against a life where each evening at the same time, there would be a key in the door, few actions unaccounted for. I wondered whether it was worth the candle.