A Loving Mistress

by Rosemary Friedman

  The Rose Garden, which went back to the beginning, came to be our second home. We walked in it whenever we could, measuring our lives against its season. We trod the deserted winter paths with their sodden leaves; watched the sap rise in the spring; stood impotently by while the willows shed their glaucous tears into the lake, weeping for the summer.

  The roses belonged to us. Over the years we grew to know them all. King’s Ransom and Bonfire Night, Ivory Fashion and Serenade.

  Victor’s favourite was Madame Louise Laperrière. One summer when her petals littered the brown earth like a crimson pot-pourri, he picked one up and held it, a vermilion comma, in his palm.

  ‘Madame Louise,’ he said, ‘Can’t you see her in the palace of the Sun King?’

  He gave the petal to me gently as if it were alive. I pressed it between the pages of Dacie’s Practical Haematology, then had it mounted and framed. Today it stands on the table beneath the window next to the terracotta bowl filled with pink cones.

  From our seat, which bore a plaque in the memory of ‘Emily Longford – who so loved this garden’, we watched the pageant, reflecting the passing of the years. We grew to know the people, although they were never the same, our ears becoming conditioned to the Babel of their tongues.

  ‘When I die,’ I asked Victor once we were sitting there, ‘will you name a seat after me?’

  I thought for a moment that he hadn’t heard. He always weighed and measured his replies.

  ‘I won’t ever let you die.’

  I looked at the leaves, shrivelled and brown, on the path.

  ‘Everything dies.’ I crunched one underfoot.

  He chose not to pursue the subject which I knew had not gone unrecorded. If you could unravel his mind it would be an inventory of seemingly futile remarks chronicled as meticulously as events of great moment.

  We planned to go to Jamaica – the first of our winter trips together – at the beginning of December, so that Victor would be back in time for Christmas with his family.

  I was as excited as a child. ‘Soft white sands, crystal clear waters and the rhythmic beat of the calypso’, the travel brochures said. Everyone else was doing their Christmas shopping. Determined to take knowledge with me, I went to the library and lost myself, on the long evenings, in the island’s history, its people and politics, religions and dialects.

  When I asked Victor what it would be like he said:

  ‘Hot!’

  Sophie came with me for clothes. In the dispassionate mirrors of the department stores I regarded myself in the bright colours she thought appropriate to a tropical sun. I was not beautiful except under Victor’s gaze.

  In my flat we laid everything out on the bed.

  ‘I feel like a bride,’ I said.

  Sophie looked at me sharply and I realized that I was not and would not be.

  ‘Richard’s going out with an analyst,’ she said.

  I felt a surge of irrational jealousy. I had always been a dog in the manger. It was not nice.

  ‘What’s she like? Who told you?’

  ‘American. Divorced. I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  She sounded intriguing and had chosen Richard.

  I tried to concentrate on the clothes.

  November crept by. It was an unattractive month, grey and cold with neither the tints of autumn nor the delights of Christmas to commend it. Jennie had her third baby, a boy, and I went to see her, surrounded by flowers and radiant with motherhood.

  ‘See what you’re missing,’ my mother’s eyes said. She was looking after the other two while Jennie was in hospital; but she was wrong. I listened to the talk of episiotomies and breast pumps and how the baby had Trevor’s dimpled chin, and was not jealous, thinking only for a brief moment of the child I had destroyed.

  When we were alone I told Jennie about Jamaica. Her eyes widened.

  ‘Lucky you!’ she said, holding her baby which it was hard to believe had been inside her less than three days ago. She kissed the top of his soft head in a sensual gesture of contentment.

  ‘Don’t forget to send us a postcard.’

  I bought a huge yellow teddy bear and a blue pram suit for my new nephew, who did not look as if he would ever grow into it, and went back to my life.

  Two days before we were to leave Victor came round with my ticket. I was to meet him on the plane. It was to be the pattern of our lives. He was more harassed than usual. I could read his day in his face. Often he didn’t kiss me when he came in. Sometimes I think he did not see me.

  He insisted on inspecting my passport, checking that it was in order, and that my case had the appropriate keys and that I hadn’t forgotten anything. It was both irritating to be treated like a child and gratifying to be looked after. It was folly to argue.

  I gave him a drink and let the problems that habitually built up before he went away, wash over me. It was a mood I was familiar with. I liked to think I sent him home to Molly less distracted than when he arrived.

  ‘See you on the plane then.’

  I wondered how I would survive the next two days.

  ‘I’d better go.’

  He meant while he was capable of it.

  Through the barren trees I watched the car leave its parking place in the square. Until it turned the corner at least, I knew that he was thinking of me.

  When I said good-bye in the department I was aware that they envied me. Some of them had plans for family Christmases. A few for chalet parties in the Alps. None for Jamaica.

  I promised I wouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t do.

  I washed my hair, which had been cut into a geometric shape, and painted my toenails scarlet. My case was ready on the bed. The flat was tidy and the plants watered. I had cleared the fridge of its bits and pieces, not wanting to come home to walking gorgonzola and fragments of mouldy bread. In my enthusiasm I’d forgotten to leave anything for supper. I had a tin of sardines and one of beans but nothing to put them on. I settled for an apple – its skin wrinkled like the cheek of a very old woman – which I hadn’t had the heart to dispose of, and the end of a packet of chocolate biscuits I kept for Victor.

  I was lying back in the bath when the phone rang.

  I guessed it was my mother telling me to ‘take care’ or Sophie to wish me ‘bon voyage’.

  My sybaritic mood destroyed by its insistence, I got out and wrapped my towel around me. It was a safe bet that half-way across the sitting-room, where I left wet, Man-Friday prints in the carpet, the ringing would stop. It did not.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Jean?’

  It was Victor.

  My whole life seemed to pass through my mind as it’s purported to to one dying, before I said:

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s off.’

  ‘Jamaica?’

  I was playing for time; for reprieve.

  ‘William’s broken his arm.’

  A great wave of hatred surged through me. It was directed towards an innocent nine-year-old whom I had never met. Surely, I wanted to say, a broken arm, it’s not all that serious. Then I remembered Molly and her helplessness and hated her too.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  He was anxious to get off the phone.

  ‘Jean? Are you there?’

  Where did he imagine I was?

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I sat down on the sofa. In my damp bath towel. Like a boxer in his corner. Stunned. Defeated. It was the first time. Later I would get used to it. Well not used to, but familiar with. It was a body blow, putting me in my place, second, to his family, his life.

  I started to shiver. With the shock. With the night air that seeped in through the ill-fitting sash windows. I had not put the fire on in the sitting-room. I wrapped the wet towel more firmly round me and summoned the will power to get up. In the bedroom I stared at the case with its swimsuits and beach wraps and the hollow corner left for my sponge-bag. I wanted to play back the last few moments,
to convince myself that they had actually happened. Suddenly I wanted Richard. I picked up the phone next to the bed. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hi’ in a merry transatlantic acent.

  I let the receiver fall back into its cradle and sat down next to the case.

  William had slipped while playing football on the muddy ground and had a comminuted fracture of the radius. He was quite ill. It was obvious that Victor was going to be preoccupied with him during the two weeks we should have been in Jamaica. I replaced the swimsuits and the dresses with warm sweaters and trousers and went to Aldeburgh to commit my sorrows to the neap tides. Walking along the shingle, my hair plastered to my head with spray, I tried to convince myself that my liaison with Victor was what I wanted and that I was always going to be content with playing second fiddle. I threw stones into the water, my anger competing with its winter rage. I should have been on tropical beaches. I was not used to being thwarted.

  Victor phoned every day. Jamaica was not cancelled, he said, only postponed. It was all very well for him but I would get no more leave from the hospital until June. I could not just down tools whenever I wanted.

  It wasn’t easy to go back to work.

  ‘Where’s the suntan?’

  ‘You’re not very brown.’

  ‘“Take me to Jamaica where the rum comes from”.’ In calypso rhythm.

  I told them about Aldeburgh giving no reasons. They became unbearably solicitous, treating me as if I were ill, and exchanging glances.

  The hospital was awash with parties. Ward parties, student parties, departmental parties. The place reverberated with good cheer. My colleagues brought their husbands and their boyfriends along to share the bonhomie, the goodwill to all men. I stood detached. A smile on my aching face. I could not take Victor. He was too well known.

  I could not take him home for Christmas either and had to listen to my father, sitting back, replete with turkey and Christmas pudding, holding forth about finding a man and not leaving it until it was ‘too late’. They had a discussion around me about how stupid I was not to have married Richard. My mother, in her new red dress, still could not ‘for the life of her’ see why I had changed my mind at the last moment – such a nice boy – and held up Jennie and Trevor, with the new baby and the children busy with their presents, as the archetypal unit of happiness.

  ‘Anyone on the horizon?’

  I glanced at Jennie who knew.

  ‘No one special.’

  ‘Well don’t leave it too late.’

  My mother let me have it over the dishes, using such phrases as getting ‘set in my ways’ and ‘delaying it too long’, as if it were choosing a new carpet. The phrase ‘old maid’ was never actually used.

  I left them roasting chestnuts over the fire and dissecting the Queen’s speech. As I drove back to London the first snowflakes were falling.

  It was a dead world, London on Boxing Day; a ghost world. Little traffic even along the Euston Road. The snowfall had been abortive and there was nothing to dispel the greyness of the empty streets. I walked towards the park, conscious of my isolation at a time of peace on earth and goodwill amongst men.

  In our garden Lady Johnson was in pink bud, Ginger Rogers in full December bloom.

  There was no one on our seat. My hands in the pockets of my duffle coat, I watched a child, uncertain, on his new roller skates; a blonde six-year-old, proud as any mother, steering her shiny doll’s pram beside the lake. A stout lady in a pink angora hat tried to throw Christmas pudding to the ducks but the gulls, who moved more swiftly, deprived them of their dinner.

  Grey clouds lazed across the grey sky.

  A few foreigners in strange leather coats peered from side to side at England. No one had emptied the bins.

  I thought of Richard, snug in his flat, our flat, with the American analyst; of Victor and Molly and the children enjoying Boxing Day with its mood of lethargy. Was Victor thinking about me or was I relegated to the working day compartment of his mind? Was the difference in the love he had for me qualitative or quantitative from the love he bore Molly? He did love her. He had made that clear. It was a love one had for a lame dog, a broken reed, tender and compassionate, with none of the sensual overtones of our relationship. I had spent other Boxing Days alone but only when I was alone; not abandoned while the other half of me fulfilled his domestic commitments.

  I sat until my nose grew cold and my fingers numbed, nursing my resentment.

  On New Year’s Eve, as if to compensate me for my dreary Christmas, for my disappointment, for William’s arm, Victor gave me a Christmas present. A parcel of shares in his company – he has given me some for each year that we have been together – and a string of pearls, opera length, of exquisite light and colour. My present to him, cuff-links of lapis and malachite, had cost me a month’s salary. He wears them, wore them – will I ever get used to it – to this day. I never knew what he told Molly although perhaps she was too wrapped up in herself to notice. New Year’s Eve was, and would continue to be, our day. One of the few in the year when Victor spent the night because he took Molly and the children down to her mother’s.

  I pretended we were married, for twenty-four hours; that I would have Victor to myself for ever. Jennie has often said of me that I only wanted things I couldn’t have. She’s right of course but it has never made anything any easier.

  Over dinner I heard about his Christmas. William was out of hospital but his arm was still in plaster and he had to be helped to open his presents, a Hornby train set and a camera. Victor had given Molly a peridot bracelet, to add to her collection of Victorian jewellery, and a Blake watercolour which she had hung in her sitting-room. Sometimes he described the house to me, his home, and I did battle with my imagination to picture what it was like. I knew it was huge, and that there was a billiard room. Apart from himself and Molly and the three boys there was the Nannie – a German girl who looked after Gavin – and a Spanish couple who ran the house with the help of a daily. I tried to envisage Molly as his spoiled and ignorant wife, using her symptoms for her own ends. The more I heard of her the more I realized that she was a sad and intelligent woman imprisoned in her mind and in her sitting-room, with its books and its paintings, overlooking the garden. It was true that she could not travel with Victor but through her reading she had been all over the world. You could set her down, Victor said proudly, in any city, and she could take you mentally on a guided tour. Had she been more stupid, more demanding, instead of merely incapacitated, she would have been easier to hate.

  They had been joined for Christmas lunch by Molly’s parents, Victor’s two brothers and their families and his friend Romilly, his alter ego since their school days. Of all his small, tightly-knit circle, Romilly was the only one who knew about me. On my side, apart from Richard, who no longer counted, I had only Jennie who knew, and of course Sophie who had been in on it from the beginning.

  I visualized them in the big drawing-room – which Molly did not like and rarely sat in except on occasions such as Christmas, in front of the open fire, the men in their cashmere sweaters – Molly’s mother had given Victor a new one, pale blue – the women gossiping, the children playing on the floor with their new toys. I wondered whether Molly would have been so contented with her little circle, her impregnable family circle, had she known about me.

  After dinner Victor offered me a night club hoping I’d refuse. I did, not wanting to spend the precious hours I had with him surrounded by other people. He said he felt guilty at not taking me out enough but I was not short of diversion. We went back to the flat and made love in front of the electric fire to the accompaniment of Prokofiev, as the New Year came in.

  On the anniversary of our meeting at Shotmere we went back for the weekend and Victor gave me the print of Waggoner’s Wells.

  The early part of the year was Victor’s travelling time. Australia, the Far East, Europe. He brought back a Buddha three feet high. It stands in the hall and we hang our coats on it. I’ve taken to touchi
ng its head for luck, or perhaps reassurance, on my way out. In the hall too is a blue Murano vase from Venice. It is always filled with white flowers. I grew to know their names.

  Once I asked him the reason for his preoccupation with flowers that were white, seeking for some hidden meaning. He looked at me as if I had said something extremely stupid.

  ‘I just like white flowers.’

  Lacking in insight of any kind he really thought that was all there was to it. Sometimes I longed for the kind of dialectic I had had with Richard. When I tried to find explanations for behaviour, either in Victor or myself, he’d accuse me of talking ‘psychological claptrap’. He was rigid in every way, unable to bend. If he did I knew he would crack. He was extremely intolerant. One of the things he was unable to tolerate was smoking. Until a year before I met him he had, he told me, been a chain smoker inhaling his way through several packets a day. Having suddenly seen the light, an article on the connection between smoking and lung cancer when he was in Washington, he had given it up, just like that. No hypnosis or aversion therapy for Victor. In his office people smoked – even in the washrooms – on pain of instant dismissal. Victor could detect any aberration a mile away. Sometimes he distributed anti-smoking leaflets to the young typists and offered bonuses to any of his employees who broke themselves of the habit. He was totally unable to comprehend people who were not as iron willed as himself.

  Sometimes I read about him in the newspapers. I’d turn to the City page and see Victor staring back at me with the stern, implacable image known to all but a few privileged persons of whom I was one. ‘Mr Victor Pattison, Chairman of Universal Industries, announced today that pre-tax profits for the year were up so many millions on a turnover of so many more!’

  The figures read like telephone numbers. Victor was not all that interested in money. Probably because he had so much. It was work which motivated him, turned him on, gave him his kicks. Apart from his beautiful home, and his car which belonged to the company, he had few extravagances. No yacht in the South of France, no horse, no second home. Now and again he bought a painting, and of course jewellery for Molly, but these he regarded as investments, protecting the future of his family. Like all wealthy men he had his meannesses. He had installed a pay-phone for his staff and children in his home. Both must be disillusioned, he felt, from the belief that the service was magic and therefore free. He did not consider such behaviour niggardly – he was quite hurt when I once suggested it – only as a practical and commonsense measure. As far as I was concerned I knew that he would give me anything I wanted if I asked for it. I did not ask.