A Loving Mistress

by Rosemary Friedman

  Sometimes, while Victor was away, Sophie, between lovers, came to stay with me bringing with her all the familiar disorder of the basement flat. She was selling her designs well now and hoped eventually to open her own shop. We had long talks about how I could tolerate a part-time relationship. Sophie could not believe that it suited me. I was not such a loving, caring girl as Sophie. I enjoyed my hours of solitude in the knowledge that I also had Victor. I had grown used to spending a great deal of my time alone. I didn’t expect Sophie to understand. I was quite glad when she went, taking her mess with her. Once she made me a breathtaking outfit in bronze shot silk by way of payment for my hospitality. It was greatly admired at hospital parties.

  In the year that Richard got married I changed the course of my life for Victor.

  On one of our rare Saturday mornings together – he had told Molly he was playing golf – we were sitting in our garden. It was early May and the temperature, incredibly, in the middle sixties. One or two daisies were already pushing their heads through the grass. On the path in front of us a yellow-beaked blackbird hopped cheekily.

  Feeling the sun, it was so long since we’d seen it, penetrating my clothes with its warmth, I had my face turned to it and sat close to Victor who had his head in the newspaper. I leaned over his shoulder to see what it was that he was reading and my eyes fell on ‘Marriages.’ ‘Dr Richard Flynn and Miss Irene Taylor of Greenwich, Connecticut’ …Richard had married the American analyst.

  I sat very still, aware of the birdsong all around me, watching the tourists sprung from their winter sleep. Was I angry? Upset? Would they start a family that would not be mine? Had I been foolish to turn Richard down for Victor?

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ Victor said without looking up.

  Although I had not been speaking before he had detected the change in my mood. The oneness I felt with him answered my questions.

  ‘Richard’s got married.’ I pointed to the announcement.

  Victor said nothing. It was a subject he was touchy on, I suppose because of his inability to marry me and his dislike of the untidy arrangement I represented in his personal life. There was no movement between us but I felt him withdraw, as if Richard had come between us.

  ‘There’s a Senior Registrar vacancy coming up at the hospital,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘In Pathology. I’ve applied for it. There’s a pretty good chance that I’ll get it.’

  You would suppose that he hadn’t heard but he missed nothing. Everything was fed into the non-stop computer of a brain. I waited for the data to be processed.

  ‘I don’t want you to apply.’

  I sat up, startling a fat sparrow at my feet into reproachful flight. A paddling of ducks, Goldeneyes, glided along the surface of the lake, heads emerald in the sun.

  Victor closed the paper, as if the subject were wrapped up, folding it neatly.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours, three or four days a week is not very much. It would be nice if we could go away together more.’

  The Senior Registrar post was the penultimate rung on the ladder of the hospital hierarchy. Victor was asking me to step off within sight, within a few years anyway, of the Consultantship. It was unbelievable.

  ‘Couldn’t you go into private practice? I don’t know how these things work…’

  I wondered if he cared.

  ‘…I just want to see more of you. I need you Jean.’

  He seemed totally unaware of what he was asking me to do. In his mind it was not a problem.

  My medical career to date had not come easily. From my first tentative incision into the female thorax in the dissecting room, through second MB to the nightmare of the finals and after that, Membership. I had had to slog. Every inch of the way. ‘Senior Registrar’ would bring me within sight of my goal.

  Victor was waiting for an answer.

  ‘I hate it when you go away.’

  It was not what I had intended to say.

  I talked to Jennie about it. She said I was mad. I stood in her Barnes kitchen leaning against the washing machine, which was whirring busily round with its load of nappies, while she fed the baby with one hand and gave Kate and Thomasina lunch, answered their interminable questions and prevented them from strangling each other.

  She held a teaspoon of carrot, which she had lovingly puréed, in mid-air.

  ‘You’d be wasting your life! What if Victor…disappears or something?’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Molly could find out… You’d be left with nothing, no hospital job, you’d never get another. You must think of the future, of yourself. Why throw everything away?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I said.

  The baby shut his mouth firmly and turned his head.

  Jennie chucked the carrots down the sink.

  It was; hard to explain. Impossible. Even to myself. I spent sleepless nights knowing what I was going to do.

  Victor didn’t mention it again but a week later the whole thing came to an irrational head.

  Victor came to the flat at lunchtime. It was one of those days when we felt enormously close, overwhelmed by love and desire for each other. Neither of us wanted to go back to work but we were slaves to the inexorable clock. When he left, he was driving to Birmingham for a two hour meeting, he said he’d phone me at the hospital when he arrived just so that we could hear each other’s voices.

  I spent the afternoon in the anti-coagulant clinic among the haemophilias and other bleeding disorders, trying not to leave it in case Victor rang. As the time wore on I checked my watch and became increasingly uneasy. It was not like Victor to forget. At five o’clock when everyone had started to pack up and talk about the evening ahead I called the switchboard.

  ‘Are there any messages for me?’ I asked. ‘Mr Palmer?’

  There was nothing.

  I hung about in the lab until seven o’clock, which was ridiculous, then slowly tidied my bench, hung up my white coat and put on my jacket.

  It was raining which always made the traffic worse; for twenty minutes it scarcely moved. We were crawling up to the lights at Baker Street when I saw the placard ‘Pile up on A5. Four dead!’

  I heard a noise in my head like car horns, loud and persistent. It seemed to come from miles away. There was a tapping at my window and I opened it. A man with his collar up stood, shoulders hunched, in the rain.

  ‘For Chris’ sake! Are you blind or something? The lights have changed three times!’

  I looked dully at the traffic lights across which the needles of rain were slanting. The road was clear in front of me.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He started to go to his car then turned back uncertainly. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  I pulled up and bought a newspaper. There seemed to be nothing about a crash and I wondered if I had imagined it. I looked at the placard and folded the newspaper; it was in the Stop Press at the back. Two lines only. I felt sick and stood there not knowing what to do, aware of my awkward situation. My first wild impulse was to phone Molly. At a time like this surely – there were to be so many others – then Victor’s office, but of course it would be closed. His personal assistant, Mrs Hicks, there would be dozens in the book. I was aware of being jostled on all sides by commuters buying newspapers and disappearing into the maw of the tube station. Four dead. Victor. If he hadn’t been involved in the accident why hadn’t he rung me? There was one ray of hope. The chassis of his Rolls was made of steel and would not crumple easily. Perhaps he had only been injured. I prayed.

  In the car again I noticed that my hands, which seemed detached from my body, were trembling. I had to concentrate hard in order to get home. My skirt caught in the car door as I was trying to close it. I dropped the key in the gutter, then my gloves as I bent down to retrieve it. The keys to the outer doors of the flat seemed to have got lost in the far reaches of my handbag.
I could hear them rattling but each time I fished I brought out a torch, a pen, a lipstick. They came out entangled with a comb. As I turned the lock I could hear that the telephone was ringing. I urged myself to hurry but of course, in my fumbling haste, became more slow. I tripped over my briefcase and trying to save myself crashed into the living-room door, bruising my shin. As I lunged for the receiver the ringing stopped. I stared at it with disbelief. I waited for a while, sitting by it, willing it to ring. I rang Sophie but it had not been her, Jennie, who was bathing the children, my mother who said ‘hello stranger’. I sat in the dark, listening to the silence, not daring to get up and forgetting to have anything to eat. Dear God, I prayed, if you let Victor live I will give up the hospital, give up everything…only let him be alive.

  I went to bed, because it was time, and spent a night crazed with dreams. In the morning I touched his pyjamas beneath the pillow and felt sick, afraid.

  The day had to be lived. I picked up my briefcase from where I had stumbled over it in the hall and opened the front door.

  The telephone rang. I could not believe it.

  It was Victor.

  I realized that he was more important to me than any hospital job in the world.

  He had been delayed by the traffic congestion, which resulted from the pile-up, and had been late for his meeting. He had rung the flat when it was over, expecting me to be there, and got no reply. The switchboard at the hospital told him everyone in Pathology had left. He had got home two hours later than he had promised to a distraught Molly who would not leave his side.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ The tears were streaming down my face, and the sunshine, following the rain, flooded through the window and into my eyes, the two combining to make vision impossible. ‘Oh, Victor!’

  ‘I love you.’ He’d never said it on the phone.

  ‘When will you come?’

  ‘Did you get the job?’ my father asked.

  I had gone home for Sunday lunch. The weekends seemed interminably long without Victor.

  My parents had lived in the same house since they had been married, a semi-detached with a long, narrow garden. As a child I had thought the house enormous and the garden a paradise where I had played with Jennie, not a suburban strip with its dying wallflowers and flowering polyanthus as it appeared now. My father, a gentle man, who was a pharmacist, had bought the shop where he worked when he married my mother, and had since acquired the property on either side, where now, in addition to dispensing, he sold nursery requirements and French perfumes to the ladies of Kingston Vale. In his leisure time he gardened, sat on the local council and was a well-liked and respected citizen.

  We had roast pork with duchesse potatoes which my mother had painstakingly piped into beige-tipped whorls. The house was full of evidence of her capacity for taking pains. She had made all the cushions and most of the curtains and bedspreads. Since Jennie and I had left, our bedroom had become her sewing room. She dried flowers and bottled plums and made chutney from the small, unripe tomatoes my father brought in from the greenhouse. Jennie took after her in these skills. They were the happiest couple I knew, never seeming to want for anything except each other’s company and the home and hobbies they had created. Now that they had grandchildren, Jennie’s children, they were replete.

  I picked up my knife and fork and answered my father’s question.

  ‘The job. No.’

  I had withdrawn my application despite some heavy persuasion to the contrary by my colleagues. He would not have understood. He didn’t know, after all, about Victor. It was easier to say no.

  ‘Never mind.’ My father helped himself to the apple sauce. ‘It’s always been more difficult for a woman. I expect there’ll be other opportunities. Would you like some apple sauce?’

  Victor was serious. He took a lease on three rooms on the ground floor of a house in Devonshire Place and gave me carte blanche to set up a lab. I was ambivalent about the whole thing, not quite trusting the decision I had made, but let myself be carried along on the tide. I became deeply involved in the respective merits of various microscopes and centrifuges and waited for my hospital job to finish. Bob, one of the technicians with whom I worked, had bought, and was converting a Victorian house which had put him heavily into debt. He offered to come with me. I knew that I would miss the protective umbrella, the academic stimulus and the political infighting of the hospital. I had to weigh it all against the light that had come into my life – Victor.

  We did eventually go to Jamaica although not of course in the year I would always remember as ‘William’s arm’. It is one of our favourite places. Often I have tried to analyse why but it defies explanation. It is in the sun but so are the ski-slopes in April, and Africa where we have spent many happy times. In any case I burn easily and get prickly heat and am no sunworshipper. There is yellow corato, hibiscus and frangipani, oleander, jasmine and jacaranda with its inimitable night fragrance; there is the Caribbean, warm as milk, licking the silver sands to reach the coconut palms, and red-leaved almonds. There is our cottage where the bougainvillea and thrumbregia hang from the pergola and tiny lizards drop into the bowls of papaya, water-melon and nazeberries on the breakfast table. There is the daytime song of the blackbird and the night chorus of the crickets punctuated by the raucous cry of the bull-frogs. It is none of these things alone that draws us back. Perhaps it is the peace of mind we found the first time; the tropical torpor that washed over us leaving the body limp and the mind relaxed. Perhaps it is because I feel I have all of Victor to myself. In Jamaica, he is a changed man.

  I was like Alice in Wonderland. Possibly it was the disappointment of the previous attempt at which I had wept tears of rage like a child, that heightened my awareness of everything.

  We stopped at Kennedy. Outside it was snowing, thick, soft whirling flakes, but we were insulated in the glass paperweight of the airport where we shared a pastrami sandwich two inches thick with pickles and chips on the side.

  ‘This is my island in the sun.’ Our island. I have only to put on the record ‘Yellow Bird’, or the song of ‘Annie Palmer The White Witch Of Rose Hall’, to be back in Montego Bay. It is all recorded in the notebook of my mind.

  The road to the hotel, running narrowly between sugar and bananas. Black skinned women in bright cotton dresses, carrying umbrellas, walking in a slow dream. Washing lines outside the shanties; orange and red and yellow instead of white and grey.

  We fell asleep instantly, not bothering to unpack.

  Stopping only for iced water from the thermos jug in the bedroom and to turn off the giant fan that whirled, propeller-like, over our heads.

  Sybaritic days. The ocean warm, pellucid. Banana daiquiris. Americans in meat or rolling mills with names like Herb and Eunice and Marlene calling for Planter’s Punch or vodka gimlets on the rocks.

  Days when we didn’t move outside our cottage. Becalmed, on a lilo in our private pool which overhung the sea, my sun hat over my nose, I was in the middle of the world.

  Long afternoons. Love. Without Victor having to look at his watch, needing to phone Molly. He did phone her. Each evening when the sun, with no warning, dropped into the sea. In Virginia Water the pipes were frozen.

  At Negril, deserted white sands to infinity, hand in hand along the shore playing shipwreck. I had no desire to escape.

  Victor taking my photograph. A small boy appearing from the palms selling necklaces he had made himself, standing by my side to face the camera; like my child, holding his wares aloft. Victor placing a necklace round my throat as though it were diamond. It hangs from a hook on the bathroom wall. When I glance in the direction of the tiny pink and yellow shells I can feel the limpid water on my feet, the sun searing my shoulder blades.

  Cook-out night on the dark strand; curried goat and baked potatoes whose taste and smell took us back on the conveyor belt of time to our first encounter at Shotmere.

  Water lit by flares; calypsos played by silhouettes in a canoe; sweet co
rn and hot chillies; wood smoke in the nostrils; limbo dancers, white-soled, supple as cats.

  Victor played golf at Tryall while in the market, amid the roasting corn cobs and the test match scores, the hanging baskets and calypso drums, I bargained for presents to take home.

  ‘Come into my shop!’

  ‘I’m right here.’

  ‘Don’t you like me?’

  ‘I give you wholesale prices.’

  ‘You wan’ tote bag?’

  ‘I make you special price. Two dollar fifty. I poor girl.’

  Poor girl with poor children. Barefoot.

  Horseback on rough dirt tracks round the plantations high above the sea. Avocados, bananas, yams, pimentos; sugarcane hacked with a machete; for Victor’s boys.

  Great houses, in coconut and cattle country, echoing with the cries of slaves.

  Our last night. A villa party in the hills. Jamaican three piece band on the torch-lit lawn. The distant lights of Montego Bay. Velvet night pierced by Southern drawls of tall belles from Richmond, Virginia, gauzy dresses like fireflies, touching the flowers in their hair.