A Loving Mistress

by Rosemary Friedman

  She did not comment on this insult to her intelligence.

  ‘Are you a Lesbian?’

  It was an interesting thought.

  ‘My friend Barbara is a Lesbian. She’s having this thing with an old woman of about thirty.’

  She was inviting my confidence, wanting me to confess to a homosexual liaison.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well don’t you ever want a man?’

  Someone had been feeding her the ‘Ice-Bank’ story.

  ‘You can tell me,’ Bonnie said. ‘I won’t discuss it with anyone.’

  I took her hand across the table. At fifteen she was a woman. The world had changed since my own adolescence. She was friendly and concerned, like Jennie.

  ‘I’m very happy,’ I said. ‘That’s all I can say.’

  ‘Then you must have a lover. I shall have several.’

  It was one of the rare moments when I wished I had had a daughter. A child. Someone of my own.

  When I repeated the conversation to Victor he said: ‘I’d never thought of myself like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A lover.’

  We were sitting on the grass in our garden – the seats were all occupied – opposite the orange mass of ‘Bonfire Night’.

  Victor’s socks were neat round his narrow ankles, his manicured hands hanging loosely from wrists which were crossed over his knees.

  I picked a blade of grass for no reason, held it between my thumbs, tried to whistle with it as I had as a child. ‘A lover is one who loves.’

  ‘Then I’m a lover,’ Victor said.

  Isle de France. Mauritius, with its pink and purple sea. I had no idea it was to be our last trip.

  Until the final moment I was never sure. Was Molly going to be all right, would the arrangements for her care in Victor’s absence run smoothly, would there be no crisis in the company or with Lucy? I was always surprised, even then, when we found ourselves, Mr and Mrs Palmer, actually on the plane.

  Isle Maurice, with its high, craggy mountains, its singing waterfalls and long, snaky canyons.

  We had a bungalow, thatched with straw, on the sands facing the Indian Ocean; I stood in the doorway, weary from the journey, watching it froth up on to the white strand through the tall casuarinas. It was too quick. Plucked from the cold of a winter city and deposited in the warm embrace of the tropics.

  Victor had given me the tragic story of the doomed lovers, Paul and Virginia. I read it on the plane, transporting myself ahead of time to the South Sea Isle, en route to India, with its groves of mangoes and lemons. As always on holiday, I took Victor’s watch from him. ‘“When the shadows of the banana trees are at your feet it will be dinner time. When the tamarinds fold their leaves it will be night.”’

  Despite the shadows and the tamarinds it took a while for Victor, at home in perpetual motion, to adapt to the unhurried tempo of the days. I loved to see him unwind, to watch as the creases of his daily life were ironed out by the sun. I think he never let go completely. Despite the slowing of his movements, the moments of grace, Molly and the Company were never far away. He did phone Molly. His abrupt absences were part of the pattern. I knew that when he came back his step would have quickened and that the relaxing process would have to start all over again.

  Had we been less wrapped in ourselves, in our precious store of days, I suppose we would have taken more notice of the portents. The wind whipping up white peaks on the grey deeps of the ocean and agitating the surface of the pool; the boatmen, watching the sky, making fast their boats; the anxious voices and urgent steps of the hotel staff as they furled the parasols and took away everything that could be moved from the path of the cyclone.

  The rain woke me up. It was knocking at the windows like a frenzied traveller seeking admission, dripping through the thatch on to my face, and in a runnel, into the corner of the room.

  I sat up calling ‘Victor!’

  When he slept he died.

  The floor was awash. I paddled my way to the window.

  I had always been afraid of nature, of natural powers. I had not seen it reek such havoc. In the dark the wind moaned, sang, howled on its awesome journey hurling the rain against the glass savagely and bending the casuarinas in its path. I spread my fingers and held them against the cold glass wondering if it would hold against the witches’ sabbath of a night.

  The sudden cracking of a casuarina woke Victor. I heard him sit up.

  ‘Jean?’

  I turned my head.

  ‘Come away from the window.’

  The trunk of the tree had snapped like a matchstick. It lay across the ground.

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Come back to bed.’

  As he spoke the water began dripping on his head and he shot out of bed. There were no lights. We clung together in the dark.

  A sheet of blue lightning lit the room.

  We shifted the bed, trying to find a dry corner, groped for our possessions, to save them, bumping into each other in our haste. Had we not been so cold and wet it might have been funny.

  We threw towels on the floor to soak up some of the water and put the shower curtain over the bed. Beneath it we listened to the stutter of the drops as they fell in their pizzicato stream.

  I clung to Victor. ‘Will we be blown away?’

  The bungalow was built of basalt. I knew that we would not.

  I thought longingly of our garden. Of Doris Tysterman and Ginger Rogers, wishing we were in it, instead of six thousand miles away from everything that was familiar.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a punishment,’ I said against the wind.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Loving each other.’

  ‘If it’s a crime,’ Victor said, ‘I enjoy my criminal tendencies.’ He kissed my ear.

  I meant because of Molly and we both knew.

  We slept fitfully. Once I noticed that the wind had changed tack, bending the casuarinas, in a gesture of obeisance, towards the sea; through my dreams I heard its shrieking and moved closer to Victor.

  The silence woke me. Either that or Victor coughing. I wondered if he had a chill from lying all night in a damp bed. He sat upright in the shambles of our room, beneath the striped shower curtain, his handkerchief to his face. When he took it away there was bright blood on it.

  I cannot hear the wind now, not even the gentle English breeze without remembering that moment. And the felled trees.

  And others, stripped of their foliage, standing nakedly ashamed, ankle deep in debris on the shore.

  And boatmen staring silently at the wrecks of the wooden hulks they had so carefully secured.

  And the broken glass.

  And the blocked roads.

  And the sagging telegraph poles.

  And the dazed look of those who had lost their homes.

  The wind had dropped but the sea was still angry, beating against the sands.

  I looked on the desolation and cried inwardly for our paradise, knowing that it was lost and that we would not regain it. And that I had to get Victor home.

  He was not concerned. As if coughing up blood were an everyday occurrence. He was more preoccupied with the lack of running water and air conditioning, the cold food and the fact that the island had been temporarily cut off. He could not tolerate being out of touch; with his empire, with Molly. He chafed at the heat in our bungalow, at the lack of service in the hotel, at the flies and at the general air of disintegration. We picked fights with each other; about everything. He made me give him back his watch. He spent hours in the manager’s office waiting for news that the airport was open. I stood by watching him fret.

  In London, no one had heard about our cyclone. Only Romilly had read the two lines hidden away amongst the faits divers of The Times.

  Victor refused to have his chest X-rayed. Apart from the peptic ulcer which had originally taken him to Shotmere, he had, since I had known him, had few complaints.

  Like most men he made heavy w
eather of a cold but felt that to seek advice for anything else before he was in extremis was unmasculine, unmanly. A woman with something wrong would look to remedy it, quietly, immediately, with sense. The relationship to cars was in inverse proportion. A man sought mechanical aid at the first rattle; a woman, ignoring the symptoms, would drive on until it died on her, at which she would be both hurt and surprised.

  It was nothing, Victor said. Too much snorkelling. If it happened again he would think about it.

  I put Paul and Virginia in the bookcase, and the conch shell Victor had given me, on the shelf, together with the other mementoes. Sometimes, when I pick it up to dust, marvelling at the delicacy of its colour and its contours, like silk beneath my touch, I think of Isle Maurice with its cannis flowers and spiky mountains and the cyclone, and that it marked the beginning of the end.

  I lived that spring with every fibre of my being. Victor did not look ill. He was particularly busy and worried about the recession which had its grip on the country and, if anything, was going to squeeze tighter before it released its hold.

  Gavin was getting married, to a suitable girl, which made up just a little for Lucy who was somewhere in South America but would be home for the wedding. I saw Molly and the family for the second time in my life.

  I stood outside St George’s, Hanover Square, with the rest of the passers-by who had nothing better to do. Everybody liked to see a bride, especially in the spring. They were mostly shoppers and girls in their lunch break, sexually liberated but hankering paradoxically after white weddings.

  Molly, in her wheel chair, her legs like sticks, was still beautiful. I had thought her into middle age, grey and apathetic, but the years had touched her only lightly and she looked lovely, content. The chauffeur pushed her into the church assisted by the ushers who had rushed forward to help and I thought uncharitably how she must love it, the attention. I don’t suppose she could have walked now if she wanted to. What a waste of a life, of Victor’s, but of course her loss was my gain.

  Victor, in his grey morning suit, stood obligingly on the steps for the press photographers. As he half-turned towards the cameras he caught my eye and there was all our life together in the look he gave me as I stood forlorn on the pavement.

  I sat at the back, taking my place at the last moment when everyone had gone in. The two families, in their wedding finery, appraised each other and waited for the bride. I was conscious of my rôle as outsider and that I belonged without belonging, loved and was loved, but could not be recognized.

  There is always a tightening of the throat in the moment of silence before the organ strikes up with the Wagner and the bride enters.

  It is not real. Life is not a floating dress with a hundred yards of tulle; it is not a bouquet of white flowers, a radiant smile, a steady and unimpeded procession up a structured aisle. It is two steps forward and one step back, the road strewn with obstacles many of which seem insurmountable and some of which actually are.

  For a day it was make-believe. We need our dreams, our fantasies.

  Golden, ethereal, she looked like Molly as a young girl. No wonder Victor was thrilled with her. The diamond ear-rings he had given her winked as she passed. I look at Lucy, sitting apart, her face chalk white, her lips scarlet, her clothes crumpled as if she had just got out of bed. Her eyes followed the bride, her new sister-in-law, but I am sure did not see her. She stared unblinkingly, as if she were stoned, which she probably was.

  Gavin, a young Victor, only taller, turned to greet his bride, his face naked with love. I wondered if later there would be a Jean Banks in his life or whether they would walk together, hand in hand, towards the sunset. I was getting cynical. I was getting old. Soon I might have a grandfather for a lover. It seemed grotesque. I went out into the pale sun of Hanover Square.

  There were years for roses as for wine. That summer was one of them and Madame Louise Laperrière queen of them all. Neither claret nor burgundy, ruby or scarlet, crimson nor cardinal, blooming triumphantly, she held court. I think we must have worn a special hollow in the path in front of her.

  It was as if we had opened our garden to the public. A cavalcade of sightseers came to admire it in a confusion of tongues.

  Rosa Zigeuner and Passion; young couples on the grass; flowing robes; arms and legs thrust tanned from dresses in sweet pea colours; soft breasts in tee-shirts; bare chests; ‘Watch the Birdie’; ducks in full throat, overfed; ice-creams dripping in the sun.

  Who wanted abroad?

  It was Molly’s birthday and Victor threw a surprise party on the lawn.

  Pamela, Gavin’s wife, was pregnant, wanting to fill the large new house in Holland Park with children.

  Victor took me to Glyndebourne. The Magic Flute. The night was magic. The Sussex countryside. The scent of nicotiana. The lake. The Downs etched clearly against the evening sky. In other years it had rained. Not this. We drove back through the night, not speaking; reluctant to break the spell.

  As summers go it was almost perfect.

  That autumn I was busier than I had ever been.

  Victor, tight-lipped, was running round in circles because of the recession. Trevor, whose company had gone down with the many others in the cruel sea of the economic climate, had sold the house in Barnes for a ridiculously low sum and cut his losses. He and Jennie had bought a delapidated cottage on a remote hillside in Wales and gone back to nature in disgust. That left me on my own to visit our father whom senility had finally overtaken.

  Bottles of wine and whisky left, gaily wrapped and labelled, in my waiting room reminded me that it would soon be Christmas.

  Each year it started earlier. I remembered the time when it had been a two-day fest, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Now, answering machines, more than a week before, replaced people who had gone ‘to the country’, ‘to their constituencies’, ‘winter-sporting’, ‘to the sun’.

  I did not enjoy it. The parties, full of forced gaiety beneath the paper chains; dry turkey – no longer saved for Christmas Day – and drier stuffing; mince pies and too many nuts; the nightmare of the snarled traffic – everyone up to see the lights; letters delivered irregularly at inconvenient hours; importunate dustmen; Christmas trees and lighted windows with cotton-wool snow; no sense out of anyone high on celebrations. Then a pall, which settled over England for two weeks as the nation, glutted, in front of its television, watched old disaster movies, snapped and snarled in enforced proximity and dosed its indigestion.

  For me it meant two weeks without Victor. We were going to Kenya in the New Year.

  On Christmas Eve Victor and I had lunch together. It had become a ritual, a kind of last fling before together with the other mistresses of England I withdrew gracefully to count the days. Someone, I thought at times, should start a club for us.

  My shopping, what there was of it, was done. I had no need of orange peel matchsticks, iced fancies or Brussels sprouts in nets.

  By Christmas Eve, after the spending spree, London was bereft. The parking meters stood sentinel over empty bays. The traffic wardens had knocked off.

  They say that watching a man eat you can tell what kind of lover he will be.

  Victor was consideration itself, taking as much pleasure in selecting what we were to eat and what to drink as he did in the meal itself.

  He ordered for me – he had long ago learned my preferences. Some of his favourites didn’t interest me at all but I enjoyed his obvious delight in them. In our early days the highspot of the meal had been the dessert trolley when we’d piled our plates like greedy children, exchanging tastes and sharing morsels. Now with appetites muted and waistlines needing to be watched, we eschewed what had once been temptingly irresistible and settled, if anything, for a little fruit or cheese.

  We lingered over coffee, exchanging confidences, bits and pieces of ourselves.

  Afterwards we went back to the flat.

  Two weeks without each other.

  It was reflected in our love.

 
; The bedroom with its prints of Ullswater and Waggoner’s Wells looked upon our passion.

  In the sitting-room, not wanting it to be time for him to go, wishing the afternoon would last forever, I watched Victor at the record player and wondered what it was to be. He was in his shirtsleeves, strange for mid-week, but there was to be no more office for a fortnight.

  Gauging his mood I guessed the violin.

  He came to sit beside me on the sofa and I moved closer to him as the first notes flowed like honey into the room.

  Concerto in D, Beethoven. When I play it now it brings back with agonizing clarity, not only Victor, but the concern, of the violinist, for the future of mankind.

  We didn’t switch on the lights. We listened a little, slept a little, spoke a little until the square of the window panes grew dark behind the white cyclamen and the room began to be chill.

  I saw it coming.

  ‘It’s after five.’

  He had brought the image of Molly into the room. I switched on the electric fire, offered to make some tea, hoping to delay him.

  He refused it, fetching his coat and tie and putting them on.

  He took a long box from his pocket.

  ‘Happy Christmas!’

  It was a watch, simple, functional. In other years, he had bought watches of gold and diamond and complained I never wore them.

  On the back two words were engraved. Jean Palmer.

  Victor fastened it on my wrist.

  ‘It winds itself.’

  I looked at its face, square and uncompromising.

  Five-fifteen on the 24th.

  I would not forget it.

  I took my key and went down to the square with him. The lamps were lit, a hazy coronet around each orange head.