The Rolls was new. He changed them frequently. ‘Sand’ this time, paled by the phosphorescent light.
He did not kiss me except with his eyes as the window slid open.
The engine came gently to life.
‘Bye Jean.’
‘Happy Christmas.’
How could it be?
I watched him, as I had done so many times, manoeuvre expertly between the two lines of parked cars on our side of the square.
He waved, as always, as the car slid round the corner.
How was I to know that I would not see him again?
I was going to Jennie and Trevor in Wales but not until Boxing Day, when Thomasina was coming back and I could share a bedroom with Bonnie. There was what remained of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to kill, with no newspapers – not that there would be any on the Welsh hills, no central heating or inside loo either. I was looking forward to it to take my mind off the Victorless days. I could have gone out. It was not for want of being asked. I did not fancy being the spectre at the family feasts to which I was invited.
On Christmas Day I cleaned the flat, caught up with my correspondence and packed my case with all the heavy woollies I could find, for Wales.
In the evening, to pass the time, I got out the slides of Kenya. We’d never tired of it. The game parks with their dik-dik, waterbuck and gazelles; watchful baboons fondling their young, antelopes, hartebeest and cheetah.
Victor loved the birds, the yellow-crowned canaries and the shrikes, and I the dark velvet nights, the electric silence pierced by the sounds of cicadas beneath the blue-starred sky.
In Africa, of all places, I was able to forget not only that Victor did not belong to me but the concrete jungle in which we spent our days. Beneath its spell I pretended that we would not go back and that I would have Victor to myself for ever.
I closed the curtains and switched off the lights.
From the wall a delicate, elegant impala looked at me, into the room, with great, soft eyes and I remembered Victor covered with red dust, holding the camera, motioning to me for silence as he waited for the animal to come near. Victor feeding birds; a squirrel; a mongoose; he was patient with them all, even the lizards and at night the great black beetles that dropped from nowhere.
Gardenias and acanthus.
Monkeys with blue balls.
Me in my nightdress on the balcony at Kilagouni. We had got up with the sun and I was laughing, begging Victor not to take the photograph because my nightdress was transparent. In the background the snow-capped crest of Kilimanjaro.
Nairobi and the Aberdares.
The Country Club shaded by Cape chestnut and the jacaranda trees.
My photograph of Victor photographing peacocks on the lawn.
Mohamed, who attached himself to us, to Victor really, shinning up a tree for cashew nuts, his smile white in his polished face.
His village, where we practised the words he had taught us: Jambo Hallo. Habari How are you? Mzuri Sana Well.
Me, outside his home with his two wives and his six children playing among the chickens in the dust.
Victor, negotiating by the roadside for the Makonde statue which stands by the fireplace.
Butterflies and waterholes.
Our solitary lion.
Giraffe stripping the trees.
Mohamed waving, sad to see us go.
Victor sent a pair of ‘footyball’ shoes, blue and white, to Mohamedi Omari Mega, Diani Mwakamba, PO Box 98, Ukunda, Mombasa, Kenya.
I wonder did he ever receive them.
They were happy as sandboys, Jennie and Trevor. It needed a certain type of guts.
Instead of leaving neatly every morning in his city suit, Trevor was up at six in his wellies to milk the goat and Jennie followed him not long after, lop-sided with the smelly garbage pail of vegetable peels and the scrapings from everyone’s plates. They had sheep and chickens and two dogs. As well as the small-holding, situated awkwardly on the hillside, where there was always work to be done, there was the cottage which bit by bit they were restoring with the help of manuals and their own hands – apart from the impossibly heavy work for which they hired a friendly labourer. They were wiring and plumbing and plastering and tiling; the lot. They had taken ‘before’ pictures and I had no doubt that in years to come there would be the ‘after’ ones and that it would be delightful and they would make a huge profit.
I had to admit they looked well. Jennie had rosy cheeks and had let her waistline, which she covered with Laura Ashleys, go to pot and Trevor was ruddy and muscular as he had never been. The folding of the timber construction business was, he said, the best thing which had happened to him.
But it was not for me.
Time passed so slowly.
I was always amazed how early it was.
It was quiet and peaceful but after a few days I began to yearn for London and for Victor although he would not be there until Friday. I walked and I helped Jennie with the cooking and I fed the chickens (I drew the line at milking the goat) and I had long talks with Bonnie and played some Scrabble and read till my eyes were sore and slapped a bit of whitewash on the outhouse; and froze!
I had never been so cold. The hillside was exposed and the wind, of which it caught every bit, raw. It was warm by the fire and in the kitchen but icy everywhere else and I was glad when it was time to go upstairs and I could retire with my two hot-water bottles and one of Victor’s sweaters which I wore in bed.
They assured me it was lovely in the summer. I’m certain it was. I am by nature neither a grower nor a livestock tender, preferring places which were organized for people rather than for animals and crops.
It was nice to see them so happy though, Jennie and Trevor, and so enthusiastic. I envied them that.
Towards the end of my stay I had to admit I was feeling a great deal fitter, well more hardy at any rate, and no longer so intolerant at the lack of diversion. I was quite sad in a way to leave the cottage and realized that what they were doing represented the fantasy that most of us have at some point in our lives but rarely do anything about.
Bonnie travelled to London with me but I did not take her back to my flat because at five o’clock I was expecting Victor. My heart was beating with excitement and anticipation and I felt as apprehensive as a young bride.
Jennie had given me scones and jam and a walnut cake, all of which she had made, and I laid a tray to give Victor a celebratory tea. The Christmas cards, still on the mantelpiece, made it seem like a party.
I peeled off my woollen layers and had my first hot bath for ten days and got ready to welcome him.
He was never late.
Not without phoning.
I pushed the switch down on the automatic kettle a dozen times.
At six o’clock I began to be worried.
My heart was racing but this time with anxiety.
I rang the office; his private line.
There was no reply.
In twenty-six years I had not rung his home.
I did not do so now.
I waited.
I waited all of Saturday, afraid to go out, living on scones and jam and walnut cake. The phone rang and it was Sophie and I told her to go to hell. At five o’clock I ran out to the supermarket but looked blankly at the shelves and came back with a tin of soup and some over-refrigerated Brie which wouldn’t ripen in a thousand years. As I ran up the stairs I heard the phone ring but it was in the flat below.
It was the longest Sunday of my life. I didn’t even go out for the papers in case I missed him. Wild thoughts went through my head. There had been an accident. Molly. He had stopped caring. Even now there were such thoughts. I touched his chair, seeing him in it. Told myself, aloud, not to be such a fool.
It had happened only once or twice since I had known him. He was as reliable as clockwork.
By the end of the day I was as near to crazy as I had ever been.
I rang his home number, my hands trembling as I dialled,
intending just to hear his voice and put down the phone.
I let it ring for fifteen minutes.
There was no reply.
I took a sleeping pill at two and at eight was wakened by the phone.
Victor!
I grabbed the receiver, knocking the instrument to the floor.
It was the laundry about a sheet.
It was too early to call his office. I would ring from my rooms.
Between the sleeping pill living its half-life and my agitation I could hardly get dressed. I put the last of Jennie’s scones under the grill for breakfast.
In Harley Street life was beginning. Doctors with cases and receptionists with rested legs let themselves in with keys.
About to cross the road I met Romilly going to the dentist. We stood by the letter box.
‘Seen Victor?’ I said, trying to keep my anguish from the words, ‘over Christmas?’
He stared at me.
I had the feeling that hours passed although the lights only changed once.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Know what?’
I put out a hand to the letter box. For support. It found the slot marked: ‘London. Numbered Postal Districts Only’.
‘He died on Boxing Day.’
The adjoining slot said: ‘Other Places’.
Other Places. I looked at it stupidly.
‘A sudden haemorrhage. The funeral was on Friday. It was a family affair. Of course we couldn’t invite you. I’m surprised you didn’t see it in the papers.’
I didn’t trust myself to speak.
I removed my hand from ‘Numbered Postal Districts Only’ to see if I could stand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Romilly said, ‘I thought you knew…’
It was the nearest that he got to a concession.
He pressed the button of his digital watch.
‘I really must… My tooth’s been giving me hell all weekend.’
He looked at me.
‘Poor old Victor. Shook us all up. Molly’s gone to stay with Gavin and Pamela. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.’
Bad tidings.
Twenty-six years must have been written large across my face because Romilly who was not usually perceptive said:
‘Are you all right?’
I nodded.
He took out his wallet and gave me his card with his office number.
‘Ring up if you like.’
Sophie took me in.
Like a plant she watered and fed me getting nothing in return. There was nothing to give. I had been wiped clean, eviscerated.
She had kept her newspapers. I rescued them, smelling of polish, from the broom cupboard and the top of the portable television set in her bedroom.
There were pictures of skaters on the frozen Serpentine and Sales with cut-price china coming up for grabs; I read ‘Births’, ‘Birthdays’, and ‘UK Holidays’ not wanting to find what I was looking for.
Jones
Kelly
Lewis
Murray
Norman
Oram
Pattison.
‘Pattison. Suddenly on December 26th. Sir Victor Ian, beloved husband of Molly, father of William, Tristan, Gavin and Lucy. Funeral private. No flowers.’
Seeing it written down. Five lines. Dictated over the telephone to some ‘Classified Ad.’ girl, got through, finally, to my frontal cortex. Victor was dead. I would not see him again.
There was an obituary the following day:
Sir Victor Pattison, Chairman and Chief Executive of United Industries…suddenly at the age of 62…leading industrial figure…spokesman for international industry… as a business negotiator unsurpassed…school second Rugby XV…cricket for his house…St John’s Cambridge …gained a First… Administrative Officer Admiralty… patron of the arts… Glyndebourne… Royal Opera House …quick and incisive brain…complete intellectual integrity…respect and affection of his subordinates… married… Molly Hamilton…three sons and one daughter.
It had nothing to do with Victor.
It was as if he had never been. There were no children, no family, no shared hearth to keep him alive. Sophie did her best but she had a shop now in the King’s Road where she sold her designs to anyone who could afford them, and I could see that I was getting to be a nuisance.
The flat had changed. All around there was evidence of Victor but it had become a dead and empty place. I touched the things, our things, picking them up as I would have to pick up the pieces of my life. The Makonde figure, feeling the heat of Africa; the soapstone knife, rubbing it as if like Aladdin’s Lamp it would produce Victor. I touched the print of Waggoner’s Wells and the faded watercolour of Ullswater. It was no use. I could not bring him back. Neither could I believe that he had gone. Dead. There was no last thing to cling to. No letter. No good-bye. I looked forward to a future in which it would be a question of filling the empty spaces in my head. Nobody needed me. I belonged to no one.
I sat in the blue wing chair feeling its arms around me but they were not Victor’s.
I went to work and I came back. Each evening I noticed the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece with surprise, as if someone had just put them there, but did not take them down.
I wrote to Jennie, needing her. She was all I had. She wrote back, pages and pages on which the ink had run from her tears, begging me to come and stay for as long as I liked. It was no comfort.
Five o’clock was the worst. I took to going straight from work to the cinema so that the two hours, mine and Victor’s, did not have to be lived through. I sat through every film in London, seeing none.
Once I saw a sand-coloured Rolls and stopped breathing for a moment. It was driven by a Nigerian and had diplomatic number plates.
When I felt strong enough I rang Romilly who came round.
There had been no warning. Victor had been fetching wine from the cellar for Boxing Day lunch when he had collapsed. It was some time before Gavin found him, but it would have made no difference. The autopsy revealed carcinoma of the bronchus. Poor Victor. Poor darling Victor. I tried to get more out of Romilly, who was patient, unusually kind, but there was no more to tell; no small redeeming feature to which I could hold fast. Just Victor in the cellar lying in his own blood and Château Lafite. Molly had begun to regain the use of her legs. They said it was the shock.
Romilly finished his drink and stood up. We had nothing more to say to each other. Our mutual interest had been Victor and he had written the final chapter for me.
I had one more question.
‘Where is he buried?’
He was reluctant to tell me. What did he think I would do?
He mentioned the place; near Victor’s home.
As I shut the door on him I had the impression he had expunged me from his life as if I were the writing of a child across a magic slate.
Epilogue
I was a stranger in our garden.
A haloed, watery sun shone onto the frozen earth. The seats, geometrical forms stretching to infinity as in a photograph, black and white, were empty; ours, Emily Longford’s, indistinguishable from the rest.
On orange, webbed feet, the pintails waddled in slow procession, a school outing, across the icy surface of the lake.
A solitary walker, upright, in a fur hat, with stick and military bearing strode the frosty paths where once, as in a dream, there had been multi-coloured summer hordes.
It was trying to snow. Tiny flurries which melted before they reached the ground.
A wino with a tattered coat tied with string appeared from nowhere and raised his plastic carrier to the skies.
‘I want it to snow…’ his cry was sonorous.
The man with the military bearing turned his head.
‘…I’ve talked to the clouds!’ He pointed his beard to the sun. ‘I want there to be snowdrifts ten feet high!’
I would not have minded.
Anything.
There was no Joseph’s Coat, n
o Africa Star. ‘No Skateboarding in This Garden’.
Only Madame Louise had survived. One single scarlet flower in a dense green jungle.
I trod in my boots on the arctic soil. There was no one to see me. I would not have cared.
Bending forward I picked the rose.
I had the impression she had been waiting for me.
There was no gravestone. Just a frozen hump in the hard ground. Victor was lying beneath it. The world had become a wilderness in which I was condemned to wander. A crowd was no longer company; faces – pictures; talk – so many words. In the midst of his days. He who had so loved order. There was no one to be angry with. I wept for myself. A passing cleric, hands raw with cold, nodded, solemn with sympathy, seeing not a lover, one who loved, but a middle-aged woman in a duvet coat.
‘Funeral Private,’ Molly had decreed. ‘No Flowers.’
The thorns of Madame Louise Laperrière pricked my fingers through my woollen gloves.
I saw the rose, redolent of things past, through my tears which ran like water down the window of a flower shop.
I held her crimson head, gently, infinitely gently in both my hands then laid it, scarletly, on the brown earth.
It was my single act of defiance.
ROSEMARY FRIEDMAN
GOLDEN BOY
This is one of Rosemary Friedman’s best-loved novels. Freddie Lomax is a slick, work-driven city executive, popular and sociable, other eyes always drawn to the magnetic field of his charm. Utterly without warning he is given two hours to clear his desk at the bank and he finds himself joining the ranks of the middle-aged unemployed. His confidence that a new job will appear proves unfounded, and with all the time he now spends at home his marriage to Jane begins to suffer…until, when he thinks he can go no lower, he discovers that he is not the only one with problems and he applies his talents to a last attempt to save his relationship.
A Loving Mistress Page 12