We despatched the last of the rosé and the Reblochon.
Left the sheets at the blanchisserie, as we had been instructed. Fastened the shutters on the bays.
In Maida Vale Melanie looked at us, tanned and relaxed, with contempt. Cora held out her arms to me. I told Richard, who had come out to the waiting taxi, how much I had enjoyed myself.
Back in my flat I knew that I had only been pretending.
Part Two
I took Richard out for lunch on his birthday and he asked me to marry him. I had booked up at what he called a ‘waiters and plates’ place, a Victor type restaurant, on the river. It was not Richard’s scene. I wondered if I was trying to fit him into Victor’s empty mould and knew that if I was the task was hopeless. There were butterballs and stephanotis on our table, and through the windows, with their swagged curtains, we could see the ducks. Glasses and cutlery were set down and removed for no apparent reason, and waiters, like ballet dancers, served touring Americans and hacking-jacketed groups with heated rolls from hollowed loaves of bread. With the decorum of altar boys they proffered our escalopes de saumon et St Pierre aux Crones Sauce Aneth, minute pink morsels adrift in a cream sea, with tomato slivers and cucumber circles. On a separate plate, baby mangetout and single cauliflower sprigs flanked miniscule puff-pastry fish. Richard captured the last of his sauce with the sculpted spoon. Used to traditional Sunday lunches in Maida Vale or at his mother’s, I could see that he was still hungry. He consoled himself with the Château La Pointe. Charlotte aux poires sur nages de fruits – a scant two forksful set on a dolly-mixture lake of finely cut strawberries and kiwis – satisfied my sweet tooth. Richard went for the cheese.
‘Jean?’
I knew what was coming. Had sensed its approach since our return from France. In the way Richard tried to involve me more in the life of his household. In the day-to-day management of his home in Maida Vale. He asked for my opinion. Sought my advice.
‘I know it’s soon for you…’
It made no difference. A lifetime would not have been long enough. Of course he had to propose. We could not have lived unlawfully with his children and I would not allow Richard into Victor’s bed. It surprised me that people still bothered to get married. I meant young people. Not old enough to be grandparents, like Richard and myself. Perhaps the desire not only to be loved, but to be seen to be loved, was becoming more important in a world that grew increasingly impersonal, steadily more standardised. I wondered what my answer would be. I had pre-empted the question many times in my head, my thoughts drifting away as they did these days. I had never wanted to be married. Except in my weak moments, to Victor. I thought that such close proximity implied a dysfunctional approach to living for both parties, allowing for neither flexibility or growth. I had always been afraid of commitment.
‘Do you think it a good idea for us to get married?’ Richard said.
I was saved from answering by the waiter with the coffee-pot, dancing a fandango with the sugar and the cream. He left a plate of almond tuiles – the smallest I had ever seen – on a gold doyley, on the table. I thought of the ramifications. I would have to give up my flat; abnegate my freedom. I looked at Richard. It was almost thirty years since he had first proposed to me. I had no strength. It had gone with Victor. I felt myself being drawn into the vortex of the house in Maida Vale, the undercurrent of Richard’s family with the demands of their daily lives – when I had had only my own to consider – of assuming Irene’s mantle. I said I would think about it but I knew what my answer would be.
I wanted to discuss it with Molly, as if I had to ask her permission.
‘You don’t love Richard,’ Molly said.
Love is only one of many reasons for electing to spend your life with someone. Sometimes we are too frail to survive the jungle, too frightened to sally forth into the darkness on our own. Molly threw every objection at me, voicing my own thoughts. I valued – or had – my independence; was bad at children; used to pleasing myself.
‘You are not a maîtresse de maison. Don’t do it, Jean.’
There had not been many changes in my life requiring conscious decisions. Apart from leaving the hospital service and setting up on my own – at Victor’s insistence – the last one had been giving up Richard and agreeing, although no formal agreement had been made, to live as Victor’s mistress. It was strange now to be reversing the process. I wondered whether it was too late. Whether my ways were too set for change, for adaptation.
Richard waited for my decision. We discussed it in the park, listening to the band. I could not go near the Rose Garden which had been mine and Victor’s. It was to be an adult and mature union. Of equals. For the very best reasons. That we elected to live in each other’s company under the same roof. Each self-sufficient. The best of all possible worlds. I had not actually said yes.
I married Richard in June. We had no honeymoon. It was the day before Ben’s A levels. Richard couldn’t leave him. Sophie made me a dress for a wedding present. It was pure silk, the colour of coffee ice-cream, and had a long, loose jacket to match. Molly came to the Register Office, I wished she hadn’t, although I had invited her. It was as if Victor’s eyes were on me. Jennie and Trevor came up from Wales, excited and pleased for me – Jennie liked everything to have an ending, to be ‘happy ever after’ – and Bob from the Path. Centre, with Margaret. Melanie and Martha came for Richard – his sister was away – and his friend Jeremy (who had lent us the flat) with his wife Muriel. Melanie, Cora on her back like a papoose, her lip curling, stood like stone. Martha cried. When I tried to comfort her, to kiss her after the ceremony, her body stiffened.
Packing up my flat had not been easy. It was like purging Victor, personally. I sold it to a QC and his wife who had a house in the country, as a pied-à-terre. In the bathroom, eyeing Victor’s aftershave, I heard him say ‘she must be a widow’. They bought the carpets and curtains but they didn’t want the furniture, they had their own.
A house clearance man came, a stub of a pencil behind his ear. On this sofa, I wanted to say, we listened to Bach and Vivaldi; in winter, warmed by this fire, we made love; that table, by the window, was where Victor spread his evening newspaper, if he got home before I. The man named a sum. To cover the goods and chattels. I was selling memories.
‘This chair…’ I touched it protectively.
It was as if Victor was in it. I wondered should I take it to Maida Vale, to my new home.
The man waited. The chair, faded blue, somewhat threadbare at the arms, was of no great value. I let it go by default.
He replaced the pencil. I knew I had sold everything far too cheaply, but I did not care.
I packed up the souvenirs, the Buddhas and the boxes, the coral and the starfish, the sediment from the good wine of my life. They went into a tea-chest, together with Gerald’s letters, ready for Richard’s attic. Only the watercolour of the lake where I had spent my first weekend with Victor – May Higgins, I wondered was she still alive – would be displayed on Richard’s wall.
I spent the night before my wedding with Sophie. She cooked an enormous bowl of pasta and we got extremely drunk which wasn’t difficult with my pills.
‘To the weaker sex,’ Sophie said, raising her glass, meaning men, ‘God bless ’em!’
Maudlin, we played ‘do you remember’.
Our first shared basement flat with Sophie’s dressmaking, her patterns and her headless model, all over the place; my house jobs – three nights on and one night off, staggering home inebriate with tiredness from the wards; painting the bathroom clover, from an end of range, and ending up with one pink wall; Sophie’s lovers – she only attracted failures, wanting to mother them – the permanently resting actor, the alcoholic, the playwright without a chance in hell. Sophie had used, not loved them. She had had one love. A Scottish laird for whom she had lost three stone in weight and would have put her hand in the fire had he so wished. He had wooed her for years then suddenly disappeared to marry the horse
y daughter of a neighbouring estate.
‘Life is a bum,’ Sophie said. ‘Do you realise, Jean, that despite the duplicity,’ she touched her auburn hair ‘three parts chestnut and two parts gold, despite the sleight of hand’ – her fingers caressed her cheek, ‘time has caught up with us. Where has it gone, I ask myself, where has it gone?’
A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone. We had sung it at school. School. Over thirty years ago. I was as drunk as Sophie.
‘Do you remember that turd from Iran?’ Sophie said.
He had lost all his money at black-jack and then lost Sophie’s.
And Jennie’s children.
And Sophie’s positive cervical smear and her hysterectomy.
And the day my mother died.
And Sophie’s parents. Both of them. Coming back from Paris on a DC 10.
‘Sometimes I am afraid.’ Sophie held a bottle to the light, amazed that it was empty. ‘Frightened. We should have got married, you and I, Jean, when we were young, neatly, had children like everyone else.’
‘“All the lonely people”…’ She started to sing while looking for the corkscrew.
‘…“Where do they all come from? All the lonely people. Where do they all belong?”’
She held the bottle between her knees, against the embroidered kaftan she had picked up in Morocco.
‘Did I ever tell you, Jean, that I was in love with Victor?’
I looked at her in astonishment.
‘Victor guessed. That was why he insisted on you moving out. Buying you the flat.’
‘I thought it was your mess?’
‘That too. I got over it. I swore I’d never tell you. He was a man with great char…char…’
‘Charisma.’
‘He exuded…’
‘Sophie, shut up!’
The cordial atmosphere evaporated.
Sophie broke the silence. She sounded less drunk.
‘I don’t think Molly’s any good for you. It’s over. You mustn’t let Victor fester.’
Fester.
It needed Sophie to say it.
I proffered my glass for its refill. To erase Victor whom Sophie, deliberately I’m sure, had brought into the room.
Sophie started to hum and dance round the furniture, her kaftan flowing.
My obfuscated brain, awash with vinho verde and Dr Hartley Taylor’s pills, put silent words to the tune:
‘I’m getting married in the morning
Heigh-ho, the bells begin to chime…’
I realised suddenly, and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before, that it was my last night of being Jean Banks.
I had thought that only my name would change. How stupid of me. How short-sighted.
Richard’s parents, although frail, were still active. They came to the wedding-breakfast given by the Potters, Richard’s friends. Jeremy worked with him at the Maudsley. Muriel had made everything herself. Just looking at the table in the Hampstead dining-room, with its terrines, and its mousses in the shape of fish, made me feel inadequate.
‘It’s all frightfully easy,’ Muriel, who was a photographer and whose black and white portraits lined the walls, said breezily when complimented. ‘I sling everything in the Magimix.’
They had given us a food-processor for a wedding present. She might just as well have given me her Hasselblad. I did not know what to do with it.
‘Taste this gougère, darling,’ Richard said, offering me a bit of his hot choux pastry puff, no heavier than a whisper. ‘Muriel made it.’
I could not cook. Only eggs and grills and heating things up. I’d never had to.
‘No one’s looking after the bride!’ Muriel offered me a plate of triangular pastries. ‘Börek. They’re Turkish.’
Jeremy proposed the toast. He chose his words carefully. It never ceased to amaze me how we avoid the truth for fear of offending. Everyone in the room was aware that the deaths of Victor and Irene had made the day possible, but Jeremy rocked back and forth on his heels and looked at his glass in embarrassment, picked and pecked at his words, rather than mention the dead, Richard’s and mine.
When Richard replied, eulogising me, Ben and Martha looked embarrassed, and Melanie, with Cora, left the room.
Richard kissed me in front of everyone and I had a momentary sensation of warmth and belonging which was probably due to the champagne.
Mrs Bark had done her grudging best in the house. It was shining and comparatively tidy and she had cut yellow roses from the garden and put them on the kitchen table. We had taken the children out to dinner, a Chinese restaurant where they had seated us at a round table with a ‘lazy Susan’. Seeing the carnation in Richard’s buttonhole and my outfit – a little over the top for won ton soup and chicken chow mein – the manager had put two and two together and hovered, his gold tooth glinting, and leaned over Martha, covering her hand with his to her acute discomfort, to demonstrate the correct hold of her chopsticks. The evening had not been a success. Melanie was silently reproving, Martha not feeling well and Ben fidgety because his Applied Maths was on Monday and he wanted to get back to his revision. Cora, as if she sensed the atmosphere, cried in her carry-cot, upsetting the other customers. By the time it got to the toffee bananas the tension had eased a bit and looking round the table at Richard’s children I had a swift and disturbing fantasy that they were mine.
We were not unusual, Richard and I, with our lopsided family. Times had not only changed but been transfigured. I don’t suppose the team which stumbled upon the efficacy of exogenous oestrogens in inhibiting ovulation had any idea of their radical effects upon society. Its benefits were indisputable, but sometimes I wondered if they had not come from a Pandora’s box of less attractive consequences. Women, it was true, were free. To indulge in sex, casual or committed, without fear. We no longer needed to get steamed up about it. But what about the debased coin of relationships at which no one was any longer prepared to work? At the first hint of discord, partners were discarded, or exchanged, like ill-fitting shoes. The proliferation of second and third marriages – with their ‘his’ and ‘hers’ children – of ageing men with nubile wives and tiny babies, of menopausal women espousing virile youths, of single mothers and one-parent families, of the swinging and swapping, the matrimonial musical chairs, that was taking place stemmed directly from the capital-lettered Pill, which bespoke happiness but did not discharge its claim.
I may have married Richard on the rebound, after Victor, but I could never complain that my eyes had not been open. Molly had seen to that.
‘It’s difficult enough bringing up your own children,’ she’d said, glancing at Lucy’s photograph. ‘I can’t begin to think how one would manage someone else’s.’
I understood their hostility towards me, Ben’s and Martha’s (Melanie was merely supercilious) – any child deprived of his mother’s love at a crucial stage in his development would feel the same – and was convinced that patience and understanding on my side, and time on theirs, would help to dispel it. What Molly had failed to convey was that it is in the minutiae of daily life that children cause most havoc.
We were all tired after the wedding. It had been a long and stressful day. Richard saw Martha into bed – he still tucked her up – while I got out of Sophie’s coffee silk in my unfamiliar home. Caught up in the outward manifestations of our union, Richard’s and mine, our public declaration of intent, I had had little time to think. As I undressed in the room with its double bed which had once been Irene’s, uncertainties about the future, about the wisdom of my decision, which seemed now to have been taken by someone else, stole unbidden into the silent language of my mind. I felt the sudden trepidation of a young bride. As if the acceptance of Richard’s ring, identical to that which I had given him, implied expectations which I doubted my ability to fulfil. These were not only physical – although the public plighting of our troth seemed somehow to have dispelled the carefree ethos of Villefranche – but an obligation to assume ch
aracters, wife and mother, which so far I had managed to avoid. The bedroom had been cleared, I don’t know when, of Irene’s clothes, her possessions, but in the bathroom, neither Richard nor Mrs Bark had thought to dispose of a frosted-glass reminder of the woman whose place I was usurping. By the taps a half-used bottle of turquoise body-lotion, a faded ribbon round its neck, spoke louder than words. If Richard wondered at my lack of vivacity on our wedding night, he did not verbalise it. Our apprehension of each other had a listening quality to it, as if we were not alone, and it took time before we succumbed to the ardour which engulfed us. Through it we heard a hammering on the door.
‘It’s all right,’ Richard said, as I clutched at the sheet. ‘It’s locked.’
‘It’s me,’ Ben’s aggrieved voice said, as he rattled the handle. ‘Martha’s been sick.’
At the Centre they treated me like a young bride, winks and nudges.
‘How’s married life?’ Bob said.
‘Terrific!’
Influenced by my new and adopted family I realised that I had fallen into the idiom of the day. The reply was neither fitting nor accurate.
It had not taken long for the ramification of the step I had taken to become apparent. On the very first day I had come home from work to find Martha playing hunt the slipper for a missing ballet shoe. She was running round the house like a wild thing, turning everything in her path upside down.
‘When did you last have it?’ I tried to be helpful, logical.
‘I’m going to be late!’ she wailed.
‘If you’d just think for a moment…’ I sounded like a school teacher.
She streaked past in her striped school dress.
I wandered round the house after her not knowing quite what it was I was looking for.
‘What colour was it?’
‘What colour do you think!’
‘There’s no need to be rude.’ I heard my mother’s voice in my ears. I was not going to start, on my very first day, disciplining Martha.
A Second Wife Page 7