She found the shoe behind the piano, in the dining-room which was rarely used. She pulled it out by the ribbon which came off in her hand. I was standing in the doorway. Martha stared at me, a look of panic on her face.
‘It’s the dress rehearsal!’
She meant for the end-of-term concert in which she was to dance the part of a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I looked at the child, red-haired and freckled like her mother (there were photographs everywhere), and saw my life course before my eyes like a man drowning. It was as if hours had passed although it was only seconds.
A voice which seemed to come from my lips said: ‘Give it to me.’
My hand, unbidden, extended itself for the shoe.
Opening Irene’s basket, of cottons and safety pins and thimbles and buttons all in a hideous tangle, I felt like a jewel thief. Sewing was not my forte. It was Jennie who took after our mother in domestic skills. There was no pink thread. The needle did not go easily into the satin slipper and I made a botched job of it.
The maths paper had gone badly. Ben had come in with a face like thunder soon after Martha left, slamming the front door after her.
‘What time’s dinner?’ He stood, lopsided from his school bag, his head almost reaching the lintel, in the doorway.
‘I’ve no idea.’
And I hadn’t.
Ben grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl.
The implications of his words began to dawn.
Richard came in with a spit-roasted chicken for our first family meal. When I had been a visitor he had cooked, or sent Ben out for a take-away. Mrs Bark, if it was one of her days, sometimes left a casserole in the oven. If Melanie had anything to do with it there were lentil burgers or hummous and wholewheat pitta, from the health shop. Richard had bought up half the delicatessen, wanting it to be a kind of celebration, everything to be nice. It was, except for the atmosphere. Martha was cheeky, trying to impress her best friend Noh, a Eurasian girl with almond eyes, with whom she giggled over some shared secret throughout the entire meal; Ben surly – ‘the pressure of exams’ Richard excused him; and Melanie concerned only with shovelling free-range egg into Cora, whom she had taken on a protest march. I sat in Irene’s place.
Afterwards, in the sitting-room, Richard wanted to watch the wildlife series he was following, and Melanie the news, to see if she had appeared in film clips of the demonstration. Sparks flew. Melanie snatched Cora from Richard’s lap and said she was going out. Before she left she brought in the baby alarm and banged it on the table. We took it to bed with us. I stayed awake listening to Cora breathing and was terrified, imagining cot-death and other disasters, when there was no sound. I must have dropped off because her crying, hoarse and angry, woke me. Richard got up. I looked at my watch. It was three a.m. Melanie was home but had forgotten to switch off the alarm.
I did cook. Tired of Mrs Bark’s watery offerings, and wanting to relieve Richard, I opened Irene’s file of recipes torn from magazines and scribbled on scraps of paper, redolent of her presence. I came home early, cut up summer vegetables for minestrone, put a fillet of beef and potatoes into the oven and made a fool with strawberries.
‘I don’t like bits,’ Martha said, putting her spoon down on the soup. ‘Mummy used to blend it.’
The potatoes were hard.
I learned later from Mrs Bark, who was only too pleased to tell me, that you had to parboil them. ‘Mrs Flynn,’ she said, meaning Irene, ‘was very fond of sweet potatoes,’ and added gratuitously, ‘She was American, you know.’
Melanie, allergic to strawberries, did not touch the fool.
I hadn’t realised, my path smoothed by Victor, how charmed my life had been. When Jennie came up from Wales – bringing me a bottle of home-made elderberry port – to catch the sales, I looked at her with new eyes, wondering how she had managed to bring up four children. What had caught me unawares, at Maida Vale, was the lack of space. Not the house, which was large enough, but the sense of private and emotional freedom I had unwillingly forsaken for the shared joys of marriage. Richard did not understand. He offered me Irene’s room on the top floor, where she had analysed her patients, for myself. It was as she’d left it. Her desk with its lizard blotting pad, the bookcases, Freud and Winnicott, her chair, behind the patients’ couch, covered with a striped dhurry.
‘I’ll put everything away,’ Richard said.
I would not let him. Consigning Irene’s possessions to the attic would not rid the house of her. It was not her room I needed but elbow-room in my head, which both Richard and his family invaded.
‘You get used to it,’ Jennie said at lunch, laughing at me over her potato gnocchi.
She had let herself go on her Welsh hillside. I was surprised, looking at her, not having noticed it before, that somewhere along the line my younger sister had turned into our mother.
‘You’ll never get used to it,’ Molly said. ‘I told you it was not for you.’
We were in her sitting-room, the windows open onto the summer garden and, after the turbulence of Maida Vale with its comings and goings and impedimenta of children and babies, it was like a haven; everything – the Blake watercolours – in its place.
Molly saw me looking at them.
‘Blake had visions, you know, as a small boy. A “tree filled with angels”. Later he saw Christ and the Apostles, and swore that Joseph, the carpenter, told him the secret of Italian tempera painting, and that his brother Robert – who was dead – taught him the technique of printing.’
Dr Hartley Taylor would have had a field day with Blake.
I had come from him. One of my rare visits. The black dog no longer dwelt on my shoulder, perhaps because I had not time for it and, try as I might, I could not re-create my former misery. Depression was like childbirth – although I could not personally vouch for it – once gone the agonies could not be relived. I was continuing with my tablets – for there were still setbacks at brief and unexpected moments – a miniscule dose.
‘How are the children?’ Molly asked.
My surrogate children.
‘Fine. Ben’s off to Scandinavia after the exams. Richard and I are taking Martha and Melanie and the baby to Birchington – we’ve rented a house – then Richard’s going fishing for a week.’
It was a far cry from my holidays with Victor. I guessed that Birchington, cooped up with Richard and the girls, would bring no respite from the resentment of his children which threatened to undermine our relationship. It would have been better had they called me something. There was no question, of course, of Mummy or Mother. I would not have wanted it. They did say Mummy, a dozen times a day, especially Martha – ‘Mummy used to…’ ‘Mummy always…’ – when they wanted to make clear to me how my ways differed from Irene’s. I had told them to call me Jean, which they did when it could not be avoided. To each other I was ‘she’ – I’d heard them talking, when they thought I was out of earshot – as I was when they spoke of me to Richard, who was divided in his loyalties. It couldn’t have been easy for him. ‘They don’t really mean to be offensive.’ It was what he believed. And it wasn’t a question of lack of manners. Often they fell over backwards to be polite. It was the reproach, inherent in their voices, that I was not Irene, the accusation, in their regard, that I had appropriated her place. It was Martha I felt sorry for. I’d noticed that she managed never to be alone with me if she could help it. It was clear that she suffered. One night, when Richard was at a meeting, I’d gone in to say goodnight to her and sat on the bed, feeling her body retreat beneath the bedclothes.
‘I was a little girl once,’ I said. I had meant to convey that I understood how she felt, but it sounded mawkish.
Martha stared at the ceiling as if it was the first time she had seen it.
I tried again.
‘Why don’t you tell me about your mother?’ There was a photograph of Irene by the bed. ‘I’d like to hear about her.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.�
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‘It might make you feel better.’
The lips, soft and childlike still, tightened.
‘I know it’s hard for you but you’re not making it very easy for me either. I’m not taking your Daddy away from you, you know.’
But I was. I could see it in her eyes.
‘It’s a losing battle,’ I told Molly. ‘Particularly Martha.’
‘She’s at a difficult age,’ Molly said. ‘I remember Lucy…’
I don’t know what I would have done without Molly, to pour my heart out to. I had never, in the Victor days, felt the need of a woman friend. When Molly said: ‘Gavin and Pamela are emigrating to Canada. I’m thinking of going with them,’ it came as a shock.
‘There’s nothing here,’ Molly said. ‘Now Victor’s gone. The house is too big.’
I didn’t want to lose her. It was almost as bad as Victor dying.
I think it was my reluctance to let Victor go, in my head, that dogged my relationship with Richard. He never asked me if I loved him. I think he knew. I was very fond of him. He was kind and easygoing, often spoiling me, which I did not deserve, but there were problems, minor irritations, which drove me mad and had nothing to do with Richard’s children. Molly said it was because I had not grown up in a marriage, had the edges rubbed off. My own company was what I missed most. The dual pleasures of being by myself and not being with other people. I was often uncommunicative, particularly before breakfast. Richard tried to jolly me out of my reserve, confusing my needs with his deficiencies. I wondered how it had been with Irene. That she had been a little dynamo in the mornings I learned from Mrs Bark. At night, in bed, I was ready to chat to Richard into the small hours. It was new and exciting for me to share my hopes, my fears, my dreams, with someone who cared, at the end of the day. Richard wanted to sleep. I was an owl and he a lark. I hadn’t realised how many adjustments there were to be made, that the patterns of sleeping and eating, of privacy and togetherness, must all be adjusted.
If I had had any lingering illusions about marriage, Mrs Bark dispelled them. In her day-to-day encounters with ‘Daddy Harry’, as she referred to her husband, she employed not only field strategy, but heavy artillery. She was pleased to get out of the house to avert her eyes from the sight of ‘Daddy Harry’ insouciantly messing up her pin-neat home with his presence, until it was time to drown the bitter pill of his redundancy in the Roebuck with his dole money. Often I was late for work, transfixed by the torrent of verbiage indicting the unfortunate ‘Daddy Harry’ who, in his cups, was not averse to laying ungentle hands on his wife (as I told Mrs Flynn). The rebuke was implicit. Irene had listened. I wondered had she provided solutions. I had none. No antidote to apply to the minor abrasions of my own marriage. When we quarrelled – once I had thrown a hairbrush at Richard and it landed against the wall waking Cora with its impact – he was quick to apologise, taking me in his arms and seeking to make all right with our world. I was sullen, sulking. There seemed so much to learn about co-existence, I looked with admiration, they had the edge on me, at Richard’s friends.
We saw Jeremy and Muriel most. Muriel did her best to be amiable, but she alarmed me with her breezy domestic efficiency and the reminiscences, at which she stopped tactfully short, of shared holidays, private moments over the years – often involving the seven children they had between them – with Richard and Irene. I was not gregarious. I did not find it particularly amusing to sit for an evening dissecting the prowess and careers, the dropping out and dropping in, of offspring. I’d stand with my Bloody Mary, or sit over Muriel’s delicious dinner – fabricated from the minimum of effort between her coming home from an assignment and our arrival – and watch Richard, drinking just a shade too much, come alive in the cocoon of comradeship.
‘Why don’t we have a dinner party?’ Richard said, near the end of term. ‘Before everyone disappears.’
I stared at him appalled. We had accepted a great deal of hospitality, I riding on the crest of Irene’s wave, but I was unused to ‘entertaining’. A date was fixed.
I rang Muriel – who was making raspberry vinegar – first. Melanie, Cora on her lap, at the kitchen table, listened to the exchange with amusement.
‘Richard sees Jeremy every day,’ she said. ‘Why on earth do you have to make an arrangement three weeks ahead?’
She was right of course. The very words ‘dinner party’ turned me to stone, and dissipated any rudiments of household skills I had acquired since becoming Richard’s bride.
You’d think I had invited royalty. I made myself ill contemplating menus, making up my mind about what we would eat, then changing it.
‘There’s no need to make a big thing of it,’ Richard said. ‘Stick something in the oven.’
He was right of course. He didn’t realise that I was on probation. As if I had been proposed for membership of some surreal club, and on the success of the dinner would depend my admission to the ranks, of Muriel and of Robyn and of Joan.
I bought a book: Entertaining Made Easy. But it wasn’t. I spent hours on the phone when I should have been working, to Molly, and to Sophie who was in the midst of her winter collection. I did not tell Richard of my wretchedness. It was a spectre, Irene’s, that I had to lay on my own.
Mrs Bark cleaned the dining-room and the silver spoons.
‘Mrs Flynn always used the écru table mats,’ she said, as if Irene were the only one. ‘They’re at the bottom of the linen chest.’
Mrs Flynn also, I was informed, liked the Queen Anne coffee pot polishing when she entertained, and filled the matching sugar bowl with multicoloured crystals.
‘Roll up by the long side,’ the book said. You would not believe that a middle-aged woman could shed tears over a chocolate roulade. It was Ben’s fault. I shouted at him. He came into the kitchen at the crucial moment and said, ‘What shall I do with these?’ He had got the habit from Richard. ‘Where do you want this?’ And ‘What about those?’ When he was out of range. Ben was holding grass-stained cricket whites, and looking up I lost my hold on the roulade, which was more brittle than it should have been – too long in the oven, Jennie said – and like the Lady of Shallott’s mirror, it cracked from side to side. I had been at it for hours, sifting flour and cocoa and greasing greaseproof paper.
‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ I yelled at Ben.
When Richard came home and found me weeping at the kitchen table it was not so much the roulade as the assumption, by his son, that I was responsible for the metamorphosis of his trousers. I had married his father, not taken a job in a launderette.
‘Put the cake into a bowl and cover it with fruit,’ Richard said, trying to be helpful.
He had missed the point.
I wanted to make the roulade. To enter the good wife stakes. Melanie said I was mad. I began to wonder.
I was on trial. I felt it as they came through the door in their summer finery, by which time I had bathed and changed and fixed on my hostess smile, as if I had done nothing more strenuous all day than wave my magic wand over slug-infested lettuces and lumps of raw meat. I had always considered that women like my mother and Jennie led lives of indolence, extending their tasks, like Parkinson and his law, to occupy the day. As I wondered whether the majestic gladioli I had arranged in the sitting-room, the cheese straws I had personally twisted, reached the unspoken standards set by Irene, I revised my opinion. Leading the first guests through the French windows, telling them how delighted I was to see them – when I had so exhausted myself that I was fit for nothing, except half-an-hour of mindless television and bed – I became embroiled in the dishonesty which Melanie, with her militant feminism, castigated, with the role-playing she despised.
The conversation in the garden, where Richard dispensed drinks, and I cocktail napkins, was light; the new exhibition at the Hayward; a forthcoming conference in St Kitt’s (Oliver was presenting a paper and taking Robyn with him); an anecdote (precipitated by a passing wasp) about a patient of Joan’s whom she ha
d treated for anaphylactic shock.
In the dining-room I sat remote at the head of the table, listening to the loosened tongues. After a brief skirmish with the Common Market, we had Northern Ireland with the spinach soufflé – greeted not undeservedly with applause – escalating to a passionate condemnation of terrorism over the daube. By the time I shamefacedly brought in the chocolate roulade, the conversation had veered to racism, which aroused such heated debate – helped by the Hermitage with which Richard filled Irene’s facet-stemmed wine glasses – that no one noticed (as Richard had accurately predicted) its bizarre appearance. Oliver introduced the ‘some races are morally and intellectually superior to others’ argument, and ‘the question of whether to hold a racist theory was synonymous with encouraging racial hatred’ followed me into the kitchen to which I escaped to make coffee.
Phrases detached themselves and wafted over the wooden table piled high with dirty dishes, to the sink where I put water into the kettle Irene would have remembered to fill. ‘…racial hatred as a sign of rebellion…’ Jeremy’s sibilants were no longer clear. ‘…superiority of the Teuton over the Slav…’ ‘…if I say ‘Italians make good waiters’ does that make me a racist…?’ It was Oliver who spoke and Robyn, putting him down, came in with ‘…now you’re being facile.’ Oliver, his voice rising, said, ‘Not at all. I was merely asking…’ And I gripped the edges of the sink. I heard Melanie say: ‘Are you all right?’ and looked round startled. I hadn’t noticed her, engrossed in her book, in a corner of the kitchen. I reassured her and refused her offer of help with the tray although I thought later it might have been politic to accept.
When they’d gone – it was after two o’clock and I’d thought they never would – Richard put his arms round me and said: ‘That was super, darling, they really enjoyed it,’ and I knew that he had, discussing lithium levels in white blood cells with Jeremy, while they absentmindedly polished off the basket of petit fours it had taken me an entire morning to make.
A Second Wife Page 8