Bob, who had four grown children, smiled knowingly.
‘It’s like Sisyphus,’ I said. ‘You’ve no sooner finished than you have to start again. I’d always thought, between you and me and the gatepost – a forgotten phrase of my mother’s – that people who stayed at home did nothing at all.’
Jennie came to London. Over the Eggs Benedict I looked at her with new eyes.
It was another world I had inhabited with Victor. Far removed from the real one.
I wondered should I have married Richard in the first place and had progeny of my own.
Molly’s letter from Canada did nothing to assuage my doubts. She was happy in Quebec, her health improving, making a new life for herself. Gavin and Pamela were marvellous, the house had a ‘granny flat’, and she was revelling in the proximity of her grandchildren, her anecdotes about them highlighting the fact that I had none.
I wrote to her about the nightmare week which had precipitated my uncertainty about the wasted years. Her neat reply, black ink on airmail paper, asserted that my preoccupation was an aftermath of flu, and that I should look to the future, not hanker for the past about which nothing could be done. Our letters, back and forth across the Atlantic, became an unexpected shriving, each taking the turn of penitent and priest – I had no more need of Dr Hartley Taylor – and I realised that amongst other things I had sacrificed for Victor had been my right to a friend.
I didn’t count Sophie who was always in a hurry. I poured my heart out on the page to Molly as if I was making up for lost time.
Ben rang from Sweden for his results. We opened the envelope. Three As. His place at university, Bristol, was assured. I could not have been more excited had I been Irene. Amazed at my reaction, I grabbed the phone from Richard to congratulate his son. No aspect of my life with Victor had generated such delight, such satisfaction – as if I had taken the exams myself – except perhaps the love.
While Martha still trod warily with me I was aware of a truce. On the last evening of her summer holiday, when Richard apologised for not being able to take her to school on the first day of term – he had an early patient – I was surprised to hear her say: ‘Jean will take me.’ I would not have dared to volunteer.
‘You mean “please will you”?’ Richard said.
I hushed him quickly, not wanting Martha to withdraw into her shell at the rebuke.
I was becoming sensitive to her needs, able to correlate my once forgotten childhood to her own.
In the uniform we had chosen, the blazer avowedly too big, I delivered her to the school. To my surprise she pecked me on the cheek before she picked up her satchel and her shoe bag and her hockey stick, and crossed the Rubicon from the car to the sea of small girls, blue and yellow, clustered round the gate.
‘Is that your stepmother?’ a voice enquired of Martha.
Her eyes met mine through the open window.
She turned her back on me and I did not hear her reply. Ben had gone away a boy and came home a man. I scarcely recognised him when he appeared on the doorstep. He was tanned and sinewy, his legs like tree trunks beneath the faded shorts, and he seemed to have grown. Diffidence, and a certain evasiveness, had given way to a new assurance. He seemed pleased to see me when I opened the front door.
‘Hi!’
The pack on his back filled the door-frame.
‘Hallo, Ben.’
I waited for him to come in but he didn’t move, turning his head towards the street. A tall blonde girl of striking beauty, like a golden dryad came up the path, unbowed by her rucksack.
‘This is Ingrid.’
Her smile was dazzling. Ben looked at her like a besotted puppy. Had he had a tail it would have been wagging. Ingrid was at least ten years his senior.
‘This is Jean.’
‘Hallo, Ingrid.’
Her grip was Amazon.
Martha was at team practice, and Melanie not yet back from the park with Cora, but the house was suddenly full of people. The rucksacks were dumped in the hall, where Ben’s was eviscerated onto the carpet to find what he had brought for me, and the kitchen all at once was filled with the animal presence of youth. When he gave me my present, a paper-knife, I embarrassed Ben, making him blush, by kissing him in front of Ingrid.
They were starving. They had been travelling all night. Ben emptied the fridge of eggs and the mushrooms I had bought for dinner, and Ingrid made omelettes. They touched each other whenever their paths crossed.
Martha came back having scored two goals, and was in her seventh heaven, hugging Ben and nagging for her gift. She couldn’t take her eyes off Ingrid – whose features she was analysing idolatrously – although pretty as Martha was, with her grey eyes and dark curly hair, she would never look like Ingrid in a million years.
Melanie returned with Cora, grubby from the sandpit, and Ben couldn’t believe that his niece was walking, as if it were some unheard-of miracle, and kept her tottering round the kitchen after biscuits in his retreating hand. Ingrid picked her up: ‘Don’t tease, Bennie,’ and lifted her to the ceiling which Cora touched delightedly. Melanie made tea, searching for an egg for Cora and Marmite soldiers which were wolfed by Ben and Ingrid as fast as they were prepared. Ingrid put an arm round Martha while she showed her a photograph of her own younger sister on their farm outside Stockholm, and you could not hear yourself think for the sun-filled laughter and the voices.
Feeling suddenly superfluous I left the kitchen and went up to the bedroom, Richard’s and mine. I felt old and unwanted and wondered what I was doing with all this family, all these people, who had been so covetous of my own company. A cold dank breaker of the old depression hit me like a tidal wave and it seemed that it had never gone away. I didn’t want to be in Maida Vale, married to Richard, embroiled in his offspring, with their need and their greed, their elations and disappointments. I felt used – soon they would be calling for dinner – stifled and needed to get out.
No one heard me close the front door. They were too busy, their laughter fuelled by their own good humour. I drove against the rush-hour traffic to the quiet square where I had lived – partly lived – with Victor, where I had been happy for twenty-six years. I parked the car in a deserted meter bay and looked up at my old window, the curtains were a different pattern now, and pictured myself in the sitting-room, Victor at the door. The attempt, to go back, recapture the past, was not very successful. The months were passing. It would soon be a year. It seemed almost a lifetime. I had the sensation, emanating I presume from the depression I had not thought to see again, that I belonged nowhere: not in this square, where try as I might, I could not impregnate my idea of Victor with any semblance of life – not to Richard, surrounded by his young beneath the roof of Maida Vale, not even – and I grew suddenly afraid, chill, though the evening sun shone still through the windows of the car – to myself.
Dr Hartley Taylor had warned me. That there would be relapses. I had not thought to see again the pall of melancholy which had followed Victor’s death. It was impossible to imagine that I had ever been well.
By the time I got home, becalmed in the traffic beneath a lowering sky – a storm was brewing, matching my mood – Richard was home. He was delighted to see his son and his feathers were preened at the unexpected bonus of Ingrid. When he looked at my face, asking what was the matter, I told him I had a headache.
Richard blamed it on the approaching storm. It was my fault for lying. I could not say I hate you, your family, Irene’s family. I want to go home – wherever that was – it wasn’t even, other than temporarily, true.
Despite the omelettes, by dinner time Ben and Ingrid were starving. We had chops in the fridge for dinner, just enough to go round. Richard offered to take us all to the local restaurant in celebration of Ben’s results. I tried not to cast a gloom. To bare my teeth and emit jolly sounds in keeping with the occasion. I recognised, wearily, my old detachment, that I did not belong among the hanging ivy plants and the red-checked tablecloths and th
e black and white views of old Maida Vale, and had to sit tight to the chair to prevent myself floating away. I thought the meal would never end, wanting only to hide my face in my pillow. By the time we came out the threatened storm had broken and we got soaked dashing across the rain-bounced pavements to the car.
When it became apparent that Ingrid was not going home, not going anywhere. I offered to make up a bed for her in Martha’s room. She and Ben exchanged glances.
Richard and I were lying awake, listening to the storm, when we heard sounds from Martha’s room, footsteps along the corridor, Ben’s door open and close.
‘It seems no time since I was teaching him to bowl.’
Richard was suffering a father’s agonies, the transformation of his son into a man. I could not comfort him. He enquired after my headache, which I said was still bad. He assured me that it would be gone by the morning and took me, devoid of feeling, into his arms. Listening to the orchestrations of the storm, disturbed by our knowledge of Ingrid’s presence in Ben’s youthful bed, it was a long time before either of us slept.
My mood passed as suddenly as it had come. It was as if I had been looking into a funfair mirror, everyone, everything, gross, threatening, distorted. Without warning the glass became true again, the real world reflected. And I loved it. I really did. I had stopped fighting. Tired of seeing Ben’s empty rucksack in the already cluttered hall, I had taken it to the attic. Unable to go down again without reference to my private shrine I had picked up Victor’s photograph from the top of the tea-chest and taken it to the light of the dormer window. A man in a scarlet pullover smiled at me. I had wept onto the glass at Molly’s. Now I smiled back – remembering the good times – and returned the photo to the chest with equanimity. Richard was crossing the landing on the way to this study, with the preoccupied look he wore when he was about to work. He didn’t see me on the stairs. I could hear the sound of girls’ voices in the kitchen, Melanie, Martha and Cora, and was aware of a sensation of peace and tranquillity, as if all at once I had stopped running. As if I had come home. At dinner Richard said, ‘You’re very quiet, Jean. What’s wrong?’ I told him there was nothing. On the contrary, looking round the table, accepted, belonging, everything was right. I was like a ship coming in to harbour. I did not want to break the spell.
I relocated the furniture in the sitting-room, making a cosier grouping round the fireplace in anticipation of the winter foreshadowed by the shorter days. Shopping with Melanie in the King’s Road – we’d left Cora with Richard – I bought new cushions, with which I broke up the dull green of the loose covers. I massed flowers in a huge vase on Irene’s piano. It was two days later when I realised, to my absolute amazement, that they were white chrysanthemums.
‘You sound happy,’ Bob said, one day in the lab.
I hadn’t realised I was humming as I did a hormone assay.
We took Ben to Bristol. Ingrid had continued on her travels, the Middle East and Asia. Apart from her initiation of Ben, she had instructed Martha in the art of macramé, and shown Melanie how to make smörgåsbord with marinated herring and onion, and beef with remoulade sauce. While she was in the house Richard had identified with Ben, vicariously recapturing his lost youth. I could see what I had missed in not having children; the chance to retrace early steps, to recoup in some measure, opportunities missed. Mrs Bark had given her notice. It had to do with my interference with the routine, initiated by Irene, which she had been blindly following for so many years. I replaced her with a plump young unmarried mother, who brought her child with her to play with Cora and called me Jean, and who had never known Irene. Melanie arranged for her to look after Cora at home on the days when she didn’t come to us, and was going back to college – Women’s Studies.
In the hall of residence at Bristol, where he was to live for his first year at university, Ben became the boy again, uncertain, anxious. His nervousness infected Richard. I could see by the solicitude with which he helped Ben to stow his toothbrush, find a socket for his desk lamp, locate the kitchen. Ben came with us to the lift, which was crowded when it reached the floor. He stepped in first, to hold the doors. Richard and I held back. ‘There’s room for your parents,’ a friendly voice said. Ben did not bat an eyelid and the only sensation I had was one of pride.
The last of the Indian summer, which dappled the turning trees on the Heath, and filled the days with misty light delighted Richard. I had never cared for autumn with its air of finality, needing spring with its promise. We walked together on the patterned leaves, our Saturday morning step in harmony. I had entered marriage as an ingénue. No one had told me, not even Jennie, that to succeed demanded the talents of a skilled negotiator, the sensitivity of a neurosurgeon, and the endurance of a long-distance runner. I realised now, that in the early days at Maida Vale I had measured Richard against Victor, and found him wanting. I don’t know when I had thrown away the yardstick. There were still areas of disagreement. Moments when I wanted out. Short of an idyll there would always be. Richard’s face was turned towards me, open with content. He didn’t ask if I was happy. There was no need.
Jennie remarked upon the change in me. Our father had suffered a myocardial infarction and they had taken him by ambulance from St Joseph’s to the hospital in Hastings. I picked Jennie up at Paddington and we went down by car.
‘Marriage suits you,’ she said. ‘You’ve put on weight.’
‘I eat too much. Martha’s leftovers…’
‘I always told you Victor was a mistake.’
To pass the time, dispel the thoughts uppermost in our minds, we resurrected the past. A family gathering. A summer’s day.
‘We’re getting old,’ Jennie said.
I didn’t reply. I still looked at the world through the same eyes.
Not heeding the sea we had always loved, the gulls dipping over the winter shingle, we skirted the town, our conversation, as we neared the hospital, sticking in our throats.
The ward was full of old men oblivious to our father who lay on his counterpane, dying.
We stood, Jennie by the empty locker, and I by the curtain, but the eyes, once blue, were unseeing.
‘Pain,’ he said, a hand to his chest.
His feet were narrow in his slippers and I wondered why no one had put him into bed.
I tried to imbue the wasted frame with flesh, suffuse the withered brain with active cells. Jennie was doing the same. The Registrar, who looked no older than Ben, came with a nurse to examine him, while Jennie waited outside.
‘I’m afraid there’s not much more we can do,’ he said, ‘Mr Banks has had a massive thrombosis.’
My father opened his mouth to speak and I leaned forward.
‘Tell your mother I’ll be a few minutes late.’
He was addressing the young nurse.
Later, while he seemed to be sleeping, we waited in the visitors’ lounge, silent on the orange plastic chairs. Behind her counter, a motherly lady dispensed tea.
‘A bit better than yesterday.’
Neither of us replied.
She was undeterred.
‘We’ve had terrible gales round here.’
The Sister met us at the door of the ward. From her face we guessed what had happened while we were away.
‘In his sleep,’ she said gently, her head on one side, ‘peacefully.’
‘In his sleep, peacefully.’ Jennie put the announcement in the newspaper with the day’s date, but our father had gone from us long since, after the death of our mother. Looking at him, feather frail, his features composed, we both of us hoped, although neither of us believed, that they were at long last together.
Both Melanie and Martha, insisting, came with Richard to the funeral. The perfunctory ceremony in the crematorium chapel was over so quickly, that I was still sitting in the pew, convinced that there was more to come, when Jennie nudged me into leaving. It seemed utterly wrong that the life of a man could be arbitrarily terminated with a few mumbled words, by a clergyman w
ho had to crane his neck to read the name on the coffin half-way through the address.
Jennie stayed with me for a few days at Richard’s suggestion. People long since forgotten wrote to us. Talking, long into the night, we made the adjustments required of us.
I took my sister to the station and before she went back to Wales we clung together, wet-cheeked, on the platform at Paddington. Jean and Jennie. No longer small girls.
I could not describe, if you asked me to, the sweetness of hearing, as I opened the door at Maida Vale, Martha practising a Christmas Carol, Melanie, chastising Cora for some minor misdemeanour, and Richard, his voice solicitous, calling, ‘Darling, is that you?’
The days grew shorter, the winds keener, scooping up the shrivelled leaves as the earth hardened over the ashes of my father.
At half-term, while Richard was at a party for a retiring colleague, I took Martha to the Players Theatre. It reminded me of Gerald and our wartime evenings, rows of servicemen with their beer glasses, swaying to ‘My old man’s a dustman’, and ‘If you knew Nellie like I do’. It was the last time I was to treat Martha as a child. She was in one of her difficult moods, withdrawn and angry. The only time she brightened up was when she saw the chocolates on the programme-seller’s tray. I tried to make bright conversation, the remarks sounding hollow as I uttered them, but I could not get through to her.
It was not a good choice.
Martha sat munching, all the way through the performance, and when it was time for the choruses, sat clutching the empty box.
‘I like pickled onions,
I like piccalilli,
Pickled cabbage is all right,
With a bit of cold meat on Sunday night…’
I found myself joining in, alone, and resolutely.
‘“I like pickled onions,
A Second Wife Page 11