I like piccalilli…”’
Martha’s face was stony.
‘“…a little bit of cucum-
I cum, you cum,
A little bit of cucumber.”’
I had planned to take her to Fortnum’s Fountain restaurant on the way home. Martha said she had a stomach ache. I was not surprised.
She refused to let Richard examine her abdomen.
We had just got into bed when a shaky voice through the door said ‘Jean, can you come?’ Martha, shivering, was standing in the passage.
In her bedroom she shut the door conspiratorially.
‘Something’s happened.’
I stood stupidly, looking round the room for a catastrophe, before I realised what she was saying and how obtuse I’d been. The moods and the secrecy, the lies and the tantrums: normal responses to the changes which were occurring within the childish body. The prelude to growing up.
Melanie was out. I found what was needed in her bedroom, tip-toeing, so as not to wake Cora.
I sat on Martha’s bed. The tense drawn look she had had lately had gone. She held my hand.
‘You won’t tell Daddy?’
I had used the same words to my mother. Jennie had thought she was having a fatal haemorrhage. My grandmother – as though I had done something clever and unique – had given me half-a-crown.
For the first time since my childhood, I was looking forward to Christmas. With Victor, who spent it with Molly and the children, it had always been my least favourite time. Some years I had gone home, my anchoretic state accentuated by my mother at my father’s side, by Jennie with Trevor and her children. More often – while others, possessed, grabbed mistletoe and holly – I had kicked my heels, waiting for the holiday to be over.
It was to be a proper Christmas. In our house. My house. It had become my home and the memory of the flat was growing fainter. I had never understood what I had taken to be people’s neurotic attachment to bricks and mortar.
My mother’s to our suburban house, maintained with such devotion; Jennie’s to the Welsh cottage, renovated stone by stone. After Ben had left, Martha started school and Melanie her Women’s Studies course, we had the builders in. It was many years since the house had been redecorated. Irene had been too busy. Richard said it was time. A Mr Dodge, whose board I had seen locally, came round in a cream jacket and pointed shoes and a trendy black moustache to record my wishes. The actual work was done by himself and a youth with long hair beneath a baseball cap and a T-shirt purporting to belong to ‘HM Prison’, with whom Martha promptly fell in love.
Anyone could have told me how much I had missed in having neither husband nor family. Over the years with Victor they frequently did. No one had explained the extraordinary satisfaction of festooning one’s nest, although in my case it was too late for fledglings. With the aid of Mr Dodge and the bewitching Arthur, who wielded the paintbrush to the beat of his transistor with more enthusiasm than skill, I transformed the neutral backgrounds – undisturbing for her analysands – which Irene had created, with soft and happy colours reflecting my inner self. When our flat had needed decorating, Victor, painting everything white, had sent his ‘people’ in. Glad enough at the time to have the responsibility taken from my shoulders, I did not realise that I had been deprived. Mr Dodge gave me a paint selector, fat with a thousand colours, and when Bob asked me what I had isolated in a blood sample I had to stop myself replying Heather Beige or Dresden Green. I spent my lunch hours in the fabric showrooms and bored Richard with samples of cotton and velveteen between which I had to choose for curtains to be run up by our new daily help. We replaced the units in the kitchen and changed the tiles in the bathroom. I was like a child with a new toy. When the decorations were completed I invited Sophie for lunch and demonstrated the transformation like a young bride.
‘Good to see you so happy, Jean,’ she said over my leek and carrot soup.
‘Richard’s great.’
The expression was Martha’s. I saw Sophie smiling.
I sang my spouse’s praises. His gentleness and consideration.
‘It’s what one needs,’ Sophie said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Not an autocratic provider.’
I wasn’t sure if she referred to Victor or her latest lover.
I let it go.
I wanted to display my new husband, my new house, my new family. I planned Christmas dinner and, to ensure that they would come, invited everyone ahead of time. Jennie and Trevor, who were to stay overnight, with whichever of their children happened to be around; Muriel and Jeremy with their family; Sophie, with her latest acquisition – an international polo player – and Richard’s parents. His mother offered to make the puddings but I refused, determined to do everything myself. Discovering the joys of domesticity at a time when women, in the Western world at least, were hanging up their aprons and dusting the flour from their hands, I was swimming against the tide. Melanie found it amusing. She watched me rush home from work to cut precise circles of shortcrust for the mince pies, which I would consign to Irene’s freezer, as if I had gone back to spinning yarn from backyard sheep. She picked up the jar of mincemeat – I hadn’t gone as far, after the labour of the puddings, as to contemplate making my own – and offered to help.
Melanie had changed. At first I had thought it was Women’s Studies which had brought a glow to her skin, a softness to her demeanour, a brightness to her eyes. She had her tongue between her teeth, concentrating on filling the pies.
‘Are you in love?’ It came to me suddenly.
Melanie was wearing a peony scarf round her neck and blushed to its colour.
She ran a hand through her clipped hair.
‘Lesley says I should grow it,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
I told Richard, who said: ‘Thank God for that!’
He was beginning to despair of Melanie.
Martha and I were making up for lost time. While Richard worked in the evenings – he was co-authoring a book on personality disorders – she’d curl up beside me in the sitting-room and draw me out. She wanted to know why I had never married, what I had done with my lost youth. I told her about Victor, as if she were my daughter, and was amazed when I found myself recounting the tale as if it had happened to somebody else. I was able to say his name, Victor, without experiencing the constriction of the throat which would silence me, without becoming cast back into the gloom. Martha was fascinated. It sounded decadent, daring. It was not. There were good times and there were bad, and at the end of it I had nothing. She put a hand in my lap as if to contradict me. One night she brought down her photograph album: Irene with Richard, Irene with Richard and the children, Irene serious and pensive, Irene acting the fool. Where I saw two-dimensional likenesses, Martha could feel her mother’s arms, hear the sound of her voice. ‘This was Mummy playing tennis, Ben was ball-boy, you can just see his foot…’
She loved to hear about ‘before the war’ and my own childhood with its nostrums, iodine lockets and kaolin poultices and daily dosings, Jennie’s and mine, with ‘Cod Liver Oil and Malt’. It sounded antediluvian. Like Irene, Martha wanted to be a lay analyst. She would have stepped into her mother’s soul.
When Ben came home with all his gear and announced he was going skiing over Christmas I was disappointed. I wanted to have my family round me for the first time. ‘You’ll have enough without me,’ Ben said, by way of consolation when he saw my face. I was aware of a pang. As if I had been rejected by my own son. University, or perhaps it was Ingrid, had changed him. Apart from growing taller there was a restless quality to him, as if he no longer belonged in the house, as if he was anxious to be gone. He and Richard were frequently at loggerheads, usually about the car – Ben was learning to drive – they got on each other’s nerves. It was a nervy time. Apart from the terror alerts – an IRA bomb had ripped a hole in the perimeter wall of the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich, and Jennie had phoned in a panic from Wales to tell me to keep out of the West End – there was so much to do, so
many people to think of, so much to prepare.
‘You’d think there’d never been a Christmas,’ Bob said at the lab., as I sat making lists, candied peel and chestnuts, and cards and wrapping paper. There hadn’t been – not since my childhood.
It was years since I had been to Hamley’s; not since my nieces and nephews were young. I rode the escalators and walked, dazzled, among the climbing frames and Space Men, the farmyards and the Wendy Houses, although I only wanted something for Cora. From the chimps and the teddy bears, the owls and pandas, I chose a lion because he looked at me with eyes which were imploring and his mane was soft.
I bought a Walkman for Ben, against my better judgement.
A pair of hideously expensive leather boots she had coveted for Martha.
Pure silk camiknickers for Melanie to wear beneath her dungarees.
I enlisted Ben’s help for Richard’s present. I wanted it to be special. An expression of thanks for picking me up from the wreckage, for loving me and bringing me back to life. ‘Briefcase?’ Ben said, Richard’s was shabby. Far too prosaic. ‘Cuff-links?’ They reminded me of Victor who was never without. ‘Golf umbrella – fishing rod…’ I shook my head. ‘Mother used to…’ Ben caught my eye. ‘I was only trying…’ ‘It’s all right.’ I had grown less sensitive. ‘I try to remember her,’ Ben said, ‘but I can only think of her as ill.’ I searched for something to say to him, something consoling, then realised that he wanted to share Irene with me, not to be reassured.
In the end it was Sophie who solved the problem. A cashmere dressing-gown, warm and luxurious. I went to a dozen shops before I found the one, mid-blue and featherlight. The elegant salesman said it would last a lifetime and would Madam care to have the gentleman’s initials embroidered on the pocket.
By the day of the end of term concert at Martha’s school – Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat, in which she was a shepherd – my Christmas was so well advanced that I wasn’t bothered by the media announcements concerning final postal dates and the number of shopping days currently available. I had wrapped my presents. Perfume for Richard’s mother; a cardigan for his father; parcels in all shapes and sizes lavish with ribbon I had shaped with the scissors into drifting curls. I put my booty in a dustbin bag and, like Santa Claus, hid it in the attic. The tea-chest with its keepsakes of Victor, the ageing shoe box with Gerald’s letters and his pilot’s wings, seemed dwarfed among the old bits of carpet and stringless tennis rackets, discarded relics of Richard’s family; like Alice, they seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. I put my hand on Victor’s photograph but did not pick it up.
It was the first time that Richard had taken me to Martha’s school. He had gone by himself to the PTA meetings, to look at Martha’s books. We sat on hard chairs in the assembly hall, redolent with the unmistakable smell of small girls. Martha, in her stage make-up, heavy and amateur, came excitedly to greet us. ‘I’m not supposed to. Miss Chalmers will kill me. Have you got a programme? I wish Melanie could have come. Noh says she’s going to throw up. I’m third from the left in the back row. I won’t be able to see you because the lights will be in my eyes.’
When she’d gone, taking with her the aura of greasepaint – rouged circles on her cheeks and hideously red lips – the woman next to me turned and smiled. She thought I was Martha’s mother, that Martha was my child.
We had arrived too early, Martha had insisted. Richard fidgeted and looked at his watch. The time for starting came and went and I wondered if the hitch was Noh being sick. The headmistress apologised for the delay. The audience grew restive. The hall hot. Miss Chalmers struck the first note and the curtains opened.
Although Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat had filled the house for many weeks now, I was totally unprepared. For the verve and enthusiasm, the sound of youthful voices, the originality of the costumes, the self-possession of the cast. I lost myself to the evening. Was captivated by the exuberance and the charm. True, I joined in the laughter – when ‘Joseph’, a slim blonde with the voice of an angel, tripped over her dreamcoat to land in Pharoah’s arms, and Noh, wandering on ahead of time, darted back, as if she had been shot, into the wings – but when the curtains closed, leading to a hasty withdrawal of staffs and robes from their path, I felt a surge of pride, and a sense of amazement at the power of love and dedication and team spirit. Richard, watching as I applauded, smiled at me with amusement.
‘Wasn’t she magnificent?’ I said, meaning our shepherd.
Walking back to the car through the lamp-lit streets, a damp mist penetrating our winter coats, Martha still in her make-up, I wondered, in my lifetime with Victor, what else I had missed.
On the doorstep we collided with Ben, going out, with an armful of records.
‘Any calls?’ Richard asked.
‘Melanie answered the phone,’ Ben said. ‘She’s in the sitting-room with Lesley.’
Martha went straight to the fridge. She had been too excited and nervous to eat supper.
Outside the sitting-room Richard made tactful noises before we opened the door.
Melanie jumped up from the sofa. Her eyes were shining.
‘This is Lesley.’
A tousle-haired brunette gazed at us, through a cloud of smoke, beneath curled eyelashes. She wore a black leather bomber jacket and had bitten her finger nails.
I did not know what to say to Richard. How to comfort him. We went to bed in silence, while I tried to find words to counteract the look of disbelief in his eyes. Being a parent seemed to encompass a great deal more than PTA meetings and end-of-term concerts and, despite my having come to terms with Martha, I had not even cleared the first hurdle.
We should have guessed of course. It didn’t make the acceptance of Lesley any easier. Richard blamed himself. Melanie couldn’t understand, when she was so happy, why he was upset. It cast a shadow over the Christmas for which I had worked so hard.
December the 17th.
Six shopping days to Christmas.
It was important to remember the sequence of events.
Richard generally pottered in the garden on Saturday or did odd jobs round the house. When I asked him why he was wearing his tweed suit, his hospital tie, he muttered something about patients, that he was going out but would be back – he was taking Ben to the airport – in time for lunch.
He had brought my coffee upstairs and I lay in bed, surrounded by Irene’s recipe books open at the pages telling how to cook a turkey. The one I had ordered was enormous – a pound a person the butcher advised – and posed a considerable threat. One could cook it slowly in tinfoil, slowly without tinfoil, quickly and uncovered, quickly and covered. However many minutes to the pound were finally decided upon – I had borrowed Martha’s calculator – more must be added if the bird were stuffed at one end, and still more if the cavities at either pole were filled, which was however not advocated in the interests of moist flesh. Confused, I rang Jennie, who always put her bird in at seven in the morning – the Aga regulating itself – and hoped for the best; Richard’s mother, who said that the secret was to baste every fifteen minutes; and Sophie, who swore by celery and a Bramley apple in the crop.
In the night I’d dreamed of opening the oven on Christmas Day to find a sparrow, lying on its back, and carrying it to the table amidst ribald laughter. I told Richard my dream and he said I was taking the whole thing too much to heart, and why didn’t I let him cook the Christmas dinner as he’d done for the last two years and when Irene had been ill. He didn’t understand that this was to be my final test, the pinnacle of my initiation, and how much I wanted to succeed.
Cora was playing on the bedroom floor with her building blocks. It had become a Saturday morning ritual while Melanie slept. She waved goodbye to Richard, blowing him bubbly kisses. I told her that if she was a good girl I would take her to the park.
As we were leaving – getting her ready, boots and gloves, was an operation in itself – Ben, in his jeans and windcheater, came down the stairs.
He handed me a parcel.
‘Will you give this to Dad. It’s his Christmas present.’
‘Stay with Cora a minute.’
I ran up to the attic to add the parcel to my collection in the dustbin bag.
When I came down again, Cora had removed her gloves, and lost a boot playing games with Ben, and we started all over again.
When we got back from the park, Cora red-cheeked, with a running nose, Martha was at the kitchen table making belated Christmas cards with paper and gold paint. The radio was blaring. I turned it down.
‘What’s for lunch? I’m starving.’
‘Egg and chips…’
Martha wrinkled her nose.
‘It’s Ben’s favourite. I’ve got Cora to see to first.’
‘Wish I was going skiing. Cora!’ She screamed as the baby laid an inquisitive hand on the wet card.
I took Cora’s herring – rich in vitamins according to Melanie – from the fridge, and her avocado pear, and put her in the high-chair, out of harm’s way, while I prepared them. It wasn’t easy. Her dumpy legs were all over the place and I was still afraid I would hurt her. I gave her her drink and a wooden spoon and she beat time to the music.
I wasn’t sorry when it was time for her rest. I hadn’t got used to the energy of children. Their capacity to exhaust. I closed the curtains in her room with relief.
‘Night, night.’ I kissed her and pulled up the cot side.
‘Ni’, Ni’.’ Cora put her thumb in her mouth and held the corner of the blue blanket without which she couldn’t go to sleep.
Ben came into the kitchen, looking at his watch, while I was cooking the chips.
‘Nearly ready?’
‘Daddy’s not back yet. Lay the table, Martha.’ She still had her mess all over the place.
A Second Wife Page 12