Objects of Desire

by Roberta Latow

  It was so obvious that it prompted Page to say to Sally, ‘What could she have done to make these people dislike her so? How did she get it so wrong? How did she alienate herself from them so completely?’ Page and Sally were her friends and they would never think of discussing it with Anoushka but they could between themselves. As usual it was the down-to-earth Lancashire lass who got it right.

  ‘Look at Robert, he’s sensationally attractive. Knowing her story as we do, and I’m sure no one else but Robert does, put two and two together. She loved him, had possession of him, had everything she wanted, and was in the nicest possible way cocking a snook at them. “Get stuffed, I’ve got it all and you haven’t,” was what she was saying, and they thought she did. She flaunted, they were jealous. She was always the intruder. Poor sod!’

  Page and Sally loved Anoushka more for her having had such bad luck.

  Robert and Rosamond put on a great party for the boys and the house seemed full of fun. Anoushka kept up for as long as she could but suddenly knew she had done it all. She kissed her boys and went to her room, promising to be down for breakfast with them before she left. The chorus of thanks from them and their friends had made it all worthwhile. In the room, alone at last, all Anoushka could think about was sleep.

  A knock at her door and Rosamond entered the room. She asked, ‘Have you everything you need?’

  ‘Yes, I have, thank you.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to you, Anoushka. I think what you did coming here was very brave and right, and I was wrong not to want you here in the house.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve come to tell me? You haven’t come to apologise? Not that you can. How does one apologise for ruining someone else’s life? Stealing their husband and their children, their home, not to mention their dignity. Next you’ll be telling me you haven’t been disloyal to me, a liar, a cheat?’

  ‘No, I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that I tried many times to go away. To leave Robert for you and the boys’ sake.’

  ‘Not hard enough. Just go, please, Rosamond, leave me in peace.’

  Rosamond left the room without another word. She walked down the stairs and her heart lifted. This was her house now and it was teeming with people who were happy and laughing and having a good time. People were dancing to the steel band and singing, they were spilling out on to the lawn. Waiters were still serving all the boys’ favourite food, washed down with beer and wine for the adults, root beer or milk shakes thick with ice cream for the girls and boys, all forty of them.

  There was a crack and a rumble, then a bang as a million fireflies burst on to the night sky. Not fireflies but fireworks. A whistling sound from the lawn and a rocket burst in a shower of pink stars that rained down over the lawn. Another burst of noise, and another, and another. Several explosions at the same time and the night sky lit up like high noon. People rushed from the house on to the lawn, wanting the best view of the display, the culmination of the boys’ birthday party.

  Both Sally and Page saw Rosamond walking down the stairs and into the drawing room. ‘Is Anoushka all right?’ Page asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Do you think I should go up?’ asked Sally.

  ‘No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Sorry, I think I might have given you the wrong impression. What I wanted to say was, I think she’s all right but I’m sure she can’t help but be somewhat upset. She’s still very angry with me.’

  ‘Well, Rosamond, you really can’t blame her, can you?’

  ‘Yes, Sally, actually I can. No one ever wants to listen to the other woman, her side of the story, least of all the ex-wife.’

  Rosamond began to walk away but Sally, with a gentle hand on her arm, stopped her. ‘I’m sorry if that sounded rude, Rosamond, you have been as gracious to us all as anyone could be, and so hospitable. But can you blame us? She is our friend.’

  ‘Look, if she’s your friend, really your friend … Oh, never mind.’ And once more Rosamond tried to walk away from the girls.

  ‘No, please, what were you going to say?’ asked Sally.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky she is to have made friends with women like you. Anoushka is wonderful but there are two sides to this story, and as I said, no one ever listens to the bitch who steals another woman’s man. If you were really her friends you would listen to my side of the story, and then maybe you could help her to leave her bitterness behind her and really get on with a new and better life for herself. For as long as I am her enemy, and she will not see our side of it, she will carry the wound that Robert and I have inflicted upon her. You can’t imagine that either of us wants that for her, even though we no longer want her in our lives.’

  ‘Are you speaking here as the other woman or as a psychiatrist?’ asked Page.

  ‘Probably a little bit of both.’

  ‘She still loves Robert, doesn’t she?’ asked Sally.

  ‘I don’t know. I think she probably hates him more now than loves him, which in a way is a good sign but not great. Great would be if she just let us go, neither loved nor hated any more.’

  ‘Now that is the psychiatrist speaking,’ said Page.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. But she should hate him. He was foul to her. He is a remarkable and wonderful man, charismatic and vital in many ways. Women fall in love with him all the time. Nurses are devoted to him, they see him as god-like and a man they would like to know and care for; his colleagues look to him for direction. Robert has many facets to him, but he can be a bastard when crossed. She was constantly crossing him, and he was a bastard to her.’

  ‘And he isn’t to you?’

  ‘No, he has never been that to me. You see, we’ve been in love for a very long time. The Anoushka you know has come a long way since Robert left her. She is quite a different person. Some women are not at their best when they’re in love, especially if that love is obsessive and possessive.’

  ‘Do you know her background?’ asked Page.

  ‘No. As well as I knew Anoushka, she was always very secretive, playing her cards close to her chest. I may have been interested once, I am no longer. She’s out of my life, on any intimate level anyway. Our paths will always cross because of the boys but that’s just about it. It’s counterproductive for me to know anything about where she came from at this stage in our relationship. However, I don’t think it would have been counterproductive for her to have heard my side of Robert’s and my love story. I just tried. She doesn’t want to know. I might be wrong, she might be right. What does it matter? We’ve all started afresh, only she needs more help than we do. She’s been wronged, but isn’t blameless either in this story.’

  All during their conversation the din made by the fireworks never stopped. It seemed to grow louder and louder. Rosamond could just about hear Sally when she said, ‘I’d like to listen to your side of the story, not so you can try and justify your behaviour but for Anoushka’s sake. You know she has found someone? He’s in love with her and she’s putting him off, asking him to wait while she gets herself wholly together. I have a vested interest in that relationship. Yes, I think I would like to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘Anoushka says she has no room in her life for a second bad marriage,’ added Page.

  ‘You see, she knew it was a bad marriage but she was happy in it and so it didn’t matter to her. I’m glad to hear she doesn’t want another one. Come into the study away from this noise. We can see the fireworks from there and I really would like to tell you a few things. I’ll be brief and I promise that to listen to what I have to say will not be a disloyal act on your part if that’s what’s worrying you.’

  ‘It does,’ said Sally.

  ‘How clever of you to understand this conversation does bother us,’ added Page.

  ‘Don’t let it. Anoushka will never know. And I would never have said anything except that the bond you three women have forged is so obvious it gave me the courage to speak up.’

  In
the study Rosamond closed the doors. She had the privacy she needed. ‘It’s all quite sad in a way. Sad for everyone concerned. I was married to a man called Dr Harley Rogers. I was twenty years old when I met him, a scholarship student at Harvard Medical School. I was dirt poor, and I do mean dirt poor. I was one of those born into genteel poverty, all the trappings of a good family and no money. I was in one of the wealthiest schools in the country, and always starving and in hand-me-downs donated by my sorority sisters. But I had a burning desire to become a doctor, and I was of course young. The way we met was quite simple and terribly romantic.

  ‘The renowned Harley Rogers was at Harvard giving some lectures. I hadn’t enough money to eat regular meals and fainted in the street. He took me home and fed me. Recently widowed, he was much sought after by women – terrifically handsome, a young sixty year old, and very fit. We fell in love. He bedded me, and I knew for the first time what it was to be in a state of sexual bliss. We married on condition that I carried on with my education and internship, then started a practice. He was the founder and bright star of the Harley Rogers Clinic here in Lakeside. It was heavily endowed with old money, his as well.

  ‘I never knew or cared about his money. I fell in love with the man. He was remarkably attractive and kind, a medical genius who was not a bore but an exciting and vital human being. There was a scandal at first: the age difference, me being off at school most of the time, not being what was expected of a wife of such a famous man. But no one challenged Harley. People soon saw we were a real love story and they accepted me and learned to respect me for making him happy and having a successful career of my own.

  ‘Then Robert came into my life when he became my husband’s protégé. We fell in love. It was platonic love. We never touched each other, that would have been unthinkable. We loved Harley too much. The sexual attraction we had for each other was simply set aside. We never dreamed of being anything to each other but platonic lovers with a deep and abiding affection for each other. Our love was set apart from my love for my husband. It was years before we declared ourselves to each other.

  ‘Robert and I always agreed that though I was first in his life, he could be nothing but second in mine. We remained deeply in love on those terms for all the years Harley was alive and then he died. It was more of a loss to me than I imagined it would be because Harley and I had always discussed what would happen to me in the event of his death. Our age difference made it a near certainty that he would die before I would. For years he prepared me for that and to take over some of his work at the clinic. All that talk and preparation vanished in the wake of real loss. I wasn’t prepared for it, no matter how much I thought I would be.

  ‘Suddenly I was an extremely wealthy woman, one with responsibilities, keeping his work at the clinic on the right track. And I had lost the man I loved and revered. I needed time to grieve. Robert respected that and gave me the space I needed to heal, so that I would be ready to take on a second love, as full and rich as the first.

  ‘During that time it was not unusual for him to go abroad to operate or to spend time at heart clinics teaching other surgeons his technique. So I thought nothing of it when he went to Egypt and then arranged to take a month’s holiday in France which he had agreed to break into to give several lectures in Paris. We agreed that was to be our last separation and on his return we would set the date. It never happened.

  ‘He met Anoushka in Egypt. It was quite simple – he became sexually besotted with her. A kind of sexual madness took him over. A decadent, exotic, erotic life he had never known or experienced before opened up for him and swallowed him whole. Our love went momentarily out the window. When he returned to Lakeside with Anoushka, he woke up from the dream of lust as a way of life, and knew immediately that his relationship with her was over.

  ‘He came to me and told me what had happened. That he had been caught in a trap that was not easily escaped. He told me that Anoushka had a pathetic story, one too depraved to talk about, and that she must be let down easily. Nothing more than that about her. He had made the dreadful mistake that men sometimes, to their own detriment, make. He mixed up erotic sexual overdrive with love. It didn’t matter, this hiccup in our love story. A mistake is not necessarily the death knell for a love such as ours. He was going to send her away. In the end he was unable to, she became pregnant. The rest is history.’

  ‘So far I still see Anoushka as an innocent victim, Rosamond.’

  ‘She wasn’t to us, Page. We were two people who understood what had happened to us. But that didn’t make it easier for us. I didn’t see Robert for a long time. I couldn’t bear to. To see him married to another woman and trapped in a marriage that he despised and didn’t want, the marriage we had wanted so desperately for ourselves, was too painful. I took a year off, and came to terms with his marriage to someone else. The children were born. And the moment I saw them I loved them as if they were my very own. They were the children we would never have. He returned to me, and I could not stay away from him. We resumed our platonic love again. At least, that was the way it was at the beginning, and I embraced Anoushka and her family as my friends.

  ‘I never had any malice towards her but from the beginning you could see that she could not handle marriage with Robert, raising the children, running a home the way he wanted to live in it. She was too obsessed with Robert and her relationship with him. That was her life, her world. She would do anything to keep him happy and her marriage intact.

  ‘Early on, it was Anoushka who kept dragging me into her life. She was wily, saw how happy Robert was when I was with them. It’s true, I was happy to be with him, to add something to his home life which seemed to be a series of concessions and more concessions to make the marriage work. I was in love, he was in love, we did what we could for each other and to ease the pain of not being together.

  ‘Anoushka used me to keep her husband. She will never admit that to herself, it will always be me who has to be to blame. Me who will have to carry the tag: deceiver, cheat, thief. And I was all of those things and not at all proud of it. But she helped to make me what I became.

  ‘Yes, Robert was wrong. He should never have married her, but he wanted his children. Yes, he should have gone to her and told her the truth about us. I begged him to, believing it cruel of him not to. Those first years, I believe he did try to make it work, and when it didn’t he tried to ignore to the best of his ability his unhappiness. We were used to loving each other, we were bound together in love, and so I became his mistress. It was the best we could do, because the children were too young to break up the family life they had. He could not imagine Anoushka bringing them up alone.

  ‘If anyone ever tells you it’s easy to be a mistress, don’t believe them. She flaunted her love for Robert in front of me and everyone else, and Robert and I had to live with that. Over the years he gave her any number of reasons to open her eyes and see how unhappy he was with her. She saw nothing. In the end, he saw his life ebbing away and himself an unfulfilled man with too many regrets and bitterness beginning to seep into his soul. He couldn’t bear it, not one more day. End of story.’

  ‘I think you are trying to justify your behaviour, you know,’ said Sally.

  ‘You see, I told you, no one wants to hear the other woman’s story.’

  Chapter 16

  The sky was a dead grey colour and rain was teeming down. Drops were hitting the tarmac with the force of lead shot charged from a gun. They sent up sprays of water round the quartet’s ankles. Huddled together, holding large black silk umbrellas over their heads, they seemed oblivious to the bad weather. Having arrived in Paris from New York aboard Concorde, they were still riding high on their successful weekend.

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you all,’ said Anoushka.

  ‘You can’t thank people who have shared a good time with you,’ said Jahangir.

  ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Anoushka and Page mimicked Sally in unison and then burst into laugher.

/>   ‘You got me,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I hate goodbyes,’ said Page.

  ‘We’re all getting soaked standing out here,’ said Anoushka.

  They all seemed reluctant to break up the party. Jahangir was on his way from France to Pakistan where he was going to play in a polo match between Pakistan and India, a match of tradition and great fame that was played every year on the most remote field in the world in a spectacular setting, the mountainous region of Pakistan. Men had been playing polo there since Jahangir’s great-great-grandfather’s time. It was an event that brought people from the far corners of Pakistan and India.

  Sally and Anoushka were bound for Cap d’Antibes and the Black Orchid. Page was en route back to Hydra. Each was changing direction, shifting gear, leaving the others behind, none of them quite wanting to do so. But they did want to get on with their lives. Somehow, standing there in the rain, not one of them could quite say: The party’s over. So they just kept making inane conversation to delay the women from mounting the stairs into the small Lear jet that would take them from Paris to the South of France.

  ‘All a man’s life he waits for the bell to toll,’ Jahangir suddenly declared. ‘To hear that ring of real happiness that makes him come that little bit more alive to himself and the world. It’s a sound like no other, neither loud nor soft. It doesn’t even have to be particularly sweet, only clear. When a man hears that there is no looking back, there’s no looking forward, merely an acute awareness, bliss, an extraordinary sense of contentment. I hope you too have heard it, Sally.’