‘See you tomorrow.’ He was like a man on a drug. It was not a question.
‘Look, you mustn’t come to the hospital. Sometimes Richard meets me.’
He took a card from his wallet, wrote a number on it with the gold pen I was to get to know so well, and handed it to me.
‘My private line. Ring me during the day.’
United Industries. Of course. I had seen his picture in the newspapers.
I stood holding the card.
I didn’t ring him.
When I came out of the hospital he was there. So was Richard. I got into the Ford Anglia and saw Victor watching me in his mirror.
There was nothing wrong with Richard. On the contrary. Everything was right. My life with him was pre-recorded on some internal video. I could put it on to ‘play’ and look at it. We would be married at St Stephen’s – Wagner going up the aisle and Mendelssohn coming down – where my mother would fuss, as she had with Jennie; the reception would be a carbon copy of Jennie’s – except that it would be Richard’s relatives not Trevor’s – and my father would be overcome with emotion. Our car, when we left, would unroll toilet-paper streamers, to the accompaniment of hoots of laughter, and there would be encouraging and suggestive comments scrawled in lipstick on the back window. We would honeymoon in Cornwall, we had already decided, and come back, two weeks later, to the flat in West Hampstead. I suppose eventually I might have a child, possibly two, no more than that, at which point we would move to somewhere with a garden. Richard and I would get on splendidly. We would never be rich, but neither would we ever be poor. Every Sunday he would make breakfast, and we would read the newspapers together in bed.
‘There’s a good film at the Curzon,’ Richard said, ‘Lust for Life. Kirk Douglas.’
I made an effort to collect my thoughts.
‘Unless you’re too tired?’ He put a hand on my thigh and smiled.
I shook my head. In the dark I might succeed in stopping the hurdy-gurdy inside it.
‘Everything all right?’ He stopped at the lights. ‘You seem a bit flat.’
‘No, fine. Everything’s fine.’
‘I’m not working on Saturday if you want to go and look for curtains.’
We would go to Heal’s and I would have to decide between patterns, with acorns or modernistic shapes, or plain. I was not terribly interested. You got used to anything after a while. But the choice had to be made and we would spend Saturday morning, together with all the other starry-eyed couples, making it.
At the hospital there were whispers and muffled giggles in the department. I pretended not to notice. They were planning a party for me and having a whip round for a wedding-present.
He was there every day; Victor. If Richard came to collect me he would simply wait until we had gone then drive away.
At five o’clock each day I was aware of an increase in my pulse rate. Sometimes a technician in the laboratory would ask me a question and there would be no answer.
‘It must be love,’ I once heard them say.
They were right. Only it was not for Richard. I did love him but it was a contained love; a kind of comfortable glow. It was sparklers to rockets to what I felt for Victor. No one has ever described it, clinically I mean, for it is of course a sickness, characterized by real pain, suffocation, choking, tightness in the chest, difficulties in breathing, arrhythmia, hot flushes, cold sweats, starts, stammers, and moments of idiocy, not to mention forgetfulness, inertia and heightened perceptions as well as the lusts and yearnings peculiar to the state. Victor was becoming an obsession and was never out of my mind. I could not think, scarcely ate, could not sleep and was unable to concentrate, on anything, for any length of time. Richard put it down to nerves and said I’d be all right after the wedding.
Swearing Sophie to secrecy I took Victor, as often as I could, back to the flat.
By the time he had to leave to get back to Molly in Virginia Water we were afraid to touch and could not look each other in the eye. We were Héloïse and Abélard; the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream; pledged to each other and torn apart.
One Wednesday night when Molly’s neighbours came, as usual, to play bridge with her, we went to the opera. I told Richard someone from the hospital had a spare ticket.
Next day, I noticed the look on his face, as if he wondered how the light in my eyes could possibly have been ignited by Lohengrin.
The wedding was getting nearer and the invitations out and presents and acceptances starting to roll in. I took Richard home at weekends, to cope with everything, and realized that I would have to stop seeing Victor. Apart from anything else there was not enough time. Richard and I needed every evening to prepare our flat.
It could not go on.
I waited until Thursday when Richard presided over his weekly Group. Victor was waiting for me outside the hospital.
We went back to the flat.
I thought I had better get it over with.
I made coffee for us both.
‘There’s something I have to say.’ I put the mugs down on the table.
‘Me too.’
We looked at each other and I sat down on the far end of the sofa.
‘You first,’ Victor said.
‘No you.’
‘I want you to come away. For the weekend.’ I looked at my ring, Richard’s ring, sapphire and diamond.
‘I’m engaged to be married.’
It was a stupid and irrelevant remark.
‘The weekend after next. Molly’s parents are coming to stay while their cottage is painted.’
I said nothing.
‘Your turn,’ Victor said.
I looked at him.
‘What were you going to tell me?’
I knew that I would go away with him before I stepped into marriage and closed the door behind me.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
Richard would have insisted. Victor let it rest.
I knew that Richard must never find out.
‘There’s something else I have to tell you.’
The coffee was growing cold.
I waited.
‘I’m in love with you.’
Lying to Richard, about the weekend, I felt the contempt for myself that I deserved. He was so trusting. I told him I was going to visit an old school-friend in Durham.
‘I’d come with you,’ he said. ‘But I’ve too much on,’ – I had already looked in his diary – ‘so many loose ends to tie up before the wedding!’
It was as if the wedding were happening to somebody else; oven dishes and cake slices, five decanters and three identical trays. I stood for an hour fitting my dress, tracked down satin shoes, which I thought a terrible waste, and wrote dull thank-you notes to people I didn’t know. I felt detached from the drama – Rupert, Richard’s younger brother who was going to be best man, was taken to hospital with renal colic; we had left my father’s second cousin – ‘Dublin Annie’ – off the guest list; there was no net to be had the right shade of cream for my veil.
I tried to make it mean something. Richard said it was a defence, the feeling of detachment; I knew that it was Victor.
I had never been to the Lake District. Never been anywhere much; Brittany with Sophie, Yugoslavia – which in those days was adventurous. Mostly I spent my holidays in Aldeburgh, because I like solitude and the sound of the sea.
I don’t know what I had expected.
Like a fair sister of the sky
Unruffled doth the blue lake tie,
The mountains looking on.
I had crossed swords with Wordsworth for my School Certificate, by rote, as some kind of doggerel that must be committed to memory in order to satisfy the examiners. Afterwards, busy with my sciences, there had been no time even for that. Suddenly the Golden Treasury became alive. I was unprepared for such impact, such beauty, such skies – we were lucky with the weather – such coves and fells, such amphitheatres of mountains, such ever-changing kaleidoscopes of colo
ur, such peace and tranquillity, such ‘visionary scenes’. I can’t remember the number of times we have been back. It is one of our ‘places’. Derwentwater and Saddleback, Brother’s Water and Gowbarrow Park, Crummock in midsummer, and Buttermere. No matter how many times we returned though, I would always remember that first time. The beginning. The sun dipping towards the mountain ridges, flooding the valley with light; the golden green of the bracken, the purple bloom of the heather and as well as the sights, the sounds; oars on the water, the lowing of cows and the bleating of sheep, like some phantom orchestra, across the lake.
We stopped the car and got out to watch the sun set. A sheep, with a black face and blue markings on its back, scurried up and down the road, frantically trying to find a way into the field from which it had escaped from the rest of the flock. Victor picked it up in his arms, heavy and dirty, tucking its legs beneath it, and lifted it over the fence. He did it as if he cared, as if it were a child, efficiently, as he did everything. When it scampered away there was a look of relief on his face. He liked to set things to rights.
Our room was booked in the name of Palmer, the ‘Consultant’ at Shotmere. Already our lives were getting interwoven with small deceits. We had a bedroom overlooking the lake, a bedspread of blue and white chintz and two glasses of sherry to welcome us. Now, when we go back, no not now, Victor is dead, but afterwards, there was Travel-Scrabble and backgammon and a mini-bar and a hairdryer and a trouser-press as well as the sherry. We had no need for any of these things.
We had only time to change quickly for dinner, avoiding any contact as we did so.
I don’t remember what we ate in the candlelit dining-room, except that it had to do with soups and mousses, terrines and pâtés in what were still, as far as English cooking was concerned, the post-war years.
For dessert we had strawberry mille-feuille. I know that because I never ate it again without remembering. Not the pastry which melted in the mouth, not the feathered icing which they had managed to make neither sweet nor sticky, but Victor saying:
‘I want you know, Jean, that I will never leave Molly.’
Leave Molly. Leave Molly. It reverberated in my head as I managed to find room for the layers which dissolved like magic, the ripe fruit that left a taste of summer in my mouth.
We gave up on the cheese and after the coffee went outside for a breath of air and a look at the night lake with its black, guardian mountains. It was quite still. As if the world was over. Victor took my arm and we went inside.
In this day and age, when even Bonnie, my sister’s sixteen year old daughter, is on the pill, it must seem strange, probably unbelievable, but until that night with Victor I had never gone to bed with a man. The age was one of romance rather than permissiveness and Richard and I had been content to go along with the dating and mating game played according to the old rules. Some of the amour has, I think, gone out of sex. We no longer woo, pursue, seduce. One is no longer a prize, a cherished, adored prize, by virtue alone of one’s existence. I wonder if women, by putting too low a price on their virginity, have sacrificed some of the fun and if the pendulum will ever swing back.
What to say about that night? That we slept only in fits. Were awake, looking at each other as the cocks began to crow. Lay in each other’s arms, silent with happiness, as the first light frosted the water. We both knew that whatever there was between us was not going to go away.
Victor wanted to get up. I had not yet encountered his inability to be simultaneously still and awake for any length of time, except in the presence of music, but I held him close. He kissed me at length as if to say ‘thank you’ for the night and reached for his watch.
‘What time is it?’ I didn’t really want to know, frightened that it would precipitate a return to reality.
‘Eight o’clock.’
He threw back the covers.
‘I have to make a phone call.’
I knew that he was going to phone Molly and wondered whether I would grow to hate her. I hated her already. For her dependence upon Victor, for taking and not giving, for the hoops of steel with which she had bound him to her side.
We took a packed lunch and walked along the paths, following the contours of the lake, climbing and needing to watch our feet. Serious walkers in heavy boots and two pairs of socks greeted us as they passed. The lake shimmered and thrummed with the drone of motor boats. We climbed to the top of a fell where two grannies sat on a tree trunk getting their breath. I thought they would be congratulating themselves on the weather, admiring the view, but one said: ‘It’s very tasty but Cyril doesn’t like that sort of thing.’ And the other replied: ‘I bought a jar of sliced beetroot and it went all brown. I wonder should I ’ave kept it in the fridge.’
We scrambled down, laughing and clinging to trees, and ate our picnic on the shore, the lake lapping at our feet. We sat, touching but not talking, inside the cocoon of happiness we had created together.
In the afternoon we took the steamer to Glenridding. A man told us he had been coming to the District for twenty years and never known such weather. It was like being abroad. We got off at Pooley Bridge where Victor asked for the Financial Times. They looked at him in amazement. I bought some fudge for Sophie.
The air had made us hungry again and we had a cream tea in a sloping garden down by the lake where a dog was tied to a tree. When we got back to the hotel the sunlight was still on the water and only a couple of wispy clouds had ventured into the sky.
We forgot the time and like naughty children crept down, late, for dinner.
Later, in the lounge, an elderly American in a bow-tie, flanked by his peroxided lady done out in scarlet crêpe, leaned towards us over his brandy.
‘Forty-five years ago today,’ he confided with pride, ‘Janie and I were married. It’s our anniversary and we’re celebrating. We’ve got a grandson at Yale.’
I realized suddenly that if I threw in my lot with Victor there would never be a family to boast of, no grandson, no son, no child at university.
The remainder of the weekend passed, as dreams do. I was not looking forward to the waking up. We climbed to Aira Force and watched the water dropping over the rocks and pastures into the ravine. Walking back through the woodlands I named, for Victor, the oaks and elms, the ashes, beeches and sycamores. I picked up some pine-cones and put them into the pocket of my jacket.
In our bedroom there was a watercolour, soft blues and pinks, of the lake. On the back of it was the name of the artist, May Higgins, and her address. Before we left we called on her. She was neat and middle-aged and opened the door to us in a flowered smock. You could not see her sitting-room for paintings of the lake. We admired trees in bud against an April sun, snowy peaks framing the frosty water.
‘We’d like to remember the lake as it looks now,’ I said. She took a painting from a large portfolio.
‘I don’t do a lot in the summer. Too many people. They talk to you. I like to be alone when I paint. This is the one.’
It was our lake. Mine and Victor’s. The stones where we had sat with our picnic. The trees and the crags washed in sunlight.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She turned to Victor. ‘What does your husband think?’
She wrapped the painting, fussily, in tissue paper and gave us a label with her name to stick on the back when we had it framed. Mr Higgins, neat and tidy in a tan cardigan, smoking a pipe, saw us out as we backed the car into the main road.
The painting of the lake, executed with more love than talent, hangs above my bed; our bed. It is peaceful and looking at it calms my nerves when I am agitated, reminds me of the first of the good times with which my life had been punctuated.
When we got back to London I went straight to Richard’s, not wanting to put it off.
He put his arms around me.
‘I’ve missed you. How was Durham?’
I pulled away.
‘Richard I can’t marry you.’
He looked puzzled, like a ma
n who has been hit and doesn’t understand why.
I told him about the weekend, about Victor, about how I had been deceiving him. I didn’t compound the injury by telling him that I still loved him but that I loved Victor more.
I hope never to see anyone so hurt, so agonized, again.
He sat in the leather armchair, where he had been reading his yellow journal, unmoving. I hoped he wasn’t going to cry.
I took off his ring, which at the hotel I had worn with the sapphire in my palm while deceiving him with Victor, and put it on the desk, on the paper he was in the midst of writing.
He was silent for a long time.
‘There’s no need to destroy our life together because of a bêtise,’ he said with his second wind.
If he hadn’t used that word I might have tried to make him understand; about how it was between Victor and me. Because of it I didn’t take it out, lay it before him, scared I suppose that he might shatter it.
He refused to accept my decision, telling me that in a few days I would feel differently and that he would do nothing to stop the rolling of the wedding wheels. He talked to me as if I were one of his patients, quietly, gently, certain that reason would prevail. He covered the hurt with the balm of words, thinking to dissuade me.
I longed to comfort him but had forfeited my right.
We spoke of this and that, like strangers.
Before I left I said: ‘Tell me about agoraphobia.’
He explained that it was a disorder which was not uncommon and frequently affected young women between twenty and thirty-five years of age, who often became progressively disabled. It was characterized by dependency, claustrophobic fears, personality disturbances and sexual anxieties.
‘Is it curable?’
‘It depends. The more widespread the symptoms the more difficult it is to treat. Why do you want to know? Who has it?’
‘Victor’s wife.’
‘You didn’t tell me he was married.’
Until the last moment he kept the offer open for what he was convinced was my happiness. He pleaded and sulked, grew hot with anger and cold with pain. He tried reason, which was rational, and love which was not. When he saw that it was no use he accused me of ruining his life.
A Loving Mistress Page 3
