I was on the first stair when she said: ‘Jean.’
I was anxious to read my letter.
‘Jean…’
Her voice stopped me.
‘This came.’
She handed me the telegram and put an arm round my shoulders. I did not take it in. In my hand I had Gerald’s letter, unequivocal, with his number on it.
‘They’ve made a mistake.’ I showed her the blue envelope with my name in Gerald’s writing.
‘I don’t think so. I’m so sorry, darling. I’ll bring your supper to your room.’
She was treating me like an invalid. Not realising that I was in a state of shock, I wondered why.
I sat on the bed with its candlewick cover, identical to Jennie’s. She was at the desk doing her homework.
I had seen people, we all had, lose loved ones. The only son of the butcher in the country had fallen at Arnhem; he had had the blinds down for a week. The brother of our head-girl had refused to leave his bed for the air-raid shelter, and there had been a direct hit on the house.
‘“…reported missing and believed to have lost his life.”’
I could see the bomber, plummeting like a fireball. The parachute drifting into foreign fields.
I read his letter. How much he loved me. That he had never been in love before. His pals were teasing him as he wrote. They were very ‘busy’. He was due for leave in a week.
‘It doesn’t say he’s dead.’
I refused to believe it, for I had not said goodbye to him, taken part in his dying. In the street I ran up to strange officers in Air Force blue, looking into their faces. Coming home from school, I opened the front door in an agony of expectation, convinced that in the hall there would be caps and scarves, that Gerald would be there. I waylaid the postman for news that he had been taken prisoner, to be repatriated after the war.
The residents in the guest house gave me pitying glances. Treated me gently.
My hopes faded.
The war ended.
On VE day there was dancing in the streets.
I did not join in.
Dr Hartley Taylor was listening sympathetically.
‘I don’t seem to be very lucky.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
I knew what he meant. On balance my life had not been sad.
My father put our house in order and we went back to our lives which the mushroom clouds that summer over Nagasaki and Hiroshima did little to disturb.
For months I dreamed of burning planes, my screams waking Jennie. The demands of school and my involvement with exams helped me survive my private nightmare. I put Gerald’s letters into a shoe box – together with the telegram and a button from his uniform – and never removed his birthday present to me, tiny pilot’s wings in gold, from my chest. It was all that was left, other than the Victorian half-crown he had given me for luck, which was removed from my desk at exam time with the recommendation that my faith was better invested in the Lord.
‘Keep on with the same dose. I’ll see you again in a fortnight.’
The routine was becoming familiar. I needed someone to tell me what to do. To programme me.
I met Richard again, on the steps, coming out of the building.
‘I’m seeing Dr Hartley Taylor,’ I said, although he had not asked.
‘Oh, Chris.’
‘Victor’s dead.’
I was clutching at straws. For pity. It wasn’t fair on Richard, whose life I had once ruined.
Richard glanced at his watch. I presumed he had patients waiting.
‘Look, let’s have some coffee.’
I had been going to Molly, but it didn’t matter. I’d said I might.
I told Richard about Victor’s sudden death, which I hadn’t heard about till later, while the coffee in its speckled cups grew cold. I was like the Ancient Mariner, boring anyone who would listen. Richard had always been good at it – as a psychotherapist it was his job – which was more than I can say for Victor, who was impatient and never wanted to know.
‘I can’t cope…’
‘Is that why you’re seeing Chris?’
I nodded, noticing that I had reduced a paper handkerchief to shreds.
Richard had not changed. His face had lost its firm outline and he had put on weight, but the humour, the affability I had once loved him for, was still written into the curve of his mouth, into his eyes.
‘How’s Melanie?’
Richard’s daughter had been two when I had last seen her, what seemed a lifetime ago, feeding the ducks in the park. I pictured her grown up now, at school.
‘She has a child of her own.’
Richard a grandfather.
‘I have two others. Ben and Martha.’
I had a Makonde figure and a soapstone knife; a Rembrandt drawing and Danish candle-holders, like silver commas. I had a cutting from The Times announcing Victor’s death. And my recollections. Added up they came to nothing, which was what I had inside me.
Martha was eleven and Ben seventeen. He was mad on technology and waiting until he was old enough for flying lessons.
‘It’s like watching myself,’ Richard said.
Martha took after Irene and was searching desperately for her identity. From the furrow on Richard’s brow when he spoke of her I could see that there were problems.
I imagined that they were mine, Melanie and Ben and Martha, and that I had not jilted Richard for Victor. If I could live my life again I knew that I would do the same thing. I had loved Richard once, but not as I had loved Victor. Grandly. Passionately.
‘Your parents…?’ Richard said.
‘My mother died. Father is in a home in Hastings.’
I had not summoned up the energy, since Victor’s death, to visit him, leaving it to Jennie.
‘He doesn’t know us.’
I could see that Richard was anxious to get back to work.
He walked me to my car.
‘Thanks for the coffee,’ I said through the open window. ‘I’m sorry if I let it all hang out. On you. It’s how I am these days.’
‘Any time.’
I started the engine.
‘Love to Irene.’
Richard looked at me. He wore glasses now. Behind them his eyes darkened.
When I noticed, in the dappled morning light, how heavy my curtains had become with winter grime, I realised that the drug was beginning to work. In my nightdress, while the enthusiasm lasted, I carried the steps from the kitchen and took the nets down, the London dust filling my nostrils. I had never liked them, preferring to look out through the bare windows into the square, but Victor had insisted, in case he would be seen, although I teased him that it would be only by the birds. I put them in the bath to soak, enjoying the dirt that immediately darkened the water, as if it was my own blackness being expurgated. By the time I came back from the lab. the mood had passed. I looked at the amorphous mass and poked it with a desultory finger. The curtains stayed where they were for three days while I washed myself at the basin.
I hadn’t remarked before how everyone seemed to be part of a couple. If they weren’t actually married they seemed to be involved in long-term relationships, or frenetically severing them and embarking upon others. It was like the mention of rope in the house of a man who’d been hanged.
‘Margaret and I…’ Bob said.
It was their wedding anniversary and they were spending the weekend in the Wye Valley.
I was both angry and envious. How dare he climb the Brecon hills with Margaret, share celebratory meals, be happy in bed.
One of our technicians was getting married. Saving up for the mortgage on her first home.
I pumped my patients on their private lives, which had nothing to do with their pathology, torturing myself: ‘Where do you live?’ ‘With whom?’
I had never known, for the whole of my life, what it meant to be alone. I tried to rejoice, that I wanted for nothing, was not old and incapacitated within the four walls of some
silent room. It didn’t help. The dissociation I experienced was not only from Victor, I see it clearly now, but from myself. I could not stand my own company. Instead of an apple, eaten at my desk, the customary working lunch, I took to going out, sitting for hours among the shopping ladies as if I had nothing better to do, eavesdropping on the conversations: ‘I had the complete dinner service and when I went back to match it it was discontinued.’ ‘It’s the same with lipstick. You get used to a colour, then they’re not making it any more.’
It was not as if I had no friends. I had Sophie. A lifetime had passed since we had shared the basement flat. Before Victor. Sophie had never married, preferring a succession of lovers, not tied like Victor, but free to share her life. She called them her boyfriends. She was fat now but didn’t care. Her design business was wildly successful. She had a château in France, and a private plane in which she flew to it, and her name in the gossip columns. She did not really understand my problem. She was too busy.
‘They’re all the same…’
She meant men.
‘… You stayed with him too long, Jean, that’s your trouble.’
She was probably right. It had been easy. Convenient. I could talk to Sophie any day. She was always accessible, but it meant following her around from factory to showroom, waiting while she engaged in endless conversation, sometimes in her ghastly French, concerning colour and quality, on the telephone. I envied her busyness, her commitment, her chaotic penthouse with its drawings and materials spilled over from her work. There was no distinction. Sophie lived, ate, and breathed fashion as she always had. Men were for use and chucking out. Like the ‘cabbage’ from her fabric ends.
‘How about a dress?’ Sophie said en route to a press show. ‘Cheer you up.’
I was incapable of deciding what to put on from what I already possessed, I did not want to complicate the issue with unfamiliar garments. What was the point?
I took the train to Hastings to see my father. To tell him about Victor. Although not a word would get through to him. A phalanges of office workers, yawning and unsmiling, spilled onto the platform at Charing Cross. Two young executives in business suits settled at the far end of my carriage, its orange curtains pulled back neat as a cottage.
We rumbled greyly across the grey river.
‘Passengers for Orpington and Tunbridge Wells must not travel in the rear two portions of the train. Passengers for Orpington and Tunbridge…’
It was Jennie, on one of her rare visits to London, who had told me about Irene. She had kept in touch with Richard’s sister, Jane. Irene had developed a malignant ovarian tumour, from which she had later died. I understood the look, lost and hurt, in Richard’s eyes.
Victorian England.
Washing lines.
The English countryside, celebrated in pen and paint.
In the tunnel I thought of Molly and her fear of them, and how she could never travel by train. A voice pierced the blackness: ‘…computerised stocktaking. Of course we’re only a one man band…sort of market they’re aiming for…’
Sheep and cows and undulating pastures.
My fellow travellers got enthusiastically out at Sevenoaks where a solitary shopper, weighed down by British Home Stores bags, waited in front of the chocolate machine.
I had done the journey so many times. Battle, with its tall trunks of laced larches. West St Leonard’s. The final tunnel where we ground to a Stygian halt. Alone in the carriage, the empty seats mocked me. I was not Molly, but a near panic gripped my throat as if we could never move again. I needed someone. Anyone. Even the two young men with their identical document cases. I understood Molly as I don’t think Victor ever had. He was not one for empathy. The lighted windows of a passing train, for which we had been waiting, trundled by carrying unknown passengers to their unknown lives. We ground into motion towards Hastings, where the forecourt was empty.
‘Come from London?’ the taxi driver said.
I had walked, holding my coat against the wind and the rain, inhaling the sharp tang of the sea, down Havelock Road towards the rank. I never ceased to wonder that time, outside the metropolis, had an additional dimension.
‘Wouldn’t catch me living in the Smoke. Not for a king’s ransom.’
There was a picture of a child, in a pink angora cardigan, stuck to the dashboard.
I gave the address of the home which my father, in his twilight world, inhabited.
‘St Joseph’s, is it?’
The tone was solicitous. Here, as in other English seaside towns, they gave credence to the aged and infirm. I wondered if it had anything to do with the equinoctial impact of the sea.
The Matron was expecting me.
‘Mr Banks is in his room. We couldn’t get him to come down this morning. He’s having one of his “days”.’
I climbed the stairs, the carpet fraying, the smells of cooking rising from the kitchen.
Matron fiddled with this wraith, this father’s tie, proprietorially.
‘Your daughter’s here to see you. Isn’t that nice?’
‘I’ve got no time,’ my father said. ‘I’ve got to run this place single-handed.’
Matron left the room – small and neat, with its bedstead and cupboard – with an understanding smile. I put the yellow primula I had brought on the dressing-table.
My father’s hand had aged. I took it in mine.
‘It’s Jean.’
The eyes were vacant. A child’s.
‘I wanted to tell you about Victor. I’m not very happy.’
‘He had a whip…or a stick. He made me go down the stairs. It wasn’t necessary.’
‘Has Jennie been to see you?’
‘This place is a dump.’
I looked round the room. At the flannel pyjamas, neatly on the pillow.
‘Is there anything you want?’
‘They gave a party for me.’
I fell into the trap and waited expectantly.
‘Prescriptions all over the dispensary.’
‘Victor’s dead.’ I said, although my father hadn’t known him when he was alive.
‘It’s a disgrace…’
I knew he meant the doctors’ writing. It had been the bane of his life in his chemist’s shop.
‘I’m alone now.’ I took his other hand, leaned forward trying to get through to him. ‘I’ve got nobody.’
‘I think they do it on purpose.’
I put my lips to the cheek which in happier times had so often caressed mine.
‘My wife comes to see me.’
I was glad.
I stood up and cradled his wandering head.
‘Jean,’ I said. Then louder, as if he were deaf. ‘Jean. Say it.’ I wanted him to. Just once.
‘The essential night-time drink,’ he said.
I had lunch on the forsaken sea-front. Local plaice, heavy with batter, beneath a mound of chips. The waiter, in evening dress, stood staring at me. I was the only customer. The price was fixed. Dessert included. Apple pie and custard. I took one taste of the glutinous yellow sauce on the tinny spoon and asked for the bill, to get away from the thrum of the piped music. Leaning against the wind, my hair soaked, I walked up the hill to the station.
When I got home my phone was ringing. It was Molly wondering where I’d been.
‘I’m sorry about Irene,’ I said inadequately to Richard in our café. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘You had your own problems.’
‘Too wrapped up in myself, you mean. You should have told me.’
‘To be perfectly honest,’ Richard said, ‘I still find it difficult…after two years.’
‘You must be very sad.’
It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about Irene.
‘Do you still live…?’
‘In Maida Vale.’
We were back on safe ground.
‘Melanie lives with us. With her baby. And Martha and Ben. I’d like you to meet them.’
I was not yet fit co
mpany. The breaks in the clouds of my despair had become more frequent, but I could not rely on my mood. I had promised to have tea with Molly. Richard walked with me to my car.
‘I had no idea you were at the Maudsley.’
‘I’ve been there for two years,’ Richard said. ‘I’m into Gestalt.’
‘Oh yes,’ I told Dr Hartley Taylor, I had got over Gerald. All that remained of that adolescent wartime passion, as painful as any in later life, had been tidied away into the shoe box and, as if it were Gerald’s ashes it contained, I had taken it with me wherever I moved. I had never spoken of him, not to this day, not even to Victor. The emotions, they say, do not age, and I still grieved when I thought of him.
It had been my first brush with death. The two events were thirty years apart yet I compared Gerald’s death with Victor’s. I had loved them both yet taken leave of neither of them, had not been caught up in the funeral rites, participated in the burial. Too much was demanded of the imagination, it was unsatisfactory. I asked Molly to fill in the details about Victor, sparing me nothing. The shock, she said, had almost felled her. She had been wearing a new Christmas dress which hung still in her closet. From time to time she’d finger it, able neither to wear it nor give it away. She was unable to face turkey either, cold platters of which had been on the table for the Boxing Day lunch, for which Victor had been fetching the wine from the cellar. By such irrelevancies death is immortalised.
It had taken the ambulance fifteen minutes to arrive. By the time it did there was nothing anyone could do. Molly would not let them take Victor away. Made them leave his body on the bed where she could see him. She found herself the centre of attention. People made cups of tea and pressed glasses of whisky into her hand, asking if they could be of help. She found herself the central figure in a human drama – a role from which she tried to distance herself – strangely able to observe what was going on outside her own body, and feeling curiously numb and detached. The children had come, William and Tristan, and Gavin with Pamela and the grandchildren – expecting Boxing Day lunch and being greeted with the death of their father – and neighbours as if from nowhere, discomforted because they could offer only panaceas in the face of Victor’s sudden demise. After the autopsy, Romilly, who had been a tower of strength, had asked Molly to select a coffin, like choosing a hat, and it had made her laugh, at the incongruity – as if it mattered – then cry, the tears which had not come before, and seemed after that never to stop. The numbness gave way to physical pain and she remembered trying to concentrate on the William Morris tapestry she had been working when Victor died, birds and trellis, with the tears soaking the canvas.
A Second Wife Page 4
