A Second Wife

by Rosemary Friedman

  It was at the funeral that Molly had started to walk again. She had been wheeled to the place and stood supported by William and Gavin as the prayers were read. As the Vicar closed his book, and the mourners turned away, she had taken her first unconscious step towards the grave, wanting to bid farewell to Victor. It was, she said, as if he had given her his vitality, the strength that he no longer needed. The funeral had been private.

  ‘No flowers,’ I said.

  Molly looked at me. We were in her sitting-room.

  ‘I never understood why you didn’t like flowers.’ Molly won’t have them in the house, Victor had said when I first met him.

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ Molly said. ‘I loathe them to be sacrificed.’

  Later she said: ‘Was it you who left the rose?’

  I nodded.

  Molly put her hand on mine. ‘I should have known.’

  ‘I have taken down my Christmas cards,’ I told Dr Hartley Taylor, three months after the event.

  They had lain where they had fallen on my mantelpiece, dusty and inert. Mistletoe and holly. Seasonal greetings from Sophie, and Jennie and Trevor, and from my nieces and nephews, Kate and James and Thomasina and Bonnie, and from my colleagues at work. I had picked up Victor’s, elegant and expensive, the card specially printed, with the words ‘Jean darling’ at which it had been too painful even to look. I kept only Victor’s, throwing the rest away, rearranging the ornaments and wiping the shelf with a damp cloth. Afterwards I had sat in Victor’s chair, his card in my hand, staring at the mantelpiece and wondering who had tidied it.

  ‘It will be one step forward and two steps back,’ Dr Hartley Taylor said.

  I had been expecting an award.

  I began to discern. The first crocuses, Molly’s budding garden, a blue carpet of forget-me-nots covering the beds. On her window-sill a brass statue of the dancing Shiva in his circle of fire, identical to my own.

  ‘Did you go with Victor to India?’ Molly asked.

  Sunrise on the Ganges. Smoke from small fires; samosas frying in the narrow alleys as, tumbled still with interrupted sleep, every sense assaulted, Victor pulled me hurrying through the begging and the shaving, and the scrubbing of goats and the shaking of rugs, and the careful carrying of Holy Water, and broad-backed ambling cows and tinkling bicycle-rickshaws, and red and saffron robes and white dhotis, through the open sewers that were the streets of Varanasi, to the ghats. Morning prayers and temple bells. A symphony of horns. Cars, and too-wide sightseeing buses, parting the shifting, shuffling pattern of humanity as if it were the Red Sea. Vendors, eyes level and serene, as if they had not crept from hovels, stretched from their street dreams to lay out their careful wares. Green beans. Yellow cauliflowers. White radishes. Betel leaves. Ragged infants, of heart-stopping beauty, trading, amongst the tourists, on their looks. The rattle of sewing machines. The silence of yoga. The public trimming of toenails, excavations of ears. ‘See the sun,’ Victor said. Tomato red, it burst into the sky, roseating the squatting boatmen along the banks of the river, where on the stones the dhobi-wallahs bashed the tired, the threadbare laundry, in perpetual rhythm, while the devotees immersed themselves, and the dead, in their white shrouds, were burned.

  ‘“I’ll have them fly to India for gold/Ransack the Ocean for Orient pearl”,’ Molly said.

  Small children carrying smaller children. Brahmins with their white thread. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  I invited Richard home. My good days now outweighed the bad. In a manic upswing I cleaned the flat, attacking it savagely, taking advantage of my mood. I bought flowers, the first since Victor, from a man on the pavement. He offered me white blooms, narcissi, not understanding – that Victor had filled my life with them – when I recoiled in horror. I would never again have white flowers. I bought tulips and put them on the table by the window, and Sancerre for the fridge.

  Richard sat in Victor’s armchair. I did not protest. Between us, helped by the Sancerre, we resurrected the past, retraced our lives. Two middle-aged people. The years had stolen the pigment from our hair, the innocence from our eyes. Richard had been fine for a while after Irene’s death, then broken down. When he was better, he had applied for the job at the Maudsley, needing the change. He’d become involved with Gestalt therapy, which derived from both Freudian analysis and the existential approach to philosophy, and was concerned with the ‘here and now’. We finished the bottle of wine and played ‘Do you remember?’: my mother, who had been inordinately fond of Richard; the dreadful day we sent the wedding presents back. We opened another bottle. I told Richard about Victor, my eyes lighting on souvenirs around the room for confirmation. Richard spoke of Irene, and the children. We were both drunk. I should not have been drinking. Not with my pills.

  Molly came for lunch. She wanted to see my flat. I wasn’t sure. I was jealous, wanted to keep what I’d shared with Victor to myself.

  ‘You don’t want to deify him,’ Dr Hartley Taylor said.

  I hadn’t realised I was feeding unhealthily upon the past.

  The Rolls, in the square beneath my window, was like old times. I ran to the door to welcome Victor, but it was only Molly coming painfully, slowly, up the stairs on her two sticks, helped by the chauffeur. Seeing her, I realised that her presence in the flat, more than any other thing, would help to lay Victor’s ghost.

  ‘I’ve lain awake at nights imagining some bordello…’ Molly said.

  I’d not heard anyone use that word.

  ‘…it’s just a sitting-room!’

  ‘Victor liked it.’ My voice was defensive. I wondered whether it had been a mistake to invite her. ‘He used to sit here.’

  We both looked at the faded blue armchair, peopling it with disparate visions.

  ‘I don’t think he ever felt at home in Virginia Water,’ Molly said. ‘The house was too big. If I had my time over again I’d do things differently.’

  ‘Wouldn’t we all?’

  ‘Would we?’ Molly fixed me with the blue eyes.

  She looked round at the mementoes which were duplicated in her own house. I guessed how she must feel.

  ‘I wonder if he’s laughing?’ I meant at seeing us, whom he had always kept apart, together in the flat.

  ‘I couldn’t give Victor what he wanted,’ Molly said, when she’d sat down. ‘I never enjoyed that side of things. Victor used to get angry. In the early days we were always fighting.’

  She looked at me. ‘I don’t think I like men very much.’

  I had the impression that she was telling me something. Asking for more than I was prepared to give.

  ‘I got some pâté for lunch,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

  I decided that life, after all, might be worth living. I attended to my patients. Had my hair coloured (four hours in tinfoil like a porcupine) and cut into a shape I could dry with my fingers. I changed my image and my executive clothes – smart suits with pencil slim skirts, silk dresses and shoes with gold round the heels – for a raggy linen skirt with a clinched waist and a huge knitted top, jeans and sneakers which I wore at weekends.

  ‘Your lost youth,’ Sophie said.

  She was partly right. I was trying to recapture something. I felt old and staid, measured against the jeunesse dorée of the London pavements, lacking in identity. ‘The sensation of being outside everything,’ my ginger-bearded guru said. It was not comfortable. Sometimes when I spoke I could hear myself talking. Could listen to myself.

  Richard took me home. To Maida Vale. Baby buggies and bicycles and wellington boots and golf umbrellas and fishing tackle turned the narrow hall into an assault course.

  In the kitchen Melanie, in grubby white dungarees, held Hermann Hesse in one hand, and fed the baby with the other. I had never seen a human being so thin.

  ‘This is Jean.’

  The violet eyes, orbs in a hollow face beneath cropped hair, appraised me. I remembered the last time I had seen her, rounded limbs and soft curls, throwing bread to the ducks
.

  She nodded at me. The hostility was tangible.

  Richard kissed the baby. ‘And this is Cora!’

  I could see how proud he was. The child recognised him. She wore a navy-blue cardigan over a nappy.

  ‘Will you listen for her?’ Melanie addressed Richard. ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Martha’s at Noh’s and Ben’s upstairs.’

  ‘A levels,’ Richard said.

  Melanie took the baby upstairs on her hip and Richard made tea. He used china cups, which I assumed hadn’t been out of the cupboard since Irene’s death; they were covered with a thin film of dust.

  ‘Is Melanie married?’ I said. There had been a ring through her ear-lobe but none on her finger.

  Richard shook his head and I could see that it was something he didn’t want to talk about.

  Ben came down and stopped in his tracks in the doorway of the kitchen when he saw me. My heart lurched back along the years. He was Richard, who had grown up in the same road as Jennie and myself.

  ‘Hi, Ben,’ Richard said. ‘Tea?’

  Ben gave me a contemptuous look and turned on his heel, muttering something about calculus.

  ‘I’d like you to meet Martha,’ Richard said. From his voice I understood that he hoped she might compensate for the churlish behaviour of Melanie and Ben.

  When she came from her friend’s we were in Richard’s study, among the blue and yellow piles of medical and psychiatric journals.

  ‘Hallo, Daddy.’ She put her arms round Richard.

  I had only seen Irene once, but this was her imprint upon the sands of time. Richard clung to his daughter in her blue school uniform.

  ‘Say hallo to Jean.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Martha said. ‘Noh’s waiting for me. It’s swimming practice and I want to get into the team.’

  ‘She’s very independent,’ Richard said.

  A voice, magnified and distorted, burst into the room from a small box on Richard’s desk.

  ‘Richard!’ It was Melanie. ‘I’m putting the alarm on.’

  I was to get used to the baby alarm. The snuffles and the breathing and small squawks as Cora turned over in her cot.

  I told Molly I had been to Richard’s. She said nothing, but I could tell from her face that she didn’t approve. She wanted me to herself with the shade of Victor making up a neat triangle. It wasn’t until later that I realised she was actually jealous.

  I was comfortable with Richard. He did not tell me to ‘snap out of it’, to ‘pull myself together’, as I struggled to break out of the long silences which overtook my sluggish thoughts. Clinical depression, which has little to do with misery or sadness, like psychoanalysis or Freemasonry is not revealed to you until you join the club. Richard had had a taste of it. After Irene’s death he had not allowed himself to mourn. For a long time he had coped with Ben and Martha and the domestic chores, as well as his own work. He had been seeing a patient when he realised, with alarm, that not a word was getting through to him, and had telephoned a colleague in panic. The episode had been short and sharp, self-limiting. If it was a disgrace, Richard said, it was one shared by such luminaries as Michelangelo and Lincoln, Balzac and Schumann.

  Mental health is measured by the capacity to work and the capacity to love.

  I saw Dr Hartley Taylor now at less frequent intervals. The gold nib no longer worked overtime. I took my pills and kept a chart, at his suggestion, assessing my despondency on a scale of nought to three. As the days grew longer and the skies less grey, the rows of three gave way to two’s, and the two’s to ones, then noughts. I tried to catch my moods and by surprise pre-empt them. They were smarter than I, and intervened between the opening of my eyes and the coming of consciousness in the mornings, hitting me, with unexpected ferocity, at unguarded moments in the day. The bad times were episodic. I no longer neglected myself, my flat. At work, apart from the odd aberration, I rediscovered my old enthusiasm, welcoming it like an old friend. The capacity to love had not returned. I doubted it ever would.

  The pieces of my shattered life assumed some sort of pattern. Instead of highlights, which were Victor, and lowlights sustained by concepts of him, there was a straighter line along which I moved, with small peaks in the shape of my visits to Molly, and therapeutic moments with Richard, on which I had begun to rely. I became a regular visitor to Maida Vale. Ben and Martha ignored me. I could sense the family circle closing against my intrusion, which was regarded as some kind of threat. There was awkwardness on my side too. I was not at my best with young people, having had no children of my own. Seeing them, Richard’s offspring, and the bond that united them, my years with Victor, for which I had sacrificed my life, seemed somehow less judicious.

  Melanie talked to me. If in naming her after Melanie Klein, Richard and Irene had been hoping for a disciple, they were disappointed.

  I was in the kitchen, holding Cora, whose hair was silver and whose eyes green, while Melanie stirred some mush for her at the stove. The baby’s dainty hand, featherlight, was clasped round my finger.

  ‘Does she look like her father?’ I said.

  Melanie tasted the contents of the pan.

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I’ve never seen him.’

  She was talking in riddles.

  A translucent bead of dribble hung from Cora’s lips. I dried it with a piece of kitchen towel from the roll that was on the table.

  ‘Frozen sperm,’ Melanie said, turning off the gas. ‘Comes out of a bank.’

  Later, when she got to know me better, I was treated to a discourse upon men.

  Melanie was not a feminist, she said, in the accepted sense of the word, for just as being an agnostic implied the existence of God, feminism by implication acknowledged – albeit in their proper place – men. To Melanie they were at best parasites and at worst redundant in the present evolutionary scheme.

  ‘Man is the afterthought of creation,’ she announced, waving a wooden spoon, while Cora salivated. ‘A modification of the female.’

  It was news to me. As was the fact that, like aphids and strawberry plants, we would shortly be cloning ourselves.

  ‘The enslavement of women is at the root of all oppression,’ Melanie said. ‘Women are the niggers of the world.’ She blew on Cora’s mashed lentils. ‘“Her wings are clipped and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.” Before you know where you are – it’s not hot, Cora, open your mouth – we will have a mutant female, differing genetically from the rest of the population and able to do without males. She will reproduce only daughters and within a few generations all females will be asexual. Think about it!’

  I did. The prospect seemed infinitely dreary.

  Later, while Melanie was at her consciousness-raising group, Richard explained that he thought Melanie’s behaviour, her fierce adoration of her daughter, was the result of her early relationship with her mother. Melanie had been six years old when Ben was born, and until that time had had Irene to herself. She was jealous of the new baby. Angry at being displaced. She was resolving the problem now by having something of her very own to love, to compensate for what she experienced as Irene’s perfidy.

  I was incapable of love. I tested myself out. Recalling Victor, I could remember only the voices, not my responses when I was in his arms. I knew that Molly loved me but, although I needed her, I could not love her in return. I tried with Cora, enjoying the softness of her limbs, the appeal of her eyes, sea-green – the sperm bank? – but handed her back, unprotesting, when the moment came, to her mother. I was aware that Richard was falling in love with me for the second time, but felt nothing, other than gratitude for his company, in return.

  ‘I am incapable of feeling,’ I told Dr Hartley Taylor. ‘There is nothing inside.’

  It was frightening. The sensation of emptiness. That there was nothing there. No outflow of warmth and appreciation for things. No spontaneous eff
usions. No stockpile of love.

  My leisure time became divided between Molly and Richard. The contrast could not have been greater. The house in Virginia Water, apart from Molly’s sitting-room, was like a mausoleum. Victor’s. One day she showed me round it. I wanted to see into every corner. After the two rooms of my flat it seemed enormous. Polished parquet floors with finely woven rugs of many colours; paintings, each with its light not vulgarly overhung, but from some concealed source, illuminating the Seurats and Cranachs from Victor’s collection. The kitchen, large enough for banquets not just Molly’s tray, in which two dark-skinned maids twittered like birds; the adjacent dining-room, with it’s mahogany table and tapestried chairs, evidence of Molly’s industry – unused, as were the billiard room and what had once been the boys’ bedrooms. Their own bedroom, Victor’s and Molly’s, how many times had I pictured it in my imagination, looked out onto the garden. There was a double bed, like any other, with a carved headboard, probably Chippendale; I don’t know what I had expected to see. In Victor’s dressing-room Molly opened the cupboards. Victor’s suits, arranged with military precision, brought a lump to my throat but, stupidly, inexplicably, it was his shoes, pairs and pairs of them on wooden trees, that made me cry.

  ‘Why on earth don’t you get rid of them?’ I said cruelly to Molly through my handkerchief, hoping she would think I was blowing my nose.