A Second Wife

by Rosemary Friedman

  She shrugged helplessly. ‘The boys keep nagging me.’

  ‘Someone will be glad of them.’ I turned the knife.

  I did not want her to possess his suits and shoes any more than, when he had been alive, I had wanted her to possess Victor. Standing in Victor’s dressing-room, his cuff-links and his collar stiffeners just as he had left them on his valet stand, I felt a resurgence of the hatred I had once felt for Molly when she had been a cypher. I wanted to pull the two sticks from beneath her so that she would fall, to make her suffer for being Victor’s widow, as I had wanted to punish her when she had been his wife. The moment of my indignation passed and, re-examining it later in the day, I realised that I had actually felt, had feelings, destructive as they were, and that it was salutary.

  Virginia Water was a house. A collection of effects with which Victor had surrounded himself, manifestations of his success. If he had a place in it, it was his study, a euphemistic term for it contained only the collection, in impeccable order, of the music he so loved. But even in this room there was little evidence of him. Victor had not been one to leave a trail.

  In Maida Vale everyone left trails. They passed and crossed, heaping up where they collided. If Victor’s study bore no sign of him, Richard’s wore its heart on its sleeve. There was no surface, and very little of the floor, which was not piled with papers and reprints, envelope folders and box-files, which no one was allowed to touch, and amongst which he swore everything could be located in a moment. Had you removed the lot from the house – together with Ben’s electronic equipment, and Martha’s books and clothes, and the unbelievable paraphernalia of Cora’s infancy – stripped it back to the basics as the house in Virginia Water had been stripped, it still would not have been empty. My own home was a no man’s land between the two.

  Jennie invited me to Wales for Easter but I refused the invitation. I spent the weekend going back. I got out all the photographs. Each place – Europe, Scandinavia, the United States – brought memories which I confronted, forcing myself to remember not only the happy times, but the occasions on which we fought, like married couples, or like alley cats. The radio offered Paschal music, the television ancient films, with the odd Easter thought, uttered by clerics in dog-collars for good measure. I preferred to look at Victor on the Parthenon, scarlet poppies at his feet; ankle deep in snow at Pontresina, in his Doctor Zhivago hat; in front of our chalet – ‘Escape for all Seasons’ – on Big Bear Lake; wearing his sunglasses outside the Tivoli Gardens. Looking at St Mark’s square, projected on the wall of my sitting-room, I recalled neither the pigeons nor the Campanile, but Victor ordering chocolate cake – with two forks – at Florian’s, after it was taken. He had first seen Egypt through the porthole of a troopship, and remembering the clear, dry air, the coloured sunsets and the dawns, had determined to go back. Our journey down the Nile, slipping back through time – Victor bent double, emerging from some regal tomb into the blinding sunlight – had been an idyll. Flat watermeadows. Contented cattle. Goats. Baked-mud villages. Ploughing oxen, followed in the line of the furrow by white egrets. Sleeping camels in the road. Temples at Edfu, Karnak, Dendera. I could, I swear, hear the kingfishers cry, the muezzin call from the minaret, the voice of our guide: ‘Now we go to the holly of hollies’ and, standing before some behemoth, ‘Look to the toes!’ Egypt passing in a palette of colours, in a panorama of dhows with their silhouette oarsmen, of bulrushes and buffalo, and Victor squatting, in the pink and yellow twilight, in a circle of children: ‘Haven’t you got a pencil, Jean?’ When we’d long ago disposed of all we had.

  As I tidied away the projector, the slides in their labelled boxes, I told myself that I was lucky to have shared so much with Victor. I almost convinced myself.

  At Maida Vale Richard cooked. He was handy and drilled holes in walls and mended things where Victor would have called a man in. We were in the kitchen and Richard was making a Bolognese sauce, attempting to crumble a beef cube into boiling water for the stock and stir the browning meat in the frying-pan at the same time. I got up to help him.

  ‘They like to make a big production out of it,’ Melanie said. ‘Richard can turn a fishcake into a three-day event.’

  I took no notice.

  ‘Contrary to received opinion,’ Melanie went on, ‘men are simply brought up by their mothers to inherit the earth; they are not helpless.’

  She’d not met Victor. He would have no more been capable of concocting a Bolognese sauce than flying. Yet I suppose, thinking about it, had it been his mission in life, he would have mastered it, as he mastered anything which was important to him, and created it to his exacting standards, to perfection.

  The tomatoes spluttered from the frying-pan onto the white enamel of the cooker. I wet a sponge beneath the mixer tap and cleaned up the mess.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Melanie said, and with Cora under her arm, walked out of the kitchen.

  ‘I seem to irritate her,’ I said to Richard.

  ‘It’s not difficult.’

  I knew that he was distressed. He liked me to come to Maida Vale with him but the open hostility of his children tore him apart.

  Melanie had come down from Oxford with a first in social anthropology. She had had a succession of jobs – advertising, copywriting, typing in a television newsroom, selling brushes on doorsteps, where she was subjected to sexual harassment from the area manager – which she finally abandoned to found the Tufnell Park Women’s Collective, which called for the extermination of men and the abortion of male foetuses, and sincerely believed that if suitably dedicated women applied themselves, and overcame any ethical objections, within a decade they would be ruling the world, with the result that there would be no more wars. According to Richard, she had given birth to Cora, crawling round the ward of the Women’s Hospital, to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Yellow Taxi’. Afterwards she had carried her baby about her person wherever she went. Her vision of herself as a Chinese peasant – together with that of Inner London as a paddyfield – was soon dispelled when her flatmate (and secretary of the collective) went down with scarlet fever and Melanie, fearing for Cora, had, on a temporary basis only, accepted Richard’s offer of her old bedroom in Maida Vale. She had been there for nine months. Richard liked her about the place, useless in the domestic sense as she was, and Ben and Martha, although disturbed by Melanie’s dialectic, adored their niece.

  Each time I stepped through the front door I felt the atmosphere become electric. For Richard’s sake – he liked me to be there – I pretended not to notice.

  There seemed to be no spring that year. Winter ended and summer began. Like a neophyte I basked in its promise, wrapped myself in its warmth. Each day I found myself looking forward to the next. I bought a primrose yellow suit with a jungle-patterned shirt. Victor had liked everything plain. I was slightly manic. Despite my elevated mood, Dr Hartley Taylor warned me against stopping my medication too soon.

  I told Molly about my growing friendship with Richard. That my intense desire for warmth and companionship overcame my dislike of the barriers erected around him by his children.

  ‘You’re on the rebound,’ Molly said. ‘Take care.’

  She did not approve of my visits to Maida Vale. I tried to explain that Victor could never be replaced. That love, such as that I had had for him, came only once; but that people needed people, the human race couldn’t have survived if we hadn’t learned that. Molly didn’t understand – any more than Melanie did, although their reasons were different – she was resentful and wanted no one to come between us and our shared remembrances.

  I was with her in Virginia Water when Lucy came home needing money. If Melanie was a symbol of her age, Lucy was its victim. She had become involved with undesirable elements from too young an age and introduced to the drug scene. Her dependence had almost broken Victor’s heart. He could no more come to terms with it than he could with the incomprehensibility of modernism in the arts, aleatoric music and random painting. Lucy, with her rejecti
on of the education and opportunities which had been her birthright, and her succession of unsuitable alliances, had been his cross.

  Despite her unkempt appearance and withdrawn face, she was still lovely. Like Molly’s, her looks were of the indestructible nature, that age or illness fail to diminish. Ravaged as she was by the excesses of her life, the blue eyes, with their pinpoint pupils, were as eloquent as ever, and her emaciated body graceful.

  ‘Dr Jean Banks.’ Molly introduced me.

  ‘I know,’ Lucy said.

  I don’t know who was more surprised. It was as if Victor had deceived me with another woman. Molly’s eyebrows were raised.

  ‘Daddy told me all about Jean. She was at Gavin’s wedding.’

  There was no resentment in her tone. Lucy had always been incapable of feeling. I felt that Victor had been laughing at me. He had tried to buy Lucy, with both money and with love. Seeing that these were not enough I presumed he had confided in her, shared our secret in an attempt to hold her. Lucy’s revelation disconcerted me, temporarily diminished Victor in my eyes. She was going to stay in Scotland, with a friend, she told her mother, and needed some clothes. Not one of us in the room believed it to be true. Molly wrote a cheque, knowing that the money would be spent on heroin or pethidine. The expression on her face, as she filled in the amount, made me feel like an intruder. As if I had seen something I should not have done.

  Taking the cheque in her scarred hand Lucy, like any normal girl, flung her arms round her mother. Two fragile lepidopterae from Victor’s flame, their intimacy excluded me, as if since her birth I had not felt that Lucy was my own daughter.

  A colleague of Richard’s offered to lend us his flat in France. I took my time deciding. I realised that it was no longer possible to go on living in the past, with its agonising whispers. I was not in love with Richard. He was comfortable. Predictable. It was this that had led me to choose the mercurial promise of the married Victor, what now seemed a lifetime ago. I wondered did I really want Richard, or was the solace I found in his presence a symptom of my depression. I let things happen. It was the easiest way.

  ‘Who will look after the children?’ Molly said, as if the arrangements at Maida Vale were her concern.

  ‘Melanie,’ I said. ‘And the cleaning lady will keep an eye on things.’

  The cleaning lady, a Mrs Bark, who had made no secret of her disapproval on our one brief encounter, had ‘done’ for Irene since her marriage and considered herself part of the family. Martha told Richard, and Richard told me, that she referred to me as ‘that woman’. I could see – it was not difficult – that in letting myself become more and more involved with Richard I was storing up trouble for myself.

  As if to relegate me to my proper place in Victor’s affections, Molly recalled her first visit to France after the war before her illness, her agoraphobia, had set a limit on her horizons. They had driven a ten-horsepower Talbot, crossing the choppy channel in a wet gale, in the days before antihistamines.

  ‘I was so sea-sick,’ Molly said, ‘I thought I was going to die. Victor didn’t know what to do.’

  I could believe that. He didn’t like illness, any aberration from the norm, and was hopeless at dealing with it.

  ‘There was just a wide open space outside Boulogne, with tracks weaving between the holes and no signposts.’

  Molly had a faraway look in her eyes and I could see that it had been a happy time, before the catalogue of her indispositions excluded her from Victor’s life, prevented them from doing things together.

  ‘There were fields of corn,’ she said, ‘as far as the eye could see. Little crosses, covered with fresh flowers, and every now and again a crashed aeroplane.’

  I wondered if one of them was Gerald’s, and if it was going to take as long to accept Victor’s loss as it had his.

  ‘There wasn’t any hot water in the hotel,’ Molly said, remembering. ‘But the meal! Real soup, steak, and a bottle of red wine. The Madame thought we were Americans and slammed the food down without speaking to us. We didn’t care.’

  I knew she meant because they were in love.

  ‘We planned to spend the last night in Abbeville but there was nowhere to stay. Practically no town. Just heaps of rubble. We slept in the car.’

  It was hard to imagine Victor roughing it.

  ‘By the time we got home we were rather pleased with ourselves.’

  We rented a car at Nice airport. Richard turned out every pocket for his credit card and driving licence. Victor’s were always neatly at hand in a pin-seal wallet. Outside it was raining, the palm trees moaning in the wind. I wondered if it was an omen.

  The flat was on the Grand Corniche. Negotiating the steep climb in the yellow headlight beams, Richard put his hand on mine.

  I willed the desolation that had swept over me, at the unfamiliar surroundings, the bleak weather, the rain falling from the night sky, to disperse.

  By the time we identified the flat, even Richard, who was a paragon of equanimity, had begun to fret. We left the car on a bend in the road, hoping no one would drive into it, carried our cases into the building, and hurried up to the top floor before the light on the stairs went out on us.

  The flat hadn’t been used since the previous summer. It was chill and shut up with the smell peculiar to uninhabited houses. In the kitchen, the opened door of the empty fridge reminded us that the shops were shut and we hadn’t thought to bring any food. It could not have happened with Victor. We found some damp sheets and Richard made the bed. I could see that he was used to it. I was unable to dismiss the black dog from my shoulder and wished I hadn’t come.

  As he was finishing I said, ‘Shouldn’t we get something to eat? I’m starving.’ Although I was no such thing.

  We had dinner in the harbour at Villefranche. Turbot, the consistency of which was not pleasant, and a gâteau which looked as if it had been lying around for days. I compared the dreary restaurant – we had chosen badly – with the hotel in the harbour where I had stayed with Victor, and where they knew him. I could taste the rognons de veau, cooked to perfection, and the dreamy white clouds on their nectarean sea of the oeufs à la neige.

  By the time we’d climbed the hill again, Richard peering through the windscreen, cursing the rain, we were exhausted. The bathroom was cold as was the water – we’d forgotten to turn the heater on – and the towels inadequate. The bed was lumpy and the springs creaked. Making love by common unspoken consent, part of the natural flow of things, essentially an act of friendship, I sought to vanquish the phantasm of Victor.

  Other bodies are like foreign countries (you must explore without a map) when you have grown used to one. Our first foray into the unknown was not an unqualified success. Richard, who had been expecting the earth to move, put the disillusionment down to fatigue, not realising, I think, despite his special knowledge, that it was Irene and Victor who had come between us.

  ‘Things always look better in the morning.’ It had been one of my mother’s sayings. I seemed to spend my life lately recalling the dead, remembering the past. I opened the shutters to the twin bays of Villefranche and of Nice. There is no light to rival the Mediterranean. When I turned from the window Richard was looking at me. I went back to bed and we compensated for the disappointment of the night, if not for the mutual miseries of our recent lives.

  I have always felt that sex illuminates the day. That it is not a thing for the night.

  ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.’ Jennie’s daughter, Bonnie, in one of her earnest conversations with me, quoting Bergson.

  I had to change, although it was easier to remain immobile in the shadow cast by Victor.

  I got hold of Jean Banks by the scruff of her neck and turned the clockwork key in her back.

  If I didn’t swim now I would go under.

  We discovered that it wasn’t necessary to follow the zig-zag of the road, that there were steps cut into the hillside,
which led down to the village. Victor… No. I was with Richard…would have not walked down…certainly not up. Richard, in his track suit, fetched breakfast croissants and the newspaper. He talked. Enthusiastic plans for the day. I was used to silence.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Headache?’

  Richard had to know. Everything. There was no space.

  I snapped.

  He flushed.

  It had not been like that with Victor. We had not invaded each other’s privacy.

  With Victor I had not laughed. As I did with Richard. Like children, as we did the marketing.

  He bought postcards to send to Maida Vale. Called every day to see if Martha was all right. If Ben was getting on with his revision.

  In front of the hotel where I had stayed with Victor, the conçierge held the door of a Mercedes for two men with fat cigars. A folded note changed hands.

  With Richard we fell upon corners. The cemetery at St Paul. Anne-Marie Martin, whose cyclamens were dead. André Geran, red and white petunias in glorious abundance. Violets – beneath a glass bell – for Françoise Langier. It was not a good place for either of us.

  At Falicon a retired camionneur, working his terraced garden, picked broad beans for us and wrapped them in a newspaper. Richards’ French was fluent. Victor couldn’t speak a word. He hadn’t needed to.

  I sent a view of the Esterels to Molly.

  I reduced my pills.

  I went with Richard to the village. He sprinted up the steps while I trailed behind, purple faced. We’d bought a net of oranges which broke. Clutching each other, we watched them roll down the hillside.

  We took our picnic to the Gorges du Paillon.

  Lay on the beach in the late spring sun. Richard swam. A handsome crawl. I had never seen Victor in the water.