A Second Wife

by Rosemary Friedman

  I left the dishes for Mrs Bark.

  When I came home from work they were still there, together with a note from Melanie to say that the ‘treasure’ I had inherited from Irene had rung to say she was poorly.

  I looked at the piled table with distaste. Dehydrated soufflé. Wilted lettuce leaves. Congealed demi-glace sauce. Richard would have done it. Made no bones. I knew it very well, yet I put on my martyr’s apron together with Mrs Bark’s rubber gloves which leaked through a hole in the thumb.

  The house was quiet. Ben out, Martha at Noh’s for tea. There was no sign of Melanie with Cora. She came and went as she pleased, never saying.

  It took me three Beethoven piano concertos and a Schubert symphony to restore the house to normal. Apart from the dishes there were cheese straw crumbs on the sitting-room carpet and in the crevices of the sofa, and sticky circles from the brandy glasses everywhere. When I had finished, immolated and consumed (I regarded Mrs Bark with new eyes – the vacuum cleaner was so heavy – and resolved to be kinder to her), I bathed and washed my hair and put on a white dress, which had been one of Victor’s favourites, and stretched out on the sofa with a glass of the Hermitage from one of the unfinished bottles. I had just got my feet up when I heard Richard’s key in the door.

  ‘Jean?’

  ‘In here.’ I did not get up. Doubted if I ever would again.

  There was a bang. His briefcase. He appeared in the doorway, flushed and dishevelled, his jacket over his shoulder.

  ‘God, it’s hot!’

  He bent to kiss me and eyed my glass. ‘I wouldn’t say no to some of that. I’m going up to take a shower.’

  It was not the assumption that I was going to run upstairs with his drink; not his ignorance of the fact that, single-handed, I had cleaned up after his dinner guests; not the inference, explicit in his glance, that I had done nothing more strenuous all day than lie, in my white dress, on the sofa, that made my eyes fill with tears. It was the fact that Richard was not Victor. Pure and simple. I had not admitted it before.

  I did not take up the wine. Did not pour it into one of the facet-stemmed glasses newly washed and put away. I lay nursing my aching feet and my resentment that Richard had not pinned a medal on my chest for something he could no way have known that I’d done.

  I heard the juddering of the pipes as he turned on the shower, the Gilbert and Sullivan that was the sine qua non of his ablutions, the banging of cupboards, the shutting of drawers. Silence. And a shout. I could not hear what was said but it started with ‘where?’ I did not respond. Closed my eyes. Waited for the ‘have you seen…’ ‘Jean…’ the voice was plaintive. ‘Have you seen?’ His diary, his razor – usually appropriated by Melanie – the personal telephone book which Mrs Bark had tidied away, his navy-blue socks.

  ‘…the nail-file?’

  There was an explosion in my head. The nail-file was kept in the bathroom. If it wasn’t in its normal place he was as capable of looking for it as I.

  ‘Jean?’

  It was not only Richard. They had all come to expect me to keep tags on their possessions, Ben and Martha, even Melanie who, a hundred times a day, searched for Cora’s one-eyed bear.

  ‘I can’t find the nail-file!’

  I did not remember going up the stairs with its Axminster pattern washed by the setting sun through the frosted glass of the oriel window. I stormed into the bedroom where Richard stood naked, startled by the eruption. I slammed drawers, opened cupboards, almost tearing the doors from their hinges.

  ‘It’s taken me more than two hours,’ I said, ‘washing up, clearing up, after last night…’

  ‘Mrs Bark…’

  ‘She didn’t come.’

  ‘Why didn’t you…?’

  ‘Two hours! And I had a dreadful day at work. Everybody wants results yesterday, and Bob’s in Greece…’

  ‘I would have…’

  ‘You’d think your precious Melanie would have lent a hand instead of leaving a note…’

  ‘You didn’t have to…’

  ‘I’m fed up with pandering to everyone and never having a moment to myself, as if I was responsible for Martha’s shoes and Ben’s cricket trousers and Cora’s toys. I married you, not Billy Smart’s circus!’

  ‘I only asked if you’d seen the nail-file,’ Richard said.

  ‘You’ve been thrown in at the deep end,’ Dr Hartley Taylor said.

  I had indeed. The repercussions of the ‘nail-file’, as I referred to it in my head, affected the entire household. Richard, goaded by my outburst, had retreated hurt, Martha had been frightened, Ben overly solicitious of his father and Melanie anxious to know what had come between us, as if she had a right. It might perhaps have not been so bad had Richard not tried to explain about the wretched nail-file. That ‘Irene used to…’ If I had seen red before, I was now blinded, by injustice and my tears of self-righteousness over the dishes. I let him have it.

  ‘You always…’

  ‘I only…’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  Blaming and defending, parry and riposte, the accusations growing wilder. Despite his Gestalt training, Richard, as I had yet to learn, could not, when the chips were down, stand emotional confrontation; for issues to be muddled with feelings; when I answered his shouts with shouts of my own I was being irrational.

  It did blow over. Richard recovered his good humour and bought peace roses, although there were a million in the garden. I, overcome with remorse at my outburst, made his favourite pie, phoning his mother – who was delighted – for the recipe. Melanie watched, cynical, as I rolled the pastry. I pinched together the gaping edges of the dough, wishing it were as easy to repair the cracks which had appeared in our marriage. It was a pity it didn’t come with a Good Housekeeping label warning you of the traps.

  I invited my in-laws for Sunday lunch. Martha and Ben adored their grandparents, who had all the time in the world for them and for Cora, whose strange paternity they had accepted without turning a hair. According to Richard, the only comment that his father made was that Melanie, as a single parent, had much in common with the stickleback. The old people were charming to me. Fell over themselves to be kind. But you could see that it was for Richard’s sake. Their real preoccupation became apparent over the leg of lamb.

  ‘Do you remember poor Irene’s mint-and-apple-jelly?’ my new mother-in-law said, unscrewing the jar of commercial sauce I had put on the table.

  ‘She grew the mint herself,’ she went on. ‘Grew all the herbs. She called them “’erbs” – they do in America,’ she added for my benefit. ‘Sage, borage, marjoram… I think of her every time I make my stuffing. Irene used to love gardening…’ I followed her glance through the window to the unkempt beds. ‘…Ricky doesn’t have time.’ I took the implicit rebuke. ‘…anything out of doors. Do you play tennis, Jean?’

  I admitted my deficiency in that area. Victor had enjoyed squash and golf but I’d found the one too strenuous and the other too boring, even in my youth.

  ‘… I don’t know how she managed it all…’

  Cora reached over towards Melanie and, like a magpie, purloined her dessert spoon and started banging it with obvious delight on the tray of her high chair. Other than her great-grandmother, who would, I think, have sung Irene’s praises ad infinitum, she was the only one unaware of the appropriate timing of the diversion.

  Richard did the dishes with Ben.

  ‘He’s a marvellous husband,’ his mother said.

  I wondered how she knew.

  Martha walked her grandfather round the garden.

  Melanie played with Cora on the lawn.

  I wondered, would I ever belong.

  Molly was getting ready for Canada and Dr Hartley Taylor for his annual four-week camping holiday in Austria. My two props.

  ‘Do you want to make an appointment for September?’ Dr Hartley Taylor said.

  I was no longer depressed. Only afraid. Of my ability to fill the role I had accepted with Richard�
�s wedding band. The thoughts, the fears, the anguish of the past months had been recorded by the gold pen. It was time to move on. Help would be at hand if I needed it.

  ‘You know where to find me.’

  I made my way down the stairs and through the ranks of lost humanity. It was hard to believe that I had once been among them.

  ‘I want you to have this,’ Molly said. It was the photograph of Victor in his scarlet pullover, smiling and alive. I tried to feel his embrace, hear his voice, but there was no sound in Molly’s sitting-room.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ I said.

  The house was sold to an Arab sheikh and Molly was going to Gavin and Pamela while the furniture was disposed of, loose ends tied up, before their departure for Quebec.

  ‘And I you, Jean.’ She looked round the room. ‘Sometimes I think I haven’t the strength to go. It’s strange,’ she went to the window, looking out, ‘how you imagine that life, what you’re used to, is going to last for ever. It doesn’t do to get too complacent.’

  We had lunch for the last time. It was as if Molly would take with her to Canada the last vestiges of Victor, would leave me, stranded and bereft, on the shores of my new life.

  We spoke of old times and Molly’s children, the satisfaction they gave her outweighing all discord they’d created. Except for Lucy, for whose aberration Molly blamed herself and her disability. She no longer used her sticks, and would have liked to have her time with Lucy over again.

  ‘I wonder would it have been different.’

  I was sorry I had never experienced the unquestionable joys of motherhood, and glad to have been spared its heartaches.

  I put the photograph of Victor in my handbag.

  ‘Let’s say goodbye here,’ Molly said.

  ‘You’ll write?’ I looked at her. ‘Let me know how you’re getting on.’

  There would be news of Quebec and her life with Gavin and Pamela at ever-increasing intervals. The letters would be meaningless, chronicles of events. We had no significance for each other except here in Victor’s house, which both of us peopled with his brisk step, his quiet voice.

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you,’ Molly said.

  ‘That first day…’

  We smiled at the shared memory.

  ‘I’d give you one of these…’ Molly waved a hand at the souvenirs of Victor’s travels which lined the walls, ‘…but you’ve got everything.’

  I had indeed.

  Her eyes lit on a framed Blake, pen and watercolour, The Temptation and Fall of Eve. She took it from the wall where it left a bare patch. With it, she giving, I receiving, it was as if the tenuous link that bound us was broken for ever. The room receded. I wanted the parting to be over. To go home.

  ‘I’ll write, of course,’ Molly said. I felt she was already composing the letter.

  ‘The winters are very hard,’ I said. ‘You’ll need your boots.’

  We spoke of this and that and the trauma of packing, then it was time for me to go.

  We clung together, but it was as if the ocean were already between us, vast and cold. I cried for Victor but he was nowhere in the house.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Richard said. ‘I called in at the lab.’

  I had not grown used to accounting for myself.

  ‘To say goodbye to Molly,’ I said stiffly.

  Richard said nothing. The link with Victor made him uncomfortable.

  ‘She gave me a Blake drawing…’ I picked it up to show him. From his expression you would have thought it was one of Victor’s arms or legs.

  ‘…for my consulting-room.’

  I heard Richard let out a breath of relief.

  Richard had a meeting. When he’d left I went up to the attic. To the corner where I’d stacked my other life, the shoe box containing Gerald’s letters and the memorabilia of Victor I had not unpacked. I had brought my cassette recorder to the top of the house, and sat on Richard’s old school trunk listening to Victor’s music, Brahms and César Franck, while I looked at the photograph – the primitive in me confusing it with the person – which Molly had given me. Concerto in D Major; lyrical, Victor had called it. Sonata in A Major for violin and piano. Too passionate. Too emotional. Before Richard came home I had wrapped the laughing Victor, in his red Christmas pullover, in tissue paper and laid him to rest on the top of the tea-chest. It was my private burial, to Brahms and César Franck, the funeral to which I had not, as Victor’s mistress – how I hated the expression – been invited.

  The schools had broken up. Martha was in and out of the house with her friends, and Ben, done with A levels until after the results, was getting ready for Sweden. He was a strange lad, not openly impertinent like Martha, testing my patience, but cool and distant as if he were holding back. The night before he left with his rucksack, in common with the myriad other seventeen-year-olds sprung suddenly from their chains, I made a chink in the armour of his indifference. I’d found a T-shirt, misappro-priated by Mrs Bark, among Richard’s underwear.

  Ben was in his room – a reliquary to technology – at the microcomputer, bought by Richard for his birthday. He thought it was his father at the door and looked round expectantly. When he saw me he returned his attention to the screen, but not before the familiar mask, polite and guarded, had slipped over his features.

  ‘I found a T-shirt,’ I said. ‘I thought perhaps you might need it.’

  The rucksack, a stuffed green dummy, lay on the bed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’ll leave it here.’ I put it on the chest.

  ‘Thanks.’

  His back was rigid.

  He tapped out a message, intent and serious, and waited, anticipating some response from the screen before him.

  ‘I wish I could work one of those,’ I said. We had one in the lab. ‘One feels so stupid.’

  ‘It’s dead simple.’ He didn’t look round. ‘I write my own programs.’

  I looked at the screen. X-Exit to system. R-Retrieve a file. F-Format selection.

  ‘It doesn’t look very simple to me.’

  ‘That’s your command menu,’ Ben said. ‘Of course, it all depends on your software. It’s the software that tells your hardware what to do. The chip itself is no bigger than that,’ he demonstrated his thumbnail. ‘It handles information in tiny, computer-readable units. Its internal memory is measured in bytes or bits – an abbreviation of binary digit. Each bit is one unit of the binary number system and eight bits make up one byte…’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me,’ I said.

  Ben reached out an arm and pulled a chair close to him. I accepted the unspoken invitation.

  ‘I’ll give you an example,’ he said. ‘Take an office. An American company, say, distributing mechanical equipment throughout Europe, with a head office in Geneva and regional centres in each country. I’m the Birmingham depot and I receive an urgent order to supply a local UK company. I enter the order into my computer, which is connected to the local minicomputer, which has a telecommunications link to the company’s mainframe in Geneva…’

  It was a different Ben, open and enthusiastic. I was so enthralled with ROM and RAM, and learning how I could automatically trigger predetermined actions at several locations, that I did not notice the passing of time. Ben was explaining future applications of the microchip, and its uses in chemical analysis, when I became aware of Richard standing behind me. I had not heard him come in.

  ‘I wondered where you were…’

  ‘Ben was explaining…’

  In the presence of his father Ben relegated me to my place as interloper and retreated into his shell.

  ‘That was fascinating,’ I said, ‘I really enjoyed it.’

  I hoped he would understand that I meant not only the lesson in microprocessors, but the rapport.

  I wasn’t too sure about our own holiday. You would think we were going on safari. Richard had kept Irene’s estate car and I could see why. It was packed to t
he gills with the carry-cot and tennis rackets and kites and snorkels and beach balls and spades and picnic gear; overflowing before any of us had got in. There seemed not an inch of space to spare when Melanie appeared with a cool-bag, containing food for Cora, then with Cora herself in a fetching pink sun-bonnet. Martha came out of the house with her school satchel bulging with cans of Coca-Cola and packets of potato crisps to sustain her on the journey, and installed herself on the front seat next to Richard.

  ‘Jean’s going to sit there,’ Richard said.

  ‘You know I feel sick in the back,’ Martha said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I started to get into the car next to Melanie and Cora strapped into her seat.

  ‘Do as you’re told,’ Richard said.

  ‘Mummy always let me…’ Martha was stopped in mid-sentence by Richard’s slap.

  She began to cry and was joined in sympathy by Cora.

  The look she gave me as we swapped places was devastating.

  Martha had changed. No longer the easygoing, merry child she had been, she seemed moody and withdrawn. Her previous attitude to me had been indifferent or cheeky. Lately it had become hostile and offensive.

  Melanie hushed Cora and Martha opened the crisps to console herself.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat that rubbish,’ Melanie said, as Cora made a dive for the bag.

  Martha snivelled. ‘The ancient Egyptians ate wholemeal bread. They died before they were forty.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Richard wanted to make amends for the slap.

  ‘Miss Dooley. Miss Dooley says the Eskimos have flat noses from eating too much salt.’ She snatched the crisps from Cora’s hand, making her howl again.

  ‘Look what you’ve done now!’ Melanie said.

  The house, a chalet bungalow, was a hundred yards from the seamless sand, with its piles of seaweed – taking me back sharply to my own childhood – and the grey-green sea. By the time we reached it I had played geography endings and consequences, taken my turn to hold the wriggling Cora, who refused to go to sleep, and tried in vain to guess, yearning for tranquillity, what you said to a man wearing thirty-six balaclavas, although the question had been addressed, pointedly, to Richard.