A Second Wife

by Rosemary Friedman

  Like a caged bird, Martha sprang from the car, sending empty Coke cans into the gutter, and bolted, arms like windmills, face lifted against the gusts, towards the sea.

  ‘Martha!’ Richard called after her, looking at the laden estate car.

  ‘Let her go,’ I said, remembering what it was like to feel free.

  I had reservations. About being cooped up for two weeks in the little house. I need not have worried.

  The days were unassuming. We played at household chores. Shopped in the village. Made our way with our caravanserai to the shore. We lunched at the beach café – bare feet and shorts, shuffling trays for sausages and beans – or alfresco, gritty sandwiches and peaches dripping juice, in the lea of the wind-break.

  Looking back, I recognise the days as magic, reliving pre-war holidays with Jennie, through Martha, who played endless games of summer cricket on the sands with a gang she had found, and Cora, naked, in the pink bonnet, dappled by the sun, banging happily at her castle with a plastic spade, her two front teeth like tiny pearls.

  The diversions were unsophisticated. The Saturday fête where Cora won the beautiful baby competition for contestants under two; the fancy dress parade on the green with Martha as runner-up, her photograph in the local paper as ‘Miss Piggy’, for which Melanie had made her a paper snout; an evening at the local cinema, Martha deep in popcorn between Richard and myself; evening strolls by the lace-edged ocean, into the setting sun.

  We took turns to babysit. Cora was no trouble. Tired out by the bracing air, the sea breezes, she slept where she was dropped, not moving until morning.

  I walked with Richard, my arm through his, and it was as if Irene and Victor had never been. Leaving the three girls, his daughters and his granddaughter, we’d stop to embrace, absurdly, like young lovers, beneath the street lamps on the debris littered promenade. Our nights beneath the eaves took on a luminous quality which went beyond the act of love itself.

  As we grew close – Richard sprung from his responsibilities at the Maudsley, and I daring – for the first time since Victor – Martha, sensing the harmony, withdrew. She ignored the two of us, running off with her friends, or retreated with her book to the top bunk of the pair she shared with Melanie. When she spoke, she addressed her remarks to her older sister or made her wishes known through Cora, ostensibly addressing the uncomprehending child. Sometimes, over nothing, she’d burst into tears. We let her ignore us, thinking she’d come round. It was clear that she suffered, although we could not put a name to the disease.

  I walked with Melanie, picking our way barefooted among the worm casts on the night sands. She spoke for the first time about Irene and how as a child she had always felt angry with her mother for the fifty-minute hours she devoted to her patients, at what she imagined was her expense. She had had always to defer to the daily interlopers, always to ‘be quiet’.

  She wanted to know why I had betrayed my sex by marrying Richard, relinquished my independence to have my rhythm, pattern and place of living determined by his: why I had accepted, uncomplaining, the housewife role, with its preoccupations, monotonous, fragmented and isolating.

  As she delivered her dialectic, passionate and committed, to the salt air, I realised what I had missed in my years with Victor, the price I had paid in having no children of my own.

  ‘Sea Breezes’, on its corner, the garden on three sides, was a haven. I don’t know at what point it occurred to me that the lack of restraint, the carefree atmosphere, was engendered not only by the holiday spirit, which had invaded all of us including Cora – who crawled gurgling, like a demon, over the lawn – but by the fact that the bungalow was free from reminders of Irene. Within its walls she had never ‘said this’ or ‘done that’.

  Packing up, I could see the mantle of care falling again upon Richard’s shoulders, and I wondered if the ‘other selves’ we had discovered, our new found closeness, would survive the transition to Maida Vale.

  Having always had Molly in Virginia Water to look after Victor on the rare occasions when he wasn’t well, I hadn’t realised that when men were ill they expected to be rushed home in wailing ambulances and waited on by Nubian slaves. A few days after our return from the seaside – and fortunately a week before his fishing trip with Jeremy – Richard came down with flu.

  I had dropped everything and gone to the hospital to fetch him. He didn’t want to trouble me, he said from his bed. He only needed a hot water bottle – the electric blanket had gone for its summer overhaul – and an eiderdown (Irene stored them in the cupboard in Cora’s room), and the thermometer (Ben had had it last), and a honey and lemon drink – Irene used to put something else in it, he wasn’t sure what, a little whisky perhaps – and some patients’ notes from his study, in case he had to cancel appointments, and the portable television from Martha’s room, and the Radio Times, and a bowl in case he vomited, and the paracetamol – Mrs Bark always knew where they were – and a few grapes, and for me to stay with him (at the same time as cooking a little light supper), and to take Martha for her new school uniform and a party dress – she had suddenly sprung up – if he wasn’t better in a few days.

  He wasn’t. He had a particularly nasty dose of summer flu. The children’s doctor came and said there was a lot of it about and absolutely nothing to do except bed rest, and lots to drink and – with a wink at Richard – TLC.

  ‘What can you expect?’ Melanie said, when I explained his assumption that the tender loving care for his patient would be provided round the clock by me, as if I had no work to do. I did it. And suffered pangs of guilt engendered by the pathetic way which Richard regarded me as I went off in the morning, the chronicle of his fever-ridden hours with which he regaled me at night.

  Mrs Bark came in every day. Melanie, fearing for Cora, would not go near. Martha fetched and carried – it needed more than one – but held her handkerchief over her mouth and stayed by the door. I did feel sorry for Richard but my pity was tempered by the utter unreasonableness of his behaviour. ‘They’re all the same,’ Mrs Bark said. Adding ambiguously, ‘They need to have babies.’

  While Richard convalesced – chicken broth and indolent bouts of television in the afternoons, the curtains drawn against the sun – I went with Martha for her uniform. If nursing Richard was a revelation, shopping with his daughter was a rude shock.

  ‘Of course I’ll take her.’ My concurrence had been blithe.

  I had yet to learn what every mother knew.

  In the car the atmosphere was cool, Martha replying monosyllabically to every bright question. Tuning in to the ‘pop’ programme, she stared at the traffic, at the buses and the taxis and the passing motorists, as if she had never seen their like before. I had made an effort with Martha. Tried to make allowances for the violent mood swings, the antisocial acts. Watching her locked in battle with Richard over a Saturday night disco – ‘all the girls in my class are allowed’ – or the yellow streak she had bleached into her hair from the bottle Melanie used for Cora’s nappies, I took myself back to my own adolescence, when I had been a spindly teenager, and wondered had Jennie and I really been as compliant as I remembered, whether we hadn’t committed equally outrageous acts.

  ‘Are you looking forward to going back to school?’

  ‘Mm.’ She did not even look round.

  It was as much as the fatuous question deserved, but I had run out of one-sided conversation. I enlisted Martha’s help to find a parking meter but I don’t think that she really looked.

  The uniform was not too difficult. There was a special department in the store. Martha rolled her eyes and sighed when asked to extend her arm to check a sleeve length, but was otherwise amenable until it came to the blazer which she insisted was too big, but the assistant, trying to be helpful, said allowed for growth.

  ‘What does your mother think?’

  Martha looked at me, her eyes accusing.

  ‘She’s not my mother.’

  ‘One never knows these days…’
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  I was a phenomenon of the times. My own had to do with liberty bodices, and navy-blue knickers, and knicker-linings, and velour hats, with hatbands to be sewn on, and ties.

  In the restaurant, the heat of the Indian summer not alleviated by the fans, we shared a table with a shopping couple from the country. The younger woman said impatiently, ‘There’s no such thing as “art silk”.’

  Her elderly companion sighed. ‘They don’t seem to make them long enough. I like them to the knee. There used to be that nice Miss Jones in lingerie, she knew exactly.’

  She smiled seductively at Martha, then, eliciting no response, sympathetically at me.

  Martha studiously examined the menu.

  She liked people to think she was adopted.

  In the teenage department, to the cacophony of a rock group, Martha, trying on a fluorescent catsuit, came alive. It wasn’t difficult to guess what Richard’s reaction would be to the sight of his daughter looking like a very young tart, the stretch material clinging to her childish buttocks, the zip open to her navel. We tramped the length and breadth of Oxford Street where in the boutiques only the music varied. And went home empty-handed.

  Richard, looking out of the window, wondering what had happened to us (what did he think?), supported me.

  Martha went straight to her room, turning up the volume of the record player to maximum.

  When he felt better Richard took Martha shopping himself.

  They came back with a frosted pink catsuit.

  That night I dreamed of Victor. When I woke up to find Richard beside me I felt a sense of defeat.

  Richard fussed about going fishing, about leaving me with his family. Was I sure I’d be all right? I reassured him that we would go on as usual, he would only be away for a week. He admonished Melanie to take care of me, and Martha to be polite. Like any family we stood on the doorstep, Cora on Melanie’s hip, waving him off. I was sad to see Richard go – surprising myself at the depths of my emotion, newly sprung from the deep-freeze of my grief – but had made extensive plans to pass the time. I was meeting Jennie and Trevor in town for dinner and the theatre, and playing truant for an afternoon to see Sophie’s new collection. I removed the loose covers from the sitting-room, deciding it would be a week of belated spring-cleaning, and left them with a note about the vegetables, in a heap for Mrs Bark.

  When I got home from the lab., Martha was in the hall with a grizzling, red-cheeked Cora, who she said was teething, and the news that Melanie wasn’t feeling well and was lying down. The loose covers and the note about the vegetables were still on the floor where I’d left them. Mrs Bark had not turned up. She was not on the telephone. Had I been more experienced, perhaps I would have read the signs. I prized Cora from Martha, to put her in her highchair with a teething rusk, as I had seen Melanie do, but she screamed and Martha said, ‘Now look what you’ve done’ and Melanie appeared at the top of the stairs wrapped in her duvet, looking terrible, and croaked ‘What are you doing to Cora?’ before she started to sway, with a hand to her head, and collapsed on the landing.

  My professional judgement evaporated. Faced with the responsibility for Richard’s children I became an anxious mother. The doctor wouldn’t come. There was an epidemic of flu, he said, which was sweeping the district. I was to keep Melanie in bed as I had Richard. She was a worse patient than her father. ‘Don’t open the curtains.’ ‘Leave me alone.’ Cora grizzled. Constantly. She wouldn’t come to me, screaming and working herself up into a tantrum when I tried to pick her up, wanted only Martha, who soon grew tired of carrying her around. She refused to lie down in her cot in the day, although she was obviously dropping with fatigue. I rang the lab. to say I would not be in and tried to deal with the problems which had arisen on the phone. The work was piling up and consultants would soon be screaming urgently for overdue reports. I pushed Cora to the shops and she cried all the way. ‘Daddy Harry’ rang from a call-box to say that Mrs Bark had flu. She was sorry for the inconvenience with Dr Flynn away. Inconvenience. I suppose you could call it that. From the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, the bed empty and silent beside me, I didn’t sit down. I would rather have done three weeks’ work, even when there was a rush on, in the lab. I rang Jennie for the recipe, sent Martha to the butcher for bones, and made broth for Melanie. She spilled it over the bed. I rang Jennie again, about the blankets. Could you put them in the washing-machine? Irene’s washing-machine was transatlantic in design and only Mrs Bark was privy to the enigma of the dials with their promise of a thousand choices. I found the book of words and while Cora pulled at my skirts for biscuits, standing at my knee – she could pull herself up now – tried to decide upon the composition of the assorted pile of dirty linen which had accumulated – the degree of hardness of the water, the length of the wash, the strength of the spin – to crack the code of the misleading symbols, and to translate centigrade into fahrenheit in my addled mind. I should have had a ‘hot’ line to Jennie. I could hear her laughing at me from Wales. It wasn’t my fault. At home my mother had done the washing and with Victor it had been the laundry – collect on Wednesday and deliver on Friday – crisp and clean; compared with the trauma I was going through with Richard’s family, counting it (in and out) and writing the list, had been a doddle. Perhaps if I had slept. But Cora woke a million times in the night to look at me accusingly, her cheeks scarlet, over the bars of her cot, refusing, like a jack-in-the-box, to stay horizontal. Richard phoned. I did not want to spoil his holiday. I joined the conspiracy of motherhood – Melanie would not have approved – and asked ‘How was the weather?’ and ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at the fishing stories, and lied: ‘Yes, we were all fine.’

  On the third day Martha did not get up. She said she was dying and wanted her mother. The bravado was gone. She looked like a small girl. Melanie was coughing, a nasty rasping sound. I hadn’t a stethoscope and rang the doctor, insisting that he come. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, listened to Melanie’s chest and prescribed an antibiotic. I bundled Cora into the pushchair, she was quiet and listless, her hair damp and clinging to her forehead. There was a queue in the chemist’s. I bought fish for lunch, not sure what best to do with it, and got home before I remembered there was no more washing-powder – there was no more anything much – and a pile of Cora’s dirty clothes. I needed to go to the supermarket. I had forgotten to leave a note for the milkman and he had come and gone. Martha was hot. The bed soaked. I sponged her down and tried to persuade her to drink. She shivered and I found more blankets. Cora refused to eat, turning her head away from the spoon, the carrots and the peas – usually her favourite – which I had cooked. She was a leaden weight in my arms, no longer protesting, and burning hot. I put her to bed. Martha had broken the thermometer. I thought Cora might have a viral encephalitis, and was worried. I rang the doctor, who said: ‘Really, Mrs Flynn…’ He called. It was only a sore throat! I went again for medicine. In the car. Leaving them alone. I came home with a white syrup and a five millilitre plastic spoon. Cora turned her head away and closed her lips firmly. Melanie was coughing. Martha calling for a bowl. I took her a yellow plastic one, emptying it of Cora’s cardigans and vests, and went downstairs again to answer the doorbell. A man on the step informed me earnestly that ‘Armageddon’ was round the corner. It did not surprise me. I took his leaflet with its crude portrayal of peace on earth – the lion lying down with the lamb and East meeting West over a barrel of purple grapes – and shut the door.

  My head was spinning and I thought it was because I hadn’t slept. I began to shiver, put on a cardigan and closed the windows. The temperature was still unseasonably in the seventies. I rang Jennie, shedding tears on the phone. She said hoarsely that she would have come like a shot but both she and Trevor had the flu. The sound of crying filled my ears, and the stairs became an Everest to be assaulted by my aching legs. I kept going with aspirin – my throat too painful even to soothe Cora – I was worried that she was drinking little, not eating anyth
ing at all. I lay on my bed in mid-afternoon, the sun blazing through the windows. When I woke up it was dark and the house silent. I looked in on my patients and they were all sleeping, Cora with her mouth open. I had left her untouched lunch downstairs on the table together with umpteen half-finished glasses of Ribena and Martha’s breakfast tray. The kitchen was tidy. The dishes had been put away. When I woke in the morning, the bed on fire, my bones aching, Melanie – in Richard’s bathrobe, and pale as a ghost – was on her feet.

  By the time Richard came home we were on the mend, even Mrs Bark – with the saga, blow by blow, leaning on the broom handle, of her indisposition – had returned. I told him we’d all had flu. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he said. ‘I would have come home.’

  I was glad I had not asked him to. His absence had confirmed my new-found need of him, and it wasn’t just to help me with the chores. When he came through the door with his fishing things I clung to him and it was as if it was I who had come home. Had I sent for him from Wales I would not have enjoyed the aftermath of my baptism by fire, which brought unexpected rewards. Cora, taking her first unsteady steps – grinning as if it were the world she was conquering – held out her arms towards me, collapsing into my lap. Martha was agreeable. Melanie more accepting, although nothing was said. Even Mrs Bark seemed less prickly, seeming not to refer so frequently to Irene, and consulting me, as if she valued my opinion, about the repairing of a chair cover and the advisability of a new mophead.

  ‘I had no idea,’ I said to Bob, palely back at work, ‘how much there is to do!’