A Second Wife

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

'I was not a widow. Had I been married to Victor it might have been easier. It was Molly who had the comfort of the children, hers and Victor's... I was left alone to come to terms with my grief, despair and anger, most of all anger in a society which is based upon the couple and in which death is unmentionable.'

After an affair lasting twenty-six years, Jean Banks' married lover dies. Gradually the self-assured Jean is overwhelmed by loneliness, sleeping pills and depression. Routine tasks defeat her - and she avoids suicide only by a twist of fate.

In the midst of her unhappiness, a friendship blossoms with Victor's widow, and ultimately life and love are rediscovered. A Second Wife, the sequel to A Loving Mistress, is the story of a very human recovery - the journey from darkness to all-enveloping love.

Release date: June 15, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 127

Sample

I realised suddenly, and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before, that it was my last night of being Jean Banks.

I had thought that only my name would change. How stupid of me. How short-sighted.

Richard’s parents, although frail, were still active. They came to the wedding-breakfast given by the Potters, Richard’s friends. Jeremy worked with him at the Maudsley. Muriel had made everything herself. Just looking at the table in the Hampstead dining-room, with its terrines, and its mousses in the shape of fish, made me feel inadequate.

‘It’s all frightfully easy,’ Muriel, who was a photographer and whose black and white portraits lined the walls, said breezily when complimented. ‘I sling everything in the Magimix.’

They had given us a food-processor for a wedding present. She might just as well have given me her Hasselblad. I did not know what to do with it.

‘Taste this gougère, darling,’ Richard said, offering me a bit of his hot choux pastry puff, no heavier than a whisper. ‘Muriel made it.’

I could not cook. Only eggs and grills and heating things up. I’d never had to.

‘No one’s looking after the bride!’ Muriel offered me a plate of triangular pastries. ‘Börek. They’re Turkish.’

Jeremy proposed the toast. He chose his words carefully. It never ceased to amaze me how we avoid the truth for fear of offending. Everyone in the room was aware that the deaths of Victor and Irene had made the day possible, but Jeremy rocked back and forth on his heels and looked at his glass in embarrassment, picked and pecked at his words, rather than mention the dead, Richard’s and mine. 

When Richard replied, eulogising me, Ben and Martha looked embarrassed, and Melanie, with Cora, left the room.


Richard kissed me in front of everyone and I had a momentary sensation of warmth and belonging which was probably due to the champagne.

Mrs Bark had done her grudging best in the house. It was shining and comparatively tidy and she had cut yellow roses from the garden and put them on the kitchen table. We had taken the children out to dinner, a Chinese restaurant where they had seated us at a round table with a ‘lazy Susan’. Seeing the carnation in Richard’s buttonhole and my outfit – a little over the top for won ton soup and chicken chow mein – the manager had put two and two together and hovered, his gold tooth glinting, and leaned over Martha, covering her hand with his to her acute discomfort, to demonstrate the correct hold of her chopsticks. The evening had not been a success. Melanie was silently reproving, Martha not feeling well and Ben fidgety because his Applied Maths was on Monday and he wanted to get back to his revision. Cora, as if she sensed the atmosphere, cried in her carry-cot, upsetting the other customers. By the time it got to the toffee bananas the tension had eased a bit and looking round the table at Richard’s children I had a swift and disturbing fantasy that they were mine.

We were not unusual, Richard and I, with our lopsided family. Times had not only changed but been transfigured. I don’t suppose the team which stumbled upon the efficacy of exogenous oestrogens in inhibiting ovulation had any idea of their radical effects upon society. Its benefits were indisputable, but sometimes I wondered if they had not come from a Pandora’s box of less attractive consequences. Women, it was true, were free. To indulge in sex, casual or committed, without fear. We no longer needed to get steamed up about it. But what about the debased coin of relationships at which no one was any longer prepared to work? At the first hint of discord, partners were discarded, or exchanged, like ill-fitting shoes. The proliferation of second and third marriages – with their ‘his’ and ‘hers’ children – of ageing men with nubile wives and tiny babies, of menopausal women espousing virile youths, of single mothers and one-parent families, of the swinging and swapping, the matrimonial musical chairs, that was taking place stemmed directly from the capital-lettered Pill, which bespoke happiness but did not discharge its claim.


I may have married Richard on the rebound, after Victor, but I could never complain that my eyes had not been open. Molly had seen to that.

‘It’s difficult enough bringing up your own children,’ she’d said, glancing at Lucy’s photograph. ‘I can’t begin to think how one would manage someone else’s.’

I understood their hostility towards me, Ben’s and Martha’s (Melanie was merely supercilious) – any child deprived of his mother’s love at a crucial stage in his development would feel the same – and was convinced that patience and understanding on my side, and time on theirs, would help to dispel it. What Molly had failed to convey was that it is in the minutiae of daily life that children cause most havoc.

We were all tired after the wedding. It had been a long and stressful day. Richard saw Martha into bed – he still tucked her up – while I got out of Sophie’s coffee silk in my unfamiliar home. Caught up in the outward manifestations of our union, Richard’s and mine, our public. . .