The Mark-2 Wife Read online

  ‘Do you know those people I was talking to?’ she said to her partner, but with a portion of her hair still in his mouth he made no effort at reply. Passing near to her, she noticed the thick, square fingers of Mr Lowhr embedded in the flesh of his wife’s shoulder. The couple danced by, seeing her and smiling, and it seemed to Anna that their smiles were as empty as the Ritchies’ sympathy.

  ‘My husband is leaving me for a younger woman,’ she said to the bald man, a statement that caused him to shrug. He had pressed himself close to her, his knees on her thighs, forcing her legs this way and that. His hands were low on her body now, advancing on her buttocks. He was eating her hair.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Anna said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that.’

  He released her where they stood and smiled agreeably: she could see pieces of her hair on his teeth. He walked away, and she turned and went in the opposite direction.

  ‘We’re really most concerned,’ said Mrs Ritchie. She and her husband were standing where Anna had left them, as though waiting for her. General Ritchie held out her glass to her.

  ‘Why should you be concerned? That bald man ate my hair. That’s what people do to used-up women like me. They eat your hair and force their bodies on you. You know, General.’

  ‘Certainly, I don’t. Not in the least.’

  ‘That man knew all about me. D’you think he’d have taken his liberties if he hadn’t? A man like that can guess.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Ritchie firmly. She stared hard at Anna, endeavouring to impress upon her the errors in her logic.

  ‘If you want to know, that man’s a drunk,’ said the General. ‘He was far gone when he arrived here and he’s more so now.’

  ‘Why are you saying that?’ Anna cried shrilly. ‘Why are you telling me lies and mocking me?’

  ‘Lies?’ demanded the General, snapping the word out. ‘Lies?’

  ‘My dear, we’re not mocking you,’ murmured Mrs Ritchie.

  ‘You and those Lowhrs and everyone else, God knows. The big event at this party is that Edward Mackintosh will reject his wife for another.’

  ‘Oh now, Mrs Mackintosh –’

  ‘Second marriages are often happier, you know. No reason why they shouldn’t be.’

  ‘We would like to help if we could,’ Mrs Ritchie said.

  ‘Help? In God’s name, how can I be helped? How can two elderly strangers help me when my husband gives me up? What kind of help? Would you give me money – an income, say? Or offer me some other husband? Would you come to visit me and talk to me so that I shouldn’t be lonely? Or strike down my husband, General, to show your disapproval? Would you scratch out the little girl’s eyes for me, Mrs Ritchie? Would you slap her brazen face?’

  ‘We simply thought we might help in some way,’ Mrs Ritchie said. ‘Just because we’re old and pretty useless doesn’t mean we can’t make an effort.’

  ‘We are all God’s creatures, you are saying. We should offer aid to one another at every opportunity, when marriages get broken and decent husbands are made cruel. Hold my hands then, and let us wait for Edward and his Mark-2 wife. Let’s all three speak together and tell them what we think.’

  She held out her hands, but the Ritchies did not take them.

  ‘We don’t mean to mock you, as you seem to think,’ the General said. ‘I must insist on that, madam.’

  ‘You’re mocking me with your talk about helping. The world is not like that. You like to listen to me for my entertainment value: I’m a good bit of gossip for you. I’m a woman going on about her husband and then getting insulted by a man and seeing the Lowhrs smiling over it. Tell your little grandchildren that some time.’

  Mrs Ritchie said that the Lowhrs, she was sure, had not smiled at any predicament that Anna had found herself in, and the General impatiently repeated that the man was drunk.

  ‘The Lowhrs smiled,’ Anna said, ‘and you have mocked me too. Though perhaps you don’t even know it.’

  As she pushed a passage through the people, she felt the sweat running on her face and her body. There was a fog of smoke in the room by now, and the voices of the people, struggling to be heard above the music, were louder than before. The man she had danced with was sitting in a corner with his shoes off, and a woman in a crimson dress was trying to persuade him to put them on again. At the door of the room she found Mr Lowhr. ‘Shall we dance?’ he said.

  She shook her head, feeling calmer all of a sudden. Mr Lowhr suggested a drink.

  ‘May I telephone?’ she said. ‘Quietly somewhere?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ said Mr Lowhr, smiling immensely at her. ‘Up two flights, the door ahead of you: a tiny guest-room. Take a glass with you.’

  She nodded, saying she’d like a little whisky.

  ‘Let me give you a tip,’ Mr Lowhr said as he poured her some from a nearby bottle. ‘Always buy Haig whisky. It’s distilled by a special method.’

  ‘You’re never going so soon?’ said Mrs Lowhr, appearing at her husband’s side.

  ‘Just to telephone,’ said Mr Lowhr. He held out his hand with the glass of whisky in it. Anna took it, and as she did so she caught a glimpse of the Ritchies watching her from the other end of the room. Her calmness vanished. The Lowhrs, she noticed, were looking at her too, and smiling. She wanted to ask them why they were smiling, but she knew if she did that they’d simply make some polite reply. Instead she said:

  ‘You shouldn’t expose your guests to men who eat hair. Even unimportant guests.’

  She turned her back on them and passed from the room. She crossed the hall, sensing that she was being watched. ‘Mrs Mackintosh,’ Mr Lowhr called after her.

  His plumpness filled the doorway. He hovered, seeming uncertain about pursuing her. His face was bewildered and apparently upset.

  ‘Has something disagreeable happened?’ he said in a low voice across the distance between them.

  ‘You saw. You and your wife thought fit to laugh, Mr Lowhr.’

  ‘I do assure you, Mrs Mackintosh, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s fascinating, I suppose. Your friends the Ritchies find it fascinating too.’

  ‘Look here, Mrs Mackintosh –’

  ‘Oh, don’t blame them. They’ve nothing left but to watch and mock, at an age like that. The point is, there’s a lot of hypocrisy going on tonight.’ She nodded at Mr Lowhr to emphasize that last remark, and then went swiftly upstairs.

  ‘I imagine the woman’s gone off home,’ the General said. ‘I dare say her husband’s drinking in a pub.’

  ‘I worried once,’ replied Mrs Ritchie, speaking quietly, for she didn’t wish the confidence to be heard by others. ‘That female, Mrs Flyte.’

  The General roared with laughter. ‘Trixie Flyte,’ he shouted. ‘Good God, she was a free-for-all!’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet.’

  ‘Dear girl, you didn’t ever think –’

  ‘I didn’t know what to think, if you want to know.’

  Greatly amused, the General seized what he hoped would be his final drink. He placed it behind a green plant on a table. ‘Shall we dance one dance,’ he said, ‘just to amuse them? And then when I’ve had that drink to revive me we can thankfully make our way.’

  But he found himself talking to nobody, for when he had turned from his wife to secrete his drink she had moved away. He followed her to where she was questioning Mrs Lowhr.

  ‘Some little tiff,’ Mrs Lowhr was saying as he approached.

  ‘Hardly a tiff,’ corrected Mrs Ritchie. ‘The woman’s terribly upset.’ She turned to her husband, obliging him to speak.

  ‘Upset,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, there now,’ cried Mrs Lowhr, taking each of the Ritchies by an arm. ‘Why don’t you take the floor and forget it?’

  They both of them recognized from her tone that she was thinking the elderly exaggerated things and didn’t always understand the ways of marriage in the modern world. The General especially resented the insinuation. H
e said:

  ‘Has the woman gone away?’

  ‘She’s upstairs telephoning. Some silly chap upset her apparently, during a dance. That’s all it is, you know.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick entirely,’ said the General angrily, ‘and you’re trying to say we have. The woman believes her husband may arrive here with the girl he’s chosen as his second wife.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’ cried Mrs Lowhr with a tinkling laugh.

  ‘It is what the woman thinks,’ said the General loudly, ‘whether it’s ridiculous or not.’ More quietly, Mrs Ritchie added:

  ‘She thinks she has a powerful intuition when all it is is a disease.’

  ‘I’m cross with this Mrs Mackintosh for upsetting you two dear people!’ cried Mrs Lowhr with a shrillness that matched her roundness and her glasses. ‘I really and truly am.’

  A big man came up as she spoke and lifted her into his arms, preparatory to dancing with her. ‘What could anyone do?’ she called back at the Ritchies as the man rotated her away. ‘What can you do for a nervy woman like that?’

  There was dark wallpaper on the walls of the room: black and brown with little smears of muted yellow. The curtains matched it; so did the bedspread on the low single bed, and the covering on the padded headboard. The carpet ran from wall to wall and was black and thick. There was a narrow wardrobe with a door of padded black leather and brass studs and an ornamental brass handle. The dressing-table and the stool in front of it reflected this general motif in different ways. Two shelves, part of the bed, attached to it on either side of the pillows, served as bedside tables: on each there was a lamp, and on one of them a white telephone.

  As Anna closed and locked the door, she felt that in a dream she had been in a dark room in a house where there was a party, waiting for Edward to bring her terrible news. She drank a little whisky and moved towards the telephone. She dialled a number and when a voice answered her call she said:

  ‘Dr Abbatt? It’s Anna Mackintosh.’

  His voice, as always, was so soft she could hardly hear it. ‘Ah, Mrs Mackintosh,’ he said.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Mackintosh, of course. Tell me now.’

  ‘I’m at a party given by people called Lowhr. Edward was to be here but he didn’t turn up. I was all alone and then two old people like scarecrows talked to me. They said their name was Ritchie. And a man ate my hair when we were dancing. The Lowhrs smiled at that.’

  ‘I see. Yes?’

  ‘I’m in a room at the top of the house. I’ve locked the door.’

  ‘Tell me about the room, Mrs Mackintosh.’

  ‘There’s black leather on the wardrobe and the dressing-table. Curtains and things match. Dr Abbatt?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Ritchies are people who injure other people, I think. Intentionally or unintentionally, it never matters.’

  ‘They are strangers to you, these Ritchies?’

  ‘They attempted to mock me. People know at this party, Dr Abbatt; they sense what’s going to happen because of how I look.’

  Watching for her to come downstairs, the Ritchies stood in the hall and talked to one another.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘I know it would be nicer to go home.’

  ‘What can we do, old sticks like us? We know not a thing about such women. It’s quite absurd.’

  ‘The woman’s on my mind, dear. And on yours too. You know it.’

  ‘I think she’ll be more on our minds if we come across her again. She’ll turn nasty, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Yes, but it would please me to wait a little.’

  ‘To be insulted,’ said the General.

  ‘Oh, do stop being so cross, dear.’

  ‘The woman’s a stranger to us. She should regulate her life and have done with it. She has no right to bother people.’

  ‘She is a human being in great distress. No, don’t say anything, please, if it isn’t pleasant.’

  The General went into a sulk, and at the end of it he said grudgingly:

  ‘Trixie Flyte was nothing.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Trixie Flyte is dead and done for years ago. I didn’t worry like this woman if that’s what’s on your mind.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ lied the General. ‘The woman worries ridiculously.’

  ‘I think, you know, we may yet be of use to her: I have a feeling about that.’

  ‘For God’s sake, leave the feelings to her. We’ve had enough of that for one day.’

  ‘As I said to her, we’re not entirely useless. No one ever can be.’

  ‘You feel you’re being attacked again, Mrs Mackintosh. Are you calm? You haven’t been drinking too much?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I am being replaced by a younger person.’

  ‘You say you’re in a bedroom. Is it possible for you to lie on the bed and talk to me at the same time? Would it be comfortable?’

  Anna placed the receiver on the bed and settled herself. She picked it up again and said:

  ‘If he died, there would be a funeral and I’d never forget his kindness to me. I can’t do that if he has another wife.’

  ‘We have actually been over this ground,’ said Dr Abbatt more softly than ever. ‘But we can of course go over it again.’

  ‘Any time, you said.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What has happened is perfectly simple. Edward is with the girl. He is about to arrive here to tell me to clear off. She’s insisting on that. It’s not Edward, you know.’

  ‘Mrs Mackintosh, I’m going to speak firmly now. We’ve agreed between us that there’s no young girl in your husband’s life. You have an obsession, Mrs Mackintosh, about the fact that you have never had children and that men sometimes marry twice –’

  ‘There’s such a thing as the Mark-2 wife!’ Anna cried. ‘You know there is. A girl of nineteen who’ll delightedly give birth to Edward’s sons.’

  ‘No, no –’

  ‘I had imagined Edward telling me. I had imagined him pushing back his hair and lighting a cigarette in his untidy way. “I’m terribly sorry,” he would say, and leave me nothing to add to that. Instead it’s like this: a nightmare.’

  ‘It is not a nightmare, Mrs Mackintosh.’

  ‘This party is a nightmare. People are vultures here.’

  ‘Mrs Mackintosh, I must tell you that I believe you’re seeing the people at this party in a most exaggerated light.’

  ‘A man –’

  ‘A man nibbled your hair. Worse things can happen. This is not a nightmare, Mrs Mackintosh. Your husband has been delayed. Husbands are always being delayed. D’you see? You and I and your husband are all together trying to rid you of this perfectly normal obsession you’ve developed. We mustn’t complicate matters, now must we?’

  ‘I didn’t run away, Dr Abbatt. I said to myself I mustn’t run away from this party. I must wait and face whatever was to happen. You told me to face things.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you, my dear. We agreed between us. We talked it out, the difficulty about facing things, and we saw the wisdom of it. Now I want you to go back to the party and wait for your husband.’

  ‘He’s more than two hours late.’

  ‘My dear Mrs Mackintosh, an hour or so is absolutely nothing these days. Now listen to me please.’

  She listened to the soft voice as it reminded her of all that between them they had agreed. Dr Abbatt went over the ground, from the time she had first consulted him to the present moment. He charted her obsession until it seemed once again, as he said, a perfectly normal thing for a woman of forty to have.

  After she had said goodbye, Anna sat on the bed feeling very calm. She had read the message behind Dr Abbatt’s words: that it was ridiculous, her perpetually going on in this lunatic manner. She had come to a party and in no time at all she’d been behaving in a way that was, she supposed, mildly crazy. It always happen
ed, she knew, and it would as long as the trouble remained: in her mind, when she began to worry, everything became jumbled and unreal, turning her into an impossible person. How could Edward, for heaven’s sake, be expected to live with her fears and her suppositions? Edward would crack as others would, tormented by an impossible person. He’d become an alcoholic or he’d have some love affair with a woman just as old as she was, and the irony of that would be too great. She knew, as she sat there, that she couldn’t help herself and that as long as she lived with Edward she wouldn’t be able to do any better. ‘I have lost touch with reality,’ she said. ‘I shall let him go, as a bird is released. In my state how can I have rights?’

  She left the room and slowly descended the stairs. There were framed prints of old motor-cars on the wall and she paused now and again to examine one, emphasizing to herself her own continued calmness. She was thinking that she’d get herself a job. She might even tell Edward that Dr Abbatt had suggested their marriage should end since she wasn’t able to live with her thoughts any more. She’d insist on a divorce at once. She didn’t mind the thought of it now, because of course it would be different: she was doing what she guessed Dr Abbatt had been willing her to do for quite a long time really: she was taking matters into her own hands, she was acting positively – rejecting, not being rejected herself. Her marriage was ending cleanly and correctly.

  She found her coat and thanked the dark-skinned maid who held it for her. Edward was probably at the party by now, but in the new circumstances that was neither here nor there. She’d go home in a taxi and pack a suitcase and then telephone for another taxi. She’d leave a note for Edward and go to a hotel, without telling him where.

  ‘Good-night,’ she said to the maid. She stepped towards the hall door as the maid opened it for her, and as she did so she felt a hand touch her shoulder. ‘No, Edward,’ she said. ‘I must go now.’ But when she turned she saw that the hand belonged to Mrs Ritchie. Behind her, looking tired, stood the General. For a moment there was a silence. Then Anna, speaking to both of them, said: