Authors: Roberta Latow
There was a crack and a rumble, then a bang as a million fireflies burst on to the night sky. Not fireflies but fireworks. A whistling sound from the lawn and a rocket burst in a shower of pink stars that rained down over the lawn. Another burst of noise, and another, and another. Several explosions at the same time and the night sky lit up like high noon. People rushed from
the house on to the lawn, wanting the best view of the display, the culmination of the boys’ birthday party.
Both Sally and Page saw Rosamond walking down the stairs and into the drawing room. ‘Is Anoushka all right?’ Page asked.
‘Well, I don’t know about that.’
‘Do you think I should go up?’ asked Sally.
‘No, I don’t think that’s necessary. Sorry, I think I might have given you the wrong impression. What I wanted to say was, I think she’s all right but I’m sure she can’t help but be somewhat upset. She’s still very angry with me.’
‘Well, Rosamond, you really can’t blame her, can you?’
‘Yes, Sally, actually I can. No one ever wants to listen to the other woman, her side of the story, least of all the ex-wife.’
Rosamond began to walk away but Sally, with a gentle hand on her arm, stopped her. ‘I’m sorry if that sounded rude, Rosamond, you have been as gracious to us all as anyone could be, and so hospitable. But can you blame us? She is our friend.’
‘Look, if she’s your friend, really your friend … Oh, never mind.’ And once more Rosamond tried to walk away from the girls.
‘No, please, what were you going to say?’ asked Sally.
‘You don’t know how lucky she is to have made friends with women like you. Anoushka is wonderful but there are two sides to this story, and as I said, no
one ever listens to the bitch who steals another woman’s man. If you were really her friends you
would
listen to my side of the story, and then maybe you could help her to leave her bitterness behind her and really get on with a new and better life for herself. For as long as I am her enemy, and she will not see our side of it, she will carry the wound that Robert and I have inflicted upon her. You can’t imagine that either of us wants that for her, even though we no longer want her in our lives.’
‘Are you speaking here as the other woman or as a psychiatrist?’ asked Page.
‘Probably a little bit of both.’
‘She still loves Robert, doesn’t she?’ asked Sally.
‘I don’t know. I think she probably hates him more now than loves him, which in a way is a good sign but not great. Great would be if she just let us go, neither loved nor hated any more.’
‘Now that
is
the psychiatrist speaking,’ said Page.
‘Yes, I suppose it is. But she
should
hate him. He was foul to her. He is a remarkable and wonderful man, charismatic and vital in many ways. Women fall in love with him all the time. Nurses are devoted to him, they see him as god-like and a man they would like to know and care for; his colleagues look to him for direction. Robert has many facets to him, but he can be a bastard when crossed. She was constantly crossing him, and he was a bastard to her.’
‘And he isn’t to you?’
‘No, he has never been that to me. You see, we’ve
been in love for a very long time. The Anoushka you know has come a long way since Robert left her. She is quite a different person. Some women are not at their best when they’re in love, especially if that love is obsessive and possessive.’
‘Do you know her background?’ asked Page.
‘No. As well as I knew Anoushka, she was always very secretive, playing her cards close to her chest. I may have been interested once, I am no longer. She’s out of my life, on any intimate level anyway. Our paths will always cross because of the boys but that’s just about it. It’s counterproductive for me to know anything about where she came from at this stage in our relationship. However, I don’t think it would have been counterproductive for her to have heard my side of Robert’s and my love story. I just tried. She doesn’t want to know. I might be wrong, she might be right. What does it matter? We’ve all started afresh, only she needs more help than we do. She’s been wronged, but isn’t blameless either in this story.’
All during their conversation the din made by the fireworks never stopped. It seemed to grow louder and louder. Rosamond could just about hear Sally when she said, ‘I’d like to listen to your side of the story, not so you can try and justify your behaviour but for Anoushka’s sake. You know she has found someone? He’s in love with her and she’s putting him off, asking him to wait while she gets herself wholly together. I have a vested interest in that relationship. Yes, I think I would like to hear what you have to say.’
‘Anoushka says she has no room in her life for a second bad marriage,’ added Page.
‘You see, she knew it was a bad marriage but she was happy in it and so it didn’t matter to her. I’m glad to hear she doesn’t want another one. Come into the study away from this noise. We can see the fireworks from there and I really would like to tell you a few things. I’ll be brief and I promise that to listen to what I have to say will not be a disloyal act on your part if that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘It does,’ said Sally.
‘How clever of you to understand this conversation does bother us,’ added Page.
‘Don’t let it. Anoushka will never know. And I would never have said anything except that the bond you three women have forged is so obvious it gave me the courage to speak up.’
In the study Rosamond closed the doors. She had the privacy she needed. ‘It’s all quite sad in a way. Sad for everyone concerned. I was married to a man called Dr Harley Rogers. I was twenty years old when I met him, a scholarship student at Harvard Medical School. I was dirt poor, and I do mean dirt poor. I was one of those born into genteel poverty, all the trappings of a good family and no money. I was in one of the wealthiest schools in the country, and always starving and in hand-me-downs donated by my sorority sisters. But I had a burning desire to become a doctor, and I was of course young. The way we met was quite simple and terribly romantic.
‘The renowned Harley Rogers was at Harvard giving some lectures. I hadn’t enough money to eat regular meals and fainted in the street. He took me home and fed me. Recently widowed, he was much sought after by women – terrifically handsome, a young sixty year old, and very fit. We fell in love. He bedded me, and I knew for the first time what it was to be in a state of sexual bliss. We married on condition that I carried on with my education and internship, then started a practice. He was the founder and bright star of the Harley Rogers Clinic here in Lakeside. It was heavily endowed with old money, his as well.
‘I never knew or cared about his money. I fell in love with the man. He was remarkably attractive and kind, a medical genius who was not a bore but an exciting and vital human being. There was a scandal at first: the age difference, me being off at school most of the time, not being what was expected of a wife of such a famous man. But no one challenged Harley. People soon saw we were a real love story and they accepted me and learned to respect me for making him happy and having a successful career of my own.
‘Then Robert came into my life when he became my husband’s protégé. We fell in love. It was platonic love. We never touched each other, that would have been unthinkable. We loved Harley too much. The sexual attraction we had for each other was simply set aside. We never dreamed of being anything to each other but platonic lovers with a deep and abiding affection for each other. Our love was set apart from my love for my
husband. It was years before we declared ourselves to each other.
‘Robert and I always agreed that though I was first in his life, he could be nothing but second in mine. We remained deeply in love on those terms for all the years Harley was alive and then he died. It was more of a loss to me than I imagined it would be because Harley and I had always discussed what would happen to me in the event of his death. Our age difference made it a near certainty that he would die before I would. For years he prepared me for that and to take over some of his work at the clinic. All that talk and preparation vanished in the wake of real loss. I wasn’t prepared for it, no matter how much I thought I would be.
‘Suddenly I was an extremely wealthy woman, one with responsibilities, keeping his work at the clinic on the right track. And I had lost the man I loved and revered. I needed time to grieve. Robert respected that and gave me the space I needed to heal, so that I would be ready to take on a second love, as full and rich as the first.
‘During that time it was not unusual for him to go abroad to operate or to spend time at heart clinics teaching other surgeons his technique. So I thought nothing of it when he went to Egypt and then arranged to take a month’s holiday in France which he had agreed to break into to give several lectures in Paris. We agreed that was to be our last separation and on his return we would set the date. It never happened.
‘He met Anoushka in Egypt. It was quite simple – he became sexually besotted with her. A kind of sexual madness took him over. A decadent, exotic, erotic life he had never known or experienced before opened up for him and swallowed him whole. Our love went momentarily out the window. When he returned to Lakeside with Anoushka, he woke up from the dream of lust as a way of life, and knew immediately that his relationship with her was over.
‘He came to me and told me what had happened. That he had been caught in a trap that was not easily escaped. He told me that Anoushka had a pathetic story, one too depraved to talk about, and that she must be let down easily. Nothing more than that about her. He had made the dreadful mistake that men sometimes, to their own detriment, make. He mixed up erotic sexual overdrive with love. It didn’t matter, this hiccup in our love story. A mistake is not necessarily the death knell for a love such as ours. He was going to send her away. In the end he was unable to, she became pregnant. The rest is history.’
‘So far I still see Anoushka as an innocent victim, Rosamond.’
‘She wasn’t to us, Page. We were two people who understood what had happened to us. But that didn’t make it easier for us. I didn’t see Robert for a long time. I couldn’t bear to. To see him married to another woman and trapped in a marriage that he despised and didn’t want, the marriage we had wanted so desperately for ourselves, was too painful. I took a year
off, and came to terms with his marriage to someone else. The children were born. And the moment I saw them I loved them as if they were my very own. They were the children we would never have. He returned to me, and I could not stay away from him. We resumed our platonic love again. At least, that was the way it was at the beginning, and I embraced Anoushka and her family as my friends.
‘I never had any malice towards her but from the beginning you could see that she could not handle marriage with Robert, raising the children, running a home the way he wanted to live in it. She was too obsessed with Robert and her relationship with him. That was her life, her world. She would do anything to keep him happy and her marriage intact.
‘Early on, it was Anoushka who kept dragging me into her life. She was wily, saw how happy Robert was when I was with them. It’s true, I was happy to be with him, to add something to his home life which seemed to be a series of concessions and more concessions to make the marriage work. I was in love, he was in love, we did what we could for each other and to ease the pain of not being together.
‘Anoushka used me to keep her husband. She will never admit that to herself, it will always be me who has to be to blame. Me who will have to carry the tag: deceiver, cheat, thief. And I was all of those things and not at all proud of it. But she helped to make me what I became.
‘Yes, Robert was wrong. He should never have
married her, but he wanted his children. Yes, he should have gone to her and told her the truth about us. I begged him to, believing it cruel of him not to. Those first years, I believe he did try to make it work, and when it didn’t he tried to ignore to the best of his ability his unhappiness. We were used to loving each other, we were bound together in love, and so I became his mistress. It was the best we could do, because the children were too young to break up the family life they had. He could not imagine Anoushka bringing them up alone.
‘If anyone ever tells you it’s easy to be a mistress, don’t believe them. She flaunted her love for Robert in front of me and everyone else, and Robert and I had to live with that. Over the years he gave her any number of reasons to open her eyes and see how unhappy he was with her. She saw nothing. In the end, he saw his life ebbing away and himself an unfulfilled man with too many regrets and bitterness beginning to seep into his soul. He couldn’t bear it, not one more day. End of story.’
‘I think you
are
trying to justify your behaviour, you know,’ said Sally.
‘You see, I told you, no one wants to hear the other woman’s story.’
The sky was a dead grey colour and rain was teeming down. Drops were hitting the tarmac with the force of lead shot charged from a gun. They sent up sprays of water round the quartet’s ankles. Huddled together, holding large black silk umbrellas over their heads, they seemed oblivious to the bad weather. Having arrived in Paris from New York aboard Concorde, they were still riding high on their successful weekend.
‘I don’t know how to thank you all,’ said Anoushka.
‘You can’t thank people who have shared a good time with you,’ said Jahangir.
‘Isn’t he wonderful?’ Anoushka and Page mimicked Sally in unison and then burst into laugher.
‘You got me,’ she said, smiling.
‘I hate goodbyes,’ said Page.
‘We’re all getting soaked standing out here,’ said Anoushka.
They all seemed reluctant to break up the party. Jahangir was on his way from France to Pakistan where he was going to play in a polo match between
Pakistan and India, a match of tradition and great fame that was played every year on the most remote field in the world in a spectacular setting, the mountainous region of Pakistan. Men had been playing polo there since Jahangir’s great-great-grandfather’s time. It was an event that brought people from the far corners of Pakistan and India.
Sally and Anoushka were bound for Cap d’Antibes and the
Black Orchid
. Page was en route back to Hydra. Each was changing direction, shifting gear, leaving the others behind, none of them quite wanting to do so. But they did want to get on with their lives. Somehow, standing there in the rain, not one of them could quite say: The party’s over. So they just kept making inane conversation to delay the women from mounting the stairs into the small Lear jet that would take them from Paris to the South of France.
‘All a man’s life he waits for the bell to toll,’ Jahangir suddenly declared. ‘To hear that ring of real happiness that makes him come that little bit more alive to himself and the world. It’s a sound like no other, neither loud nor soft. It doesn’t even have to be particularly sweet, only clear. When a man hears that there is no looking back, there’s no looking forward, merely an acute awareness, bliss, an extraordinary sense of contentment. I hope you too have heard it, Sally.’
He raised her arm, the one that was holding the umbrella, until it was high up over her head and then, moving out from under his, he dropped his umbrella
and took shelter under hers. They watched the umbrella roll several feet away from them. From his pocket, he removed a ring and took her hand in his. ‘It was my great-grandmother’s. I did promise you a ring.’ Then he slipped it on her finger.
It was a large square-cut diamond set in a single row of emeralds and then a row of dark blue sapphires. Sally dropped the umbrella. Jahangir swung her up off the tarmac and into his arms. They kissed amidst a confusion of tumbling umbrellas, rain drenching them, Anoushka and Page trying to cover them with their own umbrellas. Jahangir slid Sally slowly down his body and away from him and placed her, as if she was a delicate piece of porcelain, on the rain-swept tarmac.
‘You see, the party’s never over. If you’re clever you just move the venue. I have to go.’
‘You have the instructions, how to reach me on board?’
‘Have no fear, I have the instructions, I’ll call you every day.’
Jahangir led a by now drenched Sally to the several steps leading up and into the six-seater Lear jet. Anoushka and Page followed. As soon as the three women were aboard and the door securely closed, he picked up one umbrella, shook the rain from it and held it over his head. The other he closed and tucked under his arm, then he walked away from the plane across the tarmac towards a waiting car.
The plane spluttered to life and after a short warming up period took off almost immediately. By the time
the pilot told his passengers it was safe to remove their seat belts the sun was shining in a blue sky. Rainy Paris was left behind. After some fussing to dry Sally’s hair and clothes with a hair dryer supplied from the luxurious bathroom, the three settled into their deep comfortable chairs and swivelled them round to face each other.
‘This is some life for a middle-aged, middle-class housewife …’
But before Anoushka could finish her sentence Page interrupted. ‘
Has-been
middle-aged, middle-class housewife. You can hardly call yourself that now.’
‘You’re right, Page. I don’t much feel like that has-been middle-aged, middle-class housewife anymore. That’s what I was when I met you, what I have been for thirteen years. The memory bank has to catch up with the emotions and deposit the changes so I don’t slip back into the past. I stand corrected. What I was going to say was, I’ve learned so much about myself and life through this friendship with you two, and now Jahangir. How could I not think like you, Sally, like Jahangir? Why didn’t I realise that life can be a party and you just keep it going. You take the bumps, the tragedies, all with the good, ride them out as life just doing its business. I have never felt that way, ever. Suddenly after this weekend that could have been so hideous for me, I realise what I have been missing. That bell that has tolled for Jahangir, Sally, did you really hear it?’
‘Yes, I did. That very first night we met at the Taj
Mahal when he chose me and neither of you. It was more a click in the head for me. All the pieces of my life seemed to come together. The moment he took me by the hand and looked into my eyes, I was in step with him, and myself, and the world. He heard a bell, I heard a click. I was suddenly aware of life and all things beyond. It was kind of like an instant Nirvana. Buddhist monks say you can enter that moment of truth and awareness at any time, in any place. For some it happens when you give yourself up to love. A click in my head, the bell tolled for Jahangir. A slap in the face, the sight of an incredible sunrise, a great painting, a single poppy in a field of high yellow grass … it can be anything. I suppose all you have to be is open and ready to hear it, receptive enough to accept it. Did you hear it with Robert?’
‘No. I know now that I never heard that click, nor Robert that bell. There was never that moment of awareness of being one with each other and the world you talk about. I understand what you’re saying, but I can hardly conceive it. It was passion, enormous lust, admiration, aspiration, that was what governed my love for Robert from the very first time I saw him and until he left me. Survival through love, the erotic. I was constantly manufacturing happiness and living in a state of bliss and in a secure world in order not to die or just fade away, exactly as most people do. And I did find happiness, and haven’t as yet known any better than that which I had with Robert even though I am out here, alone, and working on it.’
Sally wanted to ask, ‘And what about Piers?’ But she couldn’t bring herself to, and was somewhat relieved when Page spoke up and she missed her opportunity.
‘It rang for me.’
Neither Anoushka nor Sally spoke. Page smiled at them. ‘What, no questions, no curiosity?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ve always been curious about you, Page,’ Sally admitted. ‘Always thought there might have been someone. But you’re such a private person, you never gave us the merest hint
the
man in your life might exist or had existed.’
‘I suspected,’ said Anoushka. ‘I’ve met two men who know you, Hervé and François, but it was Hervé who told me there had to be a secret love, a great love or a great disaster that made you cast off any man who became too deeply involved with you. He claims you are a legendary femme fatale for the many suitors who couldn’t capture your heart. He says that you use men as most men use women. I never believed it to be quite true.’
‘But it was, it is. There have been many men. I’ve had a wonderful, full and rich sexual life with them, and romance, and yes, even love, but they could never be
the
man. You see, I’m one of the lucky women of this world for whom the bell did toll, like it has for Sally now. I see it in you and Jahangir, that same commitment that I have to one man, one love. I’ve found my life-mate. Until I met Oscar and it happened for us, I never believed that kind of love existed. Never dreamed that I could look at one person and fall deeply
in love, that a life could come together just as Sally has described, and there could be for eternity peace and contentment.’
‘But where is he?’ asked Anoushka.
‘He left me, abandoned me for what may be a greater love.’
‘So that’s what we three have in common? We’re women who have been discarded by men. Until now, I thought Sally and I were the only ones,’ said Anoushka.
‘But you’re the only one of the three of us waiting for him to return,’ said Sally.
‘Well, not exactly waiting. If you mean that all life is suspended, that my heart is broken, that I’m pining and in despair, that time might heal a broken heart, no, it’s nothing at all like that. My heart never broke. I wait for him alone in the house in Hydra for three weeks every year. During those three weeks he is in the forefront of my mind, my dreams, every minute of the day and night. The rest of the year I just carry him in my heart and get on with life without him, which includes other romances, other men, great sex, my work, friends, and now best friends. Till you two came along, I never did have any women best friends.’
‘Will he come back?’ asked Anoushka.
‘I don’t know, not for certain I don’t.’
‘But in your heart you think he will?’
‘No, not in my heart, in my total being. I have utter and complete faith in what I have with Oscar. You see, I think, for special reasons, that our love has been
blessed by God, all the gods. As ridiculous as this may sound to you both, it’s almost irrelevant whether he does or does not come back to me. You see, we’re apart, out of communication, but we never
really
left each other. It’s more that circumstances … well, it’s difficult to explain. It’s an impossible love, let me put it that way. Impossible unless Oscar comes to terms with it. The sacrifice he has to make to return to me is tremendous. He’s a man torn between two great loves, for a woman and for the Holy Roman Church. He needed time to resolve his conflict.’
‘Oh my god, he’s a priest, a man of the cloth!’ said Anoushka, looking very shocked at this news.
‘Yes.’
An awkward silence settled over them, then Anoushka said: ‘Needed? You said needed, past tense. Does that mean that he has come to a decision?’
‘How strange that I should have said that. Almost as strange as my speaking so openly about him to you girls. Something has happened, I feel sure of that now. The idea is so thrilling it’s making me feel quite queasy.’ Page took a few deep breaths.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Anoushka.
She was smiling again. ‘Yes, it’s passed. It was rather as if someone was walking over my grave. I’m fine now, feel wonderful.’
‘I don’t quite understand, Page. He’s considering giving up the church?’
‘We agreed to part but never to stop loving each
other or wanting to be together. He’s a famous theologian who has always had a great many conflicts about the church and where it’s going, celibacy, the human factor between doctrine and believers. He’s always been a renegade priest who challenged the church, but a believer who loves Christianity. By the time I came along he was a powerful voice for reforms in the church and a redefining of Catholic philosophy. You have all at some time or other read him, heard him, or at least his name: Oscar Kroner.’
The look on Sally and Anoushka’s faces told Page all she needed to know, they had indeed heard of him.
‘And you’ve carried this tragic love around for how long?’ asked Anoushka.
‘No, Anoushka. Not tragic, and it’s carried me – us. We made a calculated decision to give each other our freedom to have other loves, other passions and interests, to put ourselves and our faith to the test. I really should explain, but where to begin? The house in Hydra, I’ll start there because you both love it and understand the magic of the place. It’s not mine. It’s ours. He bought it for himself and then gave it to me.’
There was no cabin attendant on the plane but before they had taken off the co-pilot had shown them the coffeemaker and microwave. Page rose from her chair and went to the small kitchen. There she placed a jug of coffee and warmed croissants for them on a tray and returned to her still stunned friends.
The women drank their coffee and looked at each other reassuringly. Finally, it was Sally who spoke.
‘You’re not going to leave us dangling. Surely there’s more that you can share with us. We’re your friends, we would like to know.’
‘I would, in fact, like to tell you about Oscar and me.’
‘You’re still in love with him?’
‘Oh, yes, and I have no doubt that he’s still in love with me. I think I would like to start at the end. It was always a bit unfair not to tell you the truth about the house in Hydra. It might end up being a house just for me, but like the captain who haunts it, Oscar is always there and always will be in spirit if not in the flesh.’
‘Did you live there together?’
‘Yes, soon after he had bought it. When it was mostly a wreck.’
‘Then you rebuilt it together?’
‘No. We designed it together, spent months and months working out how to restore it, and then he went away, left me, and I have been for the last five years carrying out our plans. I said I’d start at the end to tell you about Oscar and me, but maybe I had better start at the beginning.
‘It seems so strange to be talking to you about him, to anyone for that matter. I never have, you see. I never had best friends to confide in before. I’ve held him and our story close to me because ours is an impossible love, a secret love, sinful. And we are talking sin on a big scale. But not in our eyes. What we are together has never been that to us. Now that I want to talk about it, I don’t actually know where to begin. First I was going to start at the end, then at the
beginning, and now I think I should start even further back before that and tell you a little about me, before Oscar and I ever happened. Maybe you’ll understand me better and our love story even more.’