Objects of Desire (4 page)

‘Bust up our home?’ It seemed unthinkable to Anoushka.

‘I’d rather not do that. There are alternatives. I would like to keep the house intact for me and the boys. They love Chimneys. This is their home.’

‘The home you’re breaking up.’

Robert chose to ignore her remark and continued, ‘Their home has always been a stable environment for them. I know we would both like to keep that for them.’

‘But without me?’

‘Yes, without you.’

‘God, you’re a bastard.’

‘I will, of course, settle some money on you. Half of what I have. But we live so high, there isn’t much to divide. I’ll give you a portion of my income, keep you until you can find a new life for yourself.’

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’

‘Go look for it. Get out into the world and find out who you are and what you can do for yourself. You can’t do it here, not in Lakeside.’

‘Are you running me out of town now? Proposing I should leave Lakeside?’

‘I’m proposing one of us should leave Lakeside. It would be practical, it would be constructive for all of us if
you
were to choose to leave. You cannot easily, if at all, make a life on your own here in this community, not after a divorce. Half the lifestyle you know and are used to is all you might manage at best. Too tough. It would be easier for you to begin again elsewhere.’

‘No husband, no house, and now no town to live in. I suppose what comes next is to take my children away from me?’

‘I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but yes, I do want custody of the boys.’

‘Never!’

‘Don’t say never, Anoushka. The burden I’m taking off your hands gives you the freedom to go out and start again. You won’t exactly be homeless. If you agree to leave Lakeside and let me help to support you financially, I’ll make our house in the Caribbean over to you. You’ve always liked that house and living there. You can take the boys there on their holidays,
live in some degree of elegance or travel. Begin again.’

‘Oh, you’re not going to take our island home away from me. At last a sacrifice on your part! What if I don’t like these plans of yours?’

‘They’re hardly plans. I may have wanted out of this marriage for a long time but until now it was a vague thought which I never acted upon. I have never planned how we should part. I’m talking this out for the first time.’

‘Well, I don’t like your plans for me. What are the alternatives?’

‘I can leave Lakeside and the clinic. You can remain here in this town and take custody of the boys, give them a diminished life, and have a thin time yourself. Anoushka, divorced women like you – well, let me put it this way. You can never regain in this community the same life we had as a family. I’m offering you a better deal than hanging on in Lakeside. If you’re smart, you’ll take it.’

‘Oh, so now this has come down to the best
deal?
I can’t believe this is happening to me! The boys – do you think they will choose to live with you rather than me?’

‘I think they’ll choose to stay with their father here in their family home where they are happy and secure and have their friends all round them, and know that their mother is at the end of a telephone when they need her, that they can see her whenever they wish, as you can see them whenever you want to. They will understand we gave our marriage the best shot and it
somehow missed the target. Alexis and Mishka are mature boys who have seen more than half their friends come from marriages that didn’t work. Our boys understand the realities of life far more than you think. They’re kids with lots of savvy, like most children of the 90s, stable, well balanced and very bright. They will know that within this unfortunate break-up between you and me …’

Anoushka interrupted Robert, ‘Oh, you do at least agree it’s unfortunate?’

The look of utter disdain he shot at her made her shiver. He chose to ignore her remark and continued, ‘They love us both, and trust us, and will see that we are doing the best we can for all of us.’

Anoushka covered her face with her hands. She felt the tears staining her cheeks and swallowed hard, drying her eyes with the back of her hands. ‘You’re stripping me of my life, my whole world.’

‘No, just your lifestyle. I won’t be able to keep you lavishly but I promise you will never be destitute.’

‘Oh, and I’m supposed to thank you for that? Next you’ll be telling me that I’ll thank you for this one day.’

‘No, I would never have uttered that cliché, but it’s probably true.’

‘What happens next?’

‘We go and see the boys and then our lawyers, who will make a meal out of this. Unless we are careful they will come out financially better than either of us.’

This time it was Anoushka who rose from her chair and went to the vodka bottle. She poured herself a
large measure of the powerful clear liquid. After emptying her glass she went to stand next to the fireplace. For several minutes she remained silent with her back to Robert. Quite suddenly she whirled round to face him. Anger shimmered from her. ‘What if I say no, no divorce? If you leave me, you leave with nothing.’

‘Then I will leave you without a divorce, and with nothing if need be, and you will have destroyed our sons’ lives and most probably your own chances of ever finding a man to love you better than I have done. You do that and I promise the boys will hate you for your selfish vindictiveness. And so will I.’

‘Even more than you do now?’

‘Hate is the wrong word. I’m indifferent to you now, Anoushka, and that’s the result of years of love and hate. Love for being the mother of my children, for your lust and for keeping a family together for us. Hate for having trapped me into marriage, for your own pride and self-satisfaction in being my wife.’

‘You bastard! You’re blackmailing me into this divorce, using Mishka and Alexis. I never dreamed you could be so despicable.’

‘Desperate.’ The bitterness in Robert’s voice penetrated to Anoushka’s heart.

‘I don’t deserve this, Robert.’

‘Who said life is fair?’

‘Who is she?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters.’

He clenched his hand into a fist and slammed it hard
on the table, dislodging a lamp, an ashtray, a silver-framed photograph of himself, Anoushka and the twins. Robert’s anger, held in check until now, turned to rage. He pulled his wife out of her chair and held her by the arms in a painfully tight grip. He raised a hand to slap her hard across the face and she pulled back in fear. Robert trembled. He managed to retain a semblance of control over himself, enough not to strike his wife. Instead, he pushed her hard and she fell back into the chair.

He told her, ‘You don’t listen. No, that’s not true, you do listen but you don’t hear. You always hear what you want to hear, see what you want to see. You
will
pursue this questioning. I’m trying to spare you, but why do I bother? You enrage me. So much so, I want to beat you into the ground. That comes of years of concessions in our marriage, of being separated from the woman I really love and want to build a life with. That comes from my weakness, for not going out and grabbing the love and the life I wanted with the woman I love.

‘One mistake, that’s all it takes, one small mistake. That’s all we have been all these years, and now that mistake is over and still you don’t let me go. Still you question my life, my need to be free of this marriage. You have not the least understanding or feeling that this breakup is happening to
us
, not just you, that all questions are irrelevant, as are all the rehashings of our life together. Your unwillingness to face up to the misery of our situation drags me down to brutality.
Spare you? In my own fashion I’ve been trying to do that. A mistake. Now I will spare you nothing. Rosamond Rogers is the other woman, and we have been lovers very nearly from the day you and I returned from our wedding trip. And she is the woman I will marry as soon as I am free.’

‘It’s not possible,’ Anoushka gasped.

‘Rosamond and I always knew that our love for each other, if ever discovered by you, would be a blow you might never recover from, so we turned ourselves into cheats. We, and especially Rosamond, suffered embarrassment at having to sneak around for stolen moments and hidden corners, strange hotel rooms, or empty offices after dark, so that we might be together. No humiliation was too much for our lust and love for each other.’

‘Oh, now you want me to feel sorry for the woman who stole my husband away, invaded my life as a friend and betrayed me? A double betrayal. You and Rosamond … The happy life and love I thought was mine, all a sham.’

‘Rosamond and I have had to live with the knowledge of that all these years. Protecting your feelings has not been easy for us. This marriage is breaking up because when I die I want to be able to say, as one of my patients said this morning: “I don’t mind dying. I don’t mind being dead.” Only someone who has lived their life to the fullest, someone who has fulfilled themselves, can die with such dignity. The way I live now, I am not a man who could utter those words. I
would go in bitterness and regret, and I don’t intend to do that.’

Robert’s words had been spoken with such passion that for several minutes afterwards they remained silent listening to their own thoughts, their own pain. Rosamond and Robert, out of their desperation to be together whenever possible, had eased Rosamond into Robert and Anoushka’s family life. Rosamond became their best friend, the person whom the twins loved and saw as a member of their family, a friend with whom Anoushka was happy to share her husband and children. All that flashed through Robert’s mind and made him more angry; so many hints over so many years that Anoushka had turned a blind eye to. The thought and the memory of all those years the three had shared together prompted Robert.

‘Making Rosamond a friend, sharing your husband and children, our life with her – a magnanimous gesture to a lonely woman. That’s been the role you have played with Rosamond all along, and not very subtly, I might add. Enduring that was very difficult. Consideration for your feelings, guilt for not loving my wife the way I should, love for Alexis and Mishka, a belief in the family, the home – so many excuses turned Rosamond and me into cheats, and me into an adulterer. We began to despise ourselves. The relief I feel now because that’s over for me and Rosamond is immeasurable. And now that you know the truth, it must be for you.’

Anoushka regained her voice. ‘We went everywhere
together, she was a part of our lives. She added joy, became as close to us as any family member could be. Surely not? It can’t be? How could you and Rosamond deceive me? The two people I loved the most aside from my sons. I gave her my home, my family, because she could find none for herself.’

‘All those years you were treating her with pity for her aloneness and sharing our life with her, she was wanting what you were so possessive of, and feeling the pain of what she was missing. Yet she stayed on for my sake, for our family’s sake, because she knew that she was my happiness and I would abandon you all if she left me. How cruel you’ve been to us both by not opening your eyes and seeing what was there between us. We gave you so many hints. Could you not understand that there had to be something wrong with our marriage when half of the time I insisted she be part of it? No, not you. You simply couldn’t see what was right there before your eyes, how Rosamond gathered the crumbs that you threw her and lived and loved off them.

‘How do you think she must have felt all these years, always waiting for that invitation to the house from you, for your suggestion that she travel on holiday with us, and then having to go to her room alone at night while you crawled over me lustily, insinuating how sexually compatible we were and showing it off publicly. Only my acknowledging that it was true, albeit as subtly as possible, would calm you down so as not to make your behaviour more embarrassing for
Rosamond. For all our friends as a matter of fact.’

‘You pig, to speak to me like this now! You took her into my home and deceived me, both of you, right in front of me. And when she was not with us, what an actor! The good and generous husband and father and, I might add, the extraordinarily lustful lover. Love for Rosamond never stopped your hunger for sex with me, did it? What treachery, what disloyalty. Why didn’t you just leave me if as you say you didn’t love or want me?’

‘Pity. Rosamond pitied you. She said she would never break up the family, she loved us as a family.’

‘And kept silent, and made love to my husband behind my back. You were indeed discreet about that. How, when, where?’

‘Drop it, Anoushka.’

‘No, tell me, you deceitful bastard.’

‘Every chance we could get.’

‘My life has been a sham,’ she said barely above a whisper. She was beaten, pummelled by Robert’s revelations. She was feeling like a boxer whose opponent had him on the ropes and was clinging on not to go down for the count. It showed in her face, the manner in which she sat slumped in her chair, hands gripping the arms, knuckles white.

‘Yes. But it had to end.’

‘You were always going to leave me? You would have long ago but for the boys?’

‘Yes. Rosamond and I agreed not to make a move until Alexis and Mishka were of an age where they
would not be damaged by divorce.’

‘You would fuck her and love her and make serious life decisions with Rosamond, and then come home to me? I think I’m going to be sick.’ Anoushka placed a hand over her mouth and retched, but nothing happened. They were both silent for a moment while she composed herself as best she could.

‘You never knew. It never harmed you, Anoushka. I never denied you sex, affection, respect, and never embarrassed you.’

‘Am I supposed to be thankful for that? Next you’ll be telling me sex with her enhanced our sex life?’

‘That’s true. Sex, love with Rosamond, the excitement of an illicit affair, they all added to my life. I did come home and was able to cope with you and family life. She makes me feel free and alive, not trapped and suffocated by love and duty.’

The pain of what Anoushka was hearing was overwhelming but she could not help herself. She had to know more, every detail of Rosamond and Robert’s heinous exploitation of her loving good nature. She was baffled as to how she had never received a hint of what was going on. Once more she imagined that what was happening to her was not true. It was madness, but she kept wanting Robert to prove to her that it was. ‘Where? How? Does everyone know?’