Objects of Desire (5 page)

‘You won’t be satisfied till you hear it all. Do you think if I have this in-depth confrontation with you, these revelations will somehow change things and what is happening will go away? You can shove it to
the back of your mind, and we can pick up our old lives again? It’s not going to happen.’

Anoushka knew what Robert wanted was for her to accept the inevitable, be a lady, and walk away giving him his freedom in a civilised fashion. Her interminable questions more than angered him now, she saw clearly that he was enraged because she would not let go as gracefully as he had lived out his unhappy years with her. Anoushka didn’t give a damn about this anger, or the rage she saw in his face. Her gaze was as hard and mean as his now.

And it was that look in her eyes that prompted Robert to tell her now, somewhat sadistically, ‘How? In secret, discreetly. When? Stolen moments, frantic sex when you vanished for short periods of time to see to the dinner, here in this very room, Rosamond bending over the back of the very chair you are sitting in, on that sofa, that floor. Hard and full of passion for each other, desperate to be alone and intimate, we would couple. I would move in and out of Rosamond until she came, then hurriedly withdraw, zip up and caress her cheek with my hand, and thank her for being there for me. When you would go to pick up the boys from their friends’ houses, when you bathed or dressed, anytime you left us alone together and I felt we were relatively safe from your walking in on us, we had each other.

‘And at the hospital on those evenings when I was supposed to be there on clinic business, we were having sex, glorious, thrilling lust on the floor of my office. Weekends when I went away on seminars, trips
abroad on consultations with colleagues or to visit some of my more celebrated or seriously ill patients, were stolen days of bliss for us. On the grass, in a wood, in out of the way places where we were not known.

‘And when we were on holiday with you and the boys, I had it all, you and Rosamond. I revelled in the lust provided by two women who loved me. It became my way of life but the down side was that the arrangement turned Rosamond and me into fraudsters, fakes, hypocrites. For two people such as Rosamond and me who despise such venal behaviour to find ourselves dedicated to it was anathema, suicide to the soul. Self-inflicted poison, drop by drop. I hate you for that.’

‘Don’t lay this on me, Robert! You could have stopped at any time.’

‘You fool. Don’t you think we tried, many times?’

‘Not hard enough.’

‘I despise you for this, Anoushka, putting us through this confrontation now.’

‘Do you think I care any more about what you or Rosamond think about me? Rosamond! She’s worse than you. I opened my home to her, shared my life, my husband and my children with her. And don’t think there weren’t times over the years when I would rather not have done. And all the time she was stealing you and my children away from me! Oh, I did notice how much a part of our lives she was, I wasn’t altogether blind. But I never saw or imagined
that she could steal you away from me, that she was crawling into my life to push me out. Despise? Don’t you use that word about me. If anyone should despise, it is me. I despise Rosamond for what she has done and think you both disgusting. No, I take that back about her being the worse of you. She’s bad in my eyes, about as bad as you can get, but you’re worse, much worse. Controlling me with love and lust all those years, your power and charisma dominating me and my life. I’ve spent my entire marriage doing everything possible to please you. I was so grateful for love and fidelity from such a handsome, clever, attractive man. A man who made other women’s husbands look grossly unattractive. A man the entire world of medicine admired for his humanity and genius, his devotion to his work.

‘What a joke on me! I always thought you were able to be all those things because first and foremost you had the security of home and hearth with me, your one and only true love, me and the boys. That we inspired you to greatness because we were your real and only true life. That your love for us made it possible to go out into the world a hero. You pig!’

‘And there is your insufferable vanity speaking.’ Robert raised his hand once more to her. Only this time he slapped Anoushka hard across the face. The act stunned them both. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

‘I suppose you’ve wanted to do that for years,’ she said with incredible sadness in her voice.

Robert opened his eyes and gazed into hers. The icy coldness with which he looked at her made Anoushka take a step back. She formed a fist and placed the knuckles of her hand in her mouth.

‘Yes, many, many times.’ With that he walked from the room and out of the house.

ANOUSHKA RIVERS

Chapter 3

The sun was out, white-bright in a blue sky on a bitter cold day. It made things appear to be less frozen than they were, gave an illusion that soon this hard winter would be over. Everything looked sharp, crystal clean. All a lie. Nothing was either crystal clean or clear as far as Anoushka could see. Darkness, emptiness had taken over her life.

She gave Robert everything he wanted: the house as it was with all its contents down to the last pot, pan and book; custody of their sons; a discreet and immediate exit from Lakeside for her in exchange for a promise of no lies to Alexis and Mishka. Instead she and Robert would see the boys together but she would be the one to explain the traumatic events changing all their lives.

The boys’ best friends were the Holland children who lived next door, and Betsy Holland was the closest friend that Anoushka had. Close but not intimate, they were hardly women who confided their troubles to one another. There were reasons for this. Anoushka
never had any troubles. She was a woman who’d never allowed anything to cloud her idyllic life with Robert. And Betsy? It was quite simple; she was more social, had other friends with less satisfactory lives who felt angst about things Anoushka never did. It was easier to share intimacies with them. And there was a second reason. As much as Betsy liked and got along with Anoushka, she, like most of the Riverses’ friends, had grown up with Robert and liked him more than his wife. There was always something a little remote, smug, not quite New England about Anoushka, she’d felt. Or was it a fiercely independent pride in who she was, what she had, that was offputting. It gave her, rightly or wrongly, a condescending attitude. Like others who knew Robert and Anoushka as a couple, Betsy could see what Anoushka never did: that Robert had not married the right woman. Betsy often felt sad for them, but mostly for Robert and the concessions he had made. She had always wished she could have liked Anoushka that little bit more. Others were not so scrupulous. Far from pitying Anoushka after they learned of Robert’s defection, some of her neighbours were keen to distance themselves from her. It was as if they saw divorce as a contagion – or perhaps Anoushka as his wife a threat to their own propped-up and patched-together marriages.

It was to Betsy and David that Robert went after walking out on his wife. David was his childhood friend and attorney but until Robert rang their doorbell that night, he had never dreamed that Robert and
Anoushka would not stay married for always. Robert had indeed buried his unhappiness deep. It was Betsy who let herself into the Rivers house to comfort Anoushka the best she could. And it was Betsy and David who were now driving her into New York where they were to join Robert and the Rivers and Holland children for lunch in the Oak Room of The Plaza before Anoushka sailed out of their lives on the
QE2
.

This lunch was not easy for any of them, but designed for Alexis and Mishka’s sake, to make light of the devastation of a family. It was dressed up as a treat for the boys, having their best friends with them and going to see their mother off on the first lap of her travels round the world. Anoushka thought of Robert flying the four boys down from Groton for the day. They were probably at The Plaza by now.

Traffic was building up, it had been since Riverdale but kept moving along. Panic set in as Anoushka was riding alongside the Hudson River. She seemed mesmerised by the water and a ship going upriver. Betsy turned in her seat to look at her.

‘Won’t be long now. Are you all right?’

David shot a look at his wife that said, ‘What a stupid question.’

‘Sorry, Anoushka, that was a silly.’

‘If I can only get through this lunch and sail away without upsetting the boys, that’s all I care about.
All right
hardly comes into it. But I know what you mean, Betsy. Bearing up is more like it. And, yes, I am doing that, I think.’

To herself she thought, Just about. She placed a hand to her temple and closed her eyes. She was trying to be rational about the boys’ reaction to the news of the divorce. What had she expected? That they would beg them to stay together? That they would choose to live with her in lesser circumstances, in another town, another country? That they would abuse their father for devastating their lives? Yes, she had wanted and had expected them to do all those things. They hadn’t.

The very next day after Robert’s announcement that he was leaving her, he had called the headmaster of Groton and received permission to take the boys out of school for the day. Robert had arranged for a suite of rooms at a four-star country inn near the school and to have a sumptuous lunch served to them in its sitting room overlooking a lake. He knew that would be a plus for the boys because Alexis and Mishka were always ravenous, most especially during school term with nothing to fall back on but school food, and packages from home. The privacy would be a plus for them all. Under the circumstances, no public dining room would do.

The boys had been full of news of themselves and school and hardly said anything about being allowed to play truant for a day. But they were too, as Robert had suggested, mature for their years and not unaware that something was amiss. It was not long after they had entered the suite before Alexis asked, ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’

Mishka added, ‘If it’s bad news, Dad, let’s have it.’

‘Nothing wrong, just different.’ That was how Robert had answered the boys. Those words, and the cold tone of his voice, stung Anoushka now just as they had then in that pretty sitting room overlooking the lake.

Why, she wondered, didn’t they look to
me
for answers, ask
me
what was wrong? They had kissed her, cuddled her, been obviously happy to see her. But no more than a kiss and a hug and then it was to Robert that they gave their attention. Had it always been this way? Should she have handled it differently? No? Yes?

For the hundredth time she ran through her mind how she had handled the task of breaking the news to the twins. No, she concluded. She may have been unhappy with their reaction, may not have heard what she wanted to hear from them, but what she had done had to have been right for the boys, or at least she had to believe it was.

‘The lying bastard,’ she mumbled.

Thankfully neither Betsy nor David heard her, or at least they said nothing, and Betsy did not turn round to look at Anoushka. Again she agonised over what she had said to her sons. ‘There is no easy way to break this to you, boys. Your father doesn’t want to live with me any more. He wants a divorce from me but not from you. He has made it clear that a reconciliation is impossible. None of this is my doing. None of it is what I want.’

Anoushka had watched the colour drain from Alexis’s face, Mishka’s eyes fill with tears. Why hadn’t she held
her arms out to them, given them a chance to rush into them? Just standing by the window, unable to put her pain away, had been her fatal mistake. Anger and bitterness had grabbed her and would not let her go. They had consumed her and left no place for her sons to slip in and comfort her, sapped her of the energy she needed to comfort them. Instead she continued, ‘Your dad wants you to stay with him in our house, for me to make a new life for myself elsewhere. He’s running me out of town, blackmailing me with your happiness.’

‘Anoushka!’ Robert’s shout made her jump with anxiety. She was way out of line. She had gone too far. The boys looked horrified, disbelieving, she could see that in their faces. Her hysteria frightened them. They looked not to her but to their father for an explanation of her behaviour. Robert went to his sons and sat between them. He placed an arm round each of them. Mishka placed his head against Robert’s shoulder.

Why hadn’t the boys run to her, tried to soothe her? Seeing her sons and her husband together made it somehow worse for Anoushka. She was unable to help herself. The sight of them all cosy with each other had only hardened her resolve to state the facts, tell her side of it. She wanted to show Robert up for what he was doing to them all. So she had continued.

And now, in the back seat of the car crossing town to The Plaza, her words were haunting her: ‘I have agreed to your father’s terms not because I want to but because I love you both with all my heart and don’t want to uproot you from home and friends. Dad says
our divorce has nothing to do with my relationship with you boys. We can see each other whenever, wherever we want. I’m keeping the Caribbean house, and you can have your holidays there with me. We can travel. I’ll be at the end of a telephone whenever you want me.

‘All that is true, but hardly the same as us all living together as one family. Your father would like to think it’s simple for us all to dance to his new tune. Well, maybe it is for him, for you boys, but it certainly isn’t for me.’

They had been shocked by their parents’ intention to divorce. Concern for where their mother would go, what she would do, was in every question they had asked. Alexis had come out with, ‘Is it sex, another woman? Is that why Dad has stopped loving you?’

That was the question that had hurt the most. And she had done no better with that than she had with any of her other answers. She told her sons, ‘Your dad has lied to us all. He was only making believe he loved me, he says for our sakes, yours and mine. There has always been another woman he loved more than me, but I’ll let him explain all that to you as he has so cruelly explained it to me. She’s a traitor, like your father, and they have both cheated me for the last time.’

Anoushka knew her answers had been filled with bitterness and sniping at Robert, blaming him for everything, that she had kept babbling on about him irrationally, one minute attacking him, the next
telling the boys they were staying with him because he was a good father who wanted the best for them all. The crossed signals she was sending out only drove Alexis and Mishka further away from her and her unhappiness and closer to the calm, quiet support their father was emanating. Anoushka had been appalled when she realised that the boys, prompted by their father, saw her plight as nothing more than glamour, a great adventure for her to go out into the world and construct a new life for herself. They would all have new lives with the old one as a foundation to build on. She wanted to kill Robert.

David interrupted her thoughts. ‘Anoushka, I feel there is something that must be addressed and this is the last time I will be able to have a quiet word with you before we get to The Plaza.’

Though she barely heard the words, David’s voice snapped her back to the present. ‘You’re using your attorney’s voice, David.’

‘I guess I am. As both friend and attorney I am advising you for the last time that you are being rash and very foolish. You are acting out of pain and pride in not going for a better settlement from Robert than you have chosen to take. Your own lawyer has advised you of that, and though I am Robert’s attorney, I as a friend, and Robert as my client, advise you to take what he is now offering. You will be much better off.’

‘Throw Anoushka another bone? Is that what he has instructed? Everything I take from him, David, makes
me feel like a dog hungry for the leftovers of a life I once had with him. To learn that I have been living off the scraps and bones of his generosity all these years when I thought it was love is humiliating enough, don’t you think? I only want what
I
want. And I wish I had money of my own, something of myself to fall back on so I could walk away from him taking nothing. I’m not the dog he thinks I am, and I don’t want his generosity. I have had my fill of that. The house in Barbados, twenty-five thousand dollars, first-class travel for a year, and one thing, any thing, from the house that I want. And I am only taking those things so I can get on my feet. He got away cheap.’

‘That’s what he’s worried about.’

‘Tough, he’ll have to live with that.’

‘You’re not being rational or practical, Anoushka, just stubborn. You can’t make anything like the life you are used to with nothing but twenty-five thousand dollars and all your travel expenses for a year. What about when the year is up? How will you live? Even in Barbados?’

‘I don’t know how I’m going to live through this lunch, never mind anything after that. So stop asking me, and telling me what a fool I am. Don’t you think I know that? If you’re a friend then watch over my boys for me. I can’t think of anything else you can do except change the subject.’

They were waiting in the lobby of The Plaza: Robert, Alexis, Mishka, and the Holland boys, Rudi and Joe. The moment Anoushka came through the door she
saw them all standing together, eyes on the entrance. Mishka had an armful of long-stemmed white roses and Alexis carried a massive box of chocolates, wrapped beautifully in silver paper with a gold bow. They rushed forward to kiss their mother. They did indeed think her departure a great and happy adventure for her, she could tell by the smiles on their faces, the enthusiasm with which they greeted her, and were looking forward to seeing her aboard the
QE2
and having a tour of the ship. Robert had covered himself well.

Robert. The moment she saw him standing there in The Plaza her heart skipped a beat. How handsome and sexy he was. She wanted him. She was still attracted to him. It was purely physical. The chemistry for her with Robert was still there as strong as ever. As the boys hugged her and presented her with the sumptuous gifts, she smiled and kissed them and thanked them and put on a good show for them, but her heart was with Robert. She wanted him, yearned to be lost in erotic bliss with him. She wanted to come, for him to transport her into the erotic world she was so happy with him in. But it was gone, that would never happen again. An exciting sexual life with the man she loved, that too was over for her. For the first time since that dreadful night less than a week ago she realised the extent of her sexual loss. That was something else she would have to learn to live with. Yet another thing to traumatise her.

They gazed across the room at each other, his face as
hard and cold and angry with her as it had been since that night when he blew her world apart and left her with the dregs of a life. He used his anger like a shield, deflecting all Anoushka’s grief and hurt at his actions as if he was afraid to confront them face on. He was not a man devoid of compassion, but as a doctor he had long ago learned how to bury it deep.