Sooner or later all roads lead to Schiphol Airport, if only for an hour or so, on the way from here to there, in transit. It is a vast place. Today we perched on our high stools at the oyster bar where Zones C and D meet. My husband had a new-season herring and a glass of beer, and I had a brown shrimp sandwich and a modest glass of white wine. After that we planned to do our usual thing and go to the art exhibition in the new Schiphol extension of the Rijksmuseum, situated where Zone E meets Zone F. The exhibits change every month or so, and there is always some new skating scene, some famous soldier on a horse, some soothing Dutch interior to be seen, some long dead artist’s glimpse of the love and trust that exists within families, or between mankind and nature. Thus fortified, we would fly on to Oslo, or Copenhagen, or on occasion further afield, along those curving, separating lines on the KLM map – Bombay, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Perth, wherever. And if you are lucky, on the return journey the Rijksmuseum exhibits will have been changed, and there will be yet more to see. That is, of course, if delays and security checks allow you the time you expect to have to spare in that strange no-man’s land called Transit.
Lucky, I say, but thinking about it I am not sure. The paintings in the Rijksmuseum pull you out of the trance which sensible people enter while travelling, checking out from real life the moment they step into the airport, coming back to full consciousness only when once more entering their front door. The technical name for the state is de-realisation, or dissociative disorder: too much of it, they say, and you can actually shrink your hippocampus – that part of the brain from which the emotions fan like airline flight paths on the map – never to recover. It might be wiser just to stare at the departure board like anyone else. But I am with my husband, a rare bird who has never in his life experienced a dissociative state, and is enjoying his herring, and I am emerging from mine in preparation for the Rijksmuseum, and am even vaguely wondering whether I am drinking Chardonnay or Chablis, when there is a sudden commotion amongst the throng of passengers.
The herring stall is by a jeweller’s booth, where today there are diamonds on special offer. ‘The new multi-faceted computer cut’ – whatever that might be: presumably habitual buyers of diamonds know. But can there be so many of them as the existence of this shop suggests? So many enthusiastic or remorseful husbands or lovers around, who want to buy peace at any price, and stop off to purchase these tokens of respect and adoration? Though I daresay these days travelling women buy diamonds for themselves.
Next to the diamond boutique is a shop selling luggage, and a booth offering amaryllis bulbs at ten euros for two. As a point-of- sale feature I see they’re using a reproduction of that wonderful early Mondrian painting you can see in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ‘Red Amaryllis with blue background.’ I bet that cost them a bit. It’s midday by now and comparatively quiet in Schiphol: few customers and lots of staff, like a church when they congregation has left after a big service and the clerics are busy snuffing out candles and changing altar cloths. How do these places ever make a living? It defeats me.
A woman and her husband walk past us in the direction of departure gates C5-C57. They are in their forties, I suppose. I notice her because she walks just a little behind him and I tend to do the same, whenever I am with a man. It is a habit which annoys husbands, suggesting as it does too much dependency, too little togetherness, but in a crowded place it seems to me practical. You don’t have to cut a swathe through potentially hostile crowds, and passage can be effected in single file. Couples who face the world side by side, I am prepared to argue, assert coupledom at the expense of efficiency. And it must be remembered that Jacob sent his womenfolk to walk before him when angry neighbours obliged him to return to the family farm – so that the wrath of his brother Esau would fall first upon the wives, and not upon him. As it happened Esau wasn’t in the least angry about the business of the potage and was simply glad to see his long lost brother again. But lagging behind is always safest, in a world scattered with landmines, real and metaphorical. This woman seemed well aware of their existence.
I was hard put to it to decide their nationality; probably British, certainly Northern European. They had a troubled air, as if worried by too much debt and too little time ever to do quite what they wanted to do, always grasping for something out of reach, disappointed by the world, not as young as they’d like to be, or as rich as they deserved to be. I blame the Calvinists and the work ethic: people from the warmer South have easier ways, less conscience and more generous hearts. Something at any rate was wrong. The flight had been delayed, or it was the wrong flight, or they didn’t really want to go where they were going, or they didn’t want to go together, or she was thinking of her lover or he of his mistress. But I didn’t expect what was to happen next.
She was I suppose in her mid-forties: a respectable, rather pudding-faced, high-complexioned, slightly overweight, stolid blonde with good legs and expensive hair piled up untidily in a bun. She was trying too hard. Her skirt was too tight and her heels too high and slim for comfortable travel. She wore a pastel pink suit with large gold buttons. The jacket stretched a little over a middle-aged bosom: that is to day it was no longer perky but bulged rather at the edges. She carried a large shiny black plastic bag. The husband who walked before looked like a not very successful business man: he wore jeans, a tie and a leather jacket, not High Street, but not Armani either, and you felt he would be happier in a suit. His face was set in an expression of dissatisfaction, his hair was thinning: he had the air of one beset by responsibilities and the follies of others. There was no doubt in my mind but that they were married. How does one always know this? We will leave that as a rhetorical question: it being parried only with another, ‘why else would they be together?’ and the import of that exchange is too sad to contemplate.
But I thought of that tender 1641 Van Dyck painting of the newly married pair, William Prince of Orange, aged fifteen, and Mary, Princess Royal of England, aged ten, and took comfort. The weight of the world is upon the young pair, and all the troubles of state and domesticity, and they are brave and beautiful in the face of it. And I sipped my Chardonnay, or Chablis, and watched the couple walk by, and wondered about their lives. They were on their way, perhaps, to visit a first grandchild and had never approved of the marriage in the first place: or to visit her parents, whom he had never liked. Something like that.
And then one moment she is walking beside him – well, a little behind him, as I say – and he says something and she suddenly falls on her knees before him: it is quite a movement: she seems to shoot out from behind him to arrive at floor level, twisting to face him. It is the same movement you see in the Pinter play, Homecoming, I think it is, the one in which the man proposes to the woman, shooting right across the stage on his knees to entreat her to be his.
A few years back, when Harold Pinter was playing the part himself at the Almeida theatre, he lamented that his knees were no longer up to it. He was sixty. It was at one of those pre-performance meet-the-author sessions. I proposed a solution, namely, that he could alter the part to suit his knees. Just write out the proposal. It was after all his play. Pinter was horrified. The lines were sacrosanct, they had entered into the canon, were no longer Pinter’s to change. They dwelt with other scared texts in some dissociated state of their own: stage directions which had to be served and suffered for, by the writer too. I really admired that.
Picture the scene that day at Schipol. Now the woman wails aloud like an animal, a human bereft, a cow that has lost its calf, hands clasped towards her husband in entreaty; her hair toppled around her face, her red lip-sticked mouth smeary and gaping wide, her back teeth dark with old fashioned fillings. Her heels stick out oddly at the end of lean shins, as if someone had broken her bones, but people’s legs do look like that sometimes when they kneel at the Communion rail. Her skirt is rucked up, too tight and short for this sudden, passionate, noisy activity. She is not like a virgin, beautiful in prayer; she is a fat middle aged woman with thin legs having a mad fit. She is praying to him, beseeching him, have mercy, Lord, have mercy.
At the Oyster Bar glasses pause mid air; people all around pause in their transit and look to see what’s going on. The husband takes a pace or two back, embarrassed and bewildered, and stares at the wife. He is trying to look as if she is nothing to do with him. At least he does not disappear into the crowds. Perhaps she has his passport.
Something stranger still happens. Women staff come out of the shops, first hesitantly, then with more deliberation, towards the source of the noise. There are two young girls with bare midriffs, but most are brisk and elegant older women, in crisp white shirts and black skirts and sensible shoes. They cluster round the wife, they help her to her feet, they brush her down and soothe her, soothing, clucking, sympathising. She stops the wailing: she looks round their kindly, consoling faces. She feels better. She manages a tremulous smile.
An armed policeman approaches: he is dismissed by this Greek chorus of female nurturers with a look, a dismissive flick of a hand, a derisive finger, and he melts away. It occurs to me that the Nurturers, ever more difficult to sight than the Norns, who weave the entrails of Nordic heroes to decide their destiny, or those Mediterranean Furies, who drive us mad with guilt – have actually put in an appearance at Schiphol. Like the Lover at the Gate, unseen until the hour of need, who fills up the bed when the husband departs, these benign creatures turn up in an emergency, so long as it is dire enough. I have always suspected they existed, though unsung in fable, but I had never sighted them until now. And in an airport! I am privileged.
Then, as if this was her destined fate, and this was their purpose, the Nurturers propel her towards her waiting husband. She does not resist. She is tentative and apologetic in demeanour. The expression on his face does not change – ‘I am a man much set about by troubles, bravely enduring.’ The nurturers turn back into shop assistants and disappear behind their counters. The couple walk on as if nothing had happened, towards Zone C, she still just a little behind him. She pushes her hair back into its proper shape, and wobbles on her heels. She may have hurt her knees.
Back at the oyster bar things return to normal. Eating and drinking continue. The crowds close behind them. Schiphol flows on. Lunchtime is approaching: Noise levels are increasing.
‘Why did she do that?’ my husband asks, bewildered. ‘Is she mad?’
‘He may well have driven her mad,’ I say, ‘but she will not have got there on her own.’ And as we make our way to the Rijksmuseum I tell him how I imagine the day has gone for the blonde woman, and how she has been driven to distraction, to the point of falling upon her knees in a public place and wailing, imploring him to stop, just stop, her state of desperation so extreme that she managed to summon the Nurturers. What I tell him is, of course, only one of a dozen possible scenarios.
‘Marcelle,’ he said to her this morning –we will call her Marcelle, she looked like a Marcelle, and we will call him Joseph, perhaps in the spirit of mild irony: Joseph, after all, stood steadily stood by Mary in the hour of her need: he did not take a step back and try to disown her when she embarrassed him so. ‘Marcelle, did you remember to call Sylvia about Alec last night?’ Marcelle is busy packing, in a suitcase not quite big enough for all her needs. They are up early. They have a flight to catch.
Marcelle and Joseph will live in a detached house with its own thick carpets and good reproduction furniture and a designer kitchen. He will have one married daughter by an earlier marriage and they will have two teenage children between them, and a neat garden, in which anything unruly will have been cut down to size. She will use bark chippings, that ugly stuff, to keep the weeds down. Joseph: Ugly, what do you mean, ugly? Well, you should know. But I am not made of money: we cannot afford a gardener more than once a week, for God’s sake. Just get him to use bark.’ Once long ago, Marcelle dreamed of romance and roses round a cottage door: and once indeed Joseph picked a single cherry in an orchard and brought it to her. That was when she was first pregnant with Alec and Joseph was emotional about it. She kept the pip for ages, and even tried to make it sprout by putting it in water. Then she would have a whole little tree covered with cherries, but nothing happened except that the pip just lay there and the water grew cloudy and sour and she had to throw it out. All that was left was a ring round the glass which no amount of scouring would remove. Still, even that was a consolation. A memento of something good.
She would really like another suitcase especially for her cosmetics, but Joseph doesn’t like heaving cases about. Who does? Jars are heavy and bulky: creams for the eyes and the neck and the lips and the bust, each one magically different, are probably interchangeable, but she is nervous of being without a single one of them. She can’t make up her mind. She packs and re-packs: she slips jars into her shoes to save space, but the weight is unavoidable. Joseph: ‘Couldn’t you do without the gunk for just a couple of days and nights? It’s not as if they seem to make any difference. You’re over forty, nearly fifty. Surely the days when face creams would help have passed? Take them to the Charity Shop and be rid of them.’ As if charity shops took half empty jars of cream, however expensive. What do men know?
‘I called but there was no answer,’ says Marcelle. She lies.
‘Did you leave a message on Sylvia’s answer phone?’ asks Joseph. He has already packed. It takes him five minutes. He is decisive. Joseph: ‘One of us has to be.’ Now he is brushing his teeth. She cooked him his breakfast but had none herself. He likes a good breakfast; she is never hungry first thing in the morning. Joseph has good teeth: Marcelle spends a lot of time at the dentist. Joseph: ‘My mother made sure I had milk everyday. You really shouldn’t let Alec and Carla drink those disgusting sweet drinks all the time. It’s not as if you were passing on any particularly good dental genes – at least from your side.’ But how do you stop teenagers from eating and drinking exactly what they want? It wasn’t as if Joseph was around all that much at meal times to train them to do anything at all, let alone sit down when they ate and drank.
‘I couldn’t,’ says Marcelle. ‘It wasn’t switched on.’
‘That’s strange,’ says Joseph. ‘Sylvia is usually so efficient.’ Sylvia gets called ‘Sylvia’ a lot, even when ‘she’ would be more normal. Marcelle notices these little things. According to Joseph, Sylvia is elegant, Sylvia is intelligent, Sylvia has perfect teeth, what a good dress sense Sylvia has. And so slim! Such a pretty figure. Sylvia is like a sister to Joseph, and tells everyone so, though of course they are no blood relation. Sylvia has twin girls of fifteen: very smart and well behaved and no trouble at all. Joseph: ‘Sylvia knows how to bring up children.’ The only thing wrong with Sylvia is her husband Earle. Joseph thinks Earle is something of a slob, not worthy of Sylvia. Earle and Sylvia are Joseph and Marcelle’s best friends, and their children like to spend time together. But over the last five years Earle has crept up the promotion ladder and Joseph has stuck on a certain rung while others clamber up over him.
The fact is, Marcelle does not want to call Sylvia. It was late; she was tired, now thank God it is too early. Seven years ago Joseph spent a night with Sylvia in an hotel, at a sales conference. He had come home in the morning – smelling of Sylvia’s scent (Joseph: ‘Why do you never wear scent any more, Marcelle?’ Marcelle: ‘Because I am too busy. Because I never remember to put any on. It made the babies sneeze and I got out of the habit’) and had confessed and apologised and she and Sylvia had talked it out, and they had agreed to forget the incident, which had been, well, yes, both unfortunate and unexpected. Joseph: ‘I am so sorry, Marcelle. It should not have happened. But she is such a honey, such a sweet dear, you know how much you like her, and she is having such a hard time with Earle. I can only conclude somebody put something in the drink or it would never have happened. It meant nothing: just a silly physical thing. And she is your friend. I feel much better now I’ve told you.’ Yes, but in an hotel? A night? Full sex? Behind the filing cabinets would have been more understandable. Sylvia: ‘I am so, so sorry, Marcelle, I would never do anything to hurt you. I will always be open with you. It was a silly drunken thing – someone must have put something in the office drink. Completely out of character and it will never happen again. We both have our marriages and our children to think about, so shall we both just say “closure” and forgive and forget?’ So Marcelle had. Or tried to.
Sylvia was a psychotherapist who worked in the Human Resources Department of the haulage business where Joseph worked as an accountant. Earle was now director of acquisitions at the same firm and earned far more than Joseph, and had an office to himself and a good carpet. He was away from home quite a lot, visiting subsidiary companies abroad. Sylvia was brave about his absences but sometimes she would turn up at Marcelle’s door at the weekend with red eyes and talk about nothing in particular and Marcelle felt for her. And Marcelle could see that bedding Sylvia had been a triumph for Joseph: a feather in his cap, so great an event it was now what sustained him in life. ‘I was the one who bedded Sylvia, Earle’s wife, at the office party seven years ago.’
But Marcelle still did not want to call Sylvia ‘about Alec.’ Alec had been found taking drugs in school and was in danger of expulsion. Joseph reckoned that Sylvia could help with advice and wisdom, she, after all, being so good with young people. The twins would never take drugs, or be anorexic, like Carla. They were calm and orderly and dull.
‘I’ll call her when we get back from Copenhagen,’ Marcelle says to Joseph, looking up from the parade of the jars: different makes, different shapes: some gold topped, some white, some silvery, all enticing. They are going to visit the new baby, and will only be staying two days. She is glad it is not longer. Her stepdaughter has always been a bundle of resentments, at the best of times. Now she will be sleepless, and ordering Marcelle about as if she were the maid. Joseph: ‘What can you expect? You stole me from her. Now you have to put up with it.’ It will not be an easy trip. Joseph does not like the new husband.
‘That’s all very well,’ says Joseph, ‘but you promised me you’d call her and now you haven’t. I really don’t understand you.’
‘I expect it will have blown over by the time we get back,’ says Marcelle with unusual firmness. ‘Schools always over-react. And I really I don’t see why Sylvia needs to know every detail of our business.’
‘She’s a good friend to you,’ says Joseph. ‘Better than you’ll ever know.’ What does he mean by that? Has something else happened between Joseph and Sylvia? Has he tried to restart the flirtation and she refused, for Marcelle’s sake? Or is that just what Joseph wants Marcelle to think, because he’s annoyed? She gives up on the throat cream and then thinks of Sylvia’s smooth and perfect neck, and re-packs it. Perhaps she can do without the eye cream? Sylvia is seven years younger than Marcelle. Sylvia has beautiful clear bright eyes, widely spaced and good cheek bones. Flesh seems somehow to have shrouded Marcelle’s. She feels suddenly hungry and goes to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Joseph follows her into the kitchen.
‘Sylvia says the way to keep slim is never to eat carbohydrates before breakfast,’ he observes. ‘And I don’t think this matter of Alec is simply going to melt away, however much you hope it will. You have such a problem with reality! I don’t like to say this of Alec but he does have a family history of criminality. And remember the time when he was eight and you found money missing from your purse? I don’t think you dealt with that properly: Sylvia said the whole thing should have been talked through, not just swept under the carpet. Now this drugs business. Where has the boy been getting the money?’
Marcelle’s father, a respectable builder, had served a four months sentence in prison for petty theft, shortly after Joseph and Marcelle were married. He had taken a lathe home – he said by accident, but the client had reported it to the police and the magistrate – no doubt in the middle of his own building work – had seen it as a gross breach of trust. Marcelle always had an uneasy suspicion that if her father had turned into a jailbird before the marriage, not after, the wedding would never have taken place. Somehow the feeling was always there that Marcelle was lucky to have caught him – a surgeon’s son, well educated, good-looking, an accountant with a degree in mathematics, and she Marcelle, really, was just anyone, out of nowhere. Joseph’s family photographs were in real silver frames; Marcelle’s were in plastic.
She saw herself with a terrible clarity. Good legs and bosom, but with a tendency to put on weight, no conversation, no dress sense, no brains and no qualifications, a too shrill speaking voice and a vulgar laugh. And both children took after her, not him. They were a disappointment to Joseph. If he’d married someone like Sylvia – one of whose sisters was now the wife of a peer of the realm, albeit non-hereditary – he would have had children as perfect as the twins. Though Earle had once said something really nice, when they were round to dinner. Earle: ‘Say what you like about those children of yours, Marcelle, they’re never dull. They’re like you. A pleasure to be with.’ She was serving a chocolate mousse at the time. Sylvia never served sweets, only cheese. She didn’t believe in sugar. Sylvia had made quite a face when Earle said that to Marcelle and looked disdainfully at the mousse and tried to smirk at Joseph, but Joseph for once took no notice. He even seemed pleased at what Earle had said, as if he too were being complimented. Men were strange: they were pack animals, no doubt about it, and very aware of who was top dog. Sometimes she was surprised that Joseph never actually offered her to Earle, in recompense for the office party incident, just to even things out. She wouldn’t have minded too much if he had: she liked Earle. But Sylvia would have seen it as compulsive-obsessional behaviour and liked it not one bit.
She knows Joseph loves her, and she certainly loves him: she feels for him acutely as the world looks by him and over him: she wants to protect him. She knows why he is trying to upset and disturb her: there was a letter in the post recently talking about his pension and the assumption is that he had reached the ceiling his career, and will never earn more than he does now. They will never have a swimming pool like Earle and Sylvia. They will have each other, of course, but that in itself is a disappointment for Joseph. How can it not be? There are so many beautiful and brilliant women in the world that will never be his. She worries for Alec and Carla because Joseph cuts them down to size all the time, as he does her, and she knows that children grow into their parents’ plan for them, and wishes that he would just sometimes pretend to love and admire them more. It would help them.
‘I hope you’re going to change before we leave?’ he asks. She is wearing black trousers, and a dark blue cashmere sweater, soft and comfortable but rather over washed.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ she says.
‘Why don’t you wear that nice pink thing? Sylvia always says how much it suits you.’
She changes into the pink suit, which is too tight for her and makes her look vast. She has not worn it for a few months. She can’t admit it’s unwearable, she will only get a lecture on Sylvia and carbohydrates. She will just have to hope he doesn’t notice. She goes back into the kitchen. He looks her up and down and says nothing. He is not looking forward to the trip, either. His son-in-law is a man Joseph does not like or respect. He is a small time Danish architect who came to Marcelle and Joseph’s house to discuss plans for a conservatory, in the days when they could have afforded one. The plans came to nothing but he went away with the daughter. Joseph: ‘Marcelle, I can’t forgive you for this! When you knew they were seeing each other why didn’t you stop them? It’s a disaster.’ Now he has to go and see the baby, fruit of this union, and try and look pleased. He never saw himself as a grandfather.
Well I don’t want to be a grandmother either, thinks Marcelle, with a sudden burst of inner petulance, two can play at this game, and it’s your fault not mine that I am, since I married a man with a child, more fool me. She knows better than to say so: she takes a spoonful of conserve straight from the pot and puts it into her mouth without even bothering about the toast and Joseph gives a sharp intake of shocked breath and leaves the room.
Marcelle solves the beauty problem by slipping such small jars as she can into the case of Joseph’s laptop. With any luck he won’t notice the extra weight. She wears her highest heels: she knows they are impractical for travel but her morale needs boosting. Since the only good thing about her Joseph is prepared to admit at the moment is her legs, she will make the most of them. Sylvia may have the eyes and the cheekbones and the salary, but Marcelle has the legs.
They get to the airport in good time. Joseph cannot abide being in a rush and Marcelle has learned not to hold him up. She has to pay extra because her bag is so heavy. Joseph (the week after the wedding). ‘Now, about our finances. We will pay each proportionate to our earnings, and keep careful and accurate accounts. I will be paying the lion’s share out of the joint account but that is right and proper: I am your husband. I am not complaining. Personal extras must come out of our separate accounts – by extras I mean jaunts to the cafe, your friends to lunch, parking fines, excess luggage, and petrol for unnecessary outings – that sort of thing.’ And Marcelle had agreed, without asking for clarification as to who decided on the interpretation of unnecessary. Her mother had told her at the time to get everything straight within the first week of marriage because if it wasn’t done then it never would be. But that had been the week her father had gone to prison and her mother had been told she had cancer. She hadn’t been concentrating.
On the Cityhopper flight to Schiphol Joseph said, ‘I am disappointed you didn’t get through to Sylvia. It’s very unusual for her to leave the answer phone switched off. When we get to Amsterdam I’ll call her on her mobile and you can talk to her then.’
‘Did you bring the number with you?’
‘It’s on my mobile,’ he pointed out.
‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it,’ she said. That was rash.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ he said, looking at her with disdain. ‘Next thing you’ll be wanting to go through my numbers called, to check up on me and Sylvia. It really is sick, Marcelle. You’re insanely jealous of your best friend, so you’d risk the future of your own son. And your mascara has gone odd. There are little lumps of it under your left eye. Why do women want to plaster their faces with that stuff? It makes them look worse, not better.’
She could have pointed out that Alec was his son too, and if he was so sure Sylvia would know how to deal with the situation he could always have called her himself. Or popped in to her office for a consultation as to how to conduct his family affairs. No doubt he did that all the time, anyway. But she said nothing. There was a strange kind of bubbling feeling inside her. Was this what blood boiling felt like? Her ears popped as the aircraft began to descend for the landing and she felt more normal again.
Joseph called Sylvia from Schiphol to check up on the status of her phone, and Sylvia reported that it was fine, as far as she knew. Perhaps Marcelle had dialled a wrong number. It was easy to do – they made the keys so small these days: they only suited the young. She’d be delighted to talk to Marcelle about Alec, when they got to Copenhagen, perhaps, and had a little more time. It might be, perhaps, that Marcelle was the troubled one, not Alec?
‘Did you hear that, Marcelle?’ asked Joseph. ‘You might be the troubled one, not Alec. We have to think about that. Sylvia always has a fresh slant on things. I knew we ought to talk to her.’
Joseph and Marcelle make their way towards Gate B for the Copenhagen flight. After the brief good cheer of his conversation with Sylvia his mood was worsening.
‘I wish you’d keep up, Marcelle. And why are you wearing those stupid shoes? And pastel pink? For travelling? The skirt’s too short for someone your age and weight. You look absurd. The only gold buttons in this whole airport belong to you. Sometimes I think you do it on purpose.’
And that was the point at which Marcelle threw herself on the ground in front of him, on her knees, hands clasped like a supplicant, wailing; ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, come back to me, love of my life,’ so piercingly loud in her heart that the Nurturers heard and came to her rescue and returned her to him, and him to her. These things can happen beneath our very noses. I like to think that so shocked was he, so brought to his senses, he didn’t say a single mean thing to Marcelle, or even mention Sylvia, for the rest of the visit. That he even picked up the baby – it was a girl – and smiled at it, and said ‘You’re a pretty girl, just like your grandmother. And you have her lovely smile.’
‘So that’s why she did it,’ I said to my husband. ‘He drove her mad. Thank you for asking.’
‘It’s obvious you can’t resist a happy ending,’ he said. ‘I felt rather sorry for the poor husband. Dreadful when the wife makes a scene.’
By that time we were at the Rijksmuseum, but found it was closed, because they were changing the paintings.
2003