A Question Of Integrity by Susan Howatch

Author:Susan Howatch [Howatch, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-06-03T18:30:00+00:00

FOUR

‘Ruthless honesty with ourselves is required to face how much we are secretly nursing anger and resentments.’

GARETH TUCKWELL and DAVID FLAGG

A Question of Healing

I

The flat was so cold, so drab and so uninviting in that grey winter light that as soon as I entered the hall I suffered an overwhelming desire to escape. Grabbing my coat I slipped on some comfortable shoes and set off for the Barbican, that twelve-gated city-within-a-city, with its skyscrapers and mews houses, its duplexes and triplexes, its penthouses and studios, its cinema, theatres, restaurants, library, schools, offices, shops, gardens, fake-lakes and fake-waterfall. I enjoyed the Barbican. There was something sexy about all that crude concrete brutalism and that rampant, no-holds-barred architectural adventurousness which had marked — and marred — the twentieth century. I found the peculiar landscape stimulating, rather as an astronaut would be stimulated by seeing something so far beyond his earthly experience as the far side of the moon.

At Gate Six I climbed the stairs to the podium, crossed Gilbert Bridge and entered the centrally heated comfort of the Arts Centre. In the café I toyed with a Danish pastry and gazed out across the fake-lake to the dome of St Paul’s while I waited for my brain to thaw.

The more it thawed the more clearly I realised that I’d been swindled. It was as if Nicky had put my brain on ice in Devon but Lewis’s straight talking had initiated a melting process, and I was only halfway through my Danish pastry when I said to myself: wait a minute. Just how the hell have you wound up losing your beautiful home and languishing in that horrible house which you’d be more than happy never to see again?

I tried to argue that I hadn’t lost my beautiful home, since Nicky had agreed to retain it, but I knew the farmhouse wasn’t suited to the part-time occupancy he had in mind. It was too big. It required too much daily attention. There needed to be someone in full-time residence – me – who could supervise the cleaner and the gardener, and besides, if a house is only sporadically occupied, it soon falls prey to vandals or burglars. I shuddered as I thought of the possible ravages. Another hazard was the central heating. Supposing it broke down in winter with the result that the pipes froze?

The truth was that unless one was rich enough to afford live-in staff, second homes needed to be small, filled with cheap furniture and designed to require the minimum of upkeep. Anyway, the two-home syndrome was hell for women. It was all very well for Nicky to live in two homes – he merely had to drive down to Surrey and everything was waiting for him: food, wife, clean sheets, the lot. But if I had to manage two homes I’d soon be bogged down in cooking, shopping and cleaning, and in no time at all I’d be transformed into a household drudge.

The emotional cost of having two homes would also be unbearable.

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