My Life as a Wife by Elisabeth Luard

Author:Elisabeth Luard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

Trouble Comes in Threes

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.’

OSCAR WILDE, The Soul of Man under Socialism

BY 1968 I HAD FOUR CHILDREN, ALL BORN IN QUICK SUCCESSION AND not easily either. For every baby that survived, one died. The fault was mine. Wrong rare blood group, incompatible with the father, treatment still experimental. And every time I lost a baby – two little boys at full term, another still-born too early – I started another.

Four small children are a full-time occupation. When we returned to London in the summers, I could see that my city-based contemporaries were in much the same situation as I was. Husbands, though perhaps not as geographically absent as mine when we were in Spain, spent little time with their children. And as a family, we were fortunate. In Spain I could afford help with the children and the housekeeping.

Social life in London meant inviting people to dinner when the children were safely tucked up in bed, while in Spain, where children were welcome everywhere, I could take them with me wherever I went, and did. And anyway, I loved the company of my children, their fearlessness, the way they saw the world exactly as it is, their ability to create anarchy.

The state of marriage, in any event, was considered pretty old hat in what Time magazine had dubbed Swinging London. Everyone who wasn’t in therapy was on LSD or one of the new chemical compounds imported from California. Liberation was everywhere, though this, as in the days when I was footloose and fancy-free, still seemed to benefit the men more than it did the women.

Those of us who had made the alliances our parents had mapped out for us did not seem to be doing any better than those of us who had chosen our partners for ourselves.

My closest schoolfriend, a beauty as well as an heiress and the first of my year up the aisle, skipped out of her marriage on Derby Day with a plausible rogue in an Aston Martin she’d bought for him herself. Her husband, she explained, was far too fond of other men’s wives, her life was dull as ditchwater and her children were far better cared for by their devoted nanny. The note she left for her husband, she said, explained it all: ‘Your dinner is in the oven. Ask the second footman where the oven is.’

The husband was rich, the lover poor, but my friend had money to burn. Whenever the lover needed to pay a bill, he would sell the vehicle to the dealer in Berkeley Square, and his inamorata would buy it back. The arrangement worked perfectly. For a time. Thereafter she repeated the exercise with other lovers whenever the fancy took her, and has lived a merry life in sunny places where millionaires dock their yachts. Still does.

Whatever was happening elsewhere, free love was not for me. Heterosexuality was out of fashion and I was certainly out of step.

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