Free The Rules of Life by Fay Weldon

her deathbed, it was hard to remember just why she had inspired such passion in me. She could be a very trying woman, you know. She once refused to see me for two years, on the grounds that she had discovered I slept with my own wife in a double bed!’
    ‘Three,’ I said. I tried not to sound too reproachful. Timothy Tovey had his part to play. As do we all.
    ‘As long as that? I can hardly remember. But I do recall she wanted to run off with some Greek waiter: she spent two years trying to persuade him to marry her, but she failed and came back to me. That was what all that was about. Did she tell you the truth? I doubt it. I first encountered her via her dental X-rays. We shared the same dentist, way back, when I was young. The poor man was obviously hopelessly in love with her—quite deranged. “ See ,” I remember him saying, waving the X-ray plates of a total stranger in front of me, as I reclined helpless in his chair, “ a perfect arch! A crime if anything, happens to those teeth .” I could not help but notice the name. Gabriella Sumpter! It entranced me, together with the concept of a perfect arch. And I suppose it is in a man’s nature to love and want what another man loves and wants, albeit a dentist. So I sought out the young woman, and found the most beautiful creature imaginable, living with, though not married to, a prosperous, fashionable and very boring young doctor. I resolved at once to make her my mistress.’
    And so the sorry story continued. Timothy Tovey had no intention of damaging his prospects in the diplomatic service by marrying Gabriella, though he confessed to promising her he would, the more easily to seduce the poor woman. They succeeded in keeping their relationship hidden from the doctor for some years, until Miss Martock, then resident as housekeeper in Orme Square, eventually became party to it—and she it was who, under a terrible burden of guilt, informed Aldred Ray about what was going on under the pear tree at home, and in a little service flat in Mayfair away from home. Gabriella forgave Miss Martock for her indiscretion—she relied heavily by then upon her housekeeper’s dressmaking skills. But Aldred could not forgive Gabriella; alas, he hanged himself in the bathroom, there where little pink-lacquered birds flew across gilded tiles. After which scandal, of course, it was all the more difficult for Timothy Tovey to regularise his relationship with Gabriella, although he did admit that at this stage he very much wanted to. He introduced Gabriella to his mother, and to his surprise Lady Julia quite liked the girl, in spite of her past, and would almost, he thought, have consented to the match, and encouraged him to face and overcome any consequent difficulties in his career, had it not been for Gabriella’s extraordinary behaviour, one morning, over the spoiling in the wash of a cheap muslin nightgown. She had fussed and carried on as if it had been some expensive silk extravaganza, quite spoiling Lady Julia’s breakfast. It was apparent that the girl had no idea at all how to manage the servants. She had been badly brought up. A diplomat’s wife has to know how to deal with staff. It is the key to her husband’s success.
    And so, thoughts of marriage were abandoned and Gabriella was set up by Lady Julia in the little house in St John’s Wood, where it seemed she could do no harm. Here, Timothy Tovey explained, he was a frequent visitor, until shortage of money obliged him to marry Janice—a less distant relative of royalty—who was able to both line his pocket and further his career.
    ‘I loved Janice,’ Timothy Tovey said to me, ‘as a man loves a wife, and I appreciated Gabriella as a man appreciates a mistress. The wife stokes the fire; the mistress warms her hands at the blaze.’ The passion between himself and Gabriella had gradually faded. Some ten years into the marriage, when Janice had put him on a diet, came a time when the flame rekindled, and