The Story of my Husband and his Lovers

Mamba was black and not bad looking, a single mother who struggled to bring up a hyperactive and difficult boy. My friend H had taught him in the past and had told me about her. She bred Lhasa Apso dogs from her ramshackle home where she hosed the scruffy puppies with plenty of cold water before people came to view them. I later thought she also should have used this technique on my husband. It would have saved us a lot of trouble.
I bought one of her bitches and made friends with Mamba. Well spoken, in fact, extremely articulate, she confided in me and told me all about her difficult childhood in Jamaica. I invited her once or twice to my house where her disruptive nine year old giant of a boy played havoc with our grass roller, heaved it over his shoulder and threw it into the garden pond.
Mamba was my first thought when one of our friends asked me to find him a room for a couple of months.
Struggling and in need of money she was only too happy to accommodate him. Johann, the grandson of a German publisher, who had published among other things the medical records of the infamous doctor Mengele, was a kind young man who in his free time loved cooking with me. He also liked baking and the chocolate cakes he produced were out of this world.
His tastes however in the culinary field differed from his amorous ones: he was terrified of black women and especially, when they were wanton and single. He was a virgin and saw her playfulness as distasteful. He recoiled in disgust when once late at night Mamba slipped into his bedroom to inveigle him in some of her entertaining games. With great skills, as he had studied engineering, he constructed an elaborate wired system in his bedroom, that when touched, triggered a bell. It took away the element of surprise for Mamba and stopped her in her tracks. In spite of this he found her bedding in his own bed the next day. It became too much for him and he fled. I had to come and fetch him with all his gear and can still hear the screeching of my tyres when we left in a hurry. There were no good byes.
My husband was aware of this episode and I think it whetted his appetite. Mamba had done a course in foot massage and was always eager to practise on new people. In a silly moment I had suggested my husband as a guinea pig. He could do with a nice foot rub and would benefit with his stressed nerves. Soon after visiting her he became hooked. He must have liked what she did to him and Mamba must have seen some potential, for she was digging her claws even deeper. They became lovers. She was forever holding her agile hand to her heart and with the other reaching into his pocket to search for his wallet. She shamelessly called him at all times on our home phone. When she boasted to my daughter about their relationship, Delphine took action. Always having shown a great curiosity even nosiness in all things, she checked her father's waste paper basket and found torn up receipts for groceries. Carefully stuck together we realised that my husband subsidised Mamba with her household expense. Ouch! What would be next?
He had to loosen the ties. Two lines of Lord Byron came into my mind. We were "dreading that climax of all human ills, the inflammation of his weekly bills" and convinced him he had to let go. It was not as simple as we thought. The woman spurned became a dangerous tigress. She bombarded us with phone calls. She terrified us by stalking us at night around the house and looking through windows. A poster appeared by our entrance gate with details about my husband's sex life. Soon the police became involved. Mamba had told them that he had promised her employment and then reneged on it. This was supposed to be a crime. Clever with words, Mamba could twist anything to her advantage and hoodwinked even police officers into taking her side against us. Throughout the time of this upheaval she sent strange presents for the children, self-made colourful sweets that we binned straight away. For me a pot plant arrived that mysteriously wilted overnight. It made me think of voodoo and yes, Mamba was an expert. One day we found a big burning rag doll in front of our bookshop, a sign that she was serious about it. By now my husband feared leaving his work in the evenings as she made it a habit to wait for him harassing him with words, asking for favours. He went to all kind of tricks to avoid her, parked his car elsewhere or sneaked out through the back door.

One evening I waited for him in vain. A stormy night, I passed alone and worried, taking the roars of thunder and the crack of forked lightning like a rebuke for my inability to cope. "Be strong" I told myself. "No news is good news. I would have heard if something bad had happened".
The next morning, a Sunday, he arrived for breakfast with a badly bruised face. Mamba had beaten him up in the car park when she saw him with a female reinforcement. He had not retaliated as she would have undoubtedly had accused him of assault. Strangely, all three of them drove off in separate cars to the nearest police station where everything was placed on record and they were released with a warning for wasting police time. My husband had stayed the night with this other woman. She probably compensated him for the distress he had suffered.
By then I was a nervous wreck. The daily visit of the police did not help. The whole sad saga ended when our solicitors sent Mamba a letter threatening to ban her from coming near us. It did not prevent her talking to my children when they met her in town The last I saw of Mamba was her name in a London bus advertising her book about the late Princess Diana. Hopefully she had found a niche for her many talents.
My husband, taking revenge on me for my twenty-year friendship with H. has had several affairs over the years. One was with a Filipino woman, also an abandoned mother, for whom he built bookshelves from wood out of an old cupboard. He eagerly helped her with her many needs and often spent nights away. It was odd when he left me in the evening with a "Good bye. See you tomorrow".
I made a point though, when he put the photos of her two children up on our mantelpiece. I told him he should have kept them in his briefcase.

I am still laughing about the story of the Hungarian artist's model. There were nude pictures of her all over the art school where I used life models for my sculptures. One day I discovered that she was also most familiar to my husband. He had met her at his shop and become infatuated. Her miniature paintings were hanging from the ceiling in his computer room and her photographs were all over his computer. The little success stories of his life, the ones I knew so well, were combined in his e-mails to her to make him look the hero. If it was me, I would have been suspicious. Outspoken heroes soon become bores.
He tried hard to seduce her. Alas she married the son of a famous French painter who bought her a castle in France.

There was also Natalya, a six foot Russian girl, less than half of my husband's age, with a stunning heart-shaped face with whom he ardently exchanged e-mails and probably more.
Once my husband told me to cook a meal for a client. I was stunned when he appeared with Natalya. She steered her way straight to the couch. There she was, sitting next to him, their body language bold and promising. It looked as if they were holding hands, but I might be mistaken. I asked Natalya, when she tucked into my lasagne:
"Now then, what do you think of English men?
Coldly she answered in a pronounced Russian accent:
" I am not keen on them. I preferrr RRRussian men., they rrread at last books. I did not see an expression on my husband's face. He might not even have taken it in as he was looking adoringly at our guest, a bit like an alligator shortly before a sumptuous meal.
One of Natalya's ex-boyfriends, a university don, later tried it on with my daughter Delphine confiding intimate details about her. He had no idea about the connection. Life is full of surprises, isn't it? The lover of my husband I really resented was a widowed middle-aged woman who he employed in our shop. I had to work with her explaining the work schedule, but it was impossible to get any co-operation from her. She ignored me as well as the other members of staff. She only took orders from my husband. She had been the woman who let him stay the night after the violent episode with Mamba. He later travelled with her to Holland, introduced her to his family and even visited our handicapped daughter with her.
I had never wanted her to see my poor crippled child as I always saw her as a cruel woman.
There has been another one of our employees who had a relationship with my husband. I never knew how far it had gone until the day, when on a Good Friday I received a letter from her asking for my forgiveness. She had become a nun and entered a convent.
The thorns of her conscience had pricked and stung her in the end.

I have always been interested in spiders. The Australian funnel-web spider makes a habit to devour its male after mating. A bed and breakfast invitation with a surprise!
I saw my husband's love affairs like various more or less successfully spun webs. They had been woven with the element of revenge. A perpetual hunger had led to a permanent feeling of loss. As an onlooker one might have felt, there were only victims, some were eaten and some were not.