A Serious Widow

by Constance Beresford-Howe

  “Everything happens again,” says Ethel calmly, “and it’s never the same.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  My key in the lock seems to make the loud, aggressive noise of an armed invasion. My heart beats fast as I ease open the door. Cautiously I peer into the dim hallway before admitting myself and the carefully packed basket on my arm. After the bright, gusty sky outside, the old house closes round me darkly, its air confined and unnaturally heavy. I remind myself that this is Thursday and that having arranged for Mrs. Blot’s afternoon off and mine to coincide, there is no risk of meeting her here. Nevertheless the sound of my own footsteps makes me nervous. There is not another sound in the place but the ponderous tick of a clock somewhere in the dim cavern of the sitting-room. Also, as I quietly mount the stairs, the regular rise and fall of someone snoring.

  In his darkened room, Sebastian lies as before, his mouth fallen a little open. His long face is thickly bearded with white and this, together with his spectral thinness, suggests he is hardly here at all. I draw close to the bed to inspect the clutter on the side table. There is a new tube of yellow capsules, but this one is labelled with his name and his doctor’s. Somewhat noisily I go to the window, raise the blind and pull up the sash a few inches. At once a burst of brilliant light and chill air bursts exuberantly in. His eyelids twitch and he mutters something unintelligible.

  “Open your eyes, Sebastian,” I tell him loudly. “Wake up this minute.”

  “Bloody nuisance,” he mumbles. With a clumsy smack his lips come together. Then he lifts a thin and tremulous hand to screen his eyes. From behind this barricade a bloodshot eye peers at me suspiciously.

  “I’ve brought you some lunch. Sit up.”

  “You, is it? I might have known. Get that filthy fresh air out of here – it will kill me.”

  “Nonsense. This isn’t Shangri-La, God knows. Sit up and take notice. I’ve got something nice here for you.”

  “Evidence that there is an a priori order of the world?”

  “No.”

  “Proof that in diversity there is some unifying essence?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Whisky?” he says hopefully.

  “Wait and see.” To make room for my basket I remove an untouched bologna sandwich curling dryly beside a full, lukewarm glass of grapefruit juice. “What do you say to a bit of beef Stroganoff, Seb? And a glass of wine?” I take an aluminum container out and open its lid. The contents are still quite hot. I wave it under his nose to tantalize him with the aroma of beef, garlic and sour cream.

  “Whatever that is, it’s sure to give me indigestion,” he says gloomily. “However, I’ll taste a bit. It actually smells like food. Mrs. B. thinks food only comes in vacuum-sealed packets and has to taste of chemicals to be safe to eat.”

  Having poured the juice down the sink and rinsed the glass, I fill it from the half-bottle of Bordeaux I’ve brought along. He takes it eagerly in both grossly trembling hands.

  “Careful, now.” A few drops spill on the sheet, and I mop them up, not very successfully. He tastes the dish without much interest, but the wine immediately brings a little colour into his leaden lips and pale, sunken cheeks. After a moment he struggles to sit more upright, muttering, “Plonk it may be, but the hell with that – I drink for the effect.” After that he eats a little more of the beef. I sit down to watch him with satisfaction. The bright air lifts the window curtain a little and throws a delicate pattern of branches onto the carpet.

  “I suppose you haven’t heard from Pam and John yet,” I say. “There hasn’t been time.”

  “Why should I hear from them?”

  “They’re in Barbados.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yes. Of course you know that.”

  “I thought you were there.”

  “Where?”

  “Barbados.”

  “What made you think that?”

  He eyes me sharply over the edge of his glass. “You’ve not been to see me for two months.”

  “Weeks, Sebastian. Weeks.” But I shift a little in my chair. It’s disconcerting to find him so much more clearheaded today. And it is difficult to explain, even to myself, why I’ve postponed this visit so long.

  “Why haven’t you come?” he asks. “I bore you, is that it?”

  “Hush,” I tell him. And obeying some impulse probably as mysterious to him as to me, I lean forward and kiss his prickly cheek. We look at each other afterwards with mild astonishment. “You do not bore me,” I say.

  “Nor you me, Mrs. Nobody.”

  “Have some more Stroganoff.”

  “Rowena, don’t leave me alone like that again. Tell me you won’t.”

  “It’s been like this, Seb; I’ve been spending a bit more time with my daughter. She’s trying to help me –”

  But somebody is unlocking the front door below. He gives a start that spills a little more of the wine, and simultaneously a reflex of fear gets me to my feet.

  “Bloody Blot,” he mumbles. “Home early for once.”

  “Well, I think I’d better – I’ll just –”

  “Yes.”

  Swiftly I repack the basket and put my coat back on. Mrs. B.’s footsteps have retreated to the kitchen. If she has not noticed my boots in the hall cupboard, I might be able to slip away without having to face her.

  “Better go,” he says. “Scene otherwise. I’m under orders not to annoy. Extend the deadline, girl, just till tomorrow, mind. Pay attention to the footnotes.” A vein jerks at the side of his neck. Hastily he gulps down the last of the wine and drops the glass to the floor, where it obligingly hides itself under the bed.

  “Yes; take care, Seb. I’ll see you next week.”

  “No use blaming me,” he mutters. “Nothing to do with me, is it. Bloody budget.”

  I pause at the top of the stairs to make sure the hall below is clear; then I descend, trying to tread lightly on the steps that creak most. I am just pulling on my second boot when a hard voice makes me jump.

  “Miss Hell.”

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. –”

  Arms folded, she faces me, incongruously bedecked in a fussy purple dress and the once-pink slippers. Doubtless her best shoes hurt. Under its elaborate layer of blusher, eye shadow and mascara, her broad face is red with anger. Involuntarily I step a little back from her.

  “You come here is no good for him, Miss Hell. Very sick old man.”

  “Well, I don’t really think he –”

  “Sick,” she repeats, and stiff-fingers her own temple meaningfully. “You make him upset.”

  “Mrs. Wright has given me –”

  “You don’t come here. Get that? No good for him.”

  “Look, I just –”

  She glances scathingly at the basket. “What you give him? I tell the doctor. I tell Miss Wright. I’m the one look after that man. I know. You stay home.”

  My heart is drumming helplessly. My mouth is too dry to form any answer. Without a word I turn away and go.

  It takes me a long time to get to sleep the night after this encounter. Then, when at last I do drift off, I wake with a start to hear somebody trying to get in downstairs. There is a fumbling at the door handle; then the door, always a little swollen in winter-time, breaks open with its familiar, stiff creak. I sit up in bed, throat so constricted with fear I can hardly breathe. An eddy of cold air drifts up the stairs toward me. In the dark I grope for and find the big sewing shears. Unhurried, regular steps mount from below. With no relief, but accelerated panic, I recognize the tread as Edwin’s. He stands in the bedroom doorway, his insignificant height extended with anger. “I am the resurrection,” says Tom’s voice from somewhere near the altar.

  “Well?” Edwin says. “What explanation have you got for this?” He is holding out a collection plate, which immediately turns into a small jeweller’s box.

  “You were buried,” I say through stiff lips.

  He comes closer to the bed. As always when in a rage, his eye
s protrude and his skin has a yellow tinge. His sex grows enormously, threateningly huge. Then the heavy, arms-akimbo bulk of Mrs. Blot superimposes itself on the darkness at the door. I try to run down the hall to escape them, but my legs are made of stone, I can barely drag one after the other. Cornered in the bathroom, I grip the ice-cold shears and in desperation lift them high. The thin street light gleams on the double blade as I drive it into the side of his neck where, like a phantom weapon, it makes no wound and leaves no mark. What jerks me awake is someone shouting, “You go home. I tell the doctor.”

  I grope for the bedside lamp and all but overturn it before my trembling hand can find the switch. Bewildered, I look around at the familiar, empty room. On the dressmaking table, the shears rest calmly in their accustomed place. My windpipe feels sore as if I have been running for a long time. And instead of fading out of focus, the dream’s bizarre details only seem to intensify as I recall them.

  Well, I think, clumsily thrusting my arms into a dressing gown, that’s natural enough. It wasn’t a dream at all, really; more a playback of a memory tape. Switching on every light along the way, I creep downstairs and put on the kettle. Black night stands at the window. From time to time a chill roughens my skin, and my heart is still pounding. The dream is over, but it has demonstrated, as dreams do, that the past is the present, a fact basic enough to frighten anyone.

  “I don’t remember being consulted about this,” Edwin remarked with unpleasant politeness. “No doubt that’s because you knew very well what I’d say. But you obviously felt a bit uncomfortable about spending my money on something I disapprove of, or you wouldn’t have hidden it, would you?”

  “She has to have a birthday present, Edwin. And all her friends have a quartz watch.”

  “I don’t believe it does a child any good at all to have the gimmicks everybody else has. But apparently you have no respect at all for my opinion.”

  “Well, I don’t see how it will make Marion a better human being to be deprived of everything other kids have. We have no TV, for instance, which itself – In any case, the watch was on sale; it only cost –”

  “It’s the principle, Rowena; can you not get that into your head? I get no co-operation from you. You’ve spent money I can’t afford – but that’s not the point. What I can’t accept is your brand of passive resistance – worse, your deceit; your disloyalty.”

  I had no answer to that; the raw truth of it silenced me. Next day I took the little watch back to the shop where, after some unpleasantness with the manager, Edwin’s money was refunded. Marion got a new winter coat for her birthday instead. But that was not the end of it. For days afterwards his silence constricted the very air in the house to an unbreathable substance. Because I had nothing else, still less anything better, the withdrawal of whatever he felt for me, even if it was only approval, could not be endured. In the end I wept.

  “I’m sorry, Edwin. I was wrong. It won’t happen again.”

  “So you say. It’s easy to promise, isn’t it, just for the sake of peace?” He was sitting on the side of the bed taking off his socks, and this domestic intimacy added its own ingredient of ugliness to the scene, as did the fact we had to keep our voices low to avoid waking Marion.

  “Why do we go on with this?” I asked desperately. “Why do we keep on together when –”

  “I made a certain commitment. And so did you. That’s all.”

  “But what if that’s not enough?” The tears had dried up and I was proud of that, but when he stared at me I could not meet the challenge and my swollen eyes filled again. “Whatever else can be said about me,” he said, “I do look after you. Don’t forget that.”

  “I’m not – I don’t. But I still say why go on when there’s so much bitterness …” It was raining heavily outside, a dark nighttime downpour that made me ever afterwards associate rain with misery.

  “You don’t want to end it,” he said flatly.

  There was a silence. Then I said, “No.”

  He looked at me again. There was a sly, dry pleasure in his glance; it was the satisfied look of the winner, which I saw again this afternoon on the face of Calliope Blovantasakis.

  Shivering, I fold my hands around my teacup in an effort to warm them. In the eastern corner of the sky an immaculate pink streak is opening, delicate and luminous as the pearly inside of a shell. It slowly expands, shining its impersonal, impartial beauty over this dirty world and all its inhabitants. It makes its own wordless comment on that long-ago scene between me and Edwin. I sit there pondering the immortality of such defeats. The hot drink has calmed me, but I am still not brave enough to go back to bed, where that and other surrenders have so often been consummated. I sit at the kitchen table watching the radiance outside gradually thin and brighten to mundane daylight.

  The dream plays and replays its tape in my mind. Its details, down to the murderous lift of the shears, need no interpretation. What poor, battered Mrs. Blot was doing in my subconscious as a threat puzzles me at first. Then, when I understand it, something like relief steals over me.

  Finally I can think calmly, almost with regret, “Well, there it is. I can’t do it. I’m a casualty and that can’t be altered now. Nothing’s left over to help anybody else with. Never mind whose fault it all is … that’s beside the point now. What it means is I can’t risk – I can’t face – sorry, Sebastian, but there it is. I can’t afford to see you if it’s going to rake up all this … Not with my limitations. Sorry, but that’s it.”

  Once this decision is made, I feel released. A wave of drowsiness makes my head swim. Yawning, I go to the sofa and, pulling the afghan over me, fall into a deep sleep.

  Midway through February, my birthday rolls around. Almost nothing distinguishes it from any other day. Marion sends me a card with kittens on it, wishing me many happy returns. Cuthbert calls me up to convey the same message.

  “Thanks, Cuthbert.”

  “I’m up to my eyeballs here or I’d suggest dinner or something. But everything at the office is jumping and tonight I’ve got to take Basil to the vet; I think he has pip. And on top of it all, Elaine’s car blew its brakes today and I had to drive her to the day-care place to pick up Sarah. Actually it wasn’t the drag I thought it would be, though, because she’s really a cute kid. Great big blue eyes, and she chats away – a really big vocabulary for a two-year-old. She waved to me when I dropped them off and said, ‘See you around, Cupboard.’ Cute, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no more news except that one of my partners has taken on an interesting case … a lady politician under investigation for conflict of interest. That could turn out to be a real can of worms, but Jack will get her off, I’m pretty sure. And how are things with you, Rowena? Marion well?”

  “Yes, though I think she could use a holiday … or something. There’s no news here, really. I’m still chopping chickens for a living and with some help from Marion I’m managing all right.”

  “That’s good,” he says comfortably. A clicking noise now breaks out on the line, and he says rather hurriedly, “Someone’s trying to get this number, I think, Rowena, so I’d better ring off. Talk to you again soon.”

  “Yes. Goodbye, Cuthbert.”

  So much for any hope I may have had, then, that this birthday might actually see the emergence of anything new, much less a new me.

  Next evening, the familiar stamp of snow boots outside the door makes an official announcement of Marion’s arrival. With some reluctance I put down my book and get up to greet her. She disposes tidily of her outdoor things and then stands a moment smoothing her already smooth hair. There is something in the lift of her arms and the set of her back that suggests tension, even a state of heightened emotion, and this disquiets me.

  “Hello, dear. Thanks for the birthday card.”

  “Everything all right here, Mother?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I tell her, wishing it were true.

  “Actually I meant to drop in yesterday,
but things piled up and I couldn’t make it.”

  “Have you eaten? I’ve got some –”

  “No, don’t bother. I mean, I haven’t, but I don’t want anything.”

  Marion has always regarded food as an uninteresting interruption to more important matters; hence she has always been thin; but tonight I notice egg-shaped hollows under her collarbone that seem new. Her colour is high, and she moves around the room as if charged with more nervous energy than she knows what to do with. On her way past the sofa she picks up my book – Mrs. Wilson’s The Innocent Traveller.

  “But you’ve read this before,” she says, tossing it down.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Why on earth read it again, then? You know what happens – what’s the point?”

  “With her books, it’s not what happens, because not much does, generally. It’s how and why and to whom that –”

  “Makes no sense to me.”

  I let this go. She fidgets the venetian blind straight, tidies several library books into a neat pile, then brusquely turns the cat out of the big chair and drops into it herself. A second later she jumps up and heads for the kitchen. “Stay where you are,” she tells me. “I’ll make us a pot of tea.”

  In her absence, Wittgenstein repossesses the chair. Once back with the tea, she turns him out again. He stalks out of the room in dignified offence.

  “I’ve just come from the East General,” she says.

  “Oh?” I look at her anxiously. “What took you there?”

  “Bernice. The stupid fool swallowed a hundred aspirins last night.” What perplexes me is not this news, but the note of something almost like elation in Marion’s voice.

  “No, really. The poor creature.”

  “You’d think a pharmacist would make a better job than that of knocking herself off, wouldn’t you. Aspirin, of all things.”

  “Yes, but Marion –”

  “All it did was make her vomit.”

  “But isn’t that a dangerous dose?”

  “Not unless you choke to death.”