The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  Then the chill of seeing him was undone by the idiotic thrill that followed in the next second. The one that made me think for a moment that the postcard seller was my husband.

  He wasn’t of course. This wasn’t one of those moments when a person believed to be dead turns out to be alive after all and takes to turning up in all the oddest places. Instead it was like trying to convince a wounded war veteran that he’ll hardly miss his left foot: impossible and the delusion can only ever last a heartbeat. Fiercely, defiantly, while the blood roared in my ears, I took a deep breath and forced myself to think. The postcard seller was dark haired, as I had known he would be, and was presumably Welsh, and that was where the resemblance ended.

  “Kate?”

  My companion had stopped speaking and was staring at me. We retreated into the uncertain formality of new acquaintances. He said again, “Kate – Miss Ward – perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but are you all right?”

  Finally, I felt my heart begin to beat again. I knew the sense of my ridiculousness would hit in a moment, as it had done every time I had seen my husband’s image in the past days since my accident. It was a public humiliation, a cruel display of my overactive and stressed imagination timed to happen just at the precise moment when any misstep would be observed by an audience. It was a bizarre mirror of the way my life was now. Like always; a hurtful confirmation of my sheer inability to exert any control, and nothing more.

  I met the stranger’s concern across the table and set down my cup with a distant hand. Now I felt alone again and glad of it. In a moment I would make my excuses and leave. But first, for the sake of formality, I said, “Sorry, I was listening really. What were you saying about May? Why didn’t you bring her?”

  I was impressed that I had managed to grasp the dog’s name; I had barely heard the rest of what he had been saying.

  “She wouldn’t like all the hanging about while I write my notes.” He was speaking slowly, staring at me still. “You’re not all right at all. Whatever is the matter?”

  I thought about my answer and what he would say if I admitted the full implausible truth. Not about seeing Rhys, but the rest of it. I could already picture the concerned looks, the hasty covering of his instinctive recoil and the rushed assurances that of course it didn’t sound like fantasy, not really. This was, I observed grimly, precisely why I had decided to avoid unnecessary contact with my fellow guests.

  Reluctantly, I said, “I had an accident. Just over five days ago. I banged my head and still get awfully tired.” Even as I said it, I wondered what on earth had prompted me to speak. After all, any excuse would have done. Indigestion perhaps. Or a sudden alarm about the time of the next train. I gave him a watery smile. “I’m quite all right really. Please just ignore me.”

  He didn’t even blink. I began to feel extraordinarily uncomfortable. I wasn’t alone because he wouldn’t let me feel it. His eyes, I realised with a jolt, were flecked with deeper hues and at this moment they were fixed on me with an intensity that seemed to be trying to bore right into my mind.

  “An accident?”

  His brows had furrowed, perhaps in doubt. Perhaps in disbelief. And this was just the edited version. I wasn’t mad enough to tell him the truth.

  I wouldn’t tell him about the nightmare which claimed to be a memory of two men who had appeared beside me as I waited by the bus stop in Lancaster.

  The images of that day belonged to the subsequent moments of semi-consciousness at the hospital. Moments of confusion where visits from nurses and doctors merged seamlessly with the dizzying recollection of being at one moment innocently daydreaming and in the next being steered by rough hands into the depths of a shaded doorway. The questions those men had asked there were impossible demands woven about my husband’s end that I couldn’t understand and certainly could never fulfil. The bewilderment I experienced that day was indescribable. They had fixed me there with a determination that was like nothing I had ever encountered before. They had left me with a desperate hope to the very limit of my being that I would never again be required to accept the utter inferiority of my will when pitted against the dominance of another. And a terrible suspicion that hoping was never going to be enough.

  ---

  I had woken – if waking was the correct term when I had never been asleep in the conventional sense – to the busy silence of a women’s ward where fresh questions began just as soon as I opened my eyes. These questions in their turn had brought their own confusion but at least the doctors and nurses hadn’t minded at first if I didn’t know the answers. But those men, the pair on the foggy shopping street, had acted decisively when I failed to give them the response they wanted. There had been no violence from them. There had been no need. I had found myself being bustled with grasping fingers beneath each elbow towards the flank of a waiting car. I can vividly recall that moment. The memory is filled with the sheer debilitating agony of experiencing all that in a crowd and learning that that not one of the labourers, shopkeepers or besuited office workers scurrying by was even going to notice.

  It was like a very bitter repeat of an old lesson that I had tried very hard to forget.

  It had ended at the moment the car door was dragged open and I somehow slithered free and dashed round the rear to make my escape. Only to run slap bang into the path of the oncoming traffic.

  Adam was still waiting for my explanation so I gave him a carefully edited version. “I stepped out in front of a bus.” My lips formed a hapless smile. “Don’t worry; it was coming to a stop anyway.”

  “Good grief—”

  I added, “Oh, the bus wasn’t the problem. It was the rapid collision between my head and the pavement as I fell that did the damage.”

  “Good grief,” he said again. He stared at me for a moment. I watched the disbelief fade into other calculations as he read the proof in my face, in my manner and my general bearing. Then he was saying in an altogether harder tone, “And this was barely even a week ago? What on earth are you doing here? Why did I see you strolling about on the crown of a hill at the crack of dawn when you should be at home in bed being fussed over and generally well looked after?”

  I was hastily making calculations of my own. This was the most I had confessed yet to a stranger. Every other time that I had been drawn into speaking about my injury, the explanation had been forced out of me. It had been required by such people as the cab driver who had carried me away from the hospital, those people on the train and lastly the station master at Shrewsbury. Always, it had formed part of the aftermath of a dreadfully uncontrolled slide into panicked accusations. Now, for once, suspicion wasn’t directed at the person I was speaking to and I was, nominally at least, a willing participant in this conversation. It left me utterly unprepared.

  Finally, I said as mildly as I could, “My parents are abroad – in Paris in fact, as a kind of homage to the Ballets Russes who are disbanding or relocating or something like that, and I couldn’t possibly go to my sister.” I caught his look and added quickly, “She has far better things to do with her time than worry about me when she already has a hard-working husband and two very young children to care for.”

  It was easier to let him see that I was tired. It was the better part of my defence to play the hand of feebleness. Experience had taught me that much at least. It was after all a perfectly real symptom of a severe concussion and it was a wise fraudster who filled her excuses and explanations with something that passed as plausible truth.

  Because whatever else I said, I knew now beyond all doubt that I mustn’t let him see that I was frightened. That I mustn’t give anyone else the opportunity to encounter the same barefaced distrust that I had levied at about half a dozen people in the past two days and even now was trying to fix itself anew upon the dubiously friendly Jim Bristol after our strange conversation at the base of the waterfall..

  By contrast, this man wasn’t looking particularly friendly at all. He was asking, or rather demanding tersely, “Why aren’
t you in hospital then? You can’t tell me your doctor willingly let you take yourself off like this?”

  I tried to think of a convincing lie, but I couldn’t. He wasn’t impressed.

  “This is downright insane, Kate. Why the devil—” He stopped when he saw my chin lift. I wasn’t helpless here. I had, I know, had a stiff lesson that sometimes people will do things that I can’t stop and can’t control, but that didn’t mean that I had to give up the fight.

  Besides, the people on the next table were listening in. They were pretending to be reading the menu but I could tell they were eavesdropping. The tilt of the nearest person’s head gave them away. Adam seemed to perceive this too. He leaned in with a lowered voice to say more earnestly, “Sorry. No wonder you look pale.”

  His was the one new voice in the sea of all the memories. I swear it was new. It didn’t fit the helplessness of that time when two male voices growled questions about my husband, followed by the doctors’ whispered consultations over my head with the police while my self-belief bled away into the stiff white sheets of my hospital bed.

  Because I had told the police. I wasn’t foolish enough to omit that sensible step. And besides they could see for themselves that I cringed in my hospital bed every time a door opened and I heard a man’s heavy tread approaching. But those passers-by at the bus stop had been thoroughly blind to my plight. No witnesses could recall my two men and the bus driver was adamant that he had seen nothing untoward until a lone woman had lurched into the road. And what did it matter that I could describe those two men, when there was no real proof that they even existed?

  All the same, the police had been very thorough. Their questions had begun in the usual way but very gradually even a person in my state had to notice that the kindly constables seemed to be pursuing something else, chasing an altogether different line of investigation which was perhaps even more dangerous than the incident by the bus stop had been. The tone of the policemen’s questions barely changed as they drew me to talk about my grief at my husband’s passing. I had mentioned it earlier myself so couldn’t claim it was unrelated now. In any case, they said, this particular event wasn’t actually decisive enough to count as unstable. Clearly I was perfectly sound in mind now. But wasn’t it possible I had experienced a momentary bleakness? An upsurge of desolation just as the bus had made its final approach? Apparently I should find it reassuring that the doctors didn’t think there was enough evidence for true instability; because suicide was illegal and therefore liable to end, if not in an untimely grave, then certainly with a spell in prison.

  If that hadn’t been awful enough, I had to lie there patiently while they tested a second theory in the course of their questions. And I fought it even more violently than the first. They asked me why I accepted so fully that my husband was dead. They were probing for a different kind of delusion, the sort where blind hope meets reality and the collision drives a person crazy. They needn’t have worried. It was impossible for me to believe that my husband was still alive. Because if he were; if this should have been unleashed on me because he was making some devious play of his own, it meant he had knowingly sent these men after me without even so much as a note of warning and I couldn’t believe my worth ranked so low with him as that. I didn’t dare. I was even more afraid of that idea taking root than all the rest put together.

  I was used to his indifference. I had in fact worked very hard since my divorce to teach myself that indifference was all it had been and grow wise enough to share some of the responsibility for that. I was even able to apply the same reasonableness to the fact that strangers had passed by the scene of my abduction without a glance. But this wasn’t an act of indifference. This was a man I had been married to. And he had loved me once.

  If Rhys should have willingly staged his disappearance and passed this violence on to me, this was something so indescribably evil it must question the very meaning of everything I thought he was, and everything I was too. It would shatter all my values, all ideas I’d nurtured of rediscovering empowerment and freedom since my divorce. It meant my sense of self-worth really did belong to other people – those men in the bus stop, the doctors, the police and more particularly my husband. And it was theirs to take away again.

  I couldn’t believe that. I wouldn’t. I’d left hospital that same day and given myself the only hope I could. I set myself the task of unpicking Rhys’s last movements. I’d come to Aberystwyth.

  ---

  This day, Adam was waiting for my answer. I pulled myself together and began working towards a peaceful exit.

  “Anyway,” I told him cheerfully. It wouldn’t help to overdo the weariness. “I do have something to be thankful for.”

  “Really? And that is …”

  “That the bus didn’t live up to the old adage: You wait half an hour and then two come along at once.”

  He relaxed at that, clearly relieved that for the moment I was sounding perfectly normal once more. Then there was a sudden sharp clatter as a car passed beyond the window and although I fought bitterly against the instinct that prompted me to turn and look, I saw something form in his face that might have been a reflection of my underlying obsession. Sure enough I watched helplessly as his brows lowered.

  “Kate?” he began, leaning in and watching me closely. In that unsmiling gaze was something more than concern.

  Suddenly our comfortable conversation over tea and Welsh cakes might never have been. All the wise strategies for dealing with this conversation were nothing. His mouth was not forming a new question about my general welfare. It began to form something unanswerable. It only remained to discover whether the question was designed to continue the work of those men in that bus stop, or to exert control over the precarious strength of my mind.

  “Do you really not recall—?” he began but was interrupted this time by an extraordinarily prolonged clanging of bells and blowing of whistles from the station. I took the chance. I began hastily gathering my things together.

  “Oh, goodness; that’s my train.” I ignored his surprise – the perfectly authentic surprise that undid rather too many of my concerns – and set about scrabbling in my bag. “Here, let me give you my share of the bill. Did you come by train too?”

  “No, by car. You know that.” He waved aside my money with an air of intense irritation. Then I felt his hand close over my wrist as I moved to stand up. “Don’t think for one minute that I’m letting you go.”

  I felt something cold stab inside at this new tone. His hand was there upon mine. I demanded sharply, “Why ever not?”

  It was his touch that hardened me. It swung the pendulum back towards distrust. Although he was being stern it might have been meant as a joke between us. By rights the gesture ought to have belonged to someone who knew me. A friend, perhaps, who might have the right. Only he didn’t and it made me afraid to test the power of his grip and measure it against the rough grappling of those two men. Fear hinted that he wanted me to try.

  Only he didn’t. He must have felt my recoil. I saw him make a rapid reassessment, a jerked withdrawal of his hand, and watched his mind dismiss the moment as nonsense. He was already saying impatiently like a perfectly normal man might, “Why not? Because you’ve just told me you have lately sustained a severe concussion; that you haven’t been resting properly and that you’re absolutely exhausted. That’s why.”

  I struggled out of my seat and past him, dragging my unwieldy coat and bag through the gap behind me, unable to recall any more if this rough attempt at reasonableness really did stand apart in my memory from all the other angry voices that were lodged there now. It felt like something he’d said was an echo of something familiar, something much older than this recent stress, which drifted out of reach almost at the instant that I reached for it. But there was no memory there. It was nothing more than a fresh trick of the tiredness that stalked behind the fear in my mind.

  Because I was tired. I was tired of pretending to be nice. I snapped, “Don’t
be silly, Mr Hitchen. I’m quite capable of looking after myself.”

  I saw his lips release from their tight line. They parted slightly. Disbelief, stupefaction, injury; they were all here. I had to pretend I didn’t care. I had to make such a drama out of my exit even when we had just shared such a civilised lunch because the alternative was even worse. The alternative was to cling to him in the way that a lifetime of conditioning urges any frightened female to cling to the first unwitting male who happens to present himself for the part of prospective hero. But I didn’t need the vision of those men at the bus stop to remind me that reality didn’t mirror imagination and I certainly wasn’t going to truly put chivalry to the test by actually getting into a car with one.

  I shuffled out of my seat and past him with a simple farewell as my only concession. He didn’t return it. I hadn’t got many yards down the road, however, before he’d changed his mind and caught up with me. I stopped at the entrance to the station, turning to face him and trying not to bristle, not to give in to weary frustration, and most of all trying not to notice how very forbidding he seemed.

  “Thank you for the lovely meal,” I said with a brightness that jarred. “I truly am very grateful for your offer, but I’d really rather take the train.”

  “Never accept lifts from strangers, eh?”

  His wry perceptiveness shook me more than any temper could. I gave a jerky nod and turned my eyes fiercely to the oblivion of the waiting carriages before doubt could transform into guilt and from there into a confession.

  He stood there, saying nothing and frowning down at me, waiting for my attention to return to him again with perfectly genuine disbelief etched across his face. The frown softened to something closer to his natural level of seriousness and abruptly I realised, conditioning or not, just how much I wished to dare go with this kindly man with whom I’d shared a pleasant lunch instead of hurrying for the crowded train.