The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  This time comment was far from kind. I do not know which well-meaning friend retailed it to her, but it is all there in the diary. Some ladies said there should be an autopsy, others said darkly that that wouldn’t reveal anything. Both sexes pointed out that in the case of her first and her second husband the doctor had been summoned around eleven o’clock at night. They also pointed out that both husbands had a history of heart trouble. Oh no, they said, an autopsy wouldn’t reveal anything criminal.

  Maria Ferneyhough decided to move. What chance was there of a successful (in her terms) third marriage with whispers like this going around respectable Eastbourne society? She fixed on Scarborough, which had many features in common with Eastbourne—notably an aging, mainly retired population—but drew its residents from an entirely different part of the country.

  Maria’s third marriage, to Stanley Stalleybrass, was her longest before she finally settled—it lasted all of fifteen months. Clearly a diet of meat puddings and plum duffs and beer had not destroyed the man’s hardy Yorkshire constitution. He had owned a smelting works near Barnsley, had sold up after his wife had died and moved to the coast. Maria recorded that he was “v. bored.” Not for long. It would be prurient to count the number of “s. blisses” recorded in the diary after their marriage, but they certainly are frequent. It was, one feels, with a certain relief that Maria records in May 1872: “Stanley expired (after s.b.!). V. happy.” I am not entirely clear whether this last comment refers to herself or to Stanley.

  It would be tedious to follow Maria round for the next years of her life, for the details of her marriages as recorded in the diary are essentially similar to those which (against all the wishes of my dear grandmother) I have just recounted. She never again married two husbands in the same town, and this, I think, was prudent: though (to my knowledge) nothing criminal was ever involved, still, there was a danger of her reputation preceding her on her travels, which in fact it never did. Also it meant she could remarry quicker. So the decade saw her moving herself and her (more and more extensive) belongings to Aberdeen, St. Anne’s, Leamington Spa, Edinburgh, Torquay and St. Davids, becoming successively (and after elaborate legal settlements enabling her to keep control of her fortune) Mrs. Hamish McGregor, Mrs. Alfred Dunn, Mrs. James Cadogan, Mrs. Iain MacPherson, Mrs. Lionel Blount, and Mrs. Owen Thomas. The marriages lasted various lengths of time: that to James Cadogan, for example, was over by the first night, and the diary does not record that “s.b.” was involved. All the other husbands were initiated into that terrible delight, and all paid the price for it.

  It was in St. Davids, that sleepy Welsh cathedral village, that Maria Thomas, as she then was, met Mr. Julius Kirkpatrick. She was very recently widowed—a condition as regular with her as a summer cold—and preparing to up sticks and find fresh woods and pastures new. Not to mention, of course, elderly lambs to be led to the slaughter. She met Mr. Kirkpatrick, she records, in the chilly, underpopulated cathedral, after Sunday service. He was, he told her, still mourning the death of his wife the previous year, and he had come to St. Davids for the loneliness of its situation, and the healthy beauty of its walks, which he hoped would add tone to his system, which had been sadly weakened by grief and a series of minor heart attacks.

  He was there and then invited back to Maria’s substantial house (inherited, of course) on the Square. The entries at this point in her diary were becoming longer and more revealing (she later wrote several stories of a sentimental nature for women’s magazines, so perhaps it is from her that I get my bent for fiction). She records that he was “v. agreeable and well informed. Knows Edinburgh well, and Leamington Spa. Says he is sixty-one but looks yngr. Shall pursue the matter no further here.”

  The fact was that the advent in her life of Mr. Julius Kirkpatrick was an inconvenience to my great-great-grandmother’s plans. She had already decided to take a cruise to Italy. One week before meeting him she had booked her passage to Naples on an India-bound steamship, which was to depart from Southampton at the beginning of March, and which would call at Le Havre, Lisbon, Marseilles, and Genoa before arriving in Naples. Maria’s plans were for one month in the Italian South: she had booked a hotel for part of that time in Amalfi, and had reserved her return passage on another boat that did the India run for late April 1882. Clearly Mr. Kirkpatrick was a prospect, but no more than that. He was not to be allowed to come in the way of present happiness.

  She had reckoned without the man himself. After two days at the Great Western Hotel in London (“Clothes” underlined several times in the diary) she proceeded to Southampton and went on board the Duke of Albany, where she found Mr. Kirkpatrick (underlined, with several exclamation marks after it, in the diary) already ensconced. They had met perhaps four or five times in her last days in St. Davids, but apparently she had him interested—so enthralled, in fact, that he had decided to pursue her. At the various stops we have “Le Havre with Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. Conway and Mr. Kirkpatrick.” At Lisbon she went ashore with only Mrs. Conway and Mr. Kirkpatrick. By Marseilles she and he were alone. By Naples their friendship was a well-established thing. He went with her to Pompeii, and bought her several of the classical-headed trinkets that were the tourist fodder of the time (I have inherited a bracelet that I think must be one of these very trinkets). He escorted her up Vesuvius (“Mr. Kirkpatrick’s strong arm to assist me”) and even helped her choose hats and shoes. He stayed in another hotel in Amalfi while she was there, escorted her on a brief trip to Rome, and again on a weekend visit to Sicily. Clearly the friendship was more than firm, though it seems nothing was said about marriage until they were on the boat home.

  There were elements in Maria’s diary account of her Italian trip that I confess would have made me suspicious (but then I am a crime writer, and congenitally suspicious). The fact that Maria herself was not may be due to the fact that she was genuinely attracted to Julius Kirkpatrick. Maybe her adventurous spirit recognized its fellow. At any rate, when he proposed, the second night out of Naples, she accepted immediately—“v. happy”—and they were married four nights later in Spanish waters by the captain of the Lahore, the boat which they had taken, in accordance with Maria’s original plans. Several times in the days that follow she records that she is “v. happy,” and she describes as “enchanting” the days they spent in Lisbon and the French ports. One might almost think that her rocky marital career was over and she was finally happy, were it not that, in French waters, she recorded: “Talked to J. of s. bliss. Not v. interested.”

  The diary records many sayings of Julius, lists things bought, notes dinings at the captain’s table and suchlike commonplaces of shipboard life until at last they docked, traveled by train to London, and settled themselves into a suite at the Great Western, intending, according to the diary, to enjoy a week in London before traveling to settle up their affairs in Pembrokeshire, though she also records that Julius was “much plagued by business matters that he is forced to attend to.”

  The end came three days after their return to those shores, and thanks to the fullness of the account in the diary I can perhaps exercise such fictional powers as I possess and describe the scene more fully than hitherto. It began soon after breakfast, and it was sparked off, appropriately enough, by a further reference to “s. bliss.” I imagine Maria coming up behind Julius as he sat at table in their suite reading the Daily Telegraph (he was not a man of much education) and putting her arms around him and kissing him on the cheek.

  “Is my Julius happy?”

  “Deliriously happy, my dear.”

  “Has he everything he could wish for?”

  “Very nearly everything, my dear.”

  “What more could he possibly want? Was he thinking of that supreme bliss that I promised to reveal to him one day?”

  Mr. Kirkpatrick smiled secretively.

  “No, my dear,” he said, folding his paper and setting it beside his plate. “It was not that supreme bliss that you spoke to me of. In fact, I’m afraid that the
rapture Mr. Thomas and Mr. MacPherson enjoyed is not destined to fall to my lot.”

  Maria should have known then that the game was up. She had admitted to being twice widowed, but Mr. MacPherson’s was not one of the names she had mentioned.

  “Perhaps you are wise, my dear . . . with your heart . . .”

  “It should really have occurred to you, Maria, that a man with a weak heart does not climb Vesuvius. A weak heart would have been a severe handicap to me in my work as a private inquiry agent.”

  “Inquiry agent?” Maria’s voice faltered.

  “In vulgar parlance, a detective. One of my most interesting assignments over the past two years has been to follow you in your enterprising marital career.”

  “Why should you?”

  “The family of the late Iain MacPherson, of Edinburgh, engaged me. The Scots, to their credit, are a suspicious race of people, and they don’t take lightly to being disinherited in favor of a young wife, come from nowhere, disappearing to nowhere.”

  Maria’s jaw set obstinately.

  “I’ve done nothing criminal.”

  “Quite right, my dear. And after lengthy—and somewhat costly—investigations, that was the conclusion I was forced to report back to them. I trust they felt in some small way compensated for their expenses by the fact that the report made most interesting reading. Sad—or perhaps in one way most fortunate—that it would not be considered suitable reading for the ladies.”

  “When . . . did you make this report?”

  “Shortly before coming to make your acquaintance in St. Davids.”

  Maria was reduced to silence for a moment.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I’m not going to indulge in any sessions designed to produce supreme bliss, that’s a certainty. But you ask the wrong question, my dear. I am going to do nothing. The question is, what are you going to do?”

  She drew herself up and looked him straight in the eye, as if declaring battle.

  “I?”

  “You can hardly imagine that I would sleep easy, living with a woman with such a marital history? If you have done nothing criminal as yet, still your career has strayed so breath-takingly close to the borderline that clearly you would cross it the moment you thought it would suit your purposes to do so. The question is, then, where are you to go?”

  “I to go? I should have thought—”

  “I fear that in this case you have not thought nearly enough, my dear. I have already wired Davies, the lawyer in St. Davids, that the house there is to be sealed. I know you have bank accounts both in London and in St. Davids, and I have set my lawyers on to make sure you are refused access to these. There you may see the beauty of our romantic shipboard marriage, my dear. You were unable to consult with lawyers and to arrange the usual settlements and jointures.”

  “But . . . there’s protection now for married women! Protection against men like you!”

  “Ah—you refer to the Married Women’s Property Act—if I may say so, a wise and long-overdue measure. This is a milestone year for the female sex. No doubt you followed the debates and the newspaper discussions with interest. Alas, those were but debates, were but discussions. Unfortunately—and this really is unfortunate for you—the bill has not yet become law, is not expected to receive royal assent until the summer. Your property, my dear, is mine and mine alone.”

  “This is monstrous!”

  “You see now the urgency as well as the cunning of my plan. But I am not an unreasonable person. Legally you may have claim to little more than the clothes you stand up in. Upon compassionate grounds I will certainly allow you to take all your clothes and personal effects—jewelry and suchlike things. Pity you always went for money in the bank rather than portable property, don’t you think? But I’ll be generous: I’ll add a sum of ready money. Shall we say five hundred pounds? Yes, I think that would do nicely. Five hundred pounds—on condition that you do the one thing that will make my present happiness complete: remove yourself and all trace of you from this hotel by nightfall.”

  I do not know how long my great-great-grandmother stormed, fumed, counterattacked, protested, pleaded, but I do know she was out of that hotel by nightfall. And I do know that before many weeks had passed she was on the boat to Australia—no doubt feeling that only such a place was sufficiently remote for her to resume her career without the attentions of Mr. Kirkpatrick spoiling her schemes.

  It was a mistaken choice. Australia was then still a young country, a country of young men making their fortunes. Old men who had made theirs were not thick on the ground, as they were in the seaside and spa towns of Great Britain. But my great-great-grandmother was a great believer in the institution of marriage, and had never found it wanting. Within a year of landing she had married (with what legality it is perhaps best not to inquire) George Atherton, an ironmonger of Sydney two years younger than herself, a vigorous man, by all accounts, and one who could stand any amount of supreme bliss. Though by then she was in her later thirties, she soon produced two sons, and thus established the line of Athertons who have figured prominently in the history of New South Wales and Australia. It was a transformation into respectability, into social prominence, that was remarkable even by Australian standards.

  But there is one more fact about my great-great-grandmother Maria Atherton, and I record it without comment. Though the Athertons were moderately prosperous, their place in the Sydneyocracy was gained after she received a legacy of seventy thousand pounds, a great sum in those days, from a retired New England grazier. The will paid tribute to her as one of the most remarkable women in Sydney, and added that she had made an old man very happy.

  POST MORTEM

  Throughout my father’s funeral my mother sternly kept back her emotion. At home afterwards, with the relatives and the top people from the factory, she was controlled, almost gracious, though often I noticed her eyes downturned, her mouth working. Only when the stragglers had been seen from the door and the last car had driven away did she come back into the lounge, let out a great whoop of triumph, and throw her black hat in the air.

  “Hooray! Shot of him at last!”

  I looked at her disapprovingly. There were no neighbors to hear, for The Maples is set in extensive grounds, but in the kitchen was Mrs. Mottram, who had prepared and served the funeral bakemeats. I pointed meaningfully in that direction.

  My mother leaned forward in her chair.

  “I don’t give a monkey’s fart for Mrs. Mottram.”

  But she said it in a low hiss, which showed that she had taken my point.

  Now she started moving restlessly around the room. When our fellow mourners were here she had pressed food on them but had eaten nothing herself. Now she greedily sampled everything, eating voraciously as if she had ordered the lavish spread precisely with this moment in mind.

  “These vol-au-vents are delicious. No one can say we didn’t give him a good send-off. . . . I wonder if I should phone the solicitor.”

  “Of course you shouldn’t. How would it look?” Seeing this argument carried no weight with her, I added: “Anyway, you know Mr. Blore is away. Otherwise he would have been here at the funeral. He wouldn’t want any underling to deal with it. He said he’d be back tomorrow.”

  My mother’s mouth grimaced into a little moue.

  “But how on earth are we going to get through the rest of the day?”

  In the end I took her for a long drive, well away from Rotherham, where the McAtee works and the family home are situated. In a small Derbyshire pub she got thoroughly sloshed on her favorite gin slings, and that kept her happy till morning.

  It was as much as I could do to stop her ringing Mr. Blore immediately after breakfast. “Solicitors don’t get to work at nine o’clock,” I said. As it was, she made an awful impression by ringing at twenty past, and finding he was not due in till ten-fifteen. She finally spoke to him at twenty past ten, and though she conducted her end of the conversation with the sort of deco
rum she had shown at the funeral, when she put down the phone she seemed oddly dissatisfied.

  “When I said we had a copy of the will here, he said: ‘Well, we’ll discuss all that tomorrow.’ ”

  That should have told me.

  My mother dressed the part next day, which was a relief. She is inclined to use a too bright lipstick for a woman of her age, and an inappropriate nail varnish. People say she is vulgar and grasping, but we get on all right. Not because I am vulgar and grasping, but because I like a quiet life. Anyway, her black was irreproachable.

  Mr. Blore treated us with the utmost respect, as no doubt he always did treat grieving relatives, whether he liked them or not (and in the case of my mother he certainly didn’t). He ushered us to seats, offered dry, solicitorial condolences to my mother, inquired of me if the funeral arrangements had been satisfactory. We fed him back with muted platitudes. Then he sat back in his chair and let us have it.

  “But that’s bloody impossible!” screamed my mother, her mask slipping badly. “How could there be a later will? He made this one just before he became ill. He had no chance—”

  “Nevertheless he made one.”

  My mother thought.

  “Mrs. Mottram. I’d bet my bottom dollar—”

  Mr. Blore inclined his head noncommittally.

  “And I believe there were days when you had other cleaning staff in . . .”

  “Spick and Span. They gave the house a thorough clean every fortnight. I always went out when they came. . . . Witnesses. . . . I must have been mad.”

  “And your husband had access to a typewriter.”

  For those little notices to the workforce—exhortations, pep talks, ironic little comments on slackness—which I had dutifully pinned up on the notice board, and which had aroused more derision than respect since he was no longer on the shop floor to enforce his will.