The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  Back in the hotel room, Len imagined his day, going over things with Marian, wondering what John Julian was doing, speculating whether he was getting on well with his teacher (“She seemed such a nice woman”). As with most parents, such speculation was endless and self-feeding, and Len decided to save the fetching of his son from school as a delicious treat for next day.

  His work at the factory, his talk in the canteen, was dispatched with his usual efficiency. By late afternoon he was on the train to York, and then on the Inter-City to Peterborough, gazing sightlessly at the rolling English countryside. His son had run into his arms at the school gates, almost incoherent in his anxiety to tell his father everything about his day. Len had sat him on the wall of the playground to give him a few minutes to get his breath and tell him all the most important points. Then they had walked home hand in hand, John Julian still chattering nineteen to the dozen as he retrieved from his memory more facts and encounters of vital interest in his young life. Marian was waiting at the door and the whole thing was to do again—all the day’s events recounted, all the jumble of impressions and opinions rolled out again for her.

  Marian in fact was not home when he got in. She was still at her night-school class in nineteenth-century history. Len made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and sat by the kitchen table gazing out at the twilit garden, smiling to himself as he went through the excitements and joys of his day. He did not hear his wife let herself in through the front door. He did not realize she stood for some moments watching him as he sat there smiling contentedly. He was conscious only of a movement behind him as she snatched the bread knife from the table, and very conscious of pain as the knife went into his back.

  Later on, in the police station, her face raddled with tears of guilt and self-hatred, and while Len struggled for life in the local hospital, all Marian could do was sob out over and over: “I knew he’d found another woman. I’d known it for months. He was so happy!”

  THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

  Strangely enough I’d thought of Wicklow only the week before. I’d been reading a review in the Times Literary Supplement of a life of Hemingway, and reacted to the assertion: “All bullies are something else underneath, of course.” I’d shaken my head. Wicklow wasn’t, I said to myself: Wicklow was just bully through and through.

  And now here he was on the other side of a smoky, beer-sodden Glasgow bar—the body even heavier, the face jowlier, the hair flecked with gray, but still unmistakably the Wicklow of my school days thirty years on. I shivered uncontrollably and buried my head in the Literary Review.

  Perhaps it was not so strange that I’d thought of Wicklow so recently: I think he comes to my mind whenever instances of legalized cruelty come up—and heaven knows, that’s often enough these days. It must have been 1960 when I saw him last, but that was two or three years after he had left Manorfield School. He used periodically to revisit the scene of his triumphs. The period of his greatest dominance was in the mid-fifties, notably the years 1956 to 1958, when he was a prefect. Then he was at his peak. He had always, I’m sure, tyrannized over boys smaller than himself, but as a prefect he had real power. One of my waking nightmares is a memory picture taken through my legs as I was bent over for punishment: it is of Wicklow running forward, cane raised. The memory is terrible not just for the pain that came after—the sharp, annihilating pain, repeated over and over—but especially for the expression of unbounded relish on his face. After the first stroke he always laughed—the laugh succeeding his victim’s first cry of pain, telling him, as if he didn’t know already, that any pleas for mercy would be so much wasted breath.

  Wicklow wasn’t just physically cruel: he had a nice line in psychological torments too. The most perilous position at Manorfield was that of a new boy whom Wicklow apparently befriended. The boy in question was always warned, but hope of avoiding the more dreadful manifestations of Wicklow’s power by being favorite seemed to spring eternal. He could combine the psychological and the physical, as when he would overlook a minor offense with the chilling phrase: “I’ll save it up.” The end of this “saving” was always a beating of horrible ferocity.

  You will say: “But this was the fifties. Things like that didn’t happen then.” Oh, but they did: they happened in some “good” schools, and they happened in many bad schools. Manorfield was a very bad school. I told my father what the place was like when I went home for the holidays, but he just shrugged and said it was part of the process of growing up, that I needed to be toughened up, that he wouldn’t want people to say that any son of his was a ninny. I think his attitude was that he’d been through it in his time, so he didn’t see why I shouldn’t go through it in my turn. I think, even, that he rather enjoyed the thought. When, many years later, he begged me not to have him put in an old people’s home I found it quite easy to harden my heart.

  “Cardwell! If it isn’t young Cardwell! Still got your nose buried in a book I see!”

  His face was reflected, horribly distorted, in the wet barroom table, a twisted version of my nightmare picture. My heart sinking, my brain telling me over and over he could do nothing to me now, I looked up. There he was, standing over me as so often before: those rugby player’s shoulders, the large hands now clutching a pint glass, the beer belly and above all the chilling smile. I nodded, casual, very cold, trying to disguise the fact that I still felt fear of him.

  “Hello, Wicklow,” I said.

  He smiled, as if I’d just confirmed a suspicion.

  “You’d seen me, hadn’t you? Recognized me. And you didn’t come over to say hello.”

  “Is there any reason why I should?”

  “It would have been friendly. What are you having?”

  I shook my head grimly and put my hand over my half-full wineglass.

  “Wise man. I’m going to have to try to get rid of this.” He patted his belly and went over to the bar. I sat there praying that was the end of the encounter, but knowing it was not. He brought his fresh pint over to my table and sat down. “That wasn’t friendly, you know, Cardwell,” he said, “seeing me over there on my own and shrinking into your—whatever it is.” He waved his hand contemptuously at my periodical. “But then you always were a cagey little sod. What’s the word? Introverted, that’s it.”

  I tried to assert myself.

  “Look, Wicklow, what is this about? I think I’ve made it pretty clear you’re not welcome.”

  “You haven’t been chummy,” he admitted, with a mock air of forgiveness, “but I can’t for the life of me see why not.”

  “If you’re so thick that I have to spell it out, then I’ll spell it out: you’re not welcome because you’re a sadist who made my school days a misery.”

  He laughed and spread out his hands.

  “Good heavens, that was thirty years ago! What a time to nurse a grievance. Blame the system, blame the school.”

  “The system allowed it, you took advantage of it. You were the most appalling bully.”

  Wicklow smiled.

  “I dispensed discipline.”

  “You did a whole lot more than that. And you enjoyed it.”

  “Of course I enjoyed it! It would have been a bloody silly waste of effort if I hadn’t, wouldn’t it?”

  The frankness of the admission took me by surprise. He was beginning to fascinate more than repel me.

  “You used to come back after you’d left—” I began.

  “Oh boy, yes! I used to play with the First Fifteen when they just had friendlies. And then in the gym afterward. . . . I was in peak condition then. Though I say it myself, I was an artist. I had an agreement with the head boys who came after me. They used to save the hard cases for me to operate on. I used to look forward to those Saturdays. . . . Hated it when they came to an end.”

  Oh, the lovely English nostalgia for our school days!

  “Yes, I remember my last two years were free of you,” I said.

  “An old aunt, last of her line, running a small
manufacturing business, adopted me as her heir. I changed my name, took over the running of the business, moved up to Scotland.” He sighed, his regret obviously genuine. “It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, but there was some heart-searching, I can tell you.”

  “I can imagine you running a business,” I said.

  He laughed, that Wicklow laugh I remembered so well.

  “You think I’m the sort of industrialist who lays off his workers just before Christmas, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Wicklow, I do.”

  “Not at all. Nothing so crude.” His face twisted into the Wicklow smile. “But I do have a list of birthdays and wedding anniversaries.”

  “That figures,” I said. “Are you married yourself?”

  “I was, briefly. She couldn’t stand the . . . pace.”

  “You really are an appalling man, aren’t you?”

  “I am what I am what I am. Blame the school.”

  “I don’t respect people who are always trying to shift blame. You didn’t have to use the system in the way you did.”

  “Good Lord, can you imagine anyone with my tastes not? And who’s to say it wasn’t the school, giving the older boys those powers, that nourished the tastes in me. You’re not being logical, old man.”

  “I’m not feeling logical.”

  “Though, to be fair, a sadist will always find an outlet, one way or another. Look at the language politicians use when the mortgage rate goes up: ‘hurt,’ ‘bite,’ ‘strong medicine.’ I’m not very different to thousands of others. You just had a few bad times, that’s all.”

  “You changed my whole character.”

  He shrugged.

  “You look to me to be a perfectly normal man. Of a certain type.”

  I didn’t rise to that last dig.

  “You really have no shame, have you?”

  “None whatsoever. I’ve had a good life on the whole. Shame should be felt when you haven’t done what you could have done, even though you wanted to. I’ve usually been able to do what I’ve wanted to do. The only thing I’ve never done is murder anyone.”

  “You could murder my wife,” I said.

  We both laughed. A shared barroom joke that I despised myself for having initiated. But as I drained my glass my hand shook at having given myself away to him. He put out his hand and took my glass.

  “You’ll have that refill now, won’t you? Dry white? It would be.”

  By the time he returned from the bar I had got my breath back. The words had come out involuntarily because I was so preoccupied with what to do about Eileen. But I’d treated it as a joke, and he’d treated it as a joke.

  “So what about you?” he said, settling his bulk down behind the table. “What do you do for a living?”

  “Oh, nothing very exciting. I work for Nicolls, the publishers.”

  “Might have known it would be something bookish.”

  “Actually I’m on the production side. Oh, they give me a manuscript to advise on now and again, something in my field, or something on one of my hobbies. But mostly the job is practical and financial. I come up here once a fortnight because our printing works is here.”

  “Ah . . . But you live in London?”

  “Yes. Or Bromley anyway. I commute, along with thousands of others.”

  “Nice house?”

  “Nice enough. Bromley isn’t exactly Olde Worlde. Still, it’s big—bigger than we could afford if we were buying it now—and it’s got plenty of ground. When you’ve been to boarding school you value privacy.”

  “That’s right. Children? I should think you’d like children.”

  “No. My wife is . . . delicate.”

  “Ah, shame. But you like your job, do you? It’s satisfying, I should think.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is that. I’d like to be on the editorial side—that’s where my interest lies. But I’m too useful on the production things—I’m up in the technology, very good at costing and so on. So I suppose that’s where I’m stuck.”

  “And the . . . special interest: where does she work?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Come off it, Jeff—we’re both men of the world.” He laughed hugely, and I hated the thought of being a man of the world alongside him. “You’re either having something on the side, or there’s a prospect in view.”

  Inevitably I produced my man-of-the-world credentials.

  “Well, there is someone in Publicity. A lot younger than me, but—well—she seems—”

  “Interested. Good. Good for you! And hence your little matrimonial problem.” We both laughed. It was all a great laugh. “But that shouldn’t be a problem these days, should it? I got rid of mine—well, strictly speaking, she flew the nest. Why shouldn’t you do the same, or persuade your wife to?”

  “I’ve told you, she’s delicate.” My smile was bitter. “You’ve no idea how delicate a delicate wife can be! She spends half her life in bed. The fact is, her sanity’s on a knife’s edge.”

  He raised his eyebrows and laughed heartily again.

  “Guilt. That’s your problem, isn’t it, Jeff? You can’t do what you want to because you would be consumed with guilt afterward.”

  And of course he was right.

  “Yes. That is my problem.”

  “As I say, I’ve never felt that way. Perhaps I am the man to help you with your . . . matrimonial problem.”

  He said it with a huge smile, and I laughed back at him.

  “What do you propose? Some kind of Strangers on a Train deal, where I do one for you in exchange?”

  “Good Lord, no. If I wanted a murder done I wouldn’t choose a wimp like you to do it.” I was still laughing, but inside I cringed. What was it in me that wanted to live up to his horrible standards? “No,” he went on, “what I was proposing was a personal service to you. You obviously feel some kind of bitterness—God knows why, after all these years—and I’m proposing to make it up to you.”

  “And achieve a personal ambition.”

  “And achieve a personal ambition. So make sure when you’re up here again on—when will that be?—the seventeenth—”

  “That’s right. The seventeenth and eighteenth.”

  “—that you take someone out to dinner in the evening, make a late night of it, be at the works early in the morning and go home again in the usual way. When would that be?”

  “I catch the midday train, get home a bit after six.”

  “There you are: problem solved.”

  This was all done with great grins, lots of laughter—as if we were still schoolboys, and schoolboys who liked each other. But inside my heart was beating fast.

  “Joke over,” I said. “I love my wife.”

  “Absolutely, old boy. All husbands do.”

  “There is no matrimonial problem.”

  “Quite. And you’re getting younger every day, and the little thing in Publicity will wait forever. I get the picture. . . . Christ, I need a pee.” He stood up, looming over me in the old way, looking down at me and smiling. “Of course I’d make it look like a robbery.”

  I sat there as he lumbered off to the lavatory, shouldering smaller drinkers aside. Half of me screamed that I had to escape from him, from his threatening presence and from the hideous memories he evoked. The other half told me to stay, to make sure it had been a joke, to get the message through to him that if he had been serious he’d better think again because of course I didn’t want him to murder my wife. . . .

  I sat, and sat, and sat. Wicklow did not return. His cruelty was as beautifully calculated as ever. After half an hour I went back to my hotel. It was an effort to behave normally as I collected my key at the desk. When I got to my room I ran into the bathroom and stood over the basin, retching, heaving, crying. As I lay on my bed afterward, staring at the ceiling, I remembered times at school when I had done exactly the same thing after sessions with Wicklow. Same old Wicklow, same old Cardwell. And a situation that nothing at Manorfield School had prepared me for.
r />   • • •

  With daylight things didn’t seem quite so bad. On the long train trip home I reasoned that of course he had not been serious: it had just been one of Wicklow’s “games”—those horrible playings with people that had been almost worse than the beatings. The whole thing had been the drama of an evening, something to enliven a chance encounter. True, the other half of me said that one way or another I’d given him all the information he needed, and something very deep down said I’d given him the information because I wanted him to have it, wanted him to do what he was engaging himself to do. But on the whole I had convinced myself by the time I returned home that it was all a nightmarish joke, nothing more. I could face Eileen with my usual cheerful patience. My usual wimpish, cringing eagerness to keep her happy.

  Two days later I received his postcard. “Definitely interested in that business arrangement. Cheers, Chris.”

  I had forgotten his Christian name. Nobody thought of him as anything but Wicklow at school. A Christian name would have humanized him. The postcard was a view of Durham, and it was posted in Berwick. It was addressed to my home—he must have got my address from the telephone directory, the only Cardwell in Bromley. I thought of getting on to Directory Inquiries and asking for a C. Wicklow in Berwick, but then I remembered he’d changed his name.