The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  But in fact the cat flap was a godsend to Jaggers too. He began to sit on the doormat, his head on his paws, gazing through the Perspex at the human, animal and ornithological cavalcade which changed minute by minute, making the back garden a fascinating, endless soap opera: garbagemen came, and postmen, both to be barked at; birds swooped down on the bread crumbs left out for them, fought each other endlessly over the nut holder, dive-bombed the rough vegetable patch and bore off worms; male cats came in search of Gummidge, who was on the pill but still retained vestiges of her old attractions. There was always something going on. It was like one of those endless wildlife programs on television.

  And in this case the screen image could literally leap into your living room. One day when Jaggers was not on sentry duty a tom leapt through the flap in search of Gummidge. Then there was mayhem. Peter was not at home, so the pursuit went on, with barks and feline shrieks for all of half an hour, before the tom, more by accident than by design, found his way out of the flap again. When Peter got home from school he found the living room so impregnated with tomcat smells that no amount of open windows or deodorant sprays could make it livable-in for days.

  The flap was wonderful for inspecting callers too. This was the North, and the front door was for “special” callers, the back door for everyday. Jaggers could crouch and size up the dark blue trousers of gas or electricity meter readers, the bare legs of children wanting to be sponsored for this or that, or singing carols at Christmas, the varying garb of political canvassers. All were barked at, but the barks were subtly graded, from the downright menacing for garbagemen to the joyful welcoming for children.

  Was it a child, that evening in March? The legs were bare and thin, and rather dirty too, and the skirt was above the knees. Still, the heels of her shoes were higher than children wore, except in play. Jaggers barked on, a middle-of-the-road, could-go-either-way kind of bark. Anyway, the ring of the door got Peter up from the pile of exercise books that he was marking in the front room to open the door.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. Friendly—yet somehow guarded. Jaggers wagged his tail tentatively.

  “Hello again. Long time no see.”

  The tone of the visitor was cheeky, with an undertone of aggression. Jaggers recognized it. There was a Jack Russell that came to the park who took exactly that tone. It tended to run around, barking and snapping. This girl—woman—just stood there with her hands on her hips. Jaggers couldn’t see her face, but he always judged more on body than on face.

  “Come on in,” said Peter.

  They went through to the living room. Jaggers had realized by now that he had smelt the girl before. Not recently, but many seasons ago, when she had really been a child. Now she was dirtier, smelt stronger and better, but it was still the same human person. He wagged his tail and got a pat, but no more acknowledgment. The woman sat on the sofa, waiflike but not weak, not begging. The aggressive stance was still there, hardly hidden by any social veneer.

  “I’ll make a pot of tea,” said Peter.

  “Haven’t you got anything stronger?”

  Jaggers’s master paused for thought.

  “I’ve got a bottle of beer. . . . Oh yes, and there’s still some gin left over from Christmas.”

  “Gin then. With whatever you’ve got.”

  Social gestures, then, were being made, however reluctantly. Enough for a tentative welcome. Jaggers wagged his tail—thump, and then thump again. He was rewarded by a caress of his ears, which was an acknowledgment of his presence that always delighted him. She wasn’t a bad girl. He remembered that she had caressed him often, those times she had come before. Peter had liked her too. They had gone upstairs together.

  Peter came back with the gin, and a little bottle of ginger ale. He put it down on the occasional table beside the sofa. She raised her eyebrows at the single glass, but Peter shook his head. He wasn’t having anything, didn’t want to make that social gesture. He sat tensely in his chair and waited. The girl-woman filled her glass from the bottle and drank half of it down. Then she slapped the glass down loudly on the table.

  “You put me where I am now,” she said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “On the streets.”

  “I did nothing of the sort.”

  Jaggers, his nose on the carpet under the table, was exploring her feet, delicately. They certainly were like no feet he had ever known before. He had known and appreciated Peter’s feet after he had come back from a walk across the Pennines, or after a strenuous game of rugby, but these were different—or, rather, more so. Much, much dirtier. Layer upon layer of dirt—a dirt that extended, less concentrated, up her legs. It was on the feet that weeks, months, of living outside, living rough, showed most tellingly. Jaggers thought they were wonderful.

  “It started upstairs here. It was my first time.”

  “You were as eager as any girl I’ve known.”

  “What kind of schoolteacher is it that takes his pupils to bed?”

  “What kind of schoolkid is it who drags her teacher upstairs to bed? A slut, that’s the answer. You were determined to be a slut.”

  “I’m on the streets. I’m not on the game.”

  The voices were getting raised. Jaggers no longer thumped his tail. He removed his head from under the table, to be ready if anything happened. The girl was shouting, accusing. She could attack Peter, throw herself at him. It had happened before, with other women.

  There was a lull. The girl began jiggling her empty glass on the table. Peter sighed, got up and took it for a refill. Jaggers experimentally licked the feet, but got no answering caress. He lay there, unhappy at the situation.

  “I want money.”

  “You’ll have a job—getting money out of a schoolteacher!”

  “You inherited this house—you told me. You can raise money on it.”

  “I’ve no intention of doing so.”

  “I’ll take a hundred pounds.”

  “You won’t. A hundred would only be a start.”

  “It might. But if I don’t get it I’m going to your headmaster. If he doesn’t listen I’ll go to the press. And if they don’t listen I’ll go to the police.”

  The row didn’t get any louder, but it got more intense. They somehow shouted at each other in voices that were hardly raised above a whisper. Jaggers found it unsettling, challenging to his role as defender of the house and its master. Peter was getting red in the face, and the girl was too, and her voice kept breaking as if she was going to sob. Eventually she shouted:

  “What’s a girl have to do to get a drink in this dump?”

  When Peter went for her second refill Jaggers made a mistake. He looked at the girl to see that all was well, and then went to check up on the cat flap. It was a good hour since he had barked at those dirty legs. Dark had come, and there had been no birds around for hours. Now there was only the odd luminous eye of a tomcat, on the prowl in hopes of an amorous encounter with Gummidge.

  When he had done his couple of minutes on sentry-go, he went back into the hall and found the living-room door shut.

  Jaggers was unhappy. He had gone to fulfill one duty, and now found himself shut out from fulfilling another. He could not protect Peter now, nor even provide distraction. He lay with his nose against the bottom of the door, his tail quiet. Of the voices he could now hear no more than their rise and fall, the hiss of accusation, the suppressed fury of Peter’s angry retorts. Surely soon he’d come out again?

  But he didn’t, and the curve of the voices became a continual rising one, not in volume but in intensity. Jaggers heard chair springs go—they were no longer sitting, but were confronting each other standing up. The curve continued upwards, the girl’s voice like a whiplash with words of scorn and accusation. Jaggers was considering barking when he heard a tremendous thump, a shattering of glass, and then another bump—to the floor, on the other side of the room to the door. Then silence.

  Jaggers whined, unhappy. Glass—he knew the s
ound of breaking glass. But what he’d heard wasn’t like a breaking wineglass; it was something heavy, thick. . . . The thick gray glass ashtray, which had sat on the mantelpiece since Peter had given up smoking.

  Still silence. Jagger’s nose was firmly inserted into the tiny crack along the bottom of the door, as if by smell alone he could understand what was going on. He was just thinking that he might understand when Peter came out the door and shut it firmly behind him, then leaned his head against the doorjamb, sobbing.

  The brief moment that the door was open had told Jaggers. It had given him the whiff of something he came across now and then in his walks in woods and moorlands, a phenomenon that was sometimes exciting, sometimes disconcerting. It was a Not-Being. An End to Being. Lying there without Being.

  He went to the front door, whining, and lay there on the doormat. He no longer wanted to be near the living room.

  Peter stood by the door, still sobbing, otherwise motionless, for some minutes. Then he went upstairs. Jaggers heard the lavatory flush, then water running in the bathroom. When he came down he was looking more normal, but Jaggers could tell from the way he came down the stairs that he was still tense. He looked in the mirror in the hall, to see that he did look normal. Then he fetched Jaggers’s lead from the kitchen.

  A walk at this hour! Unheard of! He jumped, frisked and barked—more than usually beside himself because he was happy to get out of the house. The air outside was fresh and . . . free from that blight that was now pervading indoors. They walked to the Jug and Bottle, and Peter took him into the saloon bar.

  “Have you got such a thing as a bottle of whisky I could buy? And I’ll have a half of bitter while I’m waiting.”

  Jaggers curled up contentedly by the brass rail around the floor of the bar. He saw no need to behave other than ordinarily.

  “Having a party?” asked the landlord when he came back from the cellar.

  “Not really. An old rugby friend rang up—may drop in later. Likes a drop of scotch.”

  “Show me a rugby player who doesn’t,” said the landlord. “When they’ve tanked up on beer.”

  On the way back Jaggers showed signs of reluctance. He didn’t want to go back to the house. But where else was there to go? Peter let them in by the front door, then shut Jaggers and the whisky in the dining room. Jaggers sat listening. Peter didn’t go into the sitting room. He went to the kitchen and soon returned with a jug of water and a glass. He poured whisky, then water, then sat at the table drinking. Jaggers sat close, watching him, waiting for some sign, some revelation of intention. Occasionally he wagged his tail, occasionally a hand would come down and caress his head. He was still unsettled. It was a comfort.

  It was well after midnight, when the whisky bottle was a third empty, when Peter made a move. He got up, only a little unsteady, and left the room. Shutting the door behind him. Jaggers sat by the door, straining his ears. The house was surrounded by a tremendous night silence. Peter opened the back door, leaving it open, and Jaggers heard his steps go to the garden shed. Something taken from it—two heavy implements that clanged when he let them come together.

  He was going to the vegetable plot—that large oval that he turned over every year, but somehow never seemed to do very much with. Jaggers jumped up against the bookshelf under the back window, peering into the darkness. Yes—he was forking over and then digging. He was in condition—he kept himself in condition. Jaggers lay down on the floor again, waiting.

  After what seemed like an eternity Peter came back into the house. He came back into the dining room, chucking Jaggers’s ears. Then he went to the whisky bottle, pouring himself a stiff one. He took his time drinking it: getting his breath or summoning up courage. Then he went out, shutting the door. Jaggers heard the sitting-room door being opened. That was where the Not Being thing was. He heard something heavy being dragged. That would be it. Little clinks as bits of glass knocked together on the floor. Peter dragged it into the hall. It seemed heavier than he had expected, or perhaps now he was tired. He had difficulty dragging it round from the sitting room through to the kitchen and the back door. He bumped into the dining-room door and it came off the latch. Jaggers watched, giving the tiniest thump of his tail, but did nothing.

  The unmistakable sound of the back door being closed. In a second Jaggers was up and nosing at the dining-room door. That was the first trick in the book. A moment and he was through it, and on his haunches in front of the cat flap, on duty again.

  Peter had something in his arms. It. By the time he got to the vegetable patch they were nothing but shapes, but Jaggers could see that Peter had put It down. There was another, a new shape there. A mound. That must be It. A mound of earth. There were tiny, distant sounds. More digging. Peter had found he needed more digging. Then Jaggers saw the shape of Peter come round the mound, take up It, then lay It down, right in the hole.

  Again he saw Peter come round the mound, spade in hand. He stood by the mound, and using the spade with strong, practiced motions, he began rapidly filling the hole. Shovelful followed shovelful, the man powered by alcohol and desperation. In ten minutes the mound was nearly flattened again.

  In the kitchen Jaggers still kept watch. His tail went thump, thump, thump regularly on the linoed floor. His mind was on the future.

  What had been buried cried out to be dug up again.

  THE WOMEN AT THE FUNERAL

  Alice Furnley closed her brother’s eyes and turned to her sisters.

  “He’ll be in heaven now,” she said.

  The two younger sisters nodded. There was no doubt about that. They went into the next bedroom to tell their mother, who had been expecting it.

  “If only I could have gone first,” she said, tears running down her wrinkled cheeks. “But there—it’s God’s will. He’ll be one more saint in the holy choir.”

  They all murmured their assent, without hesitation or reservation. They knew their brother Roderick had been a man of singular gentleness and boundless charity. His consideration for his old mother and his sisters was much commended in the parish: the old lady was eighty-two, and very frail; two of his sisters were spinsters and the other had been early widowed. They all lived together in the large house and grounds in Acacia Avenue, in great harmony. “We never had an unkind word from him,” Alice told the vicar, who had prayed for him the previous Sunday at St. Michael’s. He had described Roderick as a man of boundless goodness and of good works, an example to them all. His sisters, in the family pew, had nodded. They were women of faith, of certainties, and their minds were not inquiring ones.

  Alice’s first uneasiness came at the funeral service, or rather just after it. There had been many tears shed during the address and the prayers, for a number of the congregation at St. Michael’s, not just his sisters, felt they had lost a brother: he had been counselor and confessor to many of them, had given solid aid to more than a few. The vicar had meditated, to no very good effect, on the ways of God, particularly in taking to himself so admirable a man at the early age of fifty-two. As the coffin was borne down the aisle and out to the churchyard for burial the congregation held back to allow the mourning women of the family to follow it. Sarah and Emily, the two younger sisters, helped their mother along, and were preoccupied, but Alice could look around her, could see that the church was three-quarters full, and, as she came to the pews at the back, could get a good view of the unknown women.

  They were sitting together, nine or ten of them, and they were clearly uncertain what to do at a funeral, or even in church. They had gone to some effort to make their dresses appropriate to the occasion: black or brown skirts, little dark hats or head scarves. But they were not at all the class of women that Alice would have expected at her brother’s funeral, and they were not—Alice found it difficult to find a way of putting it to herself—they were not, they didn’t look, respectable. She went out into the bitter December wind.

  There was no question of celebrating Christmas that year. Most of the cus
tomary seasonal indulgences were canceled, and those that could not be were consumed soberly, often with sad comment about how much Roderick had always enjoyed this or that. Alice said nothing to her sisters about the women in the church, but she felt weighed down by her secret. On Boxing Day the tradespeople and roundsmen were tipped by Alice, through Cook, with particular generosity, which she felt her brother would have expected. It was on that day, in the late afternoon, that she had a visitor.

  Mary, the little maid, quite new from one of Dr. Barnardo’s establishments, looked more than a little confused.

  “Wouldn’t give no name, miss, said it wouldn’t mean anything to you. But she asked special to speak to you alone, miss. She’s not—”

  “Not what, Mary?”

  “Not—not like one of us. Not a lady, miss.”

  And that, in the year of 1891, presented a problem. Where was this talk to take place? Not in the drawing room, surely, especially as one of her sisters might come in at any time.

  “Show her into Mr. Roderick’s study,” Alice said. “And tell my sisters I am busy.”

  Alice was not new to taking household decisions, but this one was unexpected, outside her usual scope. She felt almost nervous as she waited in the study. When the young woman was shown in she knew at once it must be one of the ones she had seen at the back of the church: she had on the same sort of dull, dun clothes and the same look of cleanliness achieved with effort. Now, as then, the visitor was not at ease.

  “I thought as how I should come, Miss Furnley,” she said, from just inside the door, “in case you was worried or upset about the will.”