The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  There was a dirty little basin in the corner. Soap but no flannel. Cold water—only cold water, dammit. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an immaculate white handkerchief. Not immaculate for long. Carefully, with painstaking thoroughness, he washed his hands, and then his face and neck, then put the reddened square of cotton back into his pocket. Averting his eyes from the bed, he took his tie and jacket from the hook on the door and put them on. He stood by the door, listening. In such a place there were always noises. Noises from the business that was being paid for. Noises of people coming, people going. He heard footsteps, then the front door slamming. Then silence.

  Now.

  He opened the door, slipped through it, then shut it on the hideous spectacle on the bed. Then he walked as casually as he could down the stairs, taking care on the threadbare carpet, then along the dim hallway and out into the street. Once there he turned in the direction of the main road.

  That was better lit. In fact, under a bright streetlight a man was pausing to light a cigarette. A man whose shape, form, carriage he recognized. A man whom he had once been with in similar circumstances in an alleyway off Dean Street.

  But this time there was to be no meeting. He held back in the darkness until the figure turned to his right, then walked slowly to the main road and turned off to the left.

  • • •

  The routine preliminaries to the trial were drawing to a close. Mr. Justice Macmillan had paid them what attention he could, occasionally adding to his notes. His gaze mostly went from his notes to counsel and then back again. The atmosphere in the courtroom was as electric as he had ever known it. The handsome arrogance of the accused, the vicious nature of the crime he was accused of, ensured that. Mr. Justice Macmillan was particularly conscious of the gimlet eyes of a lady with a squashed fur hat, and the twisted leer of a man whose body was like a chicken’s carcass. Both of them seemed to him like malevolent gods, as their eyes went hungrily from accused to judge and back to accused. They have already decided that he is guilty, thought the judge. Back and forth the eyes went, from guilty to innocent, innocent to guilty. But only one man in the courtroom knew, really knew, which was which.

  MORE FINAL THAN DIVORCE

  Gerry Porter had no desire to murder his wife. He would much have preferred simply to trade her in for a new model. But Gerry was a businessman, and he knew how to do his sums. He totted up the value of his butchery business, of their house and two cars, of the time-share villa in Spain. He knew it was no longer a question simply of paying her a pittance as alimony—that the judge would award his wife a substantial proportion of the marital estate. Everyway he looked at it it was impossible for him to keep his business, a roof over his head and a new wife. He sighed. It would have to be something more final than divorce. It would have to be murder. Personally, he told himself, he blamed these feminists. If it hadn’t been for these new divorce laws Sandra would be alive today.

  Well, actually Sandra was alive today. That was, of course, the problem. He didn’t think Sandra had any suspicions about the newer model, but the moment she did she’d tell her friends, and therein would lie the danger. For Gerry was determined that the police should not hear about the newer model, because he had no intention that Sandra’s death should be treated as a case of murder. Everyone knew who the first suspect was when a wife or husband was murdered. No, Sandra was not going to be murdered. Sandra was going to have an accident. Or commit suicide.

  Gerry went about it in a methodical way. There were always plenty of newspapers around in his butcher’s shop as wrapping, and between customers he studied them avidly. Plenty of people did die by accident, and the inquests on them were reported in the local rag. Gerry began classifying them in his mind into road accidents, domestic accidents and accidents at work. The last category was out, since Sandra did not go to work. The first category was large, and encompassed many different kinds of death in or under motor vehicles. Gerry did notice how many people seemed to die on holiday abroad, and he toyed with the idea of getting some Spaniard to run into her or run her down on some particularly dangerous stretch of Iberian road. But the thought of being in the power of some greasy wop (Gerry was neither a liberal nor a tolerant thinker) made him go off the idea. And the more he read about the advances in forensic science, the less inclined he felt to tamper with his wife’s car.

  But the more he thought about it, the same objection seemed to apply to domestic accidents. People did electrocute themselves; some even, apparently (God, what ignorant bastards people were!), perched electric fires on the ends of their baths. But the Porters had central heating, and Gerry doubted his ability to render their high-speed kettle lethal in a way that would fool Forensics.

  Gerry was sent off on to another tack entirely one evening when he passed the living room while his wife was having coffee with a friend, and heard her say:

  “Oh God, the Change! There’s times I’ve wondered whether I’ll ever get through it.”

  Gerry was a heavy man, with heavy footsteps, and he could not stop to hear any more. Sandra in fact went on to say that luckily she now seemed to be over the worst. Gerry had gone on to the front door, and out to the garage, and a little idea was jigging around in his mind. Gone were thoughts of accidents with car exhaust fumes, of pushing Sandra under an underground train. Suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. Or, to be more precise, the balance of her body.

  With no plan as yet firmly formulated, he nevertheless began laying the ground next evening in the pub.

  “You’re very thoughtful, Gerry,” said Sam Eagleton to him as he sat over his second pint. And indeed he was. It was quite a strain. Because Gerry was usually the life and soul of the Cock and Pheasant, with a steady stream of salacious, off-color or racist jokes.

  “Aye. It’s the wife. She’s a bit under the weather. . . .” After a pause, occupied with a gaze into the brown depths of his beer mug, he added: “It’s the Change. It’s a rotten thing to have to go through. It does things to a woman. We can count ourselves lucky we don’t have anything like it.”

  It was a most un-Gerry-like topic of conversation. Sam Eagleton thought it a bit off to mention it at all, and not good form, as it was understood at the Cock and Pheasant. He said: “Aye, it’s a bad business,” and changed the subject.

  In the Cock and Pheasant and other places that Gerry Porter frequented, they got used to the topic of the Change over the next few weeks. It was supplemented by other causes of worry and distress to Sandra, for Gerry had decided that her suicide would be the result of a cumulative burden of miseries, of myriad worries that finally became too much to bear.

  “The wife’s mother is in a bad way,” he would say. “Senile. It’s a terrible burden on Sandra.”

  Gerry’s mother-in-law was in a Home, and he had in the past made ribald jokes about her increasingly erratic behavior. Now, apparently, all he could see was the distress that it must cause his wife.

  “Gerry’s gone all serious on us,” said his friend Paul Tutin when he had gone out one evening, still long-faced. The Cock and Pheasant was not bright enough to be suspicious, but it was puzzled.

  There were other problems and vicissitudes in the Porter household that were tediously canvassed. Sandra’s attempts to get O Level English, one of the things she studied at one of her many evening classes, had hitherto been the subject of innumerable sexist jokes about the thickness of women. Now all they heard was what a terrible grief it was to her. “But she shouldn’t be trying to get it now,” he would say. “Not while she’s going through the Change.” The Porters had no children to cause them worry, but nephews and nieces were press-ganged into service, and a brother of Sandra who was serving a jail sentence was represented as an agonizing worry. But in the end it all came back to the Change.

  “It does something to some women,” Gerry would say. “You’ve no idea. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same woman I married. She says that every morning she dreads waking up.”

 
One afternoon, while she was shopping in Doncaster, Sandra dropped into the Cherry Tree Tea Shop, and was glad to see two of her old friends sitting in the window. They waved her over to their table.

  “Hello, Sandra, how are you?” Mary Eagleton hailed.

  “Fine,” said Sandra, sitting down. “Just fine.”

  “Oh, good. I am glad. Gerry was telling Sam the other night that the good old menopause was getting you down.”

  “A lot Gerry knows about it.”

  “When are you taking your O Level again?” asked Mary over the cream cakes.

  “Next week!” said Sandra, roaring with laughter. “And I haven’t opened a book since I failed last time. I bet the examiners are sharpening their pencils and licking their lips over the thought of giving me bottom grades.”

  “How’s your mother?” asked Brenda Tutin.

  “Great! Completely gaga. Doesn’t even know me when I go in, so I’ve stopped going. It’s a great relief.”

  “Gerry says you’re very upset about it,” said Brenda.

  Sandra raised her eyebrows.

  “What exactly has Gerry been saying?” she asked.

  Things went on pretty much as normal in the next few weeks. Sandra took up yet another evening class—cake decorating, of all things—and so they saw very little of each other, except at breakfast. Gerry insisted on the full menu with trimmings at breakfast time—porridge, egg and bacon with sausage and tomato, two or three slices of toast and marmalade. He said it set him up for the day. Sandra, who had been to diet classes and keep-fit classes, found cooking it rather nauseating, but she didn’t have to watch him eat it, because he propped up his Sun newspaper against the coffeepot and devoured its edifying contents along with the bacon and sausage.

  He was back from the pub (or from the newer model) more often in the evenings now when she got back from her classes. He was even rather considerate, something he had not been for many years, in fact not since the first week of their honeymoon. When she flopped down in the armchair (“Everything seems to tire her now,” he said in the pub) he offered her a vodka and tonic, and was even prepared to make her a mug of Ovaltine. Sometimes she accepted, sometimes she did not. It was certainly pleasant to have him actually doing something for her in the kitchen. (“She’s been desperate for sleep,” Gerry planned to tell the police. “She’s been trying everything.”)

  The crunch came nearly six months after Gerry had first made his decision. Sandra got back from evening classes and was exhausted, she said.

  “Vodka and tonic, darling?” Gerry asked.

  “That would be nice, Smoochie,” she said, using a pet name they had almost abandoned.

  When he brought it over Sandra noticed that he was not smelling of beer. She snuggled up on the sofa in front of the roaring gas fire.

  “This is the life!” she said.

  Gerry was watching her as she tasted her drink, though ostensibly he was at the sideboard, getting one for himself. She gave no sign that it tasted any different, and he breathed out. She swung her feet up on to the sofa, and took another sip or two of the vodka and tonic.

  “Funny,” she said. “I feel famished.”

  “Let me get you something.”

  “Would you, Smoochie? Just a few biscuits, and a bit of cheese.”

  When he got back the vodka and tonic was half drunk. Sandra ate the biscuits and cheese ravenously.

  “I don’t know why cake decorating should be so grueling,” she said, taking a good swig at her drink. “I could almost settle down to sleep here in front of the fire.”

  “Why don’t you?” Gerry said, sitting down by the head of the sofa and running his fingers through her hair. Sandra downed the rest of her drink.

  “Lovely not to have the television on,” she said, her voice seeming to come from far away. Her head dropped on to the arm of the sofa, her eyes closed. Soon Gerry heard gentle snores.

  He jumped up and looked at his watch. It was just after ten. He could aim at the 10:45 or the 10:55. Both were expresses, and both were usually on time. He put in his pocket a little bottle of prepared vodka and sleeping draft.

  (“She had it with her drink. I thought she wanted to sleep; I didn’t realize she wanted it to deaden the pain,” he would tell the police.) He intended to force it down her throat if she should show signs of waking up. Then he went out into the drive and opened both doors of his wife’s little Fiat (his own Range Rover always had the garage). Then he went back into the sitting room, took his wife gently in his arms and carried her through the front door and out to the car. He laid her gently in the front passenger seat, and got in beside her.

  The drive to the bridge was uneventful, though Gerry was bathed in sweat by the end of it. They met no more than three or four cars going in the other direction. After only ten minutes they turned into the narrow road, scarcely more than a track, which led to the railway bridge. His heart banged with relief as he parked Sandra’s car under a clump of trees.

  He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to go before the 10:45 went by, if it was on time. He looked at his wife. She was breathing deeply, her head lolling to one side. The Sovipol he had got from the doctor (“She can’t sleep, Doctor, and that means I don’t sleep, and it’s affecting the business”) was working like a dream. He got out of the car, leaned back in, and with a butcher’s strength he lifted Sandra across into the driver’s seat.

  He wiped the steering wheel, then put her fingers on it in two or three different positions. Then he let them fall, and pressed the little bottle of vodka and Sovipol into them. (“I was already in bed,” he would tell the police. “I’d had a hard day. I was knackered. I did hear her driving off, but I thought she must have left something behind at her class. She’s been getting very forgetful since the Change started. . . .”)

  Time to get her on to the bridge. It was an old one, dating from the time when this neglected track was an important road. He took her in his arms and carried her—almost tenderly—the hundred yards there. No sound of a train yet. He laid her in a sitting position by the bridge and then straightened. God, he could do with a fag. But would that be wise? No—there in the distance was the regular hum of the diesel: the Intercity 125 from King’s Cross to Leeds. He waited a moment. It wouldn’t be here for a minute or two yet. Thank God he hadn’t needed to force the contents of the bottle down her. As it was, his nerves were stretched beyond bearing by tension. He wanted to wet himself. Then, as the noise of the train grew nearer, he stretched down to the comatose figure by the bridge. He put his hands under the body.

  And immediately he felt an open palm smash suddenly into his face. In a moment it was he who was on his back across the parapet of the bridge. Suddenly it was his wife who had strong hands on his shoulders, his wife who was pushing, pushing. Dimly he heard her voice.

  “They were karate classes, Smoochie. Karate classes.”

  Then she dropped him into the path of the oncoming express.

  • • •

  The police were by and large extremely sympathetic. It was child’s play to them to unravel the details of Gerry’s plan. They talked to his friends and heard about his change of character in his pub sessions, the conversations that had prepared the way. They found his dolly bird in a little flat in central Doncaster (though she said she would never have married him, not in a million years). They found the railway timetables in his study, analyzed the earth in the pot plant into which Sandra Porter had poured most of her drink. (“It tasted so off. I thought he’d given me gin by mistake, which I hate, and I didn’t want to offend him.”) They talked to the neighbor who had passed them on the road and seen that it was Gerry driving, talked to the poacher who had seen Gerry park the car and seen him press Sandra’s hands to the steering wheel. Those prints wouldn’t have deceived a rookie constable that they were those of a woman actually driving a car. No, Gerry Porter would never have got away with it, even if he had succeeded in killing his wife.

  Sandra was quite affecting. She had dru
nk about a quarter of her drink, she said, but had filled the glass up with tonic water so he shouldn’t know. (“He could be awfully touchy,” she said.) What she had drunk had sent her soundly to sleep. When she began to awaken she was in the car, in the driving seat, and her husband was pressing her hands to the steering wheel. She was confused and terrified. How had she got there? What was going on? She had feigned sleep until she had heard the train, her husband had lifted her up, and then she—terrified—had used the techniques she had learnt at self-defense classes. (“The police are always recommending that we do them, and with the number of ghastly rapes we’ve had around here . . .”)

  Only Inspector Potter of the South Yorkshire CID had doubts.

  “Why weren’t there more signs of struggle?” he asked. “Why did she make no attempt to immobilize him rather than kill him? Why did she take up karate classes, midterm, after he’d started laying the ground in his pubs? Why did she take such care, driving to the Doncaster police station, not to disturb the fake prints?”

  “She had to kill him,” said his superintendent. “Otherwise he’d have been stalking her through the woods. She was practically out of her mind.”

  “Yet she was careful not to disturb those prints. . . . Oh, I grant you there’s no point in nagging away at it. It’s an academic exercise. We’d never secure a conviction, not even for manslaughter. Never in a million years.”

  But the doubts remained in his mind. He noticed that a few days after the inquest and funeral, Porter’s Family Butchery was open again for business. He noted that Sandra ran it very efficiently, with the help of a stalwart chap, fifteen years her junior, whom he heard she had met at karate class. When, a year after Gerry’s death, he saw in the paper that she had married him, he showed the announcement to the superintendent.