Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

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  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I Two Old Ladies, Locked . . .

  CHAPTER II The Second Mrs Machin

  CHAPTER III The First Mrs Machin

  CHAPTER IV The New Generation

  CHAPTER V The World of Learning

  CHAPTER VI Relationships

  CHAPTER VII High Words

  CHAPTER VIII Combustion

  CHAPTER IX Post Mortem

  CHAPTER X Strategies

  CHAPTER XI Grand Old Man

  CHAPTER XII Walter Machin’s Daughter

  CHAPTER XIII Walter Machin’s Son?

  CHAPTER XIV The Walter Machin Archive

  CHAPTER XV Possibilities

  CHAPTER XVI Conversation Piece

  CHAPTER XVII Happy Families

  CHAPTER XVIII Half Light

  CHAPTER XIX The Sword of Damocles

  CHAPTER I

  TWO OLD LADIES, LOCKED . . .

  ‘THAT’S MY old girl,’ said Greg Hocking, gazing out of the window of the Saloon Bar of the Spinners’ Arms.

  The bottom half of the window was frosted, and the new landlord, small and round, had to stand on tiptoe to see over it. Coming out of the gate in the high wall some way up the road, he saw a little old lady in a brick-coloured coat and a perky hat which had an air of defiance about it. Shutting the gate briskly, she turned and walked in their direction.

  ‘She a regular?’ he asked.

  ‘Not what you’d call regular. She’ll be in for a sherry or a gin-and-it two or three mornings a week. And sometimes she’ll pop down for an hour on Saturday nights, if she’s not with her daughter. Spry old character, isn’t she?’

  The landlord looked at the determined little figure, forging her way past his pub on the other side of the road, but his eyes–trained to distinguish beer drinkers from shorts drinkers, and trouble-makers from peaceful souls–saw nothing interesting in her. He turned to go back to his bar.

  ‘Wait,’ said Greg Hocking. ‘You’ll see the other come out within ten minutes, I’ll bet you.’

  They stood at the window in companionable silence, alone in the bar. The regulars at the Spinners’ were not rushing along to make the acquaintance of the new landlord, for fear he should get above himself. A canny lot, the people of Oswaldston. Greg Hocking, sipping his half pint, let his warm brown eyes rove among the people scurrying backwards and forwards in the street. Twenty minutes to go before teaching began again. When the gate up the road opened again, he gave a grunt of achieved prophecy.

  ‘That’s her,’ he said.

  The second old lady was a very different figure: she was substantial, imposing, must even in her time have been voluptuous. Her clothes announced emphatically that they were not chain-store products: a full, beige cape swirled abundantly round her full figure and was topped by a simple pudding-basin hat of brown velvet, with a massive shady brim. She was a model of style for the elderly, and to complete the picture she had on a bright red lead a sprightly black poodle. In earlier days, Hocking guessed, she would have sailed forward with the splendid confidence of a fine woman. Now she seemed to have trouble with her ankles, and she walked carefully, seeming all the time to be chafing against her carefulness.

  The landlord watched her go slowly past. ‘What’s so special about them two?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re both going shopping,’ said Greg Hocking, seeming not to answer him, and watching the figure on her way down towards the High Street. ‘They both live in that big old barn, her downstairs and my old lady upstairs, and they each do their own shopping, separately, every morning, regular as clockwork.’

  ‘Old people are funny sometimes,’ said the landlord, finding it hard to maintain interest.

  ‘They each do their own cooking, too, in the one kitchen. Madam you’ve just seen has dinner in the evening. My old girl has dinner midday. Breakfasts can be difficult, I’ve heard, but mostly Madam sleeps late. Otherwise they just listen for each other in the kitchen.’

  The landlord went back behind his bar, oppressed by these domestic details, and began polishing glasses with shoe-black thoroughness, in readiness for when the vicinity honoured him with their company.

  ‘Why do you say your old girl?’ he asked, just to keep the conversation going.

  ‘Oh, they’re both my old girls really,’ said Greg Hocking, turning his frank, smiling young face in his direction for a moment. ‘But Hilda is my particular girl. I got talking to her in here–it was my first day in Oswaldston, and I was feeling lonely. Next time she saw me she asked me in for a cuppa, and we had a good old yarn. I always go round once or twice a week now to see they’re all right.’

  ‘Is she some sort of companion?’ asked the landlord, holding a glass up to the light. Greg Hocking let out a splendid, ringing laugh.

  ‘Not on your life! No, they hardly speak to each other from what I can gather. Only time I saw them together they started getting at each other, through me. Oh no, Hilda wouldn’t be anybody’s companion, not her!’

  He paused, drinking meditatively, then he said: ‘You could say they’re related in a way, only we don’t have a word for it. They were both married to the same chap.’

  ‘By gum!’ said the landlord, impressed enough to pause in his polishing. ‘That’s a rum set-up. Never heard that one before. Both ex-wives, eh?’

  ‘Well, let’s say one ex-wife and a widow,’ said Greg Hocking. ‘My old girl’s the ex-wife. Except some say they were never really married at all. I wouldn’t know about that. Ah–here she comes now, with her sausages and fish fingers.’

  The landlord watched the little brick-coated figure with a slight accession of interest as she trailed past his window. There is something in an old scandal which makes even the most torpid average human being twitch his nose with interest. ‘Poor old bugger,’ he said. ‘Past it now, I’d guess.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Greg Hocking, annoyed and protective. ‘Game as they come, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘But why do they live together?’ asked the landlord. ‘Sounds like a bloody awful arrangement to me.’

  ‘Search me,’ said Greg Hocking. ‘But it’s not awful. They enjoy themselves no end, I can tell you that. Why, only the other day I was talking with my old–’

  But he was interrupted by the Saloon Bar door being pushed tentatively open. Through it, slowly and painstakingly, came the imposing figure in the beige cape, preceded by the little black poodle, high-stepping it over to the bar as if he were an Arab stallion at an imperial review.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Mr Hocking,’ said its owner, condescendingly.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Machin,’ said Greg Hocking.

  ‘A half bottle of gin, landlord,’ said Mrs Machin, her voice loud and confident, contrasting with her ankles.

  When she had been served, and had paid with a five-pound note, flourished commandingly across the bar, Mrs Machin turned back towards the door. But before she got there she stopped, and looked at Greg Hocking.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if I might trouble you to call on me some time?’ As she said it, her words were something between a command and a request.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Machin,’ said Greg Hocking.

  ‘Shall we say today, at tea-time, when you finish teaching? Would that suit you, Gregory?’

  It was the first time she had used his Christian name. The landlord was amused to notice the slight
est flush of pink spreading up from the young man’s neck.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Machin,’ he said again. ‘That would suit me fine.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ said the old lady. ‘Come along, Pimpernel.’ And preceded by her little dog, prancing like an enthusiastic chorus girl from a long-ago musical, she billowed out of the door, and crossed the road towards the gate of her house.

  ‘She’s a character, right enough,’ said the landlord appreciatively. ‘Been a tartar in her day, I’d guess.’

  ‘And not just in her day, either,’ said Greg Hocking.

  ‘Got you where she wants you, I notice,’ said the landlord. ‘Why do you put yourself out? Just because she plays the grande dame doesn’t mean you have to jump through the hoop when she snaps her fingers.’

  ‘I like them,’ said Greg Hocking. ‘They interest me.’ Then he added with a touch of pride: ‘Anyway, they’re something very special. In a month or two those two old dears will be known all over the country.’

  The landlord stared at him for an explanation, but he drained his glass and walked out. He thought to himself that perhaps he had exaggerated a bit, but in fact the fame of the two widows Machin was in the next few weeks to exceed even his expectations.

  CHAPTER II

  THE SECOND MRS MACHIN

  THE TOWN of Oswaldston was largely a product of the Industrial Revolution. Town histories and town guides talked of earlier times, but all physical trace of them had been swept away in the untrammelled pursuit of brass. If the centre of the town had once had character of a bluff, ruthless sort, it had been plastered down and trivialized in our own times: now it looked like any High Street of any not too prosperous town–a jungle of supermarkets and cheap chain stores, all with shrieking placards proclaiming phoney bargains and bogus price-slashing.

  Meadowbanks, Viola Machin’s house, was well over half a mile from the centre. It had been built over a century before by a mill-owner on the way up. It was of sandstone, grimed by the years, and though it had long since been overtaken by the town and become part of a mean little street of red-brick back-to-backs, it kept its head above them, and retained something of its old dignity and pre-eminence.

  Mrs Machin’s sitting-room was on the ground floor, one of four substantial, well-proportioned, satisfying rooms, all of them her domain. It looked out on to a walled wilderness of a garden and beyond that to the roofs of the working-class houses, dating back to the turn of the century. The furniture was not in period: it was mostly comfortable stuff from the ’thirties, tasteful, but a little soulless. The room was dotted with small silver picture frames, each one holding a snapshot that embalmed a fragment of Mrs Machin’s past. Greg Hocking would dearly have liked to inspect them, but he was chary of showing too lively an interest in what he already thought of as the Machin story, so instead he eased himself into the large square armchair, which exhaled and received him in a chintzy embrace.

  Mrs Machin went serenely about the room, preparing the tea. Cups, milk and sugar she had laid already on the coffee-table, with a well-loaded cake-stand, and two plates of biscuits. The kettle was boiling on a hot-plate in a dark little corner of the room (it had been installed for convenience, and to avoid unnecessary clashes in the kitchen). She was wearing a dark green woollen dress, fitting closely her still impressive figure. It was a poor comfort that people should say she must once have been a fine figure of a woman, but it was some comfort, and she exacted it. It was nice to have a man in the house, she was thinking. It didn’t happen very often these days–apart from her sons, and the vicar (but he didn’t count). She looked at Gregory Hocking sitting–broad, open and healthy–in her armchair. Just finished Dip. Ed., something of a sportsman, enjoying his first job and a regular pay packet. I could have fancied you in my younger days, she said to herself.

  Her conscious thought was–on this and many other occasions–less than completely honest. She fancied him now.

  Finally, when the various stages of the ritual were gone through, she placed the cosied teapot on the tea-tray, cautiously settled herself in the other armchair, and, waiting for the pot to draw, looked expectantly at her visitor.

  ‘It’s a very pleasant room,’ said Greg Hocking, feeling he was expected to start the ball rolling.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ she responded graciously. ‘The furniture, of course, is my own: I brought it with me when I married. It was, you know, my second marriage–’ she paused, to barb the rest of the sentence to her own satisfaction–‘as it was, in a sense, his.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Greg Hocking, neutrally.

  ‘Oh yes. And in my own little way, I’d had a literary career of my own.’ She leaned painstakingly over to the bookcase behind her, and pulled out three volumes, very conveniently to hand. The books still had their dust-jackets on, but they were very dirty. One was an emaciated volume of verse, the next a collection of short stories, the last–larger, and illustrated–a cookery book: The Cuisine of Australia and New Zealand. She sat this last on her lap, and looked somewhat ruefully at it.

  ‘It never sold very well, I’m afraid. In fact, I had difficulty in filling up the required number of pages. I was commissioned, you know. I was a very good cook, and I came from New Zealand. But it was a bit like the man–where is it?–who wrote the article on Chinese metaphysics by looking up “China” and “metaphysics” in the encyclopaedia and putting them together.’ She looked at Greg Hocking to see if he was following, and seemed pleased that he was.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a New Zealander either,’ he said, smiling back at her.

  ‘I was,’ she said, beginning to pour tea. ‘I left as a gel, you know. It’s hardly more than a memory now, and I never, luckily, had much of the accent. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to get labelled?’ She handed him tea, and plied him with both plates of biscuits. ‘I came to London in nineteen-thirty, intending–how odd to think of it now–to be a writer.’

  ‘And instead of that, you married one,’ said Greg Hocking, genially crunching a ginger nut.

  ‘To be precise, I married two,’ said Mrs Machin, leaning back in her chair in an attitude of self-satisfaction. ‘Silly thing to be proud of, but I suppose it’s a sort of claim to fame. But the first was–’ she waved her hand–‘negligible. And Walter I had, alas, for only two years. And by that time his writing life was virtually at an end.’ She looked at Greg Hocking intently, and he was struck by the hardness of her eyes: even when talking of her husband’s death, her main emotion seemed to be that she had been defrauded of something. ‘His health, you know, deteriorated after the war. For the last year of our marriage I was merely a sick-nurse. It was the tragedy of my life. There’s a cliché, but how completely true it is! I never got over it. I never wanted myself to write again.’ She looked ahead at nothing with tragic blankness, like a rep actress in a late Ibsen play: ‘Nothing–nothing–has had any meaning for me since that day in nineteen-forty-eight when he died.’

  Greg Hocking could think of no appropriate response so he cleared his throat, took a sip of tea, and then said: ‘But this new revival of interest in him must be a great pleasure for you.’

  Mrs Machin’s mood changed, as at the drop of a switch. ‘Ah yes. It’s quite wonderful. A new zest. Something to live for. A real Indian summer, just when I was looking forward to nothing but–the grave!’ She seemed to consider her words too egotistical, for she leaned forward over the cake-stand, and said: ‘For his sake. It’s wonderful that he will get the recognition he deserved. Because he never really had it, you know, never. It’s not just that he was forgotten after he died, as so often happens. He didn’t even get it in his own lifetime.’

  ‘Really? I assumed he did, because people know his name around here. And he had two books published, didn’t he?’

  ‘Published, yes. And The Factory Whistle went into three editions in nineteen-thirty-nine. But publication is not recognition. His other novel, you know, was never published. Simply never published. It has remained upstair
s in the attic all these years, until now, when Mr Kronweiser is transcribing it.’

  She raised her eyes heavenwards, as if Mr Kronweiser were some kind of recording angel. ‘You know Mr Kronweiser?’ she asked, bringing them back to her visitor.

  Greg Hocking put down his cup, to give himself a pause. ‘I have seen him a couple of times, in the Spinners’ Arms. I suppose he was . . . soaking up atmosphere.’

  Mrs Machin relaxed a little from the tensions of her tragic memories. ‘He is very earnest,’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘Just the tiniest bit . . . dull. So American, too!’ She leaned forward, and her smile now was something almost intimate. ‘To tell you the truth, he’s not my kind of man at all. As you can imagine, Walter’s reputation being what it was! I find my sessions with him much less amusing than I had hoped. But of course I have to give him all the time I can. I have to share my memories with him. That much I feel I owe to posterity.’

  The tragic muse seemed to have descended on her again, and Greg Hocking tried to relax the atmosphere by taking a piece of fruit cake and chewing appreciatively. ‘Delicious,’ he said.

  ‘Shop,’ said Mrs Machin dismissively. ‘Much too moist. But it’s not Mr Kronweiser I wanted to talk to you about today, Gregory. He sits up there, day in, day out, beavering away. No, I think I can trust Mr Kronweiser. It’s these reporters . . . ’ She cast a look of great–but to him unfathomable–significance at Greg Hocking.

  ‘Are they troubling you?’ he asked–though he did not think that this was the matter he had been invited to discuss. For an old lady, Mrs Machin gave the impression that she was quite capable of dealing with any intrusion or impertinence that mere reporters were likely to offer.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, smiling roguishly at his misunderstanding. ‘I like them. They remind me of London, of–’ she waved her hand theatrically–‘the great world. I was a sort of reporter myself, in my–salad days, so I understand them very well, only too well. That was in my very young days, by the way, before I met my first husband.’ She paused for a moment, and then looked at him impressively. ‘Of course, these are not reporters in that sense.’