Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Watch it. Here he is.’

  The three Fleet Street heads swivelled and looked at the Saloon Bar door. It is difficult to look sinister wearing casual clothes, but Mr Kronweiser very nearly managed it. He was dressed in pale blue slacks, pink and white check shirt, and sneakers, but he did not look fresh, for Oswaldston grime or the labours of the day had robbed his clothes of their glow, and there were sweaty patches under the arms of the shirt. Mr Kronweiser was pear-shaped, like a pregnant crow, the way American men get with too sedentary a job and too much junk food in their diet. His face was red and unhealthy, not well shaven, and surmounted by a mop of black hair, just beginning to turn grey. Sadly, he was barely thirty, but the long-knifed struggle for jobs, for tenure, for an impressive list of publications, had aged him well beyond his calendar years–and he had never been a young young man. He walked, or waddled, stealthily, his eyes darting from left to right. His manner mixed false geniality, false sincerity and natural shiftiness, a mixture made familiar by American politicians. People slid away as he made his way over to the bar.

  Greg Hocking grunted a greeting to Mr Kronweiser, and louder, more spurious greetings came from Chronicle, Sentinel and Grub.

  ‘Hi,’ said Mr Kronweiser, showing his teeth briefly to each, ‘hi, hi. A small lager, please. Cold.’

  ‘Finished work for the day?’ asked Chronicle genially.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Kronweiser.

  ‘Interesting job you’ve got there.’

  ‘That’s so. If you gentlemen will excuse me . . . ’ And Mr Kronweiser shuffled sideways with his glass to a corner bench, took a gross American paperback from his posterior trouser pocket, and pretended to read. But Greg Hocking saw it was a pretence. He turned over pages he had not looked at, and in fact was very busy keeping his eyes and ears attuned to everything around him.

  ‘Endearing little soul,’ said Sentinel under his breath.

  ‘Beneath that Humpty-Dumpty exterior,’ said Chronicle, ‘there lurks a thoroughly tough egg.’

  The shadow cast by the globular Kronweiser settled like smog over the bar for some minutes. It was only when the door was opened again that the atmosphere lightened. Greg Hocking heard some jovial ‘Hello Hildas’ and a cheery ‘Hello my old duck’, and his old girl came glad-handing it over to the bar.

  ‘Half of stout, please, Alf,’ said Hilda Machin, rummaging in her handbag.

  ‘Let me, Mrs Machin,’ said Chronicle and Sentinel, in ragged unison, diving for their wallets.

  ‘Ee–I’ve never been so popular. No, thanks, boys, I’ll buy my own this time round.’

  She slapped down her money on the counter, and took a sup of her stout.

  ‘Next time round, then,’ said Chronicle.

  ‘Happen,’ said Hilda Machin, giving him a roguish look. ‘But whatever it is you want, I’m not promising to give. I’m too old a hand to give her all for a half of stout, believe you me.’ She turned to Greg Hocking and patted him on the arm. ‘Anyway, I’ve got my best boy-friend here tonight, and he’s better looking nor you two.’ She stood on tiptoe and whispered into Greg’s ear: ‘Come and ‘ave a chat in the corner, eh, love? I sometimes get the feeling these two are taking notes.’

  Greg laughed, got up from his stool, and ushered her over to an empty corner table. He felt rather than saw the eyes of the reporters following him; but he certainly saw the dull, dark eyes of Mr Kronweiser half-rise from his paperback and register their move. He was nibbling his lips with irritation. Greg thought he was wishing he had chosen a nearer seat.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Greg?’ said Hilda, as she took off her coat and settled herself in. He smiled rather than answered, and looked at her proudly. Hilda Machin had little of Viola’s Kensington smartness, but she had a love of bright colour, and it marked her off. Under her brick coat she was wearing a claret-coloured frock, and it, and her cheery bird-bright face, lit up the dusty corner of the Spinners’ like a lamp in a dark place.

  ‘They’re a fine pair, those two,’ said Hilda, nodding in the direction of Sentinel and Chronicle, who were feigning conversation. ‘One of them dressed up like the dog’s dinner, the other looking like something the cat’s brought in, but both of them as like as two peas underneath.’

  ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘I’ve no call, either way. They’re Viola’s little boys. She’s got them tied around her apron-strings–“yes miss, no miss, three bags full, miss”. I’m not poking my finger in. I’ve got my own little follower.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ said Greg, draining his pint and sitting back to watch her, amused. ‘You’ve been doing deals with the Sunday Grub, haven’t you?’

  Hilda Machin followed his lead and took a significant swig of stout. Instead of answering him, she said: ‘And what did Madam want you for yesterday?’

  Greg was caught off his guard. ‘Oh, er, just a chat, like,’ he said. Hilda cackled at his discomfiture.

  ‘I’ll bet,’ she said. ‘And which role was Sybil Thorndike rehearsing for on this occasion?’

  Greg, who was lighting a cigarette, bent over, coughing. ‘Well,’ he said when he straightened, feeling he owed no loyalty in that particular direction, ‘there was a touch of Cleopatra.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hilda, raising thin but eloquent eyebrows. ‘The serpent of the Nile celebrating her diamond jubilee? Well, she must have wanted something out of you. The last time I saw her doing that little act was with Walter. And she certainly wanted something out of him.’

  ‘Can I get you another?’ said Greg, grabbing up her glass and heading towards the bar.

  ‘Need time to think, eh? Well, that’s Hilda Machin: always loses her man by being too sharp.’

  When Greg returned with her second stout and another pint for himself, Hilda Machin said: ‘On consideration, I’ll spare you the embarrassment of telling a lie.’

  ‘Good,’ said Greg, thinking she had given up.

  ‘I’ll tell you myself what she wanted. She wanted you to warn me off.’

  ‘Warn you off?’

  ‘The reporters. Don’t act the wide-eyed innocent. You’re not so green as you’re cabbage looking. She wants to make sure the joyful resurrection of Walter Machin isn’t marred by anyone hearing Hilda Machin’s side of the story. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Greg, after a pause. Then, sounding weak even to himself, he said: ‘And she has a point, you know. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone along with her. It would look pretty undignified, the two of you, slogging it out in print.’

  ‘I’ve never gone in much for dignity,’ said Hilda. ‘Unlike Dame Sybil . . . So the great British public is only to hear dear Viola’s side of the story of Walter Machin’s first marriage, eh?’

  ‘Well, put like that–’

  ‘How else should I put it?’

  ‘Actually, I think that she’s tried to steer clear of the whole subject.’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ said Hilda Machin in a voice of doom. ‘If I were her, I’d want to steer clear of it too.’

  They both turned their attention to their glasses, and Hilda Machin’s eyes had the air of looking down the long, cratered road of her own past. Greg was mentally kicking himself for reminding her of it, and perhaps for losing her trust. ‘Of course, if she said anything that wasn’t the truth . . . ’ he began, weakly, not quite knowing how to complete the sentence.

  ‘Oh, the truth. The truth’s the last thing likely to come out on these occasions, isn’t it? I don’t suppose either of us would much care for that. Still . . . I’m not sure that I like Walter Machin’s first marriage being passed over as if it were something best left under the carpet. We were married nigh on ten years, you know.’

  ‘Have you been talking to reporters?’

  ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Not on your life. We don’t speak the same language.’

  ‘But the man from the Grub?’

  ‘Well, not to say talking,’ said Hilda Machin, leaning back on her bench seat with an
air of self-satisfaction. ‘If you want to know the truth, I’ve hardly said a word to any of them, him included. If they get close to anything personal . . . “intimate” like . . . do you know what I say? I look them straight in the eye and say: “My lips are sealed.” Just like that. I never thought that was something you could actually say, but you can!’

  Greg smiled: ‘Mrs Machin will be pleased.’

  ‘Viola will, will she? Bully for her. Well actually, Greg, to come clean–well, more or less clean–I don’t want to spoil things any more than she does. Tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to it no end. All I’ve done–’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘–is to give my old photograph album to the Grub man. Poor little chap–fancy looking like that, eh? So he’ll have a whole pageful of happy snaps. Walter and Hilda on their wedding day–ah, that caught you out; you didn’t think I’d had one, did you? Walter and Hilda and the baby. The happy Machins at Blackpool. Walter, Hilda and Viola in Trafalgar Square. That’s a prize one, that is. The little Grub man’s eyes almost sparkled when he saw that one: big Walter with his arm around little Hilda and not so little Viola, grinning like a parliamentary candidate. Very poignant I find that one.’

  ‘And that’s your way of giving your side of the story, I suppose, is it?’

  ‘You could say that. Nobody can object, as far as I can see. Just a photographic record of Walter Machin’s first marriage. The camera cannot lie–well, it can, but not half so much as Viola and me would, given half the chance.’ She cackled with merriment, and then added: ‘I got a packet for them.’

  ‘Everybody,’ said Greg Hocking, ‘seems to be expecting to make a bit out of the Machin revival.’

  ‘And why not? You sound like a mucky little Methodist. We made precious little out of him during his lifetime.’ Hilda’s belligerence subsided quickly, and she smiled slyly. ‘Viola made even less than me, poor duck. He was too ill to work after they’d been married no more than a year. He’d gone back to the mill in ‘forty-six, but he wasn’t there long. So this’ll be the first time Viola’s made anything out of him. It’ll be better than the government’s Christmas bonus!’

  ‘She has money herself, doesn’t she? Private means, as they say?’

  ‘Viola? Oh yes. It was her money bought the house.’

  ‘I wonder she let him go back to the mill.’

  ‘What do you think– ? That they should have gone to live in Bloomsbury and joined the London “you-lick-my-arse” group? Walter would never have stood for that lot. Quite apart from–other reasons. Anyway, there was no question of her “letting” him go back to the mill. Walter wasn’t any woman’s poodle. Walter did what Walter wanted, and quite right too. From what I hear she managed to get the upper hand later on, but by then he wasn’t himself by a long chalk.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Greg, changing the subject as abruptly as she had earlier, ‘why you sometimes talk Lancashire and sometimes talk posh.’

  She looked at him quickly. ‘What’s so surprising about that? We all can. You wouldn’t know. You’re from Cheshire. You’re practically a Southerner.’

  ‘Not everyone can do the posh as well as you.’

  Hilda sat back, rolling her glass around the palms of her hands, and contemplated him. ‘I’m not the mill-girl that married the foreman, you know. You thought I was, didn’t you? Made it seem all “right and romantic”, didn’t it? Oh, I got an education in my time–better than Madam’s, if the truth be known. She went to a finishing school in Switzerland, and the only use they have for books there is to walk around with them on their heads. That was the sum total of her higher education. After that she started sleeping with people who could be useful to her. But I went to Teachers’ College.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Greg.

  ‘That’s what I was when I met Walter.’

  ‘What–a teacher?’

  ‘That’s right. In fact–well, never mind. I never told you because you’re all so snooty up at t’College. I taught the first three years we were married–until Rose came along. Then I gave up. It wasn’t the done thing in those days to go on after you’d begun a family, not like now. I did a bit later on, though–in the war, and after Walter left me.’

  ‘He left you, did he?’

  ‘Well, shall we say never bothered to come back to me. Viola grabbed him in ’forty-six. I think she was handed over with his demob suit.’

  ‘Was it a surprise?’

  ‘Not altogether. Walter would never have made it into the Festival of Light. And there was plenty willing in the mill in those days. So it wasn’t the first time. And she’d been doing her big act for him since way back in ’thirty-nine.’

  ‘Did you resent it?’

  ‘No–you know me. Sunny-natured Hilda. I said, “Be happy, my children.” And that’s enough questions, Mr Nosey Parker Hocking. You’re as bad as those scribblers over there. There’s me daughter. There’s Rosie.’ She waved to a mist of fair hair over by the door. ‘We’re going over to Blackburn for a bit of a do. See you soon, Greg love. Ta-raa.’

  ‘What message shall I give to Mrs Machin?’ Greg called after her, incautiously.

  Hilda Machin stopped in her tracks and turned round. ‘You can tell Viola,’ she said loudly, ‘to keep her hands off my young men.’ And bursting into a cackle of laughter she swooped on her daughter and bore her out of the Spinners’ in triumph.

  Greg downed the rest of his bitter and was uneasily conscious of several pairs of sharp Lancastrian eyes on him. God knows what they’re thinking, he said to himself. He tucked his shirt in at the back, and began to edge his way through the Saturday night crowd. As he passed the newspapermen, he got a triple invitation to have another, but he put on his sunniest smile, said two was his limit, and made it to the door. As he walked down Parfitt Road towards the High Street and the buses, breathing the modified freshness of the night air of Oswaldston, he heard the Saloon Bar door shut again, and in a moment he was conscious of a dark shadow gaining on him in the twilight.

  ‘Hello, Mr Kronweiser,’ he said, through the back of his head.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Kronweiser awkwardly. Greg kept up his normal speed, and the American’s fat little legs had to go nineteen to the dozen to keep up.

  ‘I wondered,’ he said, puffing . . . ‘did she promise?’

  ‘Promise?’ said Greg, not slackening. ‘Promise what?’

  ‘To . . . keep quiet. Not to stir up the shit.’

  ‘How did you know I was going to ask her not to?’

  ‘Oh, Viola, of course, that is, Mrs Machin. She said that you were going to.’

  ‘Oh, ah, really? That’s my bus. I must run for it. Good night.’

  As Greg leapt on to the departing double-decker, the conviction sprang fully formed into his mind that during his conversation with Viola Machin, Mr Kronweiser had been listening at the door.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE NEW GENERATION

  VIOLA MACHIN, seated in her bay window, watched from under hooded lids the approach of her daughter-in-law through the wall gate and up the garden path. Her elder son’s wife was a long-standing irritant, like an ill-perforated toilet roll. She’d never known a woman, she thought to herself, who dressed so conventionally, whose face was more boringly nondescript, whose hairdresser performed such miracles of dreariness. She’s the most uninteresting person I know, she said to herself, with considerable satisfaction.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ said Margaret Seymour-Strachey.

  ‘Hello, Margaret,’ said Viola with a sigh. She seemed bored already by the visit.

  ‘Desmond is parking the car,’ said Margaret brightly.

  ‘So I imagined,’ said Viola.

  She made no further efforts at conversation. She wondered why her daughter-in-law bothered to continue her visits. She had made her attitude clear enough to her, heaven knows, but here she was, still coming back every other Sunday, year after year, as welcome as the Irish potato blight.

  She’s really plea
sed to see us, thought Margaret Seymour-Strachey, but she’s too proud to show it, poor old thing.

  On the entry of her son Desmond, Viola Machin brightened up ostentatiously. He was not her favourite son, but he was something. Thank God she’d only had sons. She always preferred men in the house. Poor old Hilda–lost out there, as in everything else! She bustled round, putting on kettles and opening tins of biscuits and cake. Desmond Seymour-Strachey sat, accepting the bustle, as was his wont. In his early forties, with a hawk-like profile, he was good-looking enough, yet in a voracious, untrustworthy style that warned people off, and injured him in his business. He was something in insurance.

  ‘Not long to the big day now, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘Publication day?’ said Viola Machin, standing back to survey a groaning cake-stand. ‘No, not long. They’ve brought it forward a little, so that it comes out in the last week of April–after the newspaper pieces. Two and a half weeks to go.’

  ‘Perhaps you could have a little party on the big day,’ said Margaret brightly.

  ‘I had thought,’ said Viola, splendidly aloof, ‘of having a large one.’ It was in fact the first time she had thought of such a thing, and it did not seem to be a very good idea, but nothing irritated her more than being addressed in that Listen With Mother voice (particularly as her daughter-in-law spoke to her children quite normally) and it goaded her to contrariness.

  ‘Wouldn’t it tire you?’ said Desmond quickly. And getting no response from Viola, who continued fussing over the teapot, he added, more directly: ‘It would be silly to blue the profits before they’ve even begun to come in.’

  ‘Yes,’ chimed in his wife, who had sworn to love, honour and echo, ‘save it all up into a nice little nest egg.’

  Viola Machin, feeling herself once more subject to a process of diminution, said loftily: ‘It will not be a small nest egg.’

  She kicked herself as soon as she had said it. She had a pretty shrewd idea that Desmond had only the haziest notion of how much could be expected from the various books, and she had intended to keep it that way. As soon as Desmond’s boney nose sniffed money, trouble could be expected. He had left school at sixteen to make money. Failing that he had married money (little though one would think it, mused Viola, to look at her) and now that much of that was gone on an over-large house, over-large cars, and over-large meals, Desmond was back in the market-place, avid for a quick kill. To give him his due, he made no attempt to hide this consuming interest of his: it would have seemed pointless, for he assumed that everyone else was similarly obsessed, and would see through his attempts at concealment.