Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

  Now that Viola had let the cat out of the bag, she felt she had no option but to come clean.

  ‘I expect to make a lot of money,’ she said coolly, sitting down to pour. Her manner said that this was a thing of great indifference to her, but that she was just setting the record straight. ‘With all this publicity, Jackson’s is expecting The Factory Whistle to do very well. And they think the new one will be a best-seller. It should bring in a great deal of money.’

  ‘He never made much out of them before,’ said Desmond, sceptically, but with hope.

  ‘Your stepfather was ahead of his time,’ said Viola, with a romantic sigh. ‘Anyway, they were published by Mattlock’s, who had no more business sense than a rabbit. Thank goodness we’re not in their hands anymore. Jackson’s has bought the rights, and Jackson’s could make a Coptic dictionary into a best-seller if they tried. Things are going to be very different in the future, I assure you.’

  She handed Desmond his tea, and allowed her daughter-in-law to fetch her own. Then she went on, with considerable pleasure and anticipation in her voice: ‘The American rights to the new one have been sold, and so have the English paperback rights–for a very large sum. The Times is putting one of the short stories into their Saturday Review. There is talk of a film of The Factory Whistle, with Alan Bates, and they are going to read it on the BBC too. There will be a lot of money . . . ’

  She paused dramatically.

  ‘All of it, I shall keep control of. Do I make myself clear? I shall use it, or not use it, as I think fit.’

  ‘Of course, Mother,’ said Desmond, smiling unpleasantly.

  ‘Naturally, Mother dear,’ said Margaret sweetly. ‘Nobody would think of trying to dictate to you.’

  Desmond stirred his tea and ate a biscuit. There didn’t seem anything to say: even Margaret was nonplussed, and the air of the room was musty with unspoken thoughts. And the unspoken thoughts were all about money. At last, just to hear his own voice, Desmond said: ‘Funny, I never could imagine Walter Machin writing books, let alone good ones.’

  It was not a tactful remark.

  ‘You didn’t know him,’ said his mother contemptuously.

  ‘I knew him well enough,’ said Desmond, on the defensive. ‘I was nearly ten when you married him, remember.’

  ‘Ten!’ said Viola Machin.

  ‘I knew him better than I knew my own father, anyway.’

  ‘Obviously, since you never saw your own father after the age of six. Except that–I gather–you have been renewing the acquaintanceship recently.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Desmond, not apparently ashamed, but not pursuing the subject. ‘But old Walter, he was such a jolly soul–so bright, and loud, and down-to-earth, so much the life and soul of the party. Not at all my idea of a writer.’

  ‘I believe Charles Dickens was generally considered a very lively companion,’ said Viola, at her most distant. She laid her cup on the table, and leaned back in her chair, her statuesque pose accentuated by the classic fawn dress and the dark green scarf around her throat. She closed her eyes theatrically, and resembled nothing so much as a reigning prima donna who is being pestered by her producer to act. Margaret Seymour-Strachey, sensing the royal displeasure, hastened to undo the mischief.

  ‘Of course your mother is quite right,’ she said, with her cranked-up cheerfulness. ‘Writers come in all shapes and sizes. I’ve met lots at the Blackburn Literary Club. Some of them seemed really perfectly ordinary!’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Viola, opening her eyes a fraction to peer malevolently from under the slits. ‘These days the world is full of perfectly ordinary writers. But Walter Machin was not ordinary though he was funny, and lively, and good company–as well as being a great and shamefully neglected novelist.’

  ‘He was wonderful with his hands, too,’ said Desmond ingratiatingly. ‘Nothing was a problem to him, I remember. He could mend any broken toy, and make things too–I remember he made a great big rocking-horse for Hilary, and painted it in all sorts of marvellous colours. And he did wonderful things with my clockwork trains that I never thought of doing.’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ said Viola, unfreezing a fraction. ‘He was the poet of work–that’s what the man from the Sentinel called him. He was wonderful on things, on everyday smells and sounds, and what it felt like to work with your hands. He could make you feel machinery. D. H. Lawrence couldn’t make you feel that, because he’d never been a worker. But Walter had, and anyone who has read the books can feel it.’

  Viola Machin looked even more aristocratic than usual as she expatiated on Walter Machin as working-class novelist.

  ‘Yes, that’s the sort of thing I remember about him,’ said Desmond, adopting sycophancy as the easiest way out. ‘And the time when he was ill I hardly remember at all.’

  ‘And yet he was up there for nearly a year,’ said Viola, casting eyes heavenwards again, like Mr Stiggins speaking of rum. ‘And we’d only had a few months of marriage.’

  ‘But those must be the months I remember so well,’ said Desmond. ‘Though of course there was also that long leave he had towards the end of the war.’

  There was a doom-laden pause, and Desmond became conscious he had said the wrong thing again. Viola fixed him with her most commanding stare: ‘Much better not to mention that,’ she said.

  Desmond looked nonplussed: ‘Oh yes of course, if you . . . I suppose our Hilda might . . . ’

  ‘Exactly. She might be hurt. It might get into the papers, and then she’d be down here knocking on my door and screaming blue murder. No–better not give her any excuse to make that sort of trouble. Much better forget it altogether.’

  ‘How is our Hilda?’ asked Margaret Seymour-Strachey. All the children called her ‘our Hilda’, though in fact Desmond and Margaret had not spoken to her more than once or twice in their lives.

  ‘Well, I believe,’ said Viola, with her usual loftiness when that name was mentioned, ‘enjoying her little part in the great events. I had to convey to her a slight warning, though . . . ’

  ‘A warning?’

  ‘With so many reporters around, I thought she might be tempted to rake up old scores. She’s a loose-tongued, prattling creature, like most women of her class. I decided it was best to avoid trouble, rather than face it when it comes. I will not consent to be portrayed in the press as a superannuated scarlet woman!’

  Unseen by Viola Machin, something very close to a smile wafted over her daughter-in-law’s face.

  ‘And did she–heed the warning?’ asked Desmond.

  ‘I have reason to believe she saw the sense of it,’ said Viola. ‘I don’t think we need anticipate any nonsense from that quarter.’

  ‘You don’t think it might have been better to let her have her say out,’ suggested Desmond, ‘and get it off her chest? Instead of trying to silence her?’

  ‘Silence her!’ said Viola Machin, her cheeks puffing with annoyance. ‘What an extraordinary expression! Whatever could make you think I wanted to silence Hilda Machin? Even if I did, I don’t see how I could silence her. Do you, Desmond?’

  There was a long silence. The Sunday visit, frosty from the beginning, now seemed positively to crackle.

  ‘I saw Father on Wednesday,’ said Desmond finally, desperate for something to say.

  ‘Indeed? And how was he looking?’

  ‘Wonderfully fit. He is awfully well preserved.’

  ‘He would be. He always took very good care of himself.’

  ‘From the look of you, Mother,’ said Desmond ingratiatingly, ‘most people would say you were pretty good at that yourself.’

  ‘It is natural for a woman to take good care of herself,’ said Viola Machin, superbly secure in her right to generalize about women. ‘In a man it is mere effeminacy. I have no desire to see Gerald playing the handsome patriarch.’

  ‘What a pity, Mother. I was rather wondering if we might not arrange a meeting. He said himself he was very keen to see you again.’r />
  ‘Really?’ said Viola, her eyebrows flying theatrically up, though not with any apparent pleasure. ‘Whatever can have put that notion into his head? Perhaps he wants to propose to me again.’

  ‘Goodness, Mother,’ said Margaret Seymour-Strachey, ‘what can have given you that idea?’

  ‘There are precedents.’

  Margaret Seymour-Strachey’s conventional bourgeois soul seemed shocked by the notion. Her husband merely said: ‘He didn’t say anything about that. He seemed very comfortable.’

  The possible implications of this last remark struck Desmond himself as he was making it, and they were certainly not lost on Viola, who compressed her lips together grimly.

  It seemed time to go. In perfect unison, based on long marital experience and an infinitesimal twitch of the eyebrows, Desmond and Margaret Seymour-Strachey rose from their chairs and began making the ritual noises.

  ‘Well, Mother, we’ll see you in a fortnight’s time.’

  ‘Perhaps then,’ said Viola, whose lips were still set in a Gladstonian expression, ‘you will find it possible to bring my grandchildren along for me to have a look at.’

  Margaret Seymour-Strachey (who prided herself on being the perfect daughter-in-law) would do anything for her husband’s mother except bring her children into overmuch contact with her. She said: ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we? They are such busy little things at the weekends. Now, is there anything we can do for you?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Viola ungraciously. ‘I’m not a complete cripple yet. In any case, I imagine Hilary will be round tonight. He’s always willing to turn his hand to anything.’

  Normally Desmond was pleased to hear that his brother was doing his share of what he privately called ‘oldie-watching’, but tonight he merely said ‘Good’, with a preoccupied expression on his face, and made for the hall.

  At the front door, as she watched them go down the garden path, with their jolly waves and their toothpaste smiles, Viola shouted: ‘And if you see that father of yours again, you can tell him it won’t do. It won’t do at all. Nothing to be gained by our meeting. I wouldn’t make him comfortable at all!’

  Driving home in the car, Desmond and Margaret had a frank and open discussion on the subject of the books, the money, and brother Hilary. Knowing nothing about the likely sums involved, or the intentions of Viola’s younger son, the discussion was inconclusive, but as he stopped his car outside its magnificent, unpaid-for garage, Desmond said: ‘I think I’d better keep an eye on young Hilary.’

  And Margaret said: ‘I’m going to find out what a bestseller might bring in. Just for interest’s sake.’

  They smiled at each other in perfect understanding.

  • • •

  Later that same evening, Hilda Machin and her daughter were playing Scrabble by the window of Hilda’s first-floor sitting-room, when the garden gate into the street opened and admitted a square, ruddy, grinning man of thirty-five or so, swinging in his large hand an unwrapped bottle of something.

  ‘Hilary too,’ said Hilda. ‘Madam’s getting popular in her old age. Or is it the vultures gathering?’

  ‘Hilary’s not like that,’ said Rose, struggling with a handful of vowels, but watching him from the corner of her eye as he made his way nonchalantly up the path.

  Later in the evening the sound of loud laughter wafted up through the open window, and even snatches of a song. The evening visit of Hilary Seymour-Strachey seemed to have taken on a very different character to the afternoon one of his brother and sister-in-law.

  ‘Typical Hilary,’ said Rose, listening abstractedly. ‘He really is nice.’

  Her mother looked up from her letters, and gazed hard at her daughter. Another great gust of delighted laughter came from downstairs.

  ‘Oh yes, there’s a lot of Walter in young Hilary,’ said Hilda quietly.

  By the time her daughter caught the impact of the words, Hilda was intently laying her word out on the board.

  CHAPTER V

  THE WORLD OF LEARNING

  THE ROOM on the first floor of Meadowbanks, Viola Machin’s house, in which Mr Kronweiser plied his research was very tiny indeed. A gimcrack modern desk table (‘Good enough for him’) had been placed there, and there were a few shelves, stocked with the works of Walter Machin, cheap editions of Lawrence, Walter Greenwood, Orwell, Sillitoe and others, and copies of periodicals which had contributed to the revival of interest in Machin’s books. These were the basic tools of Mr Kronweiser’s research, and the study was only just big enough to hold them and him.

  Dwight Kronweiser came to this room every day, spending his mornings going through the manuscript fiction, personal letters and other papers which had been stored in the attic for thirty years before his arrival. He made transcripts of the fiction, and of all the other major documents. These he carried home, partly because the little room lacked storage space, partly to appease the secretive, magpie instinct which was part of his nature: he loved to keep, hide, obfuscate, cover his tracks; he had fantasies in the watches of the night of other scholars stealing a march on him and publishing the definitive study of Walter Machin first (though how that would be possible, in view of his privileged position, he would have been hard put to it to say). He saw mainly the cloak and dagger aspects of scholarship, and acted accordingly.

  Home, for Mr Kronweiser, was a large bedroom in a working-class house to the north of the town. In spite of his expressed desire to soak up atmosphere, he did not feel at home there. His landlady didn’t understand him. So he spent long days and evenings at Meadowbanks, working (when he had done a stint of transcription) on the manuscript which was destined to be the Walter Machin volume in the Payne’s Great Authors series of monographs. He sat at his desk, the edge pressed hard against his belly, seeming not to have an ounce of surplus bone in his body, meditating, cogitating, moulding his concrete blocks of critical prose:

  The major problem Machin confronts in The Factory Whistle is that of irrelation, which in its turn is his means of defining the absolute. The complementary, interpenetrating phenomena in proletarian life that the implied narrator confronts, and by confronting epiphanizes, are a means primarily of defining his own ambivalent relation both to the zeitgeist and to his own eternal validity.

  Mr Kronweiser stared at the ceiling in creative agony for a space, and then, neatly scoring through the word ‘validity’, he substituted ‘authenticity’.

  Having changed this stage in the argument to his liking, Dwight Kronweiser began contemplating his next deathless paragraph, and gazed fixedly ahead of him as polysyllabic concepts moved through his mind like heavy artillery on parade. In the middle of this elephantine travail, there came a knock on the door. Mr Kronweiser’s reaction was odd: he sprang to a crouch over his manuscript, then put a piece of clean paper over it. Then he blinked his eyes nervously, and said: ‘Yes?’

  It was Hilda Machin, peeping round the door with a cocksparrow expression, like the coming of spring.

  ‘Well, hello, Mrs–er–Machin, this is an honour,’ said Dwight Kronweiser, uncurling himself from his protective position, then getting up with an attempt at expansiveness. ‘I appreciate your looking me up in my cubby-hole, I really do. Now, do sit down a moment–we can just fit another chair in here.’

  And he bustled out on to the landing to fetch a straight-backed chair that stood there for no particular reason. As he did so, he kept darting his eyes nervously back to his little room and the manuscript on the desk; but when he got back in, puffing a little, he was smiling and giving little mutters of pleasure: ‘Well, this sure is nice of you, real friendly . . . ’

  Hilda Machin settled herself down on the chair, smiling happily and looking guilelessly at Mr Kronweiser who, if the truth were known, amused her very much. She looked disparagingly round his little cubby-hole as he squeezed his belly back into its pouch in the middle of the desk.

  ‘You are cramped in here, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘She could have given you
a bit more room.’

  ‘Believe me, I’m deeply grateful to be given any sort of study at all, deeply grateful. Just the chance to transcribe the manuscripts was the most fantastic luck, the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’d have been happy to transcribe them just anyplace.’

  ‘Oh, we wouldn’t want to let them out of our sight,’ said Hilda. Mr Kronweiser was unsure about that ‘we’: was it a plural, or was it an ironic reference to Viola Machin? He laughed nervously. ‘Anyway, she could have given you the study downstairs,’ continued Hilda. ‘It’s not used, and that way you could have kept everything together. You’ve no room here to keep anything at all.’

  ‘Oh, I keep everything at home–I file them there, on my own system,’ said Mr Kronweiser eagerly. ‘I shouldn’t in any case keep the originals and the transcripts in one place, no sir. You never know what might eventuate.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hilda, wide-eyed. ‘What sort of eventuations had you in mind? Burglary? Fire?’

  ‘Believe you me, anything can happen,’ said Mr Kronweiser, with gloomy relish. ‘Friend of mine at Duke–had his Ph.D stolen–all the manuscripts, notes, card indexes, the whole caboodle! It turned up a year later, all rewritten but basically identical, as a Ph.D at San Diego. No kidding! And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Another guy had his in his car. Parked it to buy a pack of cigarettes–the car was stolen by a couple of kids going joy-riding. They used the Ph.D to light a bonfire to barbecue some steaks they’d nicked. Judge said he couldn’t put an estimate on the value of the typescript, and ignored it in the sentence. Boy! That guy was sore as a cowboy’s . . . ’ Mr Kronweiser faded out abruptly and subsided into coughs. He was sweating heavily with emotion.