A Serious Widow

by Constance Beresford-Howe

  Copyright © 1991 by Constance Beresford-Howe

  First published by Macmillan of Canada 1991

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Beresford-Howe, Constance, 1922–

  A serious widow

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-705-6

  I. Title.

  PS8503.E76S47 2001 0C813’.54 C2001-901146-6

  PR9199.3.B47S47 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  This book is for

  Tom Lockwood, Q.C.,

  and his family,

  with affection and thanks.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Birth and Death Notices

  HILL, Edwin J. – Suddenly in Toronto on September 30, 1988, in his sixty-eighth year. He is survived by his wife, Rowena, and daughter, Marion. Funeral service at St. Michael’s Anglican Church on Monday, October 3 at 3:00 p.m., followed by interment at Pinewood Cemetery.

  Toronto Globe and Mail

  October 3, 1988

  “I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you – Nobody – too?”

  Emily Dickinson

  “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

  …Alice replied rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning …”

  Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  PROLOGUE

  I held my tongue and spake nothing

  Of course I didn’t argue when poor weeping Marion insisted that I wear this silly hat. It doesn’t fit – daughters’ heads for some reason are always bigger than their mothers’ – and the wind keeps shoving it to one side, so I feel like the stooge of some knockabout comedian. As for the black veil (also her idea), it embarrasses me more than words could ever tell. The glum web of it falls between me and the ceremony, the tiny clump of mourners, the prose of Latimer and Cranmer, all of which I expected would make this whole thing seem real. Instead I see everything through silk chiffon, darkly. And all the others can see is Survived By His Widow, concealed by her grief, clad in almost royal dignity by her new status as Relict. Well, it’s an identity, of sorts.

  Teach us to number our days

  Teach us to numb them, as far as possible, from now on, if you don’t mind. The days that stretch ahead of me are so full of various kinds of anxiety they don’t bear thinking of. Simply because it’s gone, the past defines itself as satisfactory – well, anyhow, safe, and not without its comforts. Now it’s been cut off with such finality and no warning, I stand on the brink of nothing but questions without answers. Do widows have to pay income tax? How do you make out a cheque? And what do you do with a dead man’s underwear and socks?

  The wind creaks the almost leafless boughs of the oak over our heads. It’s a dark afternoon, with a cold smell of decay and damp about. I will be all right, though, as long as it doesn’t rain. Why this should matter so much I have no idea, except that among all the other fears, it’s only common sense to choose a small one: if it rains, Marion’s hat will be spoiled, and she will be annoyed. Pretend that’s the worst rain could do. But if it falls today to blur the distinction between grey sky and grey earth, or between life and death, it might well tumble me weightless as a space traveller and obliterate me as totally as Edwin. Yes, better stick with lesser fears; for example, no will in the house – we’ve looked everywhere else and found nothing … All very well for Cuthbert to say that’s no real problem … Where on earth could Edwin have…

  Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts

  Yes, but for God’s sake don’t tell anybody mine. Among others, that while his death was totally unexpected (though not from time to time unwished for), it’s brought me nothing that could be remotely described as grief. There, there, they say, by way of comfort. At least he didn’t suffer. No, he just dropped dead in his Adidas outside a dry-cleaner’s shop, with the Walkman plugs still in his ears. You’ve got to cry, Marion says sternly, it will do you good. Don’t keep it all inside. And why not? If she only knew, inside is the best place for it. Shock, they murmur knowingly. Try surprise. Try relief.

  Who shall change our vile body

  Yes, indeed, changed at last. That finicking little click in his throat. The brief, pre-sleep tattoo of farts. The square of plaster always dropping off his cracked heel. Why would he keep jogging, at his age? If he’d been a couch potato like everyone else, none of us would be here now, in his case dead, the rest of us cold, scared, bored and depressed, secretly needing a wee and looking forward to the sherry and sandwiches to come. God must be a bit of a knockabout comedian himself, because it was health, of all things, that in the end did for Edwin’s vile body – numbered his days and then finished him off.

  We give thee hearty thanks

  Well, that may be going a bit far.

  It hath pleased thee to deliver this our brother

  Speak for yourself, Canon Foster. He was not my brother. Two – generally three – acts of incest every week, in that case. Multiply by thirty years and you get a pretty grim total. That’s not counting menstrual time off, of course, or his regular week in Ottawa.

  And our secret sins in the light of thy countenance

  Not that he had any, secret or otherwise. Model citizen. A clean record, if ever there was one. Never, ever, in the wrong about anything. Law-abiding, thrifty, church-going, scrupulous, decent, monogamous, sober … the Seven Deadly Virtues.

  Our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul

  Well, spiritually the closest I ever got to that state was after his regular audit of the household accounts, on those rare occasions when I managed to fiddle things out to balance debit and credit. Bodily, now, is another thing altogether. Must be about the same for everyone’s body, I guess, or why all these big promises about bliss in the world to come? My nose is itching fiercely … that’s a sign of some kind. Guilt, probably, for these subversive thoughts. I rub my nose through the veil. Frowning, Marion thrusts a handkerchief into my gloved hand. She is all smeared and bleared with crying. Surprising, really, this abandon in a woman whose strongest passion always seemed to be teaching First Aid. The other mourners control themselves much better. They shuffle and cough in the rising wind.

  Receive the kingdom prepared for thee

  One of the straps meant to lower the coffin discreetly into the hole is mishandled, and slips. The youngest of the undertaker’s graveside aides mutters something that sounds very mu
ch like “Shit.” The coffin lurches. Marion grips my hand. She is afraid I will make an unseemly commotion by crying out or fainting. Canon Foster at my elbow tactfully tries to turn me away from the open trench, but I can’t move. Behind the folds of my veil a rictus halfway between tears and a mad grin stiffens my face.

  From the beginning of the world

  Because just at that inappropriate moment, across the open grave, I have discovered Edwin standing, his bald head bared to the wind. His dark overcoat is buttoned close over the bulge of his little paunch. His left foot toes in slightly, just as it always did. Our eyes meet and hold. Marion now sees him, too. Her arm slackens under mine; then she gives a long sigh and sinks to her knees. The stout Canon briskly slings his prayer book under one arm and ducks down to retrieve her. Years of genuflection have kept him in good shape for occasions like this. Like someone in a dream, Edwin clarifies and grows larger. He clears his throat with an audible small click.

  “My name is John Edwin Hill,” he says to me. “I am his son.”

  One or two curious faces turn to look at him, pale discs in the darkening air. The others are busy jostling each other to brush down Marion’s coat and retrieve her handbag. I stand numbly looking at John Edwin Hill as if we were alone – as, in a sense, we are. There is a surflike sound of water in my ears that makes me think fleetingly of Vancouver and the novels of Ethel Wilson. Vaguely I put up a hand to straighten Marion’s hat. Then, with a jerk, I pull it off, veil and all.

  “How do you do,” I hear my colourless voice tell him. “Of course you must come back to the house.” A gust of wind scoops up a handful of dry leaves, spraying them high in the air, and it begins to rain.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “His son!” says Marion sharply, as the limousine door closes us in. “That’s ridiculous. As if Dad could have a son without ever mentioning it to us!”

  “He was married before, you know. And you’ve only got to look at the man.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not proof, Mother. Nothing of the kind. Lots of people – resemblances can – he couldn’t possibly be – Are you listening?”

  I am, but not very closely. The suburbs of Toronto glide past us serenely, as if the world were a rational place. Thickening rain blots the tinted limo window. Marion leans towards me, her eyes flashing in the home-bound headlights of rush-hour traffic. Her colour is high. Our graveside encounter with incalculable chance has shaken her, first out of, and then back into herself.

  “Mother, you surely realize that this man, whoever he is – maybe some distant relative, at most – has simply come here to claim – he’s some kind of trickster trying to con you out of Dad’s estate, or part of it. Now I want you to leave this to me. Don’t you worry about it. Dear old Canon Tom will cope with the guests – I’ve had a word with him – and Cuthbert and I will take this fellow aside. We’ll soon sort him out.”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course. It won’t take long.” She pats my cold hand briefly.

  “I wonder where the corkscrew is for the sherry.”

  “Are you all right, Mother? We’re nearly there. Here, do take my comb and do something about your hair.”

  Marion has been addressing me in exactly this tone of voice, one that combines scorn with pity, ever since she was two. I have grown so used to it I even find it vaguely reassuring. Totally incompetent women may be snubbed a lot, but people do look after them.

  “Now remember,” she says, “just leave everything to me.” The car glides to a stop outside our modest Don Mills semi. I wonder what the driver, who looks like a retired African emperor, makes of our tiny patch of front lawn on which lolls the garbage can I’ve forgotten to take in. We clamber out of the low-slung, upholstered depths, and rain flicks small, cold kisses over my forehead and cheeks as I fumble with my hat and gloves. Marion is already waiting impatiently for me at the door. The second limousine full of mourners is purring to a stop at the curb.

  In a corner of the living-room, while Tom copes with the other guests, Marion confronts the stranger. “And this is our lawyer, Cuthbert Wesley,” she tells him, offering the information together with a glass of sweet sherry. (She evidently doesn’t trust the paler decanter of dry, in case it might be stronger. Nor does she add that Cuthbert, while he played chess with Edwin regularly for the past thirty-odd years, has only once given us any legal advice, and that was when we mortgaged this house, a generation ago.)

  “Hem, my name is John Hill.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. – Hill.”

  This is a manifest lie. Cuthbert’s round face, now he is close enough to focus his thick-lensed glasses on the interloper, looks much more alarmed than pleased. But then, I remind myself, he is, like me, very easily alarmed. Tom, on the other hand, playing host with casual expertise in the background, seems entirely unperturbed. He has linked the other guests into a small, chatty group and is now refreshing himself with a generous swig of sherry. With real or assumed calm he examines a nearby framed sepia photo of my grandmother, born in 1910 and wistfully named Hope. She returns his tolerant glance with the look of mild, sweet apprehension I remember so well, and in fact see in my own mirror every day. Yet she never heard the words terrorist or nuked in her life, and was consequently quite a lot less afraid of everything than I have always been.

  I stand a little behind Marion, stealing frequent glances at John Edwin Hill with the detached curiosity of shock. He looks, in fact, less like Edwin than I first thought. Someone else’s input – presumably his mother’s – has given him a short, straight nose and fine-pored white skin. He is, in fact, altogether better looking than Edwin, a discovery in which I take little or no comfort. My eyes keep wandering around the room, where everything looks subtly different today. All my books, for one thing, have been hastily huddled out of sight, like the bottles of a secret drinker. The house even smells different, filled as it is with newly delivered pot plants, sent by Edwin’s business acquaintances as a substitute for attending the funeral. The clay pots are shrouded in wrinkled foil in various unattractive colours, and the plants themselves are ugly yellow or maroon chrysanthemums smelling of pepper. Only one, a hibiscus with gay, frilled trumpets of blossom, has charm; but it looks altogether too frivolous for a funeral.

  “The food, Mother,” Marion mutters to me. Belatedly I remember the sandwiches and whip off their protective plastic. Tom takes the platter from me with a flourish to offer it round with a bowl of olives.

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” says John Hill. “I’m afraid my turning up at the cemetery came as rather a shock to you ladies –” and here he makes a little bow to be divided between Marion and me “– but my home is in Ottawa, and I only saw the obituary notice yesterday in the Globe. When I tried to phone, I found this number was unlisted. Then my plane was delayed, so the service was nearly over by the time I …”

  “Yes, well, Mr. Hill, we won’t want to keep you here unnecessarily,” Marion says crisply. “Perhaps you’d care to identify just who –” She is the kind of person who likes to get straight to the point, indifferent to the possibility it might be more civilized to go around a longer way. I’m never sure whether this makes her admirable or just crass.

  There is a brief interruption while Tom escorts up to me various sidesmen and the People’s Warden to murmur sympathy and say goodbye. I thank them. They disappear. Tom reappears at my elbow protectively just as Hill, having set down his glass, draws two rather foxed and dingy documents from his breast pocket. “My parents’ marriage certificate,” he says, unfolding the first. “And,” producing the second, with the air of a polite bridge player taking a trick, “my own birth certificate dated, as you see, one year later.”

  Tom’s face suddenly crimsons under his thatch of white hair. He presided over my marriage to Edwin in 1957, after all. “May I?” he asks, appropriating one of the Hill documents, which, I now see, looks dreadfully authentic with its yellowed silk tassel and border of lilies. Then he blows out a long breath, as if
relieved. “Ah, I see. This certificate is dated 1944. Edwin, of course – this first marriage – he gave me the clear impression that by the time I knew him he was a widower. And childless. Of course I saw no reason to doubt his word then or now – with respect.”

  “My mother and I are both, hem, alive and well, Canon.”

  “But then – but surely then – there must have been a divorce,” says Cuthbert. He looks agitated. This may land in his lap after all – a legal rather than a moral problem. He takes a large gulp of sherry, which makes him blink and produces an outbreak of fine perspiration on his bald forehead.

  “There was not and never has been any divorce,” says Hill firmly. His rhetorical style so intrigues me I have some difficulty grasping what he actually means.

  “No, that’s ridiculous,” says Marion in a thin voice. “My parents were married at St. Michael’s. If it comes to certificates, Mother has hers, too.”

  Something like a grim little smile flickers on Hill’s thinnish lips. “Your mother and mine have both, I’m afraid, been kept in the dark all this time. Business, hem, or so he claimed, kept my father down here for three weeks in every month; but for the past twenty years or more he’s always returned to his home in Ottawa and to us. I’m sorry – this can’t be any more pleasant for you than it is for me. In fact, finding out he had a second family here has been a considerable shock to me. In any case, like you, I’m an only child. I’m here to carry out my responsibility to my mother, as I’m sure you understand.”

  “But if this is true, how amazing of Edwin,” I say, more to myself than to anyone in particular. However, no one appears to hear me. Tom gently urges me into a chair and gives my shoulder a comforting pat. Cuthbert is peering at the birth certificate, his mouth dubiously pursed, as if fearing to find no loophole there. Marion stares fiercely at her half-brother, her eyes bright with tears of outrage. This, at least, is easy to understand. The very last thing the poor girl ever expected to find herself is a bastard. And as for me, I think, what do I find myself? A kept woman? That’s what I’ve been content to be, after all, for the past thirty years. Why does the phrase have such an ugly ring now?