Three Pretty Widows

by Barbara Else

  Ha. Several tried. One or two went home with fivers.

  One night a bloke was egged on by his cobbers, good oh, mate. On with the gloves, up in the ring, a big grin to the audience — and a punch from furious Molly on his nose. Blood spouted down his chest. In shock, the man swung out and laid Molly flat on the canvas. Molly staggered to her feet, drew back her right fist and hit his nose again to great applause.

  Bloody widow. Boxing widow. Bloody wife: for several weeks Ruth’s face will look as if she’s gone ten rounds. She’s a fighter, it’s bred into the bone, but there has to be a cost to magic battles.

  chapter fourteen

  Eliot snaps his briefcase shut, swings it off the chair and stands frowning like a husband.

  Bella pushes her hands into her dressing gown pockets: a toothpick, crumpled tissue. ‘You’re still miffed with me for walking out of Ruth’s,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t think you should go to the gallery, that’s all. It’s far too soon.’

  ‘It has to be done. I don’t know what you mean.’

  She hopes he means he wants her to wait for him to help, that he doesn’t like her returning to the gallery she’s worked in next to Barnaby for all those high-and-low years. She hopes it means he’s worried sick that Barnaby still holds her. She hates herself for playing games —

  And, damn him, he ignores it.

  ‘I’d help you but …’

  ‘I have to do it on my own,’ says Bella.

  ‘I’m with the town planning people this morning. Have you written down the number?’

  ‘I’ll stop when I feel I’ve had enough.’

  Eliot grips his briefcase as if he’s off on a perilous mission. ‘I’ll call by on my way home in case you’re still there and you need me.’

  A percolating silence, teenage, awkward. Eliot clears his throat. A brisk little nod, no kiss goodbye. Off to work very like a husband, were it not for the anguish written on his forehead.

  One day, one day — will they both get over Barnaby? Will Bella stand in the hallway in her dressing gown, no nightie underneath? Will Eliot lean his ugly head towards her, the briefcase in one hand, the other slipping underneath the cotton robe to cup her, rub her softly while he kisses a sweet goodbye?

  Hey ho. If only. Barnaby dead is still larger than life.

  Bella walks quickly to her bedroom. She has black crescents underneath her eyes, like the dregs from last Halloween. Her working tights, the floppy shirt, are still in the bottom of the wardrobe where she dropped them the afternoon Lydia phoned her about Barnaby. She bundles them up, sorts the dirty clothes roughly and stuffs a load into the washer. A pseudo-wife and pseudo-widow, but somebody has to deal with the laundry. Eliot doesn’t notice if it’s done or not: if he can’t find clean clothes, he simply puts on used ones.

  A friendly voice, a touch of no-strings comfort, would be nice. Bella begins to dial Ruth, remembers how Ruth cried, will probably cry again, and downs the phone.

  Before she leaves, Bella stands for a moment in the doorway of her studio: grand name for a small spare room. An easel and blank canvas lean against the wall. Sketch paper, pencils and a clutch of brushes. No other supplies. She ought to order some. Eliot’s had a tiny sink installed, made a work bench with a curve cut into it, found a chair, collected up a row of little pliers, tiny chisels. There’s a single propane bottle for a torch. It’s a lot of trouble for a man to take if he’s only after sex — or wants a cook. It is possible he might just want this face, this trophy face, this accident of nature Bella has.

  Some men are after trophies — Jonah, for example, that suave New York art critic. Bella’s skin prickles with misery. Was Barnaby any better?

  Bella thinks some men are mad.

  She starts her car. Heat shimmers off the asphalt, creates mirages on the road. She hopes time will not pass, that she simply won’t arrive — but when she stops she’s in the yard behind the gallery. A bright little patch: a nice café, a pottery shop, designer second-hand clothes, a deli, pub, and two other excellent antique shops as well as Barnaby Rivers, Antiques.

  She’s light-headed as she walks around to the front. The window has the old brass bird cage in it. There’s a clutch of apple-pattern Carltonware and a pair of fake Staffordshire dogs. One’s got a missing ear. They look equally stupid, in the way of such dogs, fake or genuine.

  The sun beats down. Bella’s arm seems weighted with concrete. At last she unlocks the door and takes a step inside. She hears the click and buzz as the timer for the alarm comes on, and wonders if Barnaby might have changed the code. She keys in her mother’s birth date, and the noise stops. His last chance for a good joke and he missed it.

  With a shudder of despair she turns on the lights. The shop is hot and stuffy. It smells of old things: dust, memories, furniture oil. Responsibility’s a bitch. The inventory will be a nightmare. On a table just inside the door are perfume bottles, an old metronome, Bunnykins chinaware, Royal Crown Derby, snuff boxes, glass paperweights and a mechanical monkey. Shelves of badges and military insignia crowd along the shelves with tiny Limoges shoes, a miniature silver filigree tea set, Delft clogs. Old watches, pocketknives, cuff links. The stuffed ferret, whiskers and fur burdened with years of dust, has its nose poking down from a far corner as if it’s in charge of the mess.

  Nightmare, yes, or on the edge of it. The space feels so strange without Barnaby, unnatural and skewed. She expects to hear his breathing, his chuckle as he rummages in the till, his snort of irritation as he learns some plum deceased estate is given to the competition up and down the road and not to him. She expects Barnaby’s fingers to trail over her neck, his hand to pat her buttock. At the end of one aisle is the oak highchair. And the bastard let her think he had sold it.

  She forces herself into the workroom to make a cup of coffee. A bulb is missing from the central fitting. The room’s pocketed with shadows. Bella keeps her face turned away from Barnaby’s favourite summer hat, jaunty on the brass coat stand. She finds coffee beans in the supply cupboard and sets the kettle on. The plunger’s on the bench, still with Barnaby’s last grounds inside. She shivers again and rinses them away.

  Barnaby had kept yelling down the phone that she’d certainly come back — and here she is. Her old art folder is out on the design table. Bella pours hot water into the plunger. While the coffee brews, she flips the folder open. She’d finished copying the Jacques Gundersen leaves and berries the day she walked out. They should all have been sent back to the owner, but the copies are still here. She thought she’d had trouble with this one, the little red flax, yet the lines are clean and delicate. She examines the little watercolours more closely. They don’t have her initials and ‘copy of’, just Gundersen’s signature. She holds one to the light. These are the originals. So what’s happened to the copies? Has Barnaby sold them? One of his cunning little deals, no doubt. She’ll have to contact the owner and see what’s going on. Widows are supposed to clear things up. Just like a wife: pick up the dirty socks, return the library books. And there is the house to cope with once she’s finished here — though there is no way she’ll touch any of Barnaby’s clothes. It is bad enough, that hat of his, his damned panama at head height on the stand.

  The awfulness of everything sideswipes Bella. This is when she ought to cry, but she’s too numb.

  My panama? I bought that hat in Florence. She knows it’s a Borsalino, I wish she’d show it more respect. All right, thou shalt not covet, especially after you’re dead, but it cost me two hundred dollars. Thou shalt not be a pedant either, she would say. She could always bloody rile me.

  So, here I am again, again. I thought I’d vanished in a puff of smoke.

  Whether I’m an angel or ghost is still debatable. Let’s see: ghosts are meant to be rueful and unsettled. I’m pretty calm. I was always calm, I was known for it.

  Unlike pagan spirits, angels are supposed to have no sexual urges. I used to wonder what the point would be, in being an angel. Anyway, I don’t t
hink I feel sexual urges.

  That’s settled, I am an angel. No doubt the wings come later.

  Well, me and Bella in the shop. Just like old times. She’ll figure out about the Gundersens, do what the owner wants. I don’t want her to get in any strife, but if someone pays you to make copies of their property, it’s their business. You’d be an idiot to pass up some opportunities. If nobody’s hurt, what’s it matter? Thou shalt not bear false witness but a forty-dollar or so mark-up is more or less legitimate to the cost of a reproduction, or to an item you’re not sure is genuine but could be. Definitely: honesty is something you should demand from others, and try to achieve in yourself. Trying is the operative word, while staying fairly flexible.

  No, really, I wasn’t a bad man. Everyone has weaknesses, something in their past they’d prefer to have left undone, especially if it’s going to be discovered. However, you can’t be condemned for the awful things you might have done but didn’t. I could have been far worse.

  I understood why Bella left that night. If we’d lived closer to her relatives and had to see them as often as I saw mine, believe me, I’d have been the one to do a runner. That sister of hers is a tartar. That brother of hers is a prat, and his wife turns being boring into a capital offence.

  But I thought Bella would come to her senses when she’d had enough of Eliot. If I’d explained things quietly, she’d have come back like a shot. But she knew that I was not a quiet man.

  We had a lot of fun together, me and Bella. Bella singing. How I liked that. A sweet high voice like a canary — not trained like mine, of course, but she and I could do a good duet. Our party trick. She isn’t singing now; she’s looking drained.

  We sang Tom Lehrer songs, the time we dressed up as Judith and Holofernes for my parents’ golden wedding. I was Holofernes before Judith cut his head off. I was keen to be him afterwards but the costuming would have been a problem. Bella was a trifle pale for Judith but looked staggering with a sword hanging off her naked waist. Just as well we had no children: we’d have given them exquisite social discomfort.

  Lydia didn’t think our costumes funny at all. I suggested the new vicar ought to have come in a leather tunic with a life-size male puppet on his back, eyes closed in ecstasy. ‘Why’s that?’ Dad asked. ‘David and Jonathon,’ I said. The archdeacon didn’t think that funny, either.

  What did happen to that terrible old cat of Walsh and Ruth’s?

  Why did that old woman come and see me, just before I had my stroke? She asked about my childhood while we chatted about diets over coffee. She’d brought some very tasty fudge. I told Ruth the doctor had warned me about my diet. Rather a lot of whisky over the last few years. Rather more in the weeks after Bella left. Oh well. Win some, lose others. Life’s a gamble at the best of times. I should have talked to Bella, oh, I should have.

  I remember singing drunken songs with Walsh and Eliot when we were young. Not so young, perhaps, but still at that embarrassing stage young men go through when they think they own the world. A great quartet, though. Me, Eliot, Walsh and Nicolas. Well. We were young. And all in love with Ruth. Odd there was no open rivalry. We knew she loved us all like brothers, damn it.

  Bella was never sure of herself, so very unlike Ruth. Bella came from a very ordinary background, of course. I know that we did too, but my parents had selective memory loss about that, as you do, after all — as you do. Bella took a while to get used to Dad being an archdeacon — the old charlatan himself took to it like a duck to drink.

  I did used to wish my father wasn’t known for his drinking. Or for his groping of my wives. Louise threatened him with a knife, one time. Good for her. The next time the old soak turned up on our doorstep I showed him how I’d sharpened it.

  It figures. Families may seem malformed and inexplicable, and yet, deep down, it figures. One side of my father’s family had the surname of Just. I was certain as a boy it meant they’d all been judges. Most impressed, I was, till I discovered Just was shortened from Justini. They were travelling sculptors. Oh, I’ve got this portable block of marble, can I just pop it down here in your field, Sir? Gypsies, at a guess. Swindlers with social pretensions.

  That’s the great thing about this country. People can come out of nowhere and make something of themselves. Like Bella, from her background. It’s not offensive of me to say that. One grandfather sold coal, the other was a stevedore. It’s heroic, in its way.

  Ruth. It’s a shame I never liked Anna as a child. She always made me think of Nicolas. I know that’s bloody ridiculous, but Eliot felt the same. A guy can tell, without having to go on about it. There’s a lot of Ruth in that young woman, deep down. Poor kid. Nice kid. I did grow fond of her, very fond in my own way.

  I suspect I’m fading out again.

  There’s a lot I haven’t figured out about this angel business.

  If I’m a guardian angel — why? More of a voyeur, in fact. Hell, I do not want to see Bella and Eliot in bed: no angel could put up with that. Not unless the lot of them are voyeurs. I suppose that is a possibility. As a kid, I used to wonder why God had to watch over everything … it seemed very spooky to me …

  Bella’s closed the blinds in the workroom, she’s turning off the lights, pressing the alarm pad, opening the door, and —

  Barnaby wants to follow but —

  He is fading. Like dust in a ray of sun. When the sun disappears, so does the dust.

  Isn’t it nice the way when anyone thinks about being in a church they remember the dust in the sunlight? That’s because it makes you go dreamy, self-hypnotised and you can tune out of listening to the sermon.

  Jocasta would say that Barnaby is right for once, though only about heroics. Little people and their stories, there we go. Look at Bella’s distant far-back cousin. Common stock indeed, John Devonald. A grocer in some Cornish town who was involved, with others, in the killing of a publican. Why would any man do that? The ale-house would be closed for several days. John Devonald was transported to Australia, and in Newcastle, north of Sydney, he married and began to build a new life — so far, so good, you’d say. But he went to save a woman on a railway crossing and was killed by the train himself. So, he was basically a good sort. A little person and a hero. Such consolation, Mrs Devonald, to know your Mr Good-Sort died thus bravely and with no thought for himself.

  Whether you’re asking Jocasta or not, she’ll tell you some people ask for a punch on the snout.

  Jocasta laughs. You can die by water: that’s drowning. You can die by earth: that’s buried. You can die by fire: that’s obvious. You can die by air: that’s falling. You can die by accidents — that’s trains. Or you can die by human hand.

  There are times you should think of yourself. And so Jocasta thought, of herself, that day back in World War Two as she donned her coat to be off and visit Peter. She remembers it like gazing through a glass at yesterday: a tough young woman in her heavy navy coat with padded shoulders and horn buttons. With neat steps, she entered the ward at the hospital, her bag clutched at her side.

  ‘He’s second from the end, down over there,’ a nurse said, pointing. ‘I’m afraid he’s the one all bandaged up. Do you want me to come along with you?’

  Jocasta shook her head. She knew what to expect. A bandageman with thick-wrapped arms and legs, a thick-wrapped head with a hole for its mouth and holes for eyes. She sat on the little wooden chair beside the bed. There was a small box on his cabinet.

  ‘And there’s your medal,’ she said.

  He made no sound. She opened it. The medal had beaded edges and the king’s head. The ribbon was diagonal stripes of white and violet. She turned it over, and a goddess — Athena, probably — was letting a hawk fly free. For Courage, it said. Well, well.

  ‘You’ll be sorry to hear about my Grandma.’ Jocasta closed the box and put it back. ‘But she knew when it was time to go. Sensible, she was.’

  A muffled noise came from the middle of the wrappings.

  ‘I brought you some
lozenges,’ she said. ‘And some of Grandma’s cordial. There’s plenty left. We don’t like to see it wasted. You can think about whether you want it.’

  Peter moved one arm a little bit.

  ‘I’m not going to touch you,’ Jocasta said. ‘Might hurt you. Something to tell you, though.’

  Peter’s arm moved slightly again.

  ‘We’re going to have a little Peter. It won’t be a girl, I’m sure of that.’ Jocasta didn’t want it to be a girl, and so it wouldn’t be.

  Peter’s arm stayed still.

  ‘There’ll be some fuss, of course,’ Jocasta said. ‘But I’ll take care of things. My little boy will have the best.’

  Another muffled whisper came out from the bandages.

  ‘What’s that? Our boy? That’s nice.’ Jocasta smiled. ‘Now a boy needs a good strong father. And so, there’s that to think about.’

  Some silence, and a sigh.

  ‘I’m not one to beat about the bush,’ Jocasta said. ‘Will you be getting better?’

  More silence.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Jocasta. ‘It’s not much fun inside there, I dare say.’ She took up the medal box and turned it in her hand.

  Silence for another moment, then a spurt of a cough and a whisper.

  ‘Yes, I’ll have to touch you, if you want to have some cordial. Looks like you can’t sit up and drink it by yourself.’

  ‘I never gave you anything,’ Peter whispered.

  ‘You gave me enough.’ Jocasta set the box back down and patted her stomach. ‘Here’s plenty for me, thank you.’

  Another tiny silence.

  ‘I’m a woman of decision,’ said Jocasta. ‘So. You knew that, very early. It was always the right one, too.’

  There was a chuckle from the middle of the bed. The warm smell from the oven, the heat of the sun, the straining of strong young flesh, sweet kisses, loving in the dark with a summer moon above the woods. What happened can never leave you.