The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  It was a recent image. It was from an exhibition party at the gallery and I could tell it was recent because there was a poster pinned to the door of the office declaring that the next event would be the opening night of a special exhibition celebrating the lives of the Royal Couple. Rhys was standing dead centre in the frame, lazily consuming the limelight and surrounded by a beaming cluster of his most prized patrons. He looked well and happy; at least, I should say there was that pinched look about his mouth that he always wore during the build-up to the opening night and his hair was more flecked than it had been before. But the confidence was there and intact. There was no trace of the kind of desperation that might carry a man to the head of a waterfall only a few weeks later.

  It prompted me to say with no small degree of difficulty, “Forgive me, Inspector, but I haven’t had the opportunity to ask this until now. How do you know what happened to him? How do you know he jumped? Since no remains were found, I mean.”

  “No forgiveness necessary, Mrs Williams. It’s a perfectly natural question. I can tell you that several witnesses saw him do it. A woman, a poor spinster at the hotel, was practically hysterical. We lose people with alarming regularity to the rivers in those valleys and most don’t conveniently leave proof of their identity as Mr Williams did. In some ways we are fortunate he left these things.”

  Then he coughed a little as he realised that the word fortunate was perhaps not the most appropriate term to be using in these circumstances.

  I didn’t care. I was saying earnestly, “No, you misunderstand me. I mean to say that I do accept that he fell, but all the same you should know I truly believe it’s impossible the war did this. I have to ask; are you sure, absolutely sure he was alone? Was no one else involved?”

  I already knew that no one else had been seen there at that time. Of course they hadn’t. They wouldn’t have been so careless. But this was the inspector’s chance to ask me the same question. He could ask if I thought someone else was involved. If he had, I might have observed that it was rapidly becoming for me the only reasonable explanation for the dramatic transformation in Rhys’s state of mind. I would have used it as the cue to risk it all by telling the policeman the truth of my own experiences. But he didn’t.

  He only said, “The witnesses all gave the same description of events leading to his fall.”

  “And you have his note.”

  “We have a note that usually goes with such things, yes.” The inspector was surveying me carefully. He remarked, “You know, Mrs Williams, it is very natural at times like these for a grieving spouse to seek someone to blame, to seek some other explanation. But I’m afraid I can’t give you that kind of consolation. I’m very sorry.”

  His attention strayed back to the enlargement that lay on the table before me.

  Gregory was there as well of course. He was sporting his customary blazer and a debonair smile, and beside him were art historian Clifford Davis and Lord Alfred Warren, local magistrate and writer for an arts magazine. Rhys always did collect the very best. Behind them was a mêlée of assorted guests, all of whom had at one time or other either bought an artwork or been gifted the delight of an exclusive interview with Rhys. Since there was only one male amongst the group that I didn’t know, presumably he was the latest lucky journalist to be gifted that gem. On the wall behind him was one of the exhibition pieces, a painfully beautiful reworking of that famous painting of An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. In the original painting, a dramatically lit family alternately gasp and shudder at the wonder of science managing to suffocate a bird. Rhys’s version was an enormous photograph in black and white and the assembled figures were watching with varying degrees of hope, trepidation and disbelief as a dying loved one received penicillin.

  “Forgive me,” I began carefully after the inspector had led me through the list of everyone’s names. Presumably he’d had this information from Rhys’s parents and perhaps been encouraged to apply to Gregory for the names they wouldn’t know. “But I had been given to understand … I mean I had hoped that I would be able to collect his things today. Are you in fact still investigating? Do you need to keep them?”

  Inspector Griffiths smiled, his mouth disappearing completely behind its fringe. “The desk sergeant mentioned you’d said as much. I don’t quite know where you got the idea we were ready for the family to collect his belongings. It’s a touch premature. But we have concluded our investigation. There really is little we can do in cases like these, where no remains have been found; are unlikely to ever be found.”

  As he said this, his deep-set eyes gleamed black above angular cheekbones as though he were exceptionally shrewd and alert and ready to deal with the most gruesome of discoveries should the need arise. Then I realised that he was just very bored by it all and very well-practiced at hiding it. Rhys would have found him a captivating subject.

  After a suitable period of scrutiny while Inspector Griffiths decided just how much more he wanted to prove his authority by releasing Rhys’s possessions today, the policeman announced that I could take the prints, the broken camera and the clothes for the basis of some form of family memorial. The negatives and a copy of the most important prints were being retained, “Just in case the coroner wants them.”

  Quite unselfconsciously, he stuffed the images that were deemed important back into the box and left me to pack away the rest in a string bag that I dragged from its crumpled knot in the bottom of my handbag. The chosen few he retained were of the scantily clad woman.

  “May I just say, Mrs Williams …” Inspector Griffiths paused as he opened the door for me. “Your dignity has been impressive throughout. We weren’t expecting you to come all this way to see us but I’m very glad you have.”

  “Oh,” I said, more than a little taken aback. “Thank you.”

  “Yes. You might not wish to consider yourself a war widow, but the war certainly stole your husband and I’m sorry for it.”

  There didn’t seem much I could say to that, not when he must have thought he was being sympathetic and I couldn’t help imagining he was alluding to the woman in the photographs he’d kept. So I mustered a quick impression of a smile. Then I took the bag of a dead man’s possessions and walked back through the narrow corridor of the police station to sign away my conscience on innumerable forms for the release of his things.

  Chapter 12

  This time when I took my place in the tearooms on that street that led down to the pier there was no black Morris parked by the gothic university college buildings and there was no Mary to disturb my solitude either. I pulled out the envelope of photographs again while I waited for my tea and soup. Here, away from the oppressive room at the police station, the sight of his face on the glossy enlargements was only a variation of that endless habit of shocking myself into imagining Rhys was the man in the corner with his head bent over a stew, or perhaps the man outside on the pavement peering in to see if there was a vacant table, or even the very aged, very wizened old man who had waggled his hand in the air about two minutes ago for his bill. By that I mean to say that the experience of examining his photographs was unnerving but not unmanageable.

  The fourth or fifth print in the pile proved to be by his hand rather than by that other person. It was a portrait of the woman, fully clothed this time with unforgiving ironwork just behind and a leaf pattern from an unseen canopy casting pensive shadows across her face. She was about ten years older than me – more equal to Rhys’s age – and had the sort of confidence that makes a woman beautiful regardless of how her features have been arranged. I wondered if she mourned him.

  A pot of tea arrived. I smiled my thanks and reached for the next image, one of the group shots with its sea of once-familiar faces. The warmth of Gregory’s smile gave me almost the same peculiar twist that my husband’s face had given me.

  This was because Gregory was, in a slightly roundabout way, the man who could claim almost absolute responsibility for causing my divorce.

&nb
sp; It seems odd to put it like that. It seems very odd to admit at all, particularly after the inspector’s parting comments about war widows, that in actual fact it really wasn’t the insult of Rhys’s return with a fresh woman in tow that had made me leave. Admittedly, the crisis had stemmed from my husband’s infidelity, but not in the way that might commonly be presumed. The difficulty for me began long before the war with the fact that Gregory saw the hurt and sympathised, and where he sympathised he grew to imagine that I wished to seek comfort on another man’s shoulder. His own.

  Gregory Scott was Rhys’s oldest and most valuable friend – so much so that he introduced Rhys to another great friend, my uncle, and through him the artistic avant garde. But Gregory wasn’t just an enthusiastic supporter of other people’s talent. He was himself a much-decorated rowing champion with the grit to still dominate the sport now that he was off the water and in his early fifties. He was kind, loyal and incredibly generous to us all yet somehow remained the image of the perpetual bachelor; too hard for the women he wanted, and too critical of the women who wanted him.

  His pursuit of me grew so slowly that I was two years into marriage before I was sure of it. It was the insubstantial kind of infatuation that was never explicit, absolutely uninvited and astoundingly impossible to suppress given the fact that in the main he was his usual friendly self and he held a very special status as my husband’s most valued patron. The best example I have of Gregory’s behaviour at that time is that he suddenly took to doing that awful shying away thing that men sometimes do when I confided even the smallest difference of opinion – such as cringing if I said it was drizzling when he said it was fine; and we could both see the mist of rain upon the window glass. It was infuriatingly impossible to curb this mannerism since any word of mine was treated like the banter between young loves; and just to be clear why such playful teasing should have been so offensive, I don’t believe that affection has any part to play in a strategy that begins with ridiculing a person’s capacity for independent choice.

  As it was, he didn’t get very far. It never escalated to a row because I wouldn’t let it and when my husband went away to war, life became easier simply because without Rhys there, Gregory couldn’t visit much either. Then Rhys returned home and Gregory, without so much as renewing his pursuit of me, destroyed what was left of my marriage.

  To those who have never experienced the infidelity of a spouse it must seem strange that it took a row about Gregory to give me the impetus to leave. Rhys came back in 1945 with yet another muse but the real betrayal lay deeper within his artistic needs. He brought with him one other commitment: an unshakeable, unflinching determination to offer his old friend a temporary place in our office for a period of six months or so while they undertook a career-defining collaboration.

  When I told Rhys that I didn’t particularly like Gregory and I didn’t want him working in this place that was also my home, my husband’s reaction was to remind me that he couldn’t be expected to sacrifice a vital creative project for the sake of an imaginary infatuation, and a historic one at that. I’d never issued an ultimatum about the models. I quite genuinely had never dreamt that this would rank as one.

  But it did. Rhys made it very clear that it wasn’t so much that his creative impulses led him to stray but that he saw absolutely no reason to concern himself with his wife’s welfare whatsoever. It hurt. After all those years of believing myself valued if not entirely loved, this hurt.

  But silly as it sounds I still won’t blame him for it. I’d said to Adam that it mattered to me that I didn’t give way to resentment and it’s for a good reason. I can’t deny that I feel angry and I think if I had ever wanted an excuse to be bitter, this would be it. But it’s the kind of anger that belongs to me; to being humbled and having to learn that I was less than Rhys needed me to be after all those years of pretending that he hadn’t blatantly lost interest. It was one of those last inviolable standpoints in my marriage, that I retained the power to make my own decisions. Rhys challenged my feelings but he never controlled what I was, or what I did. To blame him for the life I led would mean consigning myself to the status of powerless victim and for me that would be a far, far more dangerous choice.

  ---

  My first glimpse of what true powerlessness really meant had come to me two weeks ago when rough hands snatched for physical control of what my mind would not do. And now I was sitting in this tearoom in Aberystwyth and instead of carefully examining that first tiny idea of what I should do next to ensure it never happened again – identify the one man in all the photographs who was a stranger to me – I was worrying about a different kind of snare. I was worrying about Adam.

  I think it was because every idea I had of what powerlessness might feel like was dependent on a man trying to bully, trick or, in the case of the psychological uncertainty of Jim Bristol’s interest in me, generally bewilder me into doing what he wished. Adam simply asked. I just wished I knew what he might ask for next.

  There was a clatter in the doorway as an old lady knocked over the umbrella stand. I looked up with that familiar jerk of tension only to subside again almost instantly. It didn’t really matter what Adam wanted. It didn’t matter in the slightest that his manner of steering me felt fundamentally different from the way it had unfolded with Rhys or Gregory all those times before. It didn’t matter that the incidents that had led Adam to show his disappointment were rather more about what I refused to take from him rather than what I refused to give. Those two men and their car didn’t matter either. Or Jim. I had a plan and it was one that began with paying my bill, signing out of my room at the hotel and then catching a train to anywhere that might be obscure enough to hide me for a day or two while I made a few subtle telephone enquiries about that man in the photograph.

  I decided all that and then I blinked, doubting.

  Slowly I raised my eyes to the doorway once more. The tearoom was filled with the lunchtime rush and a second girl was already hurrying through busy tables with a fist full of rags towards the spillage of umbrellas and dirty rainwater. But beyond her, sitting at a neat table against the far wall, was a familiar face and if I hadn’t been thinking about him at almost the very same moment that I had previously glanced up to survey the chaos, I would never have noticed him at all.

  Today, Jim Bristol didn’t look like himself but the jolt didn’t come from that usual mistake of imagining his half-familiar form was Rhys. Jim was idly sipping his tea while watching a youth with a young dog on the street outside and clearly my angry accusation over the missing sketchbook had made an impression. Because today, instead of the distinctive burgundy jacket, he was wearing a faintly shabby navy suit and the loosened tie and unshaven jaw of an overweight salesman.

  Jim Bristol was following me again and I didn’t know what to do.

  I focused on my tabletop. Very quietly I began to repack the photographs into their envelope. The soup arrived and I ate it quickly, ignoring the scalding of my mouth. I didn’t look at him again; I didn’t need to. Then the stew came and I did the same with that. Swallowing the dregs of my meal, I drew out my sketchbook and, opening it at the back page, carefully wrote his name beneath the untidy scrawl of the vehicle registration plate. After a moment’s hesitation, I added Adam Hitchen below that. Then I scrubbed it out again.

  The waitress took away my dish. She also took the empty teapot and with it the last of my excuses so that I had no choice but to make my exit. It was either that or tackle him. I looked up after all. He was still there, uncharacte‌ristically downtrodden now like a salesman who was losing his touch and presently entirely absorbed in the task of consoling himself with his dessert.

  The packet of photographs was swept with my sketchbook into my handbag which in turn was gathered together with the unfortunate shopping bag that bore the collection of clothes and the camera. I let the whirlwind waitress slip past and then swiftly followed her. Conveniently her duties took her almost to the door and her wake carried me un
til I had only to make two strides past the small table by the wall with its seedy patron. There was a blur in the corner of my eye as someone moved and climbed to their feet but I didn’t betray my awareness of him by turning to see whether it was the salesman or the very genteel couple behind. Then an excess of politeness very nearly ruined everything. I found myself stepping back again through the open door and facing the incoming mother’s belief that everyone had time to wait for her child’s prompted murmur of thanks. Eventually, however, I squeezed past and out, and hurried downhill along the tiled frontage towards the seafront.

  Permitting myself one brief second to turn and check, I only saw that ugly navy suit still sitting harmlessly at its table as if its owner hadn’t a care in the world.

  Chapter 13

  The descent to the seafront slid by in a euphoric state of adrenalin until it dawned on me that I was going to have to be absolutely sure now that neither he nor the other men nor any guest from the hotel saw me leave for the train station. With that in mind I crossed the road in the midst of a chattering Women’s Group on an outing and found myself a position from which to do a spot of surveillance.

  The entrance to the pier was daubed a worthy shade of brown as if someone had made a desperate bid to restore mislaid gentility over the garish orange beneath. I dithered a little on the threshold. The door swung shut on me, abruptly screening me from the street outside and I had to be very glad it did. Because while I fussed and wavered and decided I was being a fool for standing here cold in a damp frock when my coat was only half a minute away in that hotel, my salesman emerged like a black pillar out of the sea fret and reached the street corner.