The War Widow

by Lorna Gray

  It was dark when the showing ended. I fully expected them – whichever them it was, whether Jim or the brutes – to be waiting outside when my ruby-cheeked neighbour and I were finally ushered towards making our orderly way down the nearest stairs. According to my watch and the stiffness in my limbs, it was well beyond half-past nine, I had missed dinner and I had certainly missed the last train. Even if I hadn’t, I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to run for it. I barely had the nerve to step outside at all.

  They were not outside however, and even if they were, it was perfectly possible that they had chosen to mark the wrong one of the three available exits. At least no hand met my arm as I hurried along in the midst of a family of raucous cousins and no low voice disturbed my peace as I left them to run up the last few steps into the hotel. The door was locked but the night porter appeared almost immediately in answer to my anxious rap and then I was calming myself and smiling a greeting as I passed through the door, and waiting while he firmly bolted it behind. He told me confidently that no new guests had taken rooms today. We hadn’t been joined by Clarke or his friend.

  An afterthought made me accost the man and insist on settling my bill. He was reluctant because the manageress had locked up the safe for the night but my eagerness to assure him that I would be leaving very early indeed was matched by my willingness to give him the change for my payment as a tip.

  Finally I was free to slink across the foyer towards the stairs. The door into the lounge was open, casting a warm beam of light across the tiles and up onto the fifth step. I stopped in it as I caught Mary’s bright laugh. I stooped to peer through the railings. Out of sight, Mrs Alderton’s dry tinkle followed but then I heard a deeper tone make its reply and I knew precisely why no one had been waiting for me outside the cinema. There had been no need. Not when all Jim Bristol had to do was presume on my stupidity and wait in the hotel for my return.

  It had occurred to me when I first encountered the various male guests at the hotel that the mysterious threat who awaited me in Cirencester might well have decided to save me the trouble of travelling. I realised now I had been fearing all day that Adam was the man. If he were, he must have shown extraordinary foresight since he’d arrived days before I’d even dreamt of pursuing Rhys’s last steps. But Jim hadn’t. Jim had arrived only a few minutes after I’d signed my name on the register.

  I heard Mary laugh again, a happy friendly sparring, and I wondered what I should do. Then I remembered I could do absolutely nothing at all. He had, I realised, been extraordinarily lucky last night in finding himself the victim of one of my outbursts. He could be certain that no one would believe me now.

  A flutter of white drew my eye. It was Adam, watching me silently over the brim of his newspaper from his usual place in the corner. I sketched him a quick meaningless smile, and hurried away to my room.

  Chapter 15

  I suppose I must have known it was another dream. The combination of the dark space between pillars like a scene from the Royal Wedding at Westminster Abbey and the ever-present waterfall was probably enough of a clue. I climbed out, dripping, onto a sunlit platform, much the same as one for a derelict factory with rusted ironwork and invading greenery. The other spectators were leaving. They didn’t notice me; they were translucent like ghosts and their speech was as garbled as scraping nails. They didn’t notice the car either. It was standing in the midst of them, sunlight running dappled from its open door and making a strange rapping as its engine cooled. Rhys was waiting there beside it. I was supposed to ask him something. He wasn’t quite listening.

  As I said, I must have known it was a dream; I was already beginning the slow fight upwards to lie blinking in the familiar dark. But then the light exploded.

  The room was small and suffocating and suddenly I was sitting bolt upright in my bed. I was caught like a hare in a lamp-beam. The yellow blade spread from the door. Its glare was agony. At its source wasn’t Rhys, but two shadows belonging to my living nightmare. They had found me. They had been let in. They had searched out my room and forced the door. Even a locked door within a locked hotel was not defence enough. Their shadows loomed as the door made its rattling rebound off the wall to be steadied by an outstretched hand. I heard my voice scramble into a cry. It was instinct that made my body fling itself over the far edge of my single bed. As I went, the leaner of the two separated himself from the doorway and lunged across the room.

  Something snatched me back. Not him; it was a cruel stranglehold about my neck like rope. It was a third assailant and one I couldn’t see. I fought him – it. It didn’t have limbs. I was choking, panicking, raging to find the edge of the bed and succeeded only in colliding agonisingly with the headboard. But he was on me too and I was fighting him as well. Still my hands were caught and held and my desperate fury firmly hushed, and the bed sheet worked free from where it had inexplicably coiled itself around my neck. And then I was sitting in a tangle and panting violently, staring up at the heavily shadowed face and finding nothing there but a calming sort of manly kindliness.

  I shuddered back out of the waking nightmare as Adam was saying with disorientating firmness, “It was just a dream. A bad dream. Don’t be afraid. And you don’t need to fight me.”

  I gasped for breath. I opened my mouth to ask him just what the hell he thought he was doing.

  And broke instead. It was almost a relief to do it.

  He didn’t comfort me of course. This wasn’t one of those moments and I’m not sure how violently instinct would have made me react if he had. So I turned my head away and wept desolately and wetly into the palm of my hand while trying to ignore my heartbeat pounding to the point of oblivion and listening only to the fuss of guests outside my door. They were commenting on my capacity for waking the whole hotel. None of the voices belonged to Clarke. It took me a while to believe that.

  The minutes that followed were odd. I had always imagined it romantic to be confronted in the middle of the night by the very definitely bare chest of an attractive man. But romance depends on believing it was an act of heroism. It doesn’t admit the ugliness of crying or the desperate desire for solitude even while absolutely dreading that moment of being flung back into isolation. And it certainly doesn’t appreciate the inconvenience of belatedly realising that the embarrassingly elegant nightdress bought by a well-meaning mother had also ridden up to show an appalling amount of thigh. I tried to remedy it and it was only then that I realised my left hand had been enclosed thoroughly within his all along.

  He was half-sitting, half-kneeling on the side of the bed before me so that as I twisted to one side to screen my face, my hair was actually brushing against his bare shoulder. It shook me. I could feel the heat from his bare skin radiating against my cheek. My left hand was pressed by the weight of his grip against the mattress beside my exposed knee and when I stirred and impulsively began to try to get myself into some kind of order it tightened and urged me to remain still. Then I felt his mouth dip towards my ear.

  “Hang on,” that familiar voice said quietly, and he meant it.

  Then in the next moment I really was alone because he’d let me go. It was a jolt to suddenly desperately feel his loss in the midst of this claustrophobic crowd when before I’d been wishing him far from here. He moved across the room to meet Mary as she arrived with the night porter in tow and Adam used him as the excuse to push the door closed. Adam must have been shielding me from the curious stares of the disturbed residents. The people outside were talking to Mary, alternately being sympathetic and dissecting my wilfully neurotic tendencies – it was easy enough to guess who was taking which side – and it was then that I learned the explanation behind this intrusion. It really was a rescue. The general theory was that I’d had a bad dream and cried out and brought them all running.

  Only I hadn’t cried out. It had barely been a nightmare at all until my door had been broken in. I swear it hadn’t.

  I sought Adam in the gloom to beg a little clarity and found
myself blinking as the ceiling light clicked on instead. Harsh light brutally exposed the tangle of my sheets, the smallness of the room and the way my body flinched as it craved the obscurity of darkness, like a hunted animal in its hole. There was a bustle in the corner as the unlucky porter was put to work wrestling with my shattered lock. Adam was crouching over the toolbox beside him, helping. And the other man? The second shadow from the doorway who could only have been Jim?

  He was still in my room. All along he’d been standing quietly in the corner by the little table that held my things, doing nothing while those people out there peered in at me and answered Miss Bartleman’s anxious questions for the umpteenth time. He’d left it to Adam to shut the door. Only Jim Bristol hadn’t been idle all this time. He had my handbag in his hands. He was no better dressed than I. He was wearing rough-looking trousers and his chest was bare revealing a torso marked with enough old injuries to do justice to the impression he gave of a pretty fearsome war service. His left arm had a raw-looking weal in the defined muscle below the shoulder from a younger wound that had only just healed – it made me wonder if bullets tended to stalk him in peacetime too. The muscle moved as his hand turned something over. A rectangular piece of card; a photograph. He had pulled out the envelope from my handbag and was leafing through its contents.

  The sudden glare of electric light from the ceiling had disturbed him too. As I watched he paused over one, examining it, and then swiftly folded it in two and slid it into the pocket of his trousers. I might refute the claim that I’d screamed before but I certainly squeaked then. The shock of it had me half out of bed and reaching for my long housecoat. He was already moving with the sort of purpose that turned his face harsh. He must have seen me move but apparently he’d already dismissed the threat as negligible. He returned the envelope to my bag. No apology, no guilt. Not even an acknowledgement. It was an uncompromising reminder of that business over my sketchbook; and of that moment of passing him on the pier and looking back.

  I began to declare, loudly, that I knew now this hadn’t been a dream, I hadn’t cried out and brought them rushing to my rescue. I wanted him to explain why he’d broken in like this just to steal a photograph. Only, just as I was beginning to lurch across the room and Adam and the night porter were beginning to register my movement amidst all the fuss outside, Jim had already slipped through the door and gone. In his place, Mary was bustling in with a heavily laden tray in her hands.

  “Tea, Katie dear?”

  She sent me back a step. I barely looked at her. The same blind panic that had sent me flying to the edge of my bed a moment before sent me raging after him now. My breathing was short. My icy hands spared a few hasty seconds to draw the long housecoat closed about my waist. I moved, only now I found the door shut firmly before me. Mary and her tray drifted aside but Adam was in my path. He had his back to me, helping the other man to reattach the battered keeper to the doorframe. The porter was having to raise the lock to avoid the splintered wood. From his crouch Adam had his arm outstretched, holding the door firmly shut so that the porter had a firm surface upon which to work. His skin had none of the scars that marked Jim Bristol. Now his head was turning to catch the moment as I tried to dodge past. His feet were bare. So were mine. The hard electric light at this time of night cast strange shadows across his face. It probably did the same to my face too. I felt like I’d aged about a hundred years.

  I must have spoken my alarm about the stolen photograph. Adam didn’t speak but Mary looked and sounded like her usual cheerful self and her disbelieving smile followed me merrily when she remarked boldly, “Nobody’s taken anything, Katie. Don’t be silly. You’ve had a bad dream, that’s all. We all heard you scream. At least … that’s how it was, isn’t it, Adam?”

  The porter worked some screws into place and permitted Adam to drop his hand. Now he rose to his feet beside me. His roughened hair made it clear that he really had been dragged out of bed. It seemed to take an eternity for him to give me the faintest tilt of his head in confirmation.

  The acknowledgement that it was my cry that had first disturbed the hotel was reluctant. He knew how it would make me feel to be told I was guilty of making a scene again. And all the while, in my head was the unavoidably vivid memory of Jim’s recent exit from my room. His jaunty farewell and the pat on Adam’s shoulder as he left had almost been one of thanks.

  I was breathing like I was in the middle of a marathon race. Here again I was being confronted with a maddening choice between what was possible and what was probable, and what I dared do about it. It all hinged upon whether I believed what Adam had to say.

  Earlier, I had been utterly paralysed by the belief that I’d been destined for a watery grave beneath that mist-shrouded pier. The illusion had robbed me of those few vital seconds when I might have acted more wisely as Clarke approached. I might well have managed a better escape then. Or perhaps not. Now I was trying to decipher whether the illusion lay in Mary’s claim that I’d drawn this invasion into my room by calling out, or in my determination to cling to the belief that I hadn’t. And whether Adam was part of the lie or even more duped by it than I was.

  The common thread here was Jim. He set up these situations and watched as I worked myself yet again into the position of having no one to debate with except my remaining self-belief. Given the stiff lesson I’d learned with the sketchbook, there was every chance that if I made a scene now I would find the photograph had never been missing at all.

  Adam’s serious grey eyes were fixed upon my face. His voice was carefully expressionless as he asked, “Do you want to go and knock on Jim’s door?”

  Suddenly, I found myself smiling. Warmly, unexpectedly. I don’t think anyone but me would have found those dry words worthy of mirth. But after all my thoughts on powerlessness earlier and the principle differences between this man’s methods and all the other threats, the very fact he was asking this was an almost implausibly perfect illustration of his character. Only it wasn’t too perfect. He remembered our words last night on this very same threshold. He really was trying very hard to show that he knew I had the right to make my own choice. He was trying very hard to do the right thing.

  It was a little piece of beauty in the midst of all that bitter isolation. Distress suddenly retreated, quivering, to a shady corner. Not gone completely, but farther off. I laughed, though perhaps that too was a symptom of shock. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I think we both know what the general fuss would be, don’t we? Particularly when I’ve just done it again to you now.”

  I saw his eyebrows lift. “Done what?”

  I said, “Turned your trip into a public drama. This wasn’t a last-ditch attempt to lure the famous author into my room. It really wasn’t.”

  Adam’s mouth gave me the beginnings of a smile. He’d caught the reference to Mrs Alderton’s remarks overheard during the last public scene that had involved my name; the one that had proved irrefutably that he knew Rhys. He knew it was a forerunner to daring to demand that same degree of openness that he’d been urging me to share all week. I saw his attention quicken.

  Mary, on the other hand, read it all wrong. She made us both jump by throwing open my bedroom window to let in a welcome gust of damp night air and then claimed my bed and followed the act with a very scolding tut. She said, “He’s clearly not going to admit it so I shall do it for him. We don’t know whether it was all in that pretty little head of his or quite simply everyone is too afraid of my sister. But either way, it turns out that the famous author might not be quite as universally fascinating as he’d generally supposed. Barely anyone has dared speak to him today let alone give him a critique of everything he’s ever written. In fact my poor brother-in-law deserves your sympathy more than Adam here. Everyone knows he’s a doctor and this evening he got to hear all about Miss Bartleman’s friend’s idea of a cure for hysteria. Which apparently involves laxatives. So be warned, Katie, dear. But don’t let Adam bully you.”

  She m
eant it as a joke. She was arranging herself artfully upon the tossed pillows, looking of course as supremely elegant as ever. Behind Adam, there was a blur as the long-forgotten night porter finished repairing the damage to my door and bolted into the now deserted corridor with toolbox rattling. I think he’d been dragged from his bed too.

  I was suddenly conscious that by remaining standing, I was making rather too much of a thing about being near Adam. I abruptly claimed the point midway between him and Mary by perching rather less impressively on the edge of the bed on the pretext of passing her a cup of tea. This of course made it worse for Adam because now I think he began to feel his awkwardness standing in well-worn slacks and bare feet before two seated and significantly better-dressed women. Oblivious, Mary sipped her tea and said kindly, “No one really blames you, you know, for being a bit … um … prone to nervousness. Not now we know he died recently.”

  I turned my head. I said stupidly, “Who?”

  Of course I was stupid. Mary said, “Rhys. You said his name just now.”

  Had I? It came as a deeply uncomfortable shock to learn that I really was capable of uttering speech without being remotely conscious of it. Those thoughts had been private. And it raised rather ugly questions all over again about the belief that no cry of mine had justified Jim’s invasion into my room.

  Mary’s eyes were even larger in this harsh electric light. She saw my clouded face. She said seriously, “You must miss him.”

  I uttered a hasty correction and made her raise an eyebrow. And then I realised what I’d implied. I gabbled, “I mean, I—” and followed it with a complicated ramble about the difficulties of knowing what to say to a question like that. Of knowing whether I should declare roundly that I had lived a calmer life without Rhys, or act like the normal civilised human being who must naturally feel the loss of a man’s life irrespective of how infuriating he’d been as a spouse.