A Careless Widow and Other Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  A CARELESS WIDOW

  and Other Stories

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  Contents

  A Careless Widow

  Cocky Olly

  A Trip to the Seaside

  Things

  A Change of Policy

  The Image Trade

  A Careless Widow

  After taking a two-mile walk across fields half-way up the headland, to break himself in, as he put it, on the first day of his holiday, Frazier got back to the hotel. He had a bath to get the last of London off his skin, then, avoiding the bar already crowded with golf players, he went out on to the terrace to be alone. He had been coming to this hotel for three or four years in the spring, a man who liked to stay in a place full of middle-aged people, many of them so well-known to one another that it was simple for him to avoid them and to be alone. Off he went to walk all day; off they went to the golf course or to drive about in their cars. If he was slightly known it was by his surname: ‘Frazier with an “i” he would say with a piercing pedantic stare, giving a roll to his stone-blue eyes as he said it, like a tall schoolmaster mocking a boy. He was, in fact, a hairdresser who came to this lonely part of the Atlantic coast to slough off the name of Lionel, as he was called at the rather expensive salon de coiffure in London, where he was eagerly sought after. (‘You know,’ ladies said, ‘how difficult it is to get an appointment with Lionel.’) He was a tallish, slender man, not one of your sunken-chested barbers, gesticulating with comb and scissors as they skate about you, grown cynical with the flatteries of the trade. On the contrary, despite his doll’s head of grey hair and the mesh of nervous lines on his long face, he was as still and as dispassionate as a soldier.

  At this moment, on the terrace, he was examining the distant clouds over the sea half a mile below the garden; and the few villas, watching the purple, the black, the dyed pink and the golden, as they restyled themselves in one of those spectacular sunsets common on this coast. He broke off to stretch out a hand and to glance at the palm and widely stretched fingers as if looking at a mirror. And then, after the lapse into this habit of his trade, he looked at the sky again, until the sound of the door opening on to the terrace made him turn. He saw a middle-aged woman and a young man standing there. He saw her snatch the young man’s arm to reprimand him in a threatening way and then push the arm away. They moved to a table at the end of the terrace. Frazier, who preferred to be alone, thought this was the moment to go back inside, but the woman looked up as he got to the door.

  ‘Lionel!’ she called. Then she rushed at him. ‘What on earth are you doing here? How extraordinary to find you at this hotel.’

  ‘Mrs . . .’ Frazier stood still and his eyes went wide with horror. ‘Mrs Morris! I don’t believe it. How did you find it? When did you arrive?’ He pulled himself together and all those fine lines on his face switched to politeness. ‘What an unexpected pleasure.’

  With excitement she said: ‘This is my son. He’s come over from Canada.’

  And to her son she said: ‘Tom, I wrote to you about Lionel. I’ve told you how he saved my life when Alec was taken ill.’

  The son was a tall, bulky young man who gave Frazier the worldly look of one more bored than surprised by his mother’s habit of staring at men anywhere and, the next moment, going straight up to them and saying, ‘We have met before.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, Lionel,’ she said. And, almost archly, ‘What a thrill!’

  It would have been bad enough, Lionel thought, if Mrs Morris had been one of his customers. It was worse that she was a neighbour from the flat below his own in London whom (he thought) he had at last shaken off! Staying here! A woman who talked and talked, never finished her sentences. A floundering, overflowing, helpless widow, her face so dramatic as it shot out of her thick hair that was like an old black curtain round her cheeks.

  Frazier did what he could to hide the shock of seeing her. And then he was certain she knew what he felt, for the dramatic look went. She now gazed at him humbly, guiltily, as one given to excesses of gratitude and saw the talent unwanted.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said proudly, ‘Tom and I are not staying at the hotel. It’s too expensive. We have taken a flat in one of the villas down the road. We just dine here. I used to live in these parts years and years ago. When you were a boy, Tom. We have a lot of old friends here.’

  And then she laughed away the shock she had seen on Lionel’s face and said to her son: ‘I know what Lionel is going to do! Walk and walk. I don’t know how you do it, Lionel. I can’t face hills anymore. Do you know, Tom, he walks across Hyde Park twice a day to work – when he’s on his feet all day! I see you going out every morning from my window, Lionel.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frazier, ashamed now, for he liked her laugh. I’m sure we’ll meet.’

  ‘We’re just going in to dinner. Early start tomorrow,’ she said to her son. ‘We’re driving to Land’s End.’

  To escape, Lionel said he was going down the road to see what the tide was doing.

  ‘I always like to check on the tide,’ he said, as he opened the door for them and then left as they went into the dining-room.

  Disaster! Friends here? I doubt it. She’s on the war path, her non-stop tongue chasing him! Not staying, but dining every night. Oh God! His walk down to the sea was ruined. Had he let the name of the hotel slip out in those chats with her in London? At the salon he often chatted in a gossipy way about trips, hotels, countries, prices, as he stood behind his customers, feeling the heat of their scalps and seeing their torpid or fretful faces in the mirror. Women came to him to be changed, to be perfected. They arrived tousled and complaining and they left transfigured, equipped for the hunt again. They were simply top-knots to him. When they got up he was always surprised to see they had legs and arms and could walk. He sometimes, though not often, admired the opposite end of them: their shoes.

  But Mrs Morris was not a customer. She was a close neighbour, a fellow leaseholder. For him she was virtually headless, a body, a part of the building and of ordinary life. He still thought of her after the death of her husband not as a person but simply as ‘the couple downstairs’, giving the name of Summers, who had lived for at least ten years in the flat below and who had only one head between them – her husband’s, hers being disposable from a professional point of view. To Frazier her elderly husband had looked brutally placid and she as squashed as a cushion when he went up in the lift with them. What did one know about one’s neighbours in a city? Nothing, until that Saturday afternoon when his doorbell rang and rang and rang and a woman was calling ‘Mr Frazier. Mr Frazier.’ The porter and others called him Frazer – she had at any rate had the merit, he remembered of ‘giving him the “i”’. He was marinating some breast of chicken in his perfect kitchen when he heard the bell, wearing an apron of dark blue and white stripes. He dried his hands, took the apron off and went to the door. There she was, with her winter coat open and her keys jingling from her hand.

  ‘Mr Frazier! Please can you help me. I can’t get a sound out of the porter. My husband’s fallen out of bed; he’s on the floor. He’s had a stroke or a fit – I can’t get him up from the floor. I’ve rung the doctor. Would you please help me? I am sorry . . .’

  Nothing cushiony about her then. She had a tearing grip as hard as a child’s on his coat and her nails pinched through to his arm; her black hair, which usually swung over her cheeks, was now pushed back from a high naked forehead which startled him by revealing the curl of a white scar on it.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Summers,’ he said (she was not Mrs Morris to him then). She dragged him to the lift but he pulled her away, saying the stairs would be quicker. He sk
ipped down fast. She followed, more slowly, because her eyesight was not as good as his, calling out, ‘He’s been ill for a fortnight. He’s such a weight. I found him when I came back. I went out to buy some fish because of his stomach. There was nothing in the fridge.’ The door of the flat was open. He went into a thick smell, partly of spice, and upholstery that seemed vegetable and hot with marriage. He saw the open door of the bedroom – what awful curtains! – and there was Mr Summers, lying on his back on the floor with half the bedclothes dragged with him, blood on the sheet, a dribble of wet in one nostril and a pale belly with white hairs curling on it, half out of his pyjamas. The face was dark violet with a green streak in it and he had a look of disdain about the mouth. Mrs Summers was on her sharp knees beside him at once, holding her husband by the feet.

  ‘Not his ankles!’ said Lionel. He was taking the man’s pulse.

  ‘Put a pillow under his head. Pull those sheets away,’ he said calmly. Frazier got his hands under the man’s shoulders from behind and heaved him to a near sitting position.

  ‘Sit up, soldier,’ said Lionel. ‘Hup. Hup.’

  The man opened his eyes feebly.

  ‘I’ll hold him here,’ Lionel said. ‘You get him under the knees. Now, slowly.’

  They raised the body and then let it to the floor again.

  Mrs Summers stooped to pull up her husband’s pyjamas. ‘It’s the weight,’ she said again.

  ‘Change round,’ said Lionel. ‘We’ll get him nearer the bed.’

  In the end, somehow or other, they manhandled the hot body and rolled it on to the bed, Frazier falling on top of him.

  ‘We’ve got him the wrong way up. Now gently, your end.’

  The man was awake now and grunted ‘Bloody Red Cross.’ He closed his eyes and his breathing roared.

  ‘He was in the army,’ gasped Mrs Summers, apologising. ‘Were you in the army?’

  ‘Ambulance driver,’ Frazier said.

  She said: ‘He’s been climbing the wall, all these weeks. It’s those pills. I found him when I got back.’

  They sat, catching their breath. Frazier looked around the room. The Summerses were a heavy couple, with heavy furniture. The head of the wide bed was padded and crossed by two awful loops of pink satin. The padded part was stained by the grease marks left by two heads. Frazier had thought of her as a cushiony woman, but in the struggle, when their bodies or arms touched, he was shocked to feel the bones through the soft flesh. Those bones must be made of iron. He saw her roughly pull her hair back from her forehead, and now he knew why he had paid so little attention to her. The hair was dull black slow-growing stuff, hanging in loose ropes – perhaps she had had soft curls when she was young, but now her hair seemed to have been set in some out-of-date perm in a style she must have settled for once and for all years ago. Her strong nose stuck out boldly beyond the weak chin, as if they were staging another wilful life behind the curtain. The face reminded Lionel of an actor he used to see in his father’s underground barber shop when he was a boy. The actor’s eyes were large and brown and lamplike, as hers were.

  ‘You would have done better to have put a blanket over him and to have left him on the floor,’ the doctor said when he arrived, and he called an ambulance.

  Down by the sea, because the heavy weeds were hanging from the rocks, scraps of this scene came to Frazier’s mind as he stood for the moment watching the tide come in quietly, making a sound of sentences without words.

  Poor Mr Summers had died in hospital. A crowd of friends came to console her after the funeral. She came up to thank and thank and thank him and admired his flat and the plants on the balcony. There was a look of hunger on her face as she looked back on it when she left.

  Then, after a few weeks, she was at his door, asking him with apologies, to witness her signature on some document. She was wearing a red suit as bright as a geranium – an improvement. He picked up the document and saw she had signed Pamela Morris. It turned out she was two persons, indeed three, for she was open-mouthed, eager to explain. The woman he had known as Mrs Summers had divorced a man called Morris, who had once hit her over the head with a bottle. Mr Summers had been her solicitor and had rescued her. She had met him in an hotel in Vichy when she was with her father, who lived there as a tax exile. Her tale began to ramble about Europe. At every pause, her mouth remained half open to mark the change to the next chapter, going back to Mr Morris, a man often on a yacht or at a race, while she looked after baby Tom in a house near the Lizard – ‘You know the Lizard?’ Which race and where was not clear to Frazier – she was calling him Lionel now. The bright red suit turned out to have been given to her by one of her rich women friends. The shoes, too. There was a moment in this talk when she became almost a customer in his eyes. No grief, no reality, her life like the shuffling of cards. The enormous distinction of Mr Summers and indeed of herself was that they had seen no point in marrying.

  She paused as he got her a second glass of whisky and then said, ‘What a lovely piece of cut glass. You have such lovely things.’ And at this she was back to that awful night when he had been so kind, kind, kind, as if all the women in her were talking in turn. She became secretive. She repeated that she had left Mr Summers for a quarter of an hour, as she had told the doctor. But now ‘not to get fish!’ He had been asleep and had suddenly woken up and asked her to fetch his wallet from his jacket hanging over a chair. He had pulled out a slip of paper. It was a betting slip. He had backed the winner in the afternoon’s race at Newbury: he told her, ordered her, to go down to the betting shop to collect his winnings. Pamela Morris knew nothing about horse racing. The only quarrels she and Summers had – well, not the only ones – were about his betting. She knew he had not been out of the flat for ten days, but when she reminded him of this he boiled up in a temper and started getting out of bed. She was so frightened by his illness that she lost her head. Perhaps he had got out, somehow. Men did get out.

  ‘I didn’t look at the slip. I put on my coat – you saw me in my coat when I came up to your flat? – and went to the shop and when I gave the slip in, the man pushed it back at me. It was two years old!’

  There was awe in her face as she stopped for breath: it turned into a sudden laugh hissing along her delighted teeth.

  ‘The wrong slip?’ said Lionel, who was a literal rather than a laughing man, and looked at the stretched fingers of his hand. Then he understood: her laugh showed a pride in the irresistible folly of Mr Summers. Lionel saw the first tear in her great still eyes. And, even more proudly, she said, ‘I didn’t want to make a fool of him in front of the doctor. Alec, you know, was a solicitor.’

  As he listened Lionel became even more aware that Mrs Morris was a body. His clientele were no more than heads that he gardened as he gardened the plants on his balcony.

  As he listened to her Lionel became aware that their physical struggle with Summers had created an un-wanted bond. Headless she might be, from his professional point of view, but she was alive because she was deep in the belief in the plural quality of the first person singular.

  Since she admired his flat – and goodness knows he admired it himself, never thought of anything else once he got home in the evenings – he showed her round it. It was not a stew of upholstery, a goulash of furniture, as hers was: every object had been picked up, collected with great care, and had had to show itself worthy: and, by the way, nothing, absolutely nothing, had come out of a boutique, nothing outré, jokey or licentiously odd. He showed her the perfect kitchen, installed by himself, and every glittering utensil.

  ‘Alec would have loved this,’ she said, conveying that it terrified her. ‘He always did the cooking, never let me near the stove – never cleaned it, either. If he had a fault, he had a cook’s temper.’

  And she went on, in her way of begging for an answer to a question: ‘I suppose that was why he was so jealous of my husband and hated poor Tom? Wouldn’t have the poor boy in the flat?’

  That, no doubt, wa
s the measure of her love for the man.

  They went into the two other rooms, one of which he said he was going to redecorate.

  ‘Lionel,’ she said as she looked around and then went out, ‘I wish you’d decorate my flat. Tell me what to do.’

  (He ignored that at the time, but afterwards her words came back to him.)

  He bent down and picked up a piece of cotton from the carpet in the hall and then simply gazed politely at her without replying. He was vain of living alone. He shopped, cooked, cleaned and polished. His cupboards were models of order. His glass was polished. His china gleamed. The jars and packets in his refrigerator were labelled. If anything broke or went wrong, he himself repaired it. He took her out to his balcony where his plants thrived. He showed her the glazed cabinet fixed to his wall, electrically heated, where he grew his seedlings. Redecorate? Advise? Certainly not. She was clearly incompetent. After the death of Summers the smells of saucepans burned out on the stove in her flat came up to his kitchen. Out of kindness he gave her a small plant in a pot for her balcony.

  That was a mistake. In a couple of weeks, she came up with the dying plant. Overwatered. She sat with him for an hour. After this she started telephoning to him, about things that had gone wrong in her flat, and then, when he evaded her, she started slipping notes under his door. Once a week he did not mind seeing her, hearing about Summers’s will, or her son, Tom, but twice in a week was too much. She sat on his sofa, often in that red coat and skirt which did not go at all with his room, talking away about everyday life.

  ‘I love sitting here looking at everything,’ she said, sighing naïvely. ‘You are so cosy.’

  ‘Cosy’ was not a word he liked. He was a busy, practical man, not given to idle speculation.

  ‘You ought to have been a decorator.’ (Back on her theme again.)

  He said as drily as possible, struck, however, by the thought, ‘I suppose I am.’

  He was thinking of his work at the salon.