A Careless Widow and Other Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  ‘Of course! That is what you are!’ And she laughed.

  ‘I was never taught to do anything,’ she said, but as usual the words suggested that her life was a string of accidents, for which she had been avid, and that when these were disastrous they left an aftermath of glee. The only subject which did not end in a laugh was her son, by Mr Morris. She had ‘put’ him firmly into a New Zealand bank and he had left that for a job in Canada. She was proud he had done that because her ex-husband, Mr Morris, had tried to stop him. Lionel said that boys change their minds and that he himself had wanted to go on the stage.

  Lionel was a listener and was unprepared when this admission made her stop talking about herself.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘There was a boy at school called Archie. His father was a barber, like mine. He used to act in the school play. He would draw girls’ heads on pictures of Vikings in the history books – the girls in the class.’

  ‘And did he go on the stage?’

  ‘He was older than me. Killed in the war,’ said Lionel.

  ‘Oh!’ said Mrs Morris, eager to mourn. ‘And is that why you became a hairdresser rather than an actor?’

  Surprised by the intimacy of this Lionel said, not wishing to talk about Archie, who had come to life in his mind, ‘No, nothing to do with it. I suppose I used to watch my mother doing her hair when I was a boy. Brushing it, with all those hairpins in her mouth, putting up a piece of hair on top of her head and holding it there. It used to fall down and I had to hold it for her, because it often fell down when she picked up another long piece from the other side, then she would start winding it round – it always came out all right in the end like a conjuring trick. She wouldn’t let father touch it with his scissors when short hair came in. She kept hers long until she died.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Morris. ‘I used to see her when Alec and I moved into the flats and she was living with you.’

  ‘That was when father died,’ he said.

  ‘You used to take her to the theatre,’ said Mrs Morris fondly. ‘You go to the theatre a lot, don’t you?’

  Lionel was alarmed when she said this. He wished he had not revealed anything about himself. The next thing, she would be getting round him to take her to a theatre. That evening she did something very tiresome as he stooped slightly to open the door to let her out of the flat.

  ‘Poor Lionel,’ she said. ‘You were so good to your mother. Not every son is,’ she said. And suddenly she kissed him on top of the head, rather greedily, and having ruffled his hair started to put it right.

  That was too much. She was ordinary life and ordinary life always went too far. After this he made a point of putting her off when she telephoned or slipped another note under his door. He was going out, he said. Or he was washing paint, getting the spare room ready for his sister. Also, twice after Mrs Morris left, he had to get a cloth and wipe a stain of whisky from the seat of the velvet sofa she had been sitting on, and – as he said to one of his customers at the salon – he had to hunt for days all over London for something that really got stains off velvet, and in the end he had to get the sofa reupholstered. The expense! The visits stopped. If by chance he travelled up with her in the lift he felt that too much life was going up with him and – to judge by her plaintive expression – life abashed by its longing to frequent.

  He got back to the hotel. She and her son were dining in a distant corner of the crowded room. A long time passed before he saw them leave, and they showed no sign of seeing him. He went up to his room. ‘It will be intolerable. Why didn’t I ask how long they were staying? I must get out.’

  He lay on his bed looking at a guide for new places.

  The danger on the next morning was that he might meet her near the villas on the road before they left for Land’s End. Any one of them might be the one where she and her son were staying. But once he was on the beach below and had climbed to the cliff he knew he was safe for the day; and once his feet were on the close turf his mind scattered her as his restless eyes collected all the details of the long stretch of sea and the sky like another country hanging over it. No human voices, only the screams of gulls and the hum of the wind. Below him, the sea came pouring black as whales into the deep gullies between the rocks and was sucked out like suds and then hurled in again. These walks were personal victories for Lionel after the months of piddle-paddling (as he said) around all those ladies in the London salon. Occasionally he saw other men or women walking on some higher or lower ground keeping their distance as he kept his, or – if they chanced to walk close by – sticking, as he did, to passing like solitary clouds, unmarred by a muddling word. People really were like clouds in the sky, born out of the horizon, and as the hours went by they slowly joined the rising grey populations and processions that drifted away across the blue sky and the changing sunlight. Every year he felt re-born here. The sky was always young and ageless, the rocky land got older every day. Clip-clip-clipping in the salon, Lionel also aged with every day, but here, every hour made him younger as he aged.

  When he got back to the hotel at the end of a day and went into the dining-room he was relieved to notice that Mrs Morris and her son were not back. What a fuss about nothing!

  And so it went on – wet or fine, he was out, on top of this promontory or that, going further every day as if daring the Morrises. Four days passed. Not a sign of them. Had he been rude? What were they doing? Was she, in her slapdash way, being almost pompously discreet? He didn’t want to chat, but he would have liked to tell her and her son about some of his discoveries. For example, terror. His life had been without it: hers must have had its precipitous moments, poor sentimental soul. The paths he followed from one cliff edge to the next would suddenly zigzag and turn inland and then seaward again, around appalling ravines whose black or lichened walls dropped sheer to inaccessible spits of sand below. Gulls and crows were often at their savage wars there. Sometimes there were bloody feathers torn from dead bodies on the grass. There was one particular place, close to an estuary, where the land was in a state of débâcle: huge blocks of rocks, the size of houses or fallen castles, had been torn off the cliffs and were stranded there in a chaos of spouting water. Closer to the shore here was a brutal coagulation of stranded rock which had astonished him when he saw it on his first holiday here – a year when he had had a row with one of the stylists at the salon. The rock looked like the body of a truncated man, arms chopped short, huge chest and head tipped back so that one saw only the underside of a chin – a giant in a barber’s chair, tipped back and ready for a shave. He would have liked to tell Mrs Morris about rocks. She would stretch her eyes and give one of her amazed laughs, as she always did at grotesque things made half-true: that tale of her husband hitting her on the head with a bottle and leaving the scar had been told like a wonder she had had a gift for. Had her chin tipped back like that?

  There was one more terror, for the collector of terrors, which Lionel called ‘the black wall’. It was a ravine which he studied from one side and then the other. It dropped sheer to a spit of sand left by the tide where there was a narrow isolated rectangle of flat rock, like the hull of a lost ship or perhaps a table where fifty people could sit down to eat. He had often noticed that there were boulders just below the top of the wall and from below the boulders there was a thin irregular scratched line going steeply down, vanishing behind lower boulders and then beginning again. The scratch must once have been a path used by fishermen. He stepped down a yard or two, daring himself to go down then, frightened, crawled back.

  ‘Better not,’ Frazier said, looking at his hands. They were his living. He could not afford to break his fingers or his wrists on a giddy climb like that. Anyway, he had his eye on a black cloud coming dragging rain across the sea and he had no sooner turned back towards home than a squall did blow up and whipped him and soaked him before he was halfway back to the hotel six miles away. He broke his rule and went for a large whisky in the bar.

&nbs
p; This was on the sixth evening.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Mrs Morris’s son. He was sitting on a stool at the bar with a young girl wearing jeans, his hand on her knee. She was simply pretty, with her fair hair knotted up in a careless way.

  ‘This is Sal,’ said the son. ‘Mr Frazier.’

  ‘You live in Falmouth?’ said the girl.

  ‘Get clued up,’ said the worldly young man. ‘Mr Frazier is a friend of Ma’s in London. That’s someone else. I told you!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the girl. ‘Oh, I know! We saw you this afternoon, out on the cliff.’

  ‘Coming up from the Coffin,’ the young man said. ‘How far did you get? Ma dropped us on the road and we came across the fields; it’s only a mile. She’d gone to have her hair done and we had to bloody walk back. We got soaked. Did you? Did you get to the bottom? It’s called the Coffin,’ the boy said. ‘I took Sal to look at it.’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ said Lionel. Watched!

  ‘Ma used to take us on picnics down the path there when I was a kid, very sheltered down there. We used to have a house back on the road.’ (Owning the place!) And to the girl he said: ‘In Dad’s time. I told you. Before they split up.’ A young know-all, thought Lionel.

  ‘Your mother took you down that wall!’ said Lionel. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘A bit dizzy, but it used to be all right. I know what you mean – you can’t get down now, the rock’s fallen,’ the boy said.

  ‘Will you have a drink?’ Lionel said.

  ‘I think I’d better not. Sal’s soaked through and I’ve got to drop her. Ma will be back. But thanks.’

  Lionel watched them go.

  ‘London friend?’ ‘Someone else’? What did the knowing boy mean? And where on earth could she get her hair done in this part of the world, not that that would bother her!

  ‘Well,’ thought Lionel, ‘that let’s me off the hook. I suppose I’ve been rather rude to the old bird.’

  He found himself wishing to see the fat woman who had got down the ‘black wall’ when she was young.

  He went into dinner. There were two or three large laughing parties of old friends in the middle of the crowded dining-room, and murmuring grey-haired couples at other tables. Corks popped. Between courses – slow in being served because he was alone – Lionel tried to see if she and her son and the girl had slipped in and were at the table at the other end of the room. They were not. The sun had long ago gone down, and that night the fine weather broke. When he got to his room he saw his windows were drenched, and water was gushing out of the gutters above his balcony.

  In the morning, the wind was steadier, the rain quieter, but the sky was dirty and the sea looked like unwashed linen. The seagulls perched on aerials and chimneys, their indignant heads turned into the wind.

  That was the trouble on this coast: fogs or rain would set in for days. The guests in the hotel turned their backs to the windows and sat hiding themselves behind newspapers: the heartier ones went boisterously out to their cars. One or two little groups sat around talking about their relations in the towns they came from, in the tones of people sitting after a funeral. Every now and then a golfer would come back from the main door dispirited. Lionel sat in the coffee room, which was usually empty in the morning. An expert in choosing chairs, he had marked one down on his first day. It was now unoccupied. He kept an eye on the puddles on the terrace and saw at last that the rain was stopping.

  Then he heard a voice saying to one of the waiters: ‘I wonder if I could have some coffee?’

  Mrs Morris was standing there carrying a raincoat and wearing a white scarf round her head. She came at once to sit with him. She had come up, she said, because something had gone wrong with the electric power at her flat.

  ‘Would you like me to come down and look at it?’ he said at once – to make amends. He had once or twice put something right in the stove she maltreated at her London flat.

  ‘No, it’s the landlord’s job to see to it,’ she said. And then: ‘No walking today?’ – flirtatiously wagging a finger at him.

  She did not take her scarf off, and although her face looked bare, it looked shapely with thoughts of her own.

  ‘We went to Falmouth yesterday,’ she said. ‘The trees in the harbour are much better there than here. Taller, more sheltered.’

  Then, relaxing: ‘Tom said he saw you yesterday at the Coffin. Mr Morris, my husband, had a house a couple of miles away once,’ she said.

  She laughed. ‘He wanted to show his girl the place where he was brought up. Especially,’ she said, ‘the Coffin.’

  That word excited her and then she said: ‘I dropped them there. It’s a mistake to go back to the past. I mean at my age. Our age,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think?’ Yet she said this with the pride of one who had always chosen the mistake when she was young, and even now she had the warm wide open eyes of a woman hoping for another.

  ‘Tom has got a very pretty girl,’ Lionel said.

  ‘Oh, I’m so relieved he’s got a girl at last – I can’t tell you! I’d begun to think . . .’ she stopped. ‘He just wasn’t interested. I mean he’s twenty-nine. Not afraid of them, always about with them, but – indifferent. I was afraid it was my fault.’

  ‘They seemed full of themselves,’ Lionel said.

  ‘He’s very good at his job,’ she said.

  ‘I was afraid,’ she said, ‘that the divorce had upset him. Alec hated him, I told you. It was so difficult. The funny thing is’ – and it was clear she thought that this, being funny, was a revelation – ‘Tom liked Alec! Liked him better than his own father. Tom was really sad when Alec died.’

  ‘He was sad for you,’ Lionel said, who suddenly remembered he himself had disliked Mr Summers. The man had looked so much like the soap-white bust of someone who had never existed. Perhaps there was something sexy in the blind, bland conceit of busts?

  Lionel waited. She would break off sentences as if beguiling herself with the dramas hidden beyond in the open-ended.

  ‘You see, Lionel,’ she suddenly said, ‘my mother died when I was a girl, a child. Not died exactly, but “put away”. I mean, I didn’t know her. I’ll never forget what you told me about your own mother, doing her hair. When I grew up my father used to take me abroad with him on business. Norway, Sweden, France. He had a lot of business friends. He was in timber.’

  ‘Lonely for a girl,’ he said.

  ‘Most people thought I was having a wonderful time, but you are right, Lionel. I was alone half the time, sitting in hotel rooms, reading novels. The novels I read! Eating. Talking to waiters. I used to think of my mother. Mr Morris was much older than me, in timber too, a friend of father’s. After him, I mean after the divorce, I was afraid of Tom’s feeling for me.’

  She looked at him greedily, intently. Lionel saw she was working up to asking him why he hadn’t married.

  ‘Do you think a mother can be too frank?’ she said.

  Lionel was lost. He wondered if she could mean she had been chased all round Europe by her father’s friends. He could see that she might have been a pretty girl, dangerous in her naivety, either piling up daydreams or perhaps not innocent at all.

  ‘Was it really because of your mother you took up doing women’s hair?’ she said, leaning forward, avid for a secret.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Men’s hairdressing was going downhill. More money in the women’s trade.’

  He was about to tell her about the rock that looked like a man tipped back waiting for a shave. Her habit of rambling from the point was infectious. But she was too quick.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, with all her breath. ‘Money! That’s it, isn’t it? You had to look after your mother. I mean you had her to live with you. I remember when Alec and I moved into the flats. We used to see you both going out together.’ Then, looking around the room to see if anyone had come in and could hear, she said in a low voice: ‘Alec did something in the law, I never understood it – one of those things solicitors are suppose
d not to do. Horses – I don’t know. I mean, when he died, he hardly left me anything. Well, thank goodness, the flat belongs to me until the lease runs out. I’m so grateful to Tom. He came over to sort things out. He thinks I should sell the lease. What d’you think, Lionel?’

  What an extraordinary thing – Mrs Morris no longer there! New people. Builders, painters, hammering. How awful.

  She glowed at the surprise she had given him.

  ‘How much of your lease have you got left?’ he said.

  ‘I must ask Tom,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it if I were you, unless you know you’ve got a place to go to. Prices are still going up,’ he warned her. In fact, not liking change himself, he wanted to stop her.

  ‘I don’t want to be a burden on Tom. He wants me to go to Canada with him. I suppose I could, but he’s very serious about this girl,’ she said. ‘He’s fallen flat for her these last weeks. Down here! He met her with an old friend of ours. I wish I had talked to you about this before, Lionel. I’m afraid I’ve been very standoffish. You must have thought I was avoiding you, but it wasn’t that. We were out all the time. I’ve known this friend most of my life, when his wife was alive. I told him about you and Alec. But I don’t know whether I’d like to go back and live in the country again. Plants die when they see me!’ Her eyes were brilliant when she laughed now.

  ‘He’d miss his garden in London,’ she added, looking around the room again. ‘It’s stuffy in here, isn’t it?’ And she began fidgeting with the knot on her scarf.

  ‘He wants to marry me, but I don’t know,’ she said, whether offended with her scarf or the man, Lionel could not tell. ‘He’s coming over to dinner tomorrow night. I would love you to meet. You always know what to do!’

  And then she tugged off her scarf. He had been looking only at a face: but now, as she shook back her hair he saw that half of what he had called the old rope had gone and that threatening parting with it. Her hair had been chopped into short curl-like lengths, her forehead was clear, her eyebrows had come to life.