A Careless Widow and Other Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  Things

  I was out early practising my putting on the lawn, which I have brought pretty well to perfection. This was the first time I had had a chance to get out my clubs after a week of gales. They strike this jagged tip of south-west England first, tear through the leaning trees and send the fields and hedges streaming and the steep hills bowling across the map into the Channel, and take your mind and the tears in your eyes away with them. But now, as if the whole rumpus had not occurred, the sky was cloudless and as still as glass, and the only sounds were the tap of my club on the balls and the cries of the gulls ripping through the air. The young gulls must have hatched and the parents were driving off the crows. Probably next day there would be sea fog. We don’t live on land here, as my wife says, we live in weather. One lives from one hour to the next, as they turn into days and weeks and the piled up years we spent in Africa, Canada, Egypt and Hong Kong.

  On this quiet day last April Rhoda rang up. It was the first time that we had been able to have breakfast outside. As I say, I was out on the lawn and I heard the telephone ring. I am supposed to be retired, but the week rarely passes without two or three calls from the London office, the dockyard or some Ministry about an oil rig or a dry dock or asking me to go and serve on some commission of enquiry. I am a consultant now, called in when something goes wrong – stress mostly.

  I crossed the lawn. My wife, Miranda, was standing by an open window answering the call. Not in her usual calm, practical voice, but in a high thrilled rushing voice: ‘Darling, how extraordinary! How marvellous! Where are you? What are you doing? Why didn’t you write? We’ve been so worried about you. What are you doing . . .?’ and so on, as she used to do when she and I first met and she was in love. She looked younger and warmer with every word.

  Rhoda is her sister, who lives in Italy. Miranda was, I supposed, shouting to be heard in the Mediterranean. She always shouts on an international call. But she was really proclaiming, in her emotional way, across time, and that is why she was looking so young. We haven’t seen Rhoda since we went to Hong Kong about ten years ago and, frankly, it’s been a relief. She has never been one to write – a Christmas card every year, of course, but nothing more. When the long call came to an end Miranda stood staring out over the fields into the sky and to the sea. Then she came back out of time when she saw me.

  I said: ‘Has anything happened? Something wrong? It must have cost her a penny or two ringing from Italy.’

  We often laughed at Rhoda’s comic miserliness over small sums of money.

  ‘She’s not in Italy,’ said Miranda, accusing Rhoda, me, and the view with one of her dramatic stares. ‘She’s on her way down from London. She’s in Exeter. I’ve asked her to stay the night. She’s sad the children are not here: she was longing to see them.’

  There was a pause as her excitement died.

  ‘She is incredible,’ Miranda said. ‘She said she didn’t know they were both married. But I wrote her – you saw the letter – she even sent them wedding presents!’

  ‘Typical Rhoda,’ I said. ‘She lives in the future.’

  Miranda frowned at me. ‘Be nice,’ she pleaded.

  I was going to say, ‘I hope she’s not bringing that awful man Sammy she’s living with, the one with the wide trousers,’ but I checked myself. I retreated into a joke that goes back to the time when I first met Miranda and when Rhoda was no more than a child.

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘what she wants,’ pronouncing that word in Rhoda’s baby-talk way when she was very determined, dwelling on it – ‘wawnt’. Her telephone call had opened up the past for Miranda and me. Miranda laughed.

  ‘I bet she’ll wawnt our house,’ I added.

  Miranda said firmly, ‘Well, she can’t have that.’

  We are very proud of our house. We are in our sixties, though Miranda does not look it: her hair is brown and has scarcely any grey, but the house has rejuvenated us. After working for so long abroad, living as we had to in hotels, company bungalows and other people’s furnished flats and villas, with nothing of our own there, now for about the first time we have a place that is really our own and with our own things. New sofas, beds, chairs – we are still as excited as if we were newly married. We came here because Miranda was born and brought up in this part of the country, in a house called Lodge seventeen miles away, a place which had been in her family for something like a hundred years – or even more, I suppose. We have the portrait of her great-great-grandfather the ‘Trafalgar Captain’, who retired from the Navy there after that war. The picture hangs in our living-room now. Lodge is where I first met the family during our war. In the invasion scare I was billeted in the stables. We were wiring the beaches and building those concrete strong points – pill-boxes – along the coast.

  Miranda and I sometimes pass Lodge on our way to London. You can’t see it from the road because the trees and shrubberies are overgrown. You can’t even see the stump of brick tower that her grandfather built at one end of the place, in a fit of pretension, for the house is no more than a square farmhouse built of narrow slabs of brown and black stone. The trees darkened the rooms even in Miranda’s time, and the troops used to get scared by the squeaking branches scraping the slates at night. Miranda loved Lodge and was sad that the place, so settled and with windows that still, for her, seemed to hold the faces that had looked through them, was sold when her mother died. Rhoda detested it – or so she said.

  Our own house is, I am glad to say, modern and pretty with its pink walls, and I have improved it. I am efficient at this kind of thing, and Miranda has furnished it with taste. Living here, we often say, is like having a second honeymoon. We live for ourselves and know hardly any of the summer people who come down, though I meet one or two on the golf course. Of course we have our own children and grand-children down in the summer. Thick walls of flowering shrubs ten feet high – which I keep well clipped – protect Miranda’s garden where she is always working when she is not painting a little. Painting got her through the loneliness of being abroad. Here, since this is her own country and she isn’t lonely, she paints less. She says the light changes too fast for her now.

  So Rhoda came to stay.

  We both say still that we did not recognise Rhoda, except for her walk on the gravel drive, perhaps. She trotted like a busy little girl as she got out of her car, went sniffing around it, peering in, seeing the doors were locked. (She kept everything locked when she was a child.) Then she stepped onto the lawn in the high-heeled shoes she always wears to give her height and stood back like an impertinent urchin staring at our house, counting the windows – she had always been a counting girl. Then, chin still lifted, her nose wriggled and she sniffed – a good sign with her: she admired the place! I was right: she was the old Rhoda, still ‘wawnting’ until plaintiveness quickly followed.

  But she was not any of the series of Rhodas we have in our memory of her, certainly not the Rhoda I had last seen in my bank in London, ten years before, when she was off to Italy. Like Miranda’s, her hair was brown when she was a girl, but in the bank it was yellow and on it she was wearing a small black flowerpot hat. She had always been one for a fashion that had gone out and with her smudged lipstick, her hit-or-miss eyeshadow, she looked at that time like a widow who had not yet mastered the part. Naturally: she was unmarried. There was a red-faced man with a hot-from-a-funeral look with her. (I will come back to Sammy later on.) But this was not the Rhoda we now saw on our lawn. We had expected sunburn, an Italian look, but instead her little face was scalded and she wore no makeup. The flowerpot hat had been replaced by a man’s shabby brown beret, tipped forward on her head, and from under it poured a long stream of hair, grey as fog, over her shoulders and down her back. She was wearing something like a brown-striped football jersey and bright emerald-green trousers, and she now had a small belly full of impudence and authority. She looked like a witch out of a child’s book. I did not say this to Miranda as we walked towards her, but I did say, ‘Rhoda still
wants justice.’ (She had always said in her quarrels: ‘It isn’t fair. I want justice.’)

  Rhoda trotted up to us, the kissing began, and then abruptly she stepped back and considered me.

  ‘You’ve grown a beard,’ she mocked. (I have a pointed white beard.) ‘You look pink and respectable.’

  ‘Oh,’ laughed Miranda, ‘he’s not as respectable as he looks.’

  ‘You see?’ cried Rhoda with glee, turning to me. ‘She got her dig in.’

  Rhoda has always been conspicuous for a few key words. After ‘want’ came ‘dig’: she loved to see people getting ‘digs’ in at each other. The next word came out when I asked, ‘Where’s your suitcase?’ and looked into the back of her car. A pile of old cardboard boxes and tied-up packages had been tumbled in. On top of them were a radio, two umbrellas, a couple of pairs of slacks, an anorak, two tins of biscuits, Wellington boots and a stack of steel rods wrapped in canvas which looked like golf clubs. And a rolled-up sleeping-bag.

  ‘I didn’t know you played golf,’ I said.

  ‘No, that’s my bed. I can’t sleep in hotel beds. I put it on the floor. I stopped in Exeter on the way down.’

  ‘Been making tea?’ I asked. There was a teapot on the floor.

  ‘I picked it up in Taunton market,’ she said. She had a plastic bag in her hand.

  ‘Nothing in the car?’ I said.

  ‘No, those are my things,’ she said holding the bag tightly.

  ‘Things’ was another word that went back to her childhood. I remember the chest of drawers in her room at Lodge and – more important – one or two boxes containing her broken watches and dolls, strips of velvet or silk, patterns, knitting, sewing, badges, clips, combs, childish jewellery, letters, programmes, the crown of a hat she had once had, a mug, unused diaries and cracked snapshots, dozens of cotton reels. No one in the family – certainly not Miranda or a maid (there were maids when she was a child) – was allowed near the hoard. Once I remember her mother saying, ‘You must clear this mess up. What’s the good of one king?’ – holding up a playing-card – and Rhoda snatched it from her mother, put it into a cardboard box and sat on it. ‘It’s mine.’

  We were about to move into the house when she stopped and pointed back to our white gate. ‘Philip,’ she said, ‘I say! Pebbles! Was that your idea?’

  ‘It’s the name of the house. What about it? Down the road there’s Breakers, White Sands, Sea Spray, The Dunes.’

  ‘Weird!’ Rhoda mocked.

  ‘I don’t see anything weird in it,’ I said. ‘You have Bella Vista all over Italy.’

  ‘Sammy and I live in a flat,’ she said and then turned to Miranda and said, ‘Sammy is my lover.’

  ‘I know,’ said Miranda. ‘Philip told me.’

  ‘Lover’ is the last and most important of Rhoda’s key words. She did not live in time, as we did; the coming and going of lovers marked the calendar for her. We did not know many of Rhoda’s friends, but I cannot think of any man of whom she did not casually make this claim or, at any rate, did not consider whether she might wish to make it at some time or other. Sammy had lasted longer than most.

  ‘I wish you’d brought Sammy,’ said Miranda. ‘I’ve never met him, you know. You didn’t leave him in Exeter, did you?’

  ‘No, he’s in Rome. I expect he’s still in bed. He was fast asleep when I left.’

  ‘I’ll get some tea,’ I said.

  ‘No, I want to see the house first. Everything,’ said Rhoda and she put on her strong glasses for the inspection.

  I let Miranda take her. I could hear them going from room to room upstairs, talking and laughing. I went up at last to see how they were getting on. They came out of a bedroom and I pointed to the radiators and said: ‘Have you shown Rhoda the bathrooms?’ They ignored me. I went along to the first bathroom and, since they didn’t follow, I flushed the lavatory.

  Rhoda said, ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘He loves doing it,’ said Miranda. ‘He’ll never stop being an engineer.’

  ‘Not like those awful lavatories at Lodge,’ I called, ‘where the pipes clanked all over the house and you thought it was coming down, or like that one in Cairo: that was the worst.’

  ‘It’s like a second honeymoon being here,’ said Miranda – our phrase.

  ‘I never had one. Everything else, but not that. I mean you can’t count Jeremy,’ said Rhoda, walking slowly along the landing and peering at each engraving on the wall.

  ‘“Poachers Netting Partridges at Night”,’ she read aloud. ‘That was at Lodge. In the hall.’

  We got down to the sitting-room – it was once two rooms and is now large, and from the two west windows there is a clear sight of the sea and the Pig Rock, lying two miles out with its moustache of surf. Some days when bad weather is coming the rock seems to move in, dark and near: on this afternoon it glittered and seemed farther away. It’s the first thing I look at when I get up in the morning, better than a barometer.

  I mentioned this, but Rhoda, who had not taken off her beret, did not reply. She was standing still in the sitting-room, which I consider Miranda’s masterpiece: she ought to have been a decorator, she has such a gift for colour. Rhoda was counting again. In that jersey and those terrible emerald trousers, she stood out like a gypsy. Quick as a bird she picked out the one or two family things that had come to us from Lodge. She stared at the portrait of the Trafalgar Captain over the fireplace and said suddenly, ‘I looked in on old George Ogbourne in Exeter.’

  ‘I wondered why you stopped in Exeter,’ Miranda said. ‘You should have come straight through. Who is George Ogbourne?’

  ‘Oh, you know him,’ said Rhoda. ‘He used to be at Raddles, the auctioneers who sold Lodge when the Bulwers bought it. Those auction people make the money! He went in for antiques. He remembers you, Miranda. And he remembered me. “Let me see, you must be Rhoda,” he said.

  ‘He’s getting on,’ she said. ‘His son Peter runs the business now. He knows the Bulwers. You didn’t tell me that Jeremy Bulwer had married again when his wife died – that fluffy little thing. What is the new one like?’

  ‘We don’t know the Bulwers,’ I said. ‘I just see him on the golf course sometimes. Very bald.’

  ‘But Jeremy was my first lover!’ she said, forgetting us and the room for a moment, and she took a step or two, looking at her feet as if talking to one foot and then the other, plotting. And then she said sentimentally, ‘I think I’ll drop in at the Lodge while I’m here. For old times’ sake.’

  This silenced us. I know that thirty years have passed and that, thank God, Rhoda’s love affairs are no business of ours. But this was too near home. I could just imagine Rhoda ‘dropping in’ at Lodge and getting in a sizeable ‘dig’, saying what a funny thing it was – that Jeremy had been mad about her and they’d run off to London when he was engaged to his first wife, who in the end had taken him back. And then adding loudly what she used to say of all her early lovers – ‘He was impotent’ – to see how the Bulwers took that.

  ‘We shall have to stop that,’ I thought. Very embarrassing on a golf course. Almost as bad as the time I was persuaded to take Rhoda on in our London office and she fell for Doggett and his wife asked Miranda to intervene. If she has come back to start those old larks, I thought, I’ll have something to say about it and she won’t like it.

  But Rhoda was chattering on.

  ‘Peter Ogbourne says prices have gone sky high since we sold Lodge.’ And looking at a china cabinet in the room she said, ‘You’d get a thousand or more for a piece like that. I gave Peter a lift to Plymouth, his car had broken down. He was going to a sale.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re selling anything, are we, Miranda?’ I said coldly.

  Miranda said, ‘Why don’t we all sit down?’

  Rhoda studied the positions of the sofa and armchairs and then she looked closely at one of the chairs, which had a footstool under it.

  ‘My darling little stool!’ she cried. She dart
ed to it, knelt down and pulled it out, and sat on it victoriously. I have never seen an object ‘bagged’ so quickly in my life.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miranda. ‘Granny’s little stool.’ And to me: ‘Rhoda and I used to fight for it. Granny made us take turns.’

  ‘Granny always cheated,’ said Rhoda, dropping her mouth open and looking from one to the other of us to see if the ‘dig’ had got home.

  What I remembered, as I went out to get the tea tray, was Rhoda at the age of fifteen in school uniform sitting on the stool at Lodge before Miranda and I were married, staring at love, as we sat on a terrible prickly horsehair sofa, and Rhoda saying, ‘Why don’t you hold hands?’ At fifteen she was a pest who followed us everywhere. She had just become very religious: one of the maids had converted her to the Plymouth Brethren. ‘But, darling,’ her mother said, ‘they’re not quite our class.’ Rhoda’s religious phase lasted until the second year of the war when the invasion scare came and the soldiers were billeted in the stables. One of them, a Captain Blake, called her the pocket Cleopatra. (It was in her Plymouth Brethren period that she had once left the room calling out ‘Sexual intercourse is damnation’. She loved the phrase: it was directed at us.)

  I put the tray down. Rhoda gazed at the silver teapot and then shook a passing fancy out of her head.

  ‘If I had married Jeremy Bulwer I’d have had Lodge,’ she said. And picking up a scone, she waved it at the room and said, ‘Did you take all this to Africa?’

  ‘No. Of course not. Most of it’s new. We left one or two Lodge things with Philip’s mother,’ said Miranda. ‘There wasn’t much – the cabinet, the Trafalgar Captain, the secretaire . . .’

  ‘I suppose you took everything to Italy,’ Miranda said. ‘It would be easier.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Rhoda, buttering her scone. ‘We sold it all.’

  ‘Everything, after you left the Square when . . .’ Miranda began nervously.