The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  “Oh God, yes, he had a typewriter,” said my mother impatiently, the social veneer having been cast off long since. “But this new will—”

  “Is by and large the same as the old one. I need not go over the provisions of that. Unfortunately the most substantial clause, the one leaving the works and the bulk of the fortune to you, with reversion to Mr. Maurice McAtee”—he nodded in my general direction, and I got the strongest possible sense that he was enjoying himself—“is changed.”

  “Yes. Hurry up, man.”

  “He expresses the hope that Mr. Maurice will be allowed to remain in his present job, as he has been a conscientious works manager, but he doubts he has the drive or flair to head the enterprise. He therefore names Mr. Henry McAtee—”

  “Harry! But he hated Harry! He cast him off!”

  “A change of mind, I fear. Mr. Henry is to inherit both the factory and the residual fortune.”

  “You’re joking! What about me?”

  “You, madam, are not named in the will.”

  “But that’s impossible! That’s not legal!”

  “It is perfectly legal, madam. A man or woman may leave his possessions to whomsoever he pleases. It is possible for you, Mrs. McAtee, to sue in the High Court for a more adequate provision. Normally they would award you the sort of settlement you might have expected had you and your husband divorced. Doubtless you will consider this course. Nevertheless, I have to warn you that there are certain—er—allegations in your husband’s covering letter to me that would have to come out in court, and which might well—er—lead the court to take a very different view of the matter.”

  It really broke my mother up. In the car going home she kept sobbing and wailing: “After all I’d done.” It was notable that she did not add “for him.” That wasn’t what she meant at all. As we neared The Maples she muttered in a vitriolic whisper: “I’ll strangle his bloody pigeons.”

  For my father had had a love of racing pigeons, which my mother said was a sentimental relic of his working-class origins. Me, I think he genuinely loved the things. More than he did us. As soon as we got home my mother went out through the kitchen to execute her threat, but she found it a good deal more difficult than she expected. She ended up with her frustration still boiling over, and nothing more to show for her efforts than a few pigeon feathers scattered around the kitchen garden.

  My brother Harry arrived home the next day. That in itself showed that he had been forewarned, or rather forepromised. The solicitor had said he would write on the day he spoke to us. Harry was wearing a sober suit. His usual sort of dress was casual-sexy, in keeping with his image of himself as a trendy pop-star type. He had no doubt bought the suit in preparation for his good fortune. Typical of Harry that he should have spared himself the bother of the funeral.

  He was met at the door by Mrs. Mottram, who showed him into the lounge. “Awfully sad occasion,” he kept muttering, as he kissed my mother and shook my hand, his eyes sparkling with pleasure the while. When Mrs. Mottram had retired to the kitchen he threw himself into an armchair and let out a great bellow of laughter.

  “Oh, what a turn-up for the book. If you two could only see yourselves! You look like dogs who’ve just had a particularly juicy bone pinched from under their noses.”

  My mother could barely refrain from buffeting him around the head, as she so often had done in his delinquent childhood. But that day we observed the decencies, she and I. Mrs. Mottram was around all day, with a fair idea of what was going on but an incomplete one. We had no desire—my mother and I had no desire—to feed her raging hunger for gossip material. We ate the meal she cooked us decorously, while Harry fed us a (doubtless censored) version of what he had been doing in the seven years since Father had shown him the door of The Maples and told him (erroneously) that that was the last time he would see the inside of it.

  The next day Harry once again donned his sober suit and once again assumed his sober manner, and he and I went down to the factory. Changes made in the last few years made it necessary for him to be shown around it, but I had no intention of doing that myself and watching him gloat. I handed him over to the foreman and went on with my own work. Harry was remembered from the old days and thoroughly disliked (he had done the “boss’s son” act to an outrageous degree, and treated everyone from floor cleaner to foreman with contempt). Now he listened with a display of humility, but as the day wore on I heard him say things like “That will have to be changed,” or “I’m sure we can devise a better system than that,” or—most ominously—“What seems to be needed is a daring policy of expansion to pull us out of the doldrums.” This last brought visions to my mind of lunatic schemes followed by a spectacular bankruptcy. I had told no one at the factory of Harry’s good fortune, but by the end of the day the whole workforce must have guessed.

  As he left, my brother said to the foreman: “I’ll be in at nine and doing a full day’s work tomorrow. Start as you mean to go on—eh?”

  Mrs. Mottram was off that day. My mother cooked a dinner of all the things my brother particularly disliked. He maintained a flow of unabating geniality through it all, and treated me to a long account of all the changes that he intended to initiate at the McAtee works.

  “Father himself saw the need for change,” he concluded, over the spotted dick, which he merely picked at. “That’s why he put me in charge.”

  “Then it’s odd he never broached the subject to me,” I said sourly.

  “Ah, but you’re not the boy for change, are you, Morrie? ‘Do as we’ve always done,’ that’s your motto. Tried and tested methods. But tried and tested methods don’t do in the age of the computer. Industry has to develop and expand or go to the wall. Those were Father’s very words.”

  “I don’t remember them,” I said.

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Harry grinned, his habitual self-satisfaction oozing from every pore. “They were in a letter to me—the one in which he explained the new . . . arrangements. He was very considerate: told me to wait a day or two after the funeral before I came down, to give you two time to get used to the change in your fortunes. Otherwise, of course, my natural instinct would have been to pay my last respects to the old boy.” He crumpled his napkin beside his plate and stood up. “It was an interesting letter altogether.”

  That silenced us. Somehow, though he said it casually, it was as if every word was italicized. The way he looked at us, first Mother and then me, added to the effect. He took a folder of facts and figures from the factory and went up to his bedroom.

  My mother was devastated, as well she might be.

  “He’ll have to go,” she said. “We’ll have to get rid of him.”

  “Are you mad? With us the two obvious suspects? You don’t even know whether he’s made a will or not. He may have a wife, a live-in girlfriend, a child. Then where would we be? I suppose if you want to spend the rest of your life doing Open University courses with Myra Hindley . . .”

  That silenced her. I think she noticed that I said “you,” not “we.” It was perhaps cruel of me to rub in my separateness from her by adding: “If it’s not a question of that already.”

  The next morning Harry merely snatched a slice of toast on the wing, as it were, and gulped down a cup of tea. Mother and I ate in silence. The reason was that we had both of us heard Harry, while he was in the bathroom, going through the medicine cabinet. He could have found nothing, of course, but it made us uneasy. So did the fact that the reason for his lateness to breakfast was that he was having a long talk with Mrs. Mottram in the kitchen. He drove off in his own car to the factory, and I heard little of him during the day, though I registered the fact that he had already put the shop stewards’ backs up—unions like change even less than management, and Harry’s manner was not an emollient one.

  His needling of us began in earnest that night. Mrs. Mottram’s hours were staggered: sometimes she came in early, cooked lunch, and left around teatime; at others she came late and stay
ed to cook the dinner. That night she should have been off, but stayed late “to oblige Mr Harry.” Harry fetched his own plate from the kitchen, tasted it, and then said:

  “Marvelous. Tastes just like steak and kidney pie should.”

  That was all, but that was enough. The next evening, when my mother was cooking the dinner again, Harry ostentatiously phoned for a table at Rotherham’s best restaurant. It was all show, of course, all a battle of nerves: he had eaten my mother’s cooking on the second evening. But it was a battle that my mother and I did not feel we were winning.

  He had been in the saddle at the works for several days—and faces there were getting grimmer, and I was imagining financial disaster staring us in the face—when he took the opportunity of one of Mrs. Mottram’s dinners to come a little further out into the open.

  “Bumped into a chap I used to know today.”

  “Oh?”

  “Jack Lippincott. Used to be at school with him. He’s a dispensing chemist with Boots these days.”

  “Oh?” I managed to keep the quaver out of my voice. Why, in any case, should there be one? I didn’t know what Mother had got up to. Or perhaps that should read: I didn’t know what Mother had got up to.

  “Useful knowing a chemist. He’s doing a little job for me.”

  My mother said nothing. This was her new policy: to say nothing beyond conversational banalities to Harry. I didn’t see that it could get her anywhere, but then I couldn’t think of any policy that would get her anywhere.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  Two days later he took up the subject over sherry (actually Harry was drinking beer; he was not a beer man, but he drank cans of it, no doubt to make the point that opened bottles can be tampered with).

  “I got the report on that little job I gave Jack Lippincott to do today.”

  This time both Mother and I kept silent.

  “I took him some bottles of Father’s Polifexin.”

  “That’s nonsense. You couldn’t have.”

  That was my mother—it was out before she could remember her policy.

  “Couldn’t have? Because you put them in the garbage bin? Actually Mrs. Mottram retrieved them before the dustman came.”

  He smiled round at us, like a little boy before he starts torturing a bird. We kept quiet. It never does the bird much good to squawk.

  “And he tells me—roughly what I expected—that while two of the eight bottles do indeed contain Polifexin, the other six contain a mixture that he can only guess at: he thinks there’s lemon juice, Cointreau, a patent cough linctus and maybe other things too. ‘It doesn’t taste the same,’ my father said in his letter. You tried to make it so it did, but it didn’t quite work.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said my mother vitriolically. “If I was trying to poison your father—”

  “I’m not suggesting you were doing anything of the sort. You were withholding the medicine he needed after his first stroke.”

  “Either way, why didn’t he protest to Mrs. Mottram? Ask her to help, send for the police? Come to that, why didn’t he say anything to Dr. Craigie? He came seldom enough, God knows, considering your father’s standing in the community, but he did come.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Mrs. Mottram had suspicions of her own, which is why she retrieved the bottles. She tells me that there were a lot of lemons bought that she couldn’t account for because no one in the house likes them, or uses them in tea or in gin and tonics. But you’re right: Father could have told her of his suspicions, or the doctor. . . . I have a theory about that, anyway.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “He wanted to die. After all, what sort of existence was it, stuck up in his bedroom there, after the active life he’d led—running the factory, playing cricket, later bowls, walking a lot, seeing to his pigeons and racing them. No, he must have known all those things were of the past. He wanted it over with.”

  “He had only to swallow a bottle of aspirin,” said my mother, in that bitter voice she had used when speaking of my father since his death—and before it, come to think of it. “There was one by his bed. God knows I hoped often enough that he would. That would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m not sure he had any desire to save you trouble. Because he must quite soon have got a suspicion of what you were trying to do. Father—remember, Morrie?—always had a wonderful sense of humor.”

  That was true enough. Throughout our childhood he was full of conundrums, practical jokes, and jolly japes—until, that is, he saw that I always missed the point, Harry hated anything in which he might be made to look a fool, and my mother would remain stony-faced on principle. Being the one with the sense of humor in our family was about as rewarding as being the one with the sense of humor in Mrs. Thatcher’s cabinet.

  “I remember,” I said.

  “So he played a game with you. He decided to let Mother go ahead with her little plot, but to arrange an unexpected ending for her.” Harry put down his beer mug and smiled around. “He was a joker, our dad.”

  The awful thing was the sense of helplessness. We were wounded birds at the mercy of Harry, the cruel cat. Or perhaps it was my father who was the cat? That thought was to my mother the bitterest thought of all. She had fought my father all her life and now to find herself, after his death, unexpectedly his powerless victim—that was hard. But what was there we could do against that relishing glint in Harry’s eyes?

  He waited. Like all cruel cats, he played it slow. He ate out a lot, thoroughly enjoyed his new position at the works, and just occasionally made remarks like “Remember, if you try anything against me, you’d have to do away with Mrs. Mottram as well. Then of course there’s my friend Lippincott. Quite a little bloodbath you’d have to undertake. . . .”

  These thoughts, I’m sure, had already occurred to my mother. I tried not to discuss anything with her. I preferred not to know. It was bad enough during my father’s illness, suspecting.

  It was more than a week later, one Saturday at the end of breakfast, that Harry opened fire again.

  “I think it’s about time you told me your plans.”

  “Plans?”

  “Yes, plans. I shall be needing this house. My girlfriend will be coming up here in a week or two’s time. She’ll make a wonderful hostess for the firm—better than it’s ever had. She has a touch of class, has Sheila. So you two had better be thinking of moving on.”

  “But I’ve no mon—”

  Harry ignored our mother and turned to me.

  “You, Morrie, I’ve decided to keep on as works manager. That seems to be what Father intended, and he’s right: it’s the sort of plodding job you’re just about up to. And after all, I don’t think you ever knew, did you?” I sat there dumbly. “I don’t think Mother would ever have confided in you, not explicitly. . . . You may have had your suspicions, though, eh, Morrie? A little idea that something was going on? But as long as nothing was said, nothing that made you even remotely into an accomplice, then you were in the clear. But anyway I’ve decided to keep you on in the job. Provided it’s clear you serve me with the most complete, unquestioning loyalty, and carry out the new policies I’m working on to the letter. Loyalty is always important, but when it’s family working together it’s quite vital. I’m not going to tolerate an alternative power base in my own firm. Is that quite clear?”

  I nodded miserably. He turned suavely to our mother.

  “You were saying, Mother?”

  “I have no money.”

  “I believe there is such a’thing as National Assistance, or Income Support, or whatever damned name they use these days. Personally I’m against state charity, as I’m sure you are. It saps the initiative. There are plenty of jobs a woman of your age can do—jobs in the service industries, cafeteria jobs, cleaning jobs. Not well paid, of course, or pleasant, but as the saying goes: beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “I’ve nowhere to live.”

  “Haven’t you got yo
urself on the Council list? They probably have a nice little flat in one of the high-rises. People don’t like living in them, but I’m sure you’d find it perfectly pleasant. It’s only a penthouse flat under another name, isn’t it? Or perhaps Morrie would let you live with him for a while. If I know Morrie he’s got a bit of money saved, so he’ll certainly be able to walk into a nice little house or flat. You’ll have the rest of your lives to talk things over.”

  The post plopped through the door, and Harry went to fetch it while still talking.

  “You notice, Mother, I’ve said nothing about going to the police. . . . Circular from the RSPB. Now that’s a charity we can cut out. . . . I rather think I ought to go to the police. My own father cut off permanently. I’d be fully justified. But I’m a tenderhearted guy. Didn’t know that, did you, Mother? Well, I am. I don’t say I never will go to them: doubts gnawing in my mind—that’s only one of the lines I could take. But for the moment, and depending on your good behavior, I won’t go yet.” He chuckled. “I don’t think that’s what Father would have wanted. I’m sure he expected me to dob you in. But what he didn’t realize was, I’d have a sort of fellow feeling with you. Because if I’d still been here, I’d have done exactly the same as you. Maybe we’d have been partners, you and me, Mother. Morrie’s a born sitter-out, but I’m a doer. Maybe we’d have sat here and planned it all together. So though I may be going against his wishes . . .”

  He talked on, loving it. I was still sitting at the table. Suddenly my eye caught the envelope. I started to say: “But this isn’t a circular,” but bit it back. The letter was individually addressed, and to Henry McAtee. A sudden conviction concerning my father’s sense of humor washed through me. Feverishly I picked it up and opened it. It was on the notepaper of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

  “Dear Mr. McAtee,” it read. “In accordance with your father’s instructions in the covering letter, we have waited for a fortnight after his funeral before opening the will he sent us. As you will see from the enclosed copy . . .”