The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  I was glad that at last I had managed to see one of my father’s jokes.

  SOLDIER, FROM THE WARS RETURNING

  I have a photograph of my grandfather—my real grandfather—in the uniform of the King’s Own Yorkshiremen, taken on leave in 1917, when he had finished his weeks of training and was about to be sent to France. He gazes out into the camera—young, confident, even cocky. I have been told that young soldiers were encouraged to have such pictures taken, ostensibly on the grounds that they instilled smartness and pride in the regiment, in fact because their officers suspected that the photograph would soon be all that the family had to remember them by.

  But this was not the case with my grandfather, Jimmy Larkins. He bucked the statistics. He served in France and Belgium for eighteen months and only sustained a minor wound in the final push of the autumn of 1918. He also survived the flu epidemic of 1919, that final dirty trick of the President of the Immortals. On his demob he got a job as a baker’s roundsman in his hometown of Armley, and he put the war behind him.

  On the surface, at least. I do not believe that any normally sensitive person could go through those hellish years entirely unchanged. He had not sunk, suffocating, into the mud, he had not been shot as he clambered over the ridge of his trench, but he had seen hundreds who had, had known them, perhaps loved them with the comradely love of soldiers. What Jimmy Larkins would have been like if he had grown up normally in peacetime no one can now know. As it was, he seems to have come home with an urge to make up for lost time, perhaps even to live a little for the lads who had not come home.

  And there were plenty of women and girls in the Armley area who were willing to help him do it: women whose husbands had not come home, girls whose potential husbands were remembered collectively on Armistice Day, women whose husbands had come home crippled or haunted—and, indeed, women whose husbands followed the normal Northern working-class tradition that the husband’s leisure time was spent boozing with his mates while his wife stayed home to cook, clean and mind the children. There were lonely, unhappy, dissatisfied women aplenty in Jimmy Larkins’s Armley, and he did his best to bring a little joy into their lives. It was rumored that at moments of climax he would cry: “That’s one from Archie Hoddle!” or “That’s for you, Robbie Robson!”—all the names of mates of his who had never come home from France to sow their own wild oats.

  This was a rumor, as I say, for this was not the sixties, when privacy and reticence were dirty words and happiness was thought to flow from endless talk about one’s sexual proclivities and activities. This was the twenties, when you kept yourself to yourself, and all but the outcast families maintained a wall of respectability between themselves and the outside world.

  But if the ladies did not discuss among themselves what Jimmy did or did not say when he was reaching climax with them, they did show their knowledge of his activities obliquely, in jokes. “What she needs is a visit from Jimmy Larkins,” they would say of a sour spinster, or “Serve your man right if you started asking Jimmy Larkins in,” they would tell a neglected wife. After a time they started hinting that they could see his features in the babies that were born. “I don’t like the look of that snub nose,” they would say, or “Who does that high forehead remind me of?” Thus, in ritual jokes, did the women of Armley reveal their awareness of my grandfather’s doings in the neighborhood without their ever acknowledging that he had brought to them personally, along with the bread, that other staff of life.

  The women, as I say, could joke about it. Some, no doubt, wanted more from the relationship and became emotional and demanding, but Jimmy had his ways of avoiding commitment. When asked why he had never married he always said briefly: “It wouldn’t be fair.” I take him to have been good-hearted and promiscuous, fleeing mentally from the blackness of those months in France. For a time, perhaps, even the men of Armley understood.

  But the men never treated it as a joke, and as the twenties turned into the thirties they found that the whole business was becoming very sour indeed. These men had a pride of paternity as fierce as that of any aristocrat, and they added a sense of possession—exclusive possession—of a wife that boded ill both for the wives themselves and for Jimmy. The fact that they spent their evenings and weekends in pubs gave no sort of leeway to the wives they left cooped up with a brood within four walls. Their suspicion and anger found their own form, and it was not jocular. “Someone should take a knife to that randy bastard,” they would mutter into their pint mugs, or “I’d like to get that bugger up a back alley some dark night—I’d know what to do to him.”

  Their rage and frustration were dynastic too: they looked at their children, and particularly their sons, and they wondered if they were the fathers. They studied features, even pondered their characters and tastes, and wondered “where they got that from,” as if that were a scientific study and could give them certainty one way or the other. In the end they usually subsided into a boiling uncertainty which found occasional outlets in violence to their wives or their offspring.

  Usually but not always. They were simple men with strong, not always rational, feelings and a fierce pride. Their manhood was their most precious possession, and if they felt it impugned they became enraged. They loved certainties and feared doubt. To live in uncertainty, permanently, was to them a condition barely tolerable. Some of them, discussing the matter over the years, first in hints and ambiguities, later with angry directness, determined to do something about it. There were six of them: Walter Abbot, Fred Walmsley, Bill Hoggett, Mickey Turner, Harry Colton and Peter Huggins. They are names that still crop up in Armley pubs and clubs, because the crime was a local sensation, something much more than a nine-day wonder, and the men—and, inevitably, their wives—became the objects of finger-pointing hushed discussion that lasted the rest of their lives.

  In spite of the violent prognostications of the Armley men they did not decide to castrate Jimmy. Something in them shrank from that, as it did not shrink from murder. They decided to kill him in such a way that all of them must be under suspicion but no one would be able to decide which had done it.

  What may seem odd, even ironic, today is the game they chose as a cover for the murder. Bowls has nowadays a gentle, middle-class, elderly image: it is a game that is played when physical powers have declined and all passions are spent. But many workingmen in the thirties played bowls: a relaxing game after a day of hard, physical work. Four of the men were good players, and the pub where Jimmy Larkins had his pint or two after work was only a hundred yards or so from the Armley Bowling Club. So one autumn evening the six of them turned up, casually and separately, in the Wagon of Hay, bought Jimmy an extra pint, and finally set out for a game of bowls with Jimmy as umpire. Whether Jimmy, as he rolled off with them, was secretly cock-a-hoop that he had cuckolded every one of them, I do not know. I hope not—hope he regarded his relations with their womenfolk in a different light from that. But we shouldn’t try to endow the people of a past age with our own ideological baggage.

  The facts of the case were always simple. They played, in the failing light, a game of bowls. At some point in the game Jimmy went off, as he was bound to do, to go to the small public lavatory by the green. The other men claimed they had not noticed when he left, nor who had gone to the lavatory immediately afterwards. They had all relieved themselves at some stage of the game, but they had not gone into the cubicle. They had finished playing without Jimmy—it was a friendly game, and an umpire was not necessary—and had then gone home. Jimmy’s body was found next morning in the cubicle. He had been stabbed, and the old raincoat which had been used to protect his murderer from blood had then been thrown over him.

  Those were the facts, and no one ever got very far behind or beyond them. The next day the police began a series of interrogations of the men—and, to a buzz of local gossip, their wives. The men stuck doggedly to their story: they didn’t remember when Jimmy had left the green, and they didn’t remember who had gone to the lavator
y after him. They had assumed he had gone home, and had gone on with the game without thinking any more about him. They never pretended to have seen other men or women on or around the green, for, though they were hard men, even brutal, they were fair. At one point, three weeks after the murder, the police charged them all with conspiracy to murder, but they could find no evidence that the men had conspired, so, fearing a fiasco in court, they soon dropped the charge. And so there it was: six men, all with the opportunity and the identical motive for murder. The police, and everyone in Armley, knew that one of the men had done the deed, but no one knew which.

  I must be one of the few people alive who do know. I was told by my grandmother, Florrie Abbot, sitting in her little kitchen in Armley, while upstairs in the bedroom they had shared the man I called my grandfather was dying painfully of cancer. She told me the story in low, angry tones, interrupted by tears, none of them for the dying man upstairs.

  MY SON, MY SON

  Leonard Parkin planned the birth of his son for the seventeenth of October. He was going down to London for a management conference on the sixteenth, and there was a social event of the usual dreary kind in the evening, which he decided to leave early so as to enjoy all the exciting terror of the beginning of labor. The main conference was in the morning, but the afternoon was free and he was not planning to take the train home to Peterborough until after the evening rush hour. John Julian would be born in the afternoon.

  At the evening reception, held in an anonymous hotel on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Len was rather abstracted, but in the general atmosphere of wine fumes and grabs for canapés nobody noticed. They didn’t notice either when he first slipped away to the gentlemen’s, then left the hotel altogether. Len was liked, but he wasn’t much noticed.

  Back in the Great Northern, his usual hotel, Len put the chain on his door and lay happily on his bed. He wondered whether to crack the little bottle of champagne in the room fridge, but he decided that champagne wasn’t right, not for the labor. He would have a bottle of wine later on. What he wanted now was just to lie back on his bed and imagine it.

  Marian, after all these months, feeling the first pains. The look she gave him, the certainty in her eyes and in his. “I think it’s starting”—those time-honored words which would grant Marian kinship with the millions of other women who had used them. What would he do? He would go over and kiss her tenderly on the forehead, then he would run to the telephone and ring the well-rehearsed number. The waiting, the waiting! Another terrible pain, just as he saw the flashing light of the ambulance drawing up outside.

  He went with her, of course, the two of them silent in the back, he letting her grip his hand tighter and tighter as the agony came, receded, then came again. Then the arrival at the hospital, the stretchered rush to the maternity ward, he always by her side.

  He lay there for two hours, picturing the scene, filling in small details, living through Marian’s pain and her thrilled anticipation, being there with him beside her. Then he got up and poured himself some wine. It was good, but somehow as he drank, the scene became less vivid. Natural, of course, but disappointing. He wouldn’t have a drink tomorrow. He needed to be at his most alert tomorrow.

  After the morning’s business, all the representatives at the conference for the people in the confectionery business were free to do what they pleased, and they all dispersed to boozy gatherings in pubs, on shopping sprees to Harrods and Oxford Street, or on unspecified business in Soho. Leonard went to Hyde Park and lay under a tree in the sun. There his mind winged him back effortlessly to the maternity ward, and to himself sitting there by Marian, helping her through her labor. In real life, he suspected, he would have refused to be there with his wife, or been there only reluctantly, being fainthearted about that sort of thing. But in his imagination he could make the labor terrible but short, and he could cut to the magical moment when the baby was born, to his touching it, blotchy and screaming, to his seeing it for the first time in Marian’s arms—no, not it, but him, John Julian Parkin, his son and heir.

  The day was sunny and he lay there, rapturous, ecstatic, more intensely alive then he had ever been. For hours he lay savoring the sensations: the sound, the smell, the touch of his newborn son. Then he walked all the way to the station, got his case out of Left Luggage, and caught the train home. On the hour’s journey he invented little embellishments, made more vivid the picture of his son’s face. It had been a perfect day.

  It was late when he finally got home, and Marian was preparing the supper.

  “Have a good conference?” she asked.

  “Very good indeed,” he said, kissing her, feeling a sudden spurt of love for his practical, commonsensical, infertile wife. The strongest feeling in her down-to-earth heart was her passionate love for him, made poignant by her inability to have children. He could never share the birth of their son with her. Her incomprehension would have killed him stone dead. Probably she would even have felt hurt, rebuked, and any blaming was far from his thoughts.

  John Julian grew apace in the months that followed, but no quicker than a natural child would have. Leonard was strict about that. As he grew, his picture became sharper in his father’s mind: how much hair he had at birth, and what color it was; how quickly he acquired more; the precise shape of his snub nose; how he looked when he smiled. Naturally there were setbacks and worries: Len would sometimes enliven a long car journey on business by imagining bouts of colic or the worries of teething. The great landmark joys he usually kept for some business trip which would involve a night away from home. Then, as on the first occasion, he would slip away as early as he decently could from whatever function or meeting he was obliged to attend, shut himself in his hotel room, and re-create his mental world around the son that had been born to him. The pictures were so vivid—of Marian breast-feeding their boy, of his first words, the first tentative steps—that they became part of his existence, the most cherished part.

  Sometimes it became quite difficult to make the transition from the imaginary to the real world. He would come through his front door with memories still crowding around him and expect to see Marian cradling John Julian in her arms, or playing with him on the floor by the fire. Then he would have to drag himself down to earth and inquire about her day rather than John Julian’s, tell her what he’d been doing, not what he’d been imagining. For Marian remained the commonsense, slightly drab woman who reserved her greatest intensity for their lovemaking, while the Marian of his imagination had blossomed with motherhood, had become altogether more sophisticated and curious about the world. She had given up her job in the chain store to be with their boy, but Len never resented sharing him with her because certain times and certain duties were by common agreement his and his alone.

  He was a healthy boy, that was a blessing. He played well with the other children in the street, and on the one morning in the week when he went to play group, the leader commented on his nice disposition. Len started to imagine futures for him, though all the time with the proviso in his mind that of course John Julian would do exactly what he wanted to do when the time came for him to choose. He was an active, open-air child, but Len didn’t want him to be a professional athlete. It was too short and too limiting a life. But he’d be a very good amateur. Len always said when the Olympic Games were on that it was a pity the facilities weren’t used afterward for a Games for real amateurs. Perhaps by the time John Julian was a young man they would be, and he would compete—maybe as a middle-distance runner, or perhaps a pole-vaulter.

  His real work would surely be something where he could use his brain. There was no disputing that he had one, he was so forward. Len didn’t fancy his becoming a doctor, as so many parents hoped for their children, and certainly he didn’t want a surgeon son. Still, he would like something that brought with it a degree of prestige. He finally settled on Oxford and a science degree, with a fellowship to follow, and a succession of brilliant research projects.

  But that was what he ho
ped for. The boy’s future was for him to decide, though he knew John Julian would want to talk it through with both his parents before he made his decision. John Julian was rather an old-fashioned sort of boy.

  Meanwhile there was a real highlight in his life coming up: his first day at school. Marian had agreed—the Marian in his mind had agreed—that he should take him on his first day. She would be taking him day in, day out after that, she said: that would be her pleasure. It was only right that Len should have the joy of the first day. One of the firm’s confectionery factories was near Scarborough, and Len usually visited it once a year. He arranged to go in early September—Tuesday the fourth, the day that school started for five-year-olds in his area. He booked a good hotel in the upper part of the town and he went off with a head brimming with happy anticipation.

  He got through the inspection and consultations well enough. He had had to train himself over the past five years not to be abstracted, not to give only half his attention to matters of that kind: after all, it would never do for John Julian’s father to be out of a job. When he was asked by one of the local managers to dinner with him and his wife that evening, Len said with every appearance of genuine regret that unfortunately he was committed to visiting “a relative of the wife’s.” In fact, when the day’s work was done, he went back to the hotel, then took the funicular railway down to the sands. In a rapturous walk along the great stretch of beach he imagined what his day would have been.

  John Julian was excited, of course. Immensely excited. He had dressed himself and was down to breakfast by half past seven, and when his father and his mother smiled at his enthusiasm he said that he had to pack his schoolbag, though in fact he had done it the night before, and packed and unpacked it for days before that. When they set out from the front door Leonard was immensely touched when John Julian reached up and took his hand, conscious that he needed guidance and protection at this great moment of his life. At the gate he turned to wave to Mummy at the door, then took Len’s hand again for the ten minutes’ walk to the school, sometimes shouting to friends of his own age who were also with their parents on their first day at school. At the school gate John Julian looked up at his father to say as clearly as if he had used words: “You will come in as you promised, won’t you?” So Len went in, as most of the parents did, knowing the new children’s classroom from the introductory tour the week before. Soon the children were mingling, playing, and discovering their new world, and the parents, with conspiratorial glances at each other, could slip away. The wind buffeted Len’s face as he walked back to the funicular and thought what a wrench it was to leave him, and what a happiness to walk home with some of the other parents, talking parents’ talk, swapping tales of achievements and setbacks, hopes and prospects.