The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  I knew they did. Lamont had his on him because he’s one of those tradesmen chappies who won’t leave loose money in their rooms even when they’re guests of their Sovereign. Merrivale had his on him because his man had been pursuaded by mine to slip it into the inside pocket of his jacket that morning.

  “I absolutely protest, sir,” he now spluttered. “I have no money on me!”

  He opened his jacket, and pertruding from the pocket was an envelope. I extracted it and counted the money.

  “One hundred and fifteen pounds. And no doubt you too have a hundred and fifteen?” Lamont squermed and kept his jacket tight-buttoned. I held out my hand and with aggonized reluctance he took out the money. “Two hundred and thirty pounds. Well, well, well!”

  It was the sum Merrivale had won the night before, shared equally with his accomplice. I pocketed it.

  By now there were several bystanders, all curious to know what was going on. Lady Berkhampstead, interrupted mid-twinge, was loudly demanding to be told what was happening. I pointed to the Castle.

  “Betting at Balmoral. I never thought to see the day. You, sir”—I turned to Merrivale—“I would have expected to know better. You, sir”—turning to Lamont—“I had no expectations of. I count on hearing that you have both left the Castle before nightfall.”

  There was a moment’s pause. Merrivale spluttered, then the pair of them slunk in the direction of the Castle, their tails almost visably between their legs. I walked over in high good humor to watch one of the other games.

  “Just a little contratems,” I said airily. “Regard our game as scratched.”

  That evening, when my man was poking and prodding me into my evening wear to make me presentable for the dreary horrors of a Balmoral dinner, he said:

  “Colonel Merrivale’s young daughter has been taken ill, and Mr. Lamont’s mother. Quite a coincidence, sir.”

  I grunted my satisfaction, and in an interval of prodding said: “That’ll teach the Queen not to invite just any little squert who happens to suck up to her on the subject of Papa. I wonder if I should rub it in that she ought to be more careful who she invites?” I saw an expression pass over his face. I am very quick on the uptake. “Well, perhaps not. Perhaps I may just write an account of the whole busness for posteraty.”

  “That should make fasinating reading, sir.”

  My mind going back to the start of the busness and my concealment in the alcove, I said:

  “Lady Westchester has intimated that I would be welcome tonight. Don’t know that I shall take up the offer. Damned unpleasant not knowing who I’m sharing her with.”

  “I happen to know, sir, that the reason Lady Westchester was . . . unavailable last night was because her husband especially requested the favor of a night with her. The sort of ladies his lordship habitually consorts with are in particularly short supply in the Balmoral area.”

  “Really?” I said, rather pleased. But then I pondered. “That doesn’t explain the other thing, though.”

  “Other thing, sir?”

  “I heard her say of some man that he was ‘delicously ordinary.’ I’m damned sure she was talking about John Brown.”

  There came over my man’s face that smile that people call quizicle.

  “Oh that, sir. Is that what you suspected? Her ladyship has been heard to say that to several people. I think she intends the remark to be paradoxicle.”

  “To be what?”

  “A paradox, sir, is something that is apparently abserd or impossible, but turns out to be true. Her ladyship was not referring to John Brown, sir.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was referring to you.”

  For a moment he took my breath away. When the idea got through to me I felt immensely flattered.

  “Well, I say, you know, that really is rather a complement, don’t you think? I mean, here I am, with all my advantages, rather marked off by my birth, set apart all my life for a special task, and yet I manage to keep the common touch to such an extent that she can say that about me. I feel quite touched. She’s right. I am ordinary. No one would call the Russian Emperor ordinary, would they? Or the Kaiser? She really has me summed up very well.”

  “I’m glad Your Royal Highness sees it that way.”

  “I do. I’m obliged to you for clearing up the misunderstanding. In fact I’m obliged to you for giving the other matter such a satisfactory outcome too.”

  I felt about my person for something with which to show my appreciation of his very special services. It is one of the drawbacks of being royal that one has very little use for ready money, so one very seldom has any on one. Fortunately I have always found that people feel just as well rewarded by a sincere expression of Royal gratitude. I clapped my man on the shoulder.

  “Thank you, Lovesey,” I said.

  LIVING WITH JIMMY

  When I think about my mother in those years when I was growing up, the image that comes into my mind is an ashtray—a large, shiny blue one, piled high—the neat brown filter tips nestling in the untidy rubble of gray ash. Eventually, when no more could be got into it, the ashtray would be tipped into the rubbish bin under the sink, but never washed. Then the process of filling it would begin over again. It stays in my mind, this ashtray, a still life in blue, brown and gray—an image of my mother’s boredom: I bored her, her life with me bored her, she bored herself. You can imagine how interesting my life was.

  Meanness is unfortunately not one of my father’s many faults. If he had been meaner then perhaps my mother would have been forced to get a job, find someone to mind me after school and in the holidays, see new people, perhaps even make friends. That way she might have met someone or done something interesting which we could have talked about when I came home from school. But, as it was, the alimony or maintenance money (she never said what it was, just calling it “my money” when the check came in the post) arrived regularly, and was apparently generous. We never wanted for anything. And meanwhile my mother did a bit of cooking, a bit of housework, a bit of shopping and went quietly mad with boredom, of which the filter tips in the ashtray were a symptom and a symbol. I understand this very well now, at sixteen, but I think I understood it even then, though I would not have been able to find words for it. Naturally I worried more about the dismal quality of my own life.

  About twice a year my father came to take me out. This enabled us to get to know each other better: he to find out that I was a thoroughly uninteresting little girl, I to find out that he was a rather nasty man. I, of course, hid my more interesting thoughts from him (one would hardly tell them to someone one saw twice a year), while he could not hide his essential qualities from me. The noise of his car starting up to drive him away always sounded in my ears like a sigh of relief.

  Meanwhile on those days my mother had been loafing around the house, working up a good, acrid fug. She was never inventive enough to think up anything interesting or exciting to do while I was out of the way. She was what the tabloids would call an accident waiting to happen—or a bomb waiting to be exploded. Or a victim waiting to be murdered.

  I was with her when she met Jimmy Wildman. It was holiday time, summer, so inevitably I was with her. There were clothes to buy for me for the start of the new school term, and my mother said she was tired of the “filthy” local shops (she had a very limited vocabulary, which put me to shame on the rare occasions when she came to school functions). So we had driven in the little Allegro into Barstow, where we had found new shoes and a new coat for me, and done a bit of desultory shopping for her too. She was not one of those compulsive shoppers—like everything else, it soon became a bore. It was a hot day, and my mother then declared that she felt like a drink—unusually for her, for drink was not one of her problems. We found a pub with would-be rustic wooden tables and benches outside, and my mother went into the bar and got an orange squash for me, and gin and tonic for her.

  Whether Jimmy Wildman sat down at the next table with a formed intention of picking her up,
I don’t know. There were other, more desirable women there that morning, even if you were attracted by the smell of nicotine, and they were unencumbered with a child in attendance. I think I noticed him before my mother did, because I was sitting facing him and I noticed things because the bench was uncomfortable, like all benches.

  He was wearing jeans and a loose denim jacket over an ill-fitting T-shirt. He was big, but I thought it was the bigness of fat as much as of muscle (I was thirteen then, you see, and beginning to notice young males and how they looked). His hands were rough, and a dark stubble sprouted on his chin and cheeks. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin white, his hair long and greasy. He was very unattractive.

  My mother was rummaging in her handbag searching for a new packet of cigarettes and looking rather flushed.

  “I’m getting hotter and hotter, not cooling down,” she muttered.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t be drinking gin and tonic,” I said, looking around. “Everyone else seems to be drinking beer and lager and stuff like that.”

  She looked around.

  “Do you know, I think you’re right,” she said in a surprised voice, as if I had never said anything sensible in my life before. She pushed the half-finished drink away from her and marched back to the bar, cigarette hanging from her mouth.

  It was that, the pushing away of the gin and tonic, that told Jimmy Wildman that my mother had money. Not necessarily loads of money, but the sort of money that means you’re not always worrying about money. Enough.

  I saw it then, you see, as a matter of money. I can see now that there were other things. Sex, for example. Jimmy was recently out of jail, he was desperate for a woman, and if there were many more attractive women than my mother around, it was also true that they were women Jimmy was not likely to get to bed unless he took a lot of trouble with himself, which would certainly be unlike Jimmy. My mother, like her money, was enough.

  “Got a light?”

  He took no trouble, you notice, even with his opening gambit.

  Within a couple of minutes he was at our table, drinking the remains of my mother’s gin and tonic as if he were doing it a favor, and asking about the neighborhood (“wondered whether it would be worthwhile slinging my hook here”). I don’t remember much about the conversation, which was not memorable, only that before we left my mother said:

  “There’s a ladies’ lav over there, Jennifer. Go and use it before we get in the car.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Do as I say. You’ll only grizzle about wanting to go when we’re on the road, you know you will.”

  I had never in my life grizzled in the car about wanting to go to the lavatory. This habit of putting me down in public was one that annoyed me very much. I knew then that we had not seen the last of Jimmy. I saw it for certain in the knowing manner with which they said good-bye.

  He moved in two nights later. He arrived in the evening in a battered old car with one month to run of an MOT that must have been obtained sight unseen. All his belongings, nothing much, were in the back of it. It was in the course of the evening that he told us he was just out of jail. He showed no embarrassment about it. When my mother asked what for he said with a shrug: “Breaking and entering.” So unembarrassed was he that I thought he was telling the truth, though in fact he was not. He stayed the night as—shocked but fascinated—I had known he would.

  I saw him next morning, on his way to the bathroom-lavatory, quite naked. It was the first time I had seen a grown man naked, and I can’t say it interested me particularly. I was on my way downstairs, and I thought it would be impolite to take any particular notice. What I did notice, though, was that his sloppy clothes had misled me: there was a lot more muscle than fat. I should have guessed this. You do not get overfed in prison.

  When I asked my mother she said that he’d be stopping for a bit.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

  “I’ve been alone for so long,” she said, shrugging. This was no grand passion, I concluded. But I said:

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I’ll see you don’t come to any harm,” she said.

  That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.

  And so Jimmy Wildman settled down with us. His personal habits were far from nice. He ate hunched over his plate, shoveling the food in in a hit-and-miss fashion. He spent much of the day in front of the television, watching cartoons for preference. His personal hygiene was appalling, but I never heard my mother try to do anything about this.

  I began to think that Jimmy Wildman was not the sort of man a young girl ought to have around her in her impressionable years.

  He used to go to pubs most evenings. Sometimes my mother would go with him; sometimes—if they were driving out somewhere, and there was little danger of my meeting anyone from school, or their parents, and being embarrassed—I would go too. On nice evenings we would sit outside the pub, and sometimes Jimmy would get quite jolly, and a group would gather around him, laughing. He would introduce himself to strangers by banging his chest and saying, “Me Wild Man.”

  I could have died, he was so common.

  One of my father’s reluctant and infrequent visits was promised for early October. One day on the stairs I happened to overhear my mother and Jimmy in the sitting room.

  “Jennifer’s dad’s coming on Saturday. Best make yourself scarce.”

  “Why the hell should I? Are you supposed to live like a bloody nun, when he upped and left you?”

  “He’s the goose that lays the golden eggs. We don’t want him making any trouble about Jennifer.”

  There was a pause and then Jimmy said: “I’ll take off for the day.”

  I took that as a useful hint: the money coming in was for me, so it could be used to put pressure on my mother. On Saturday, when my father came to fetch me, he said he thought we’d go to the zoo. I made no objections, though I disapprove on principle of keeping animals in captivity. I thought it would be a good place to talk, so an hour or two later, when we were looking at a bored grizzly bear, and it was looking back at us boring each other, I said:

  “Mummy’s got a new boyfriend.”

  “Has she now?”

  I looked to see whether he was anticipating saving money, but my father has a very noncommittal face, due to his not having very much in the way of interests or opinions.

  “He’s yucky. He’s hulking and very working-class, and he’s been in jail.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to say anything against your mother,” he said, preparing to, “but she never had much taste, and she can hardly pick and choose at her time of life.”

  Where, I wondered but did not say, did that leave him?

  “He’s got disgusting habits, and he doesn’t even keep himself clean. He smells!”

  “Hmmm.” (I could have been talking about the family dog.)

  “It’s not very nice for me, growing up with someone like that around.”

  “No, it can’t be. But I don’t see what I can do. You can’t come and live with me.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “And your mother is a free agent.”

  “There’s the money you send her.”

  “The money is for you. And it doesn’t sound as if the boyfriend is in the high income bracket.”

  Well, at least that confirmed my suspicion, but it didn’t get me much further forward. When he let me out of the car outside the semi I called home, he said:

  “Keep me posted about your mother’s boyfriend.”

  Thank you for your concern, I muttered to myself as I went through the gate and up the path to the door.

  Jimmy kept away until late that evening. When he came back he was flushed with drink and was carrying a four-can pack of Export lager. I had noticed that my mother never seemed to give him any money for himself, but that after he’d been out in the evenings on his own he usually had cash to spare for the next day or two. I turned over in my mind what to make of this
observation, but came to no conclusion. Since he always used the car—our car—I was unable to follow him to see what he was doing.

  One day when I was talking to the headmistress about what I was to take next year I suddenly told her about him. It came out almost without my intending it.

  “There’s a man living in our house now. My mum’s boyfriend. He’s hulking and common—he just sits around all day eating and watching telly.”

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Forster, interested.

  “I think he could be violent.”

  “Has there been any violence toward you or your mother?”

  “Not toward me. I don’t think there has yet against Mother, but I’m not sure. I’m afraid of him. He’s not the sort of person should be around a growing girl.”

  “No, I can see that. . . . But I’m not sure that there’s anything I can do.”

  She did, I later learned, ring my mother and make an appointment “to talk over Jennifer’s future.” My mother never turned up. Not that one could necessarily blame that on Jimmy. In the days before she met him she probably wouldn’t have turned up for such a meeting either.

  “I wish you’d get rid of Jimmy,” I said to my mother, a week or so after that. “I don’t like the way he keeps eyeing me. It’s disgusting.”

  “Eyeing you?”

  “Yes—you know, sexually.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m going to lock my door.”

  “Go ahead. I know you’re making it up, because I know Jimmy doesn’t fancy young girls. He fancies older women, thank God. I see who he eyes off when we’re out together.”

  She flounced out of the kitchen, bumping into the open door. She was very clumsy, my mother. I thought: Well, that was another approach that didn’t work. She was quite right. The women Jimmy looked at when we were out at pubs and places were all plump, maternal types. Pathetic I called it.

  The next day the knock my mother had taken by bumping into the door had come up into a nasty blue bruise. I was pleased. I was standing at the bus stop on my way to school when Mrs. Horrocks from next door came past.