The Habit of Widowhood

by Robert Barnard

  Joshua was worth waiting for. That she knew for certain. It was very unlikely that she would meet anybody in the next five years who would force her to break her compact with Joshua. She was quite certain she would keep faith with him. Almost a hundred percent certain. It was more than probable that she would.

  And if she didn’t, of course, there was nothing whatsoever that he could do either.

  CALLED TO JUDGMENT

  When the signal came that the court was ready to begin his trial, the warder to whom the prisoner was handcuffed folded the Daily Mirror that he had been reading and stood up. They had exchanged few words in the two hours they had sat there, though the warder did not seem by nature a taciturn individual. As they began down the long, dim corridor toward the dock, he made no concessions to the fact that the prisoner was less used than he was to walking in tandem. He strode ahead, and his yokemate had to try to find the right rhythm to walk easily beside him. When they came to steps leading to a guarded, open door, the warder pushed him ahead and, as the door shut behind them, bent to unlock the handcuffs. All this was done with as little acknowledgment as possible of the prisoner’s existence.

  It was lighter in the courtroom, and the man blinked to accustom himself to the new brightness. At first he was conscious only of the droning voice of one of the counsels making a procedural point. Then, as he began to look around him, he became aware that the public gallery was full, that some of the people there were straining forward to get a good look at him: a little, birdlike man with no shoulders or chin; a woman in a hat like a squashed rabbit, with a hungry, malevolent expression. He should have expected it, but in fact he had hardly thought about the trial at all, and had been brought to court by a back entrance to avoid the crowds that had gathered. He squared his shoulders, sat up straight, and stared back at the gallery. He was not going to act guilty, ashamed, self-conscious—not he.

  Counsel had finished making his point and sat down. That was the prosecuting counsel. His own silk he recognized, having talked to him, though only once. A smooth, near-handsome man with his way to make in his profession and a determination to make it. Eyes would be on him at this trial, and he would be eager to impress. The judge too was young for a judge—a recent appointment by a Lord Chancellor anxious to dispel the public’s notion that the bench consisted of elderly fuddy-duddies quite unacquainted with the modern world.

  The judge’s head was down when the prisoner looked in his direction. He was making a lengthy note on the points raised by the prosecuting counsel. All the prisoner could see was the top of his wig. Then he finished his notes, pushed away the paper, and raised his head, to look directly into the prisoner’s eyes.

  • • •

  The name Denzil Charlton had featured prominently in the Macmillan household when Roderick was growing up.

  “Let’s have you neat and tidy,” his mother would say as she adjusted his tie and put his cap on straight. “We can’t have Denzil Charlton’s mummy looking down her nose, can we?”

  Denzil Charlton’s mummy loomed large in Roderick’s mother’s demonology, but Denzil himself had made little or no impression on Roderick. He wasn’t in his form, for a start, and he certainly wasn’t one of his friends. Roderick’s main memory was of Mrs. Charlton waiting for her son at the school gates. She was a figure (as he would put it now) of overpowering respectability—or, as his mother explained at the time, “very proper.” Little Denzil was brought to school with his shoes gleaming, his tie squarely in the center of his neck, not a hair out of place, and he was expected to be in the same state when he was fetched home in the afternoon. Even at a small private school in a Home Counties town this was thought to be excessive. Other mothers who collected their sons noted Mrs. Charlton’s expression of disapproval at any sign of dirt or untidiness on their sons, or even if they ran to greet their mothers when they came out of the gate. “I hate to think what her house is like,” said one mother, daring to voice the general feeling. Another even dared to quote Under Milk Wood—“And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes”—though the other mothers didn’t quite see the joke. The mother who said: “Poor little mite—he can hardly dare breathe,” about summed up the general feeling.

  But then one summer the Charltons moved away, and Denzil Charlton’s mummy remained only for a few more months as a bogey figure in the Macmillan home.

  “Can’t have you with jam on your chin, in case Mrs. Charlton decides to come back,” Roderick’s mother said. But like all bogey figures, Mrs. Charlton had had her day, and soon her absence meant that she was forgotten entirely.

  • • •

  Denzil Charlton had no memories of Roddy Macmillan going back to school days. All his own early school memories, in fact, were centered on the respectable London school in the respectable London suburb to which his parents moved when he was seven, then later the minor public school to which he was sent when he was thirteen. He had asked to go to boarding school, and while he was at Repton he always participated in foreign trips and adventure schools during the vacations. His parents put no obstacles in his way. He had flourished at Repton, though the master who had kept the closest eye on him uttered the stiff judgment that he was “a bit wild.” It was a verdict which his fellow pupils, particularly those who had been on the foreign trips, would have agreed with.

  Denzil’s first memory of Roddy concerned a certain party in London. It was the day after the last exam of Finals, and he had no memory of how the party had been arranged, except that most of the men were rowing men from various colleges, so presumably it had been a rowing man who had organized it and asked his friends along. The evening had begun with boisterous drinks at a London flat—it was a case of parents who were abroad—and then the twenty-odd hearty young men had gone to a nightclub somewhere near St. Martin’s Lane.

  The Casablanca was used to rowdies, but when the manager saw the size of the party he rang round for supplementary bouncers. For the first couple of hours the young men up from Oxford were in high good humor, but the manager knew that anything or nothing would change their mood. It was in fact easy to pinpoint the time when things turned nasty. It was during the floor show, when one of the solo dancers was judged to be not up to par—to be, in fact, “over the hill,” as one of the young men ungallantly pointed out in a loud voice. The manager focused his attention on him.

  Denzil Charlton was sitting, quite by chance, next to Roddy Macmillan, their chairs turned around from their table to watch the show. They had not exchanged a word thus far into the evening, but soon after he had given his opinion of the dancer Denzil turned to his neighbor.

  “I’m Denzil Charlton,” he said, putting out his hand.

  “I’m Roddy Macmillan.”

  Was it something in the quieter man that seemed to challenge Charlton? Did he mistake an expression in his eye—a groping recognition that he knew the name, perhaps—for something else? Whatever it was, it seemed to act as some sort of challenge. Denzil got louder and louder. “Crap!” he shouted at the dancer, then something nastier at the next act. “Tell her she’s shit-awful,” he encouraged Roddy, and Roddy voiced a loud, drunken expression of opprobrium. Then they started breaking up bread rolls and throwing them. That was when the heavies moved in. Denzil tried to get a general fight going, but the others were mostly enjoying themselves. The bouncers targeted well. Three of the ringleaders were seized and frog-marched out, down dim corridors, then out of a back entrance and into a dingy, rubbish-strewn back alley. One of them immediately passed out in a doorway. That left Denzil and Roddy looking at each other.

  “Christ, I need a woman,” said Denzil.

  • • •

  Roddy Macmillan’s memories of that night really began at that point. They remained so vivid partly because of the man, partly because of what subsequently happened and was said. His sexual experience thus far had consisted of an encounter with a maid at his grandparents’ home (guilty and unsatisfactory) and more pleasurable sessions with girls he
had met while walking in the Lake District, on Skye, and in the Loire Valley. He had never been with a prostitute—had regarded them, when accosted in London, with something like fear. Now he felt a firm hand on his shoulder that propelled him in the direction of Leicester Square. Down an arcade lined with expensive antiquarian bookshops he threw up. At least that cleared his head and made him feel better. Once Leicester Square had been circumnavigated they plunged into Soho.

  Denzil certainly knew what he was doing.

  “We’ll go to Ma Hartley’s,” he said. “Better choice. Ma Cook’s is nearer, but she’s got some rotten bits of flesh, and sometimes you have to take what you can get. Don’t tangle with Ma Hartley. She’s as tough as old boots.”

  Ma Hartley didn’t seem overpleased to see Denzil. “Oh, it’s you again, is it?” she said. She seemed somewhat mollified when she saw he’d brought a friend along, but she remained standing in the doorway until the details of the deal had been settled. She offered Denzil a choice of Bridget, Gloria, and Vi, and he chose Vi, recommending Roddy to take Bridget. Ma shouted “Vi and Bridget” into the back, took their money, and then said: “First floor, room on your left” to Denzil, and “Second floor, straight ahead” to Roddy. Roddy found Bridget to belie her convent name by being an efficient and no-nonsense performer. He himself felt intimidated by the thought of all his predecessors, and his proceedings resembled nothing so much as that first time with his grandparents’ maid. He stayed on his back talking for five minutes afterward, but he found the woman as uninteresting as thousands had before him. Soon he put himself to rights and staggered downstairs.

  He stopped on the corner of Dean Street to light himself a cigarette. Behind him he heard a door shut. It was Denzil Charlton. When he came up he was oddly excited.

  “Thought I heard you,” he said, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact. “Not a bad lay, is she?”

  “Not bad,” said Roddy, equally casual. “I’ve had better.” They began to walk toward Piccadilly.

  “Give her a good poke, did you?” Denzil asked with a leer. “Rod by name, Rod by nature.”

  “I’m not mad about prostitutes,” said Roddy, world-weary. “I prefer a partner who shows some interest.”

  “I love whores.” This came out with a break in the voice. Roddy threw a quick look at him and did not like what he saw. “They excite me,” Charlton went on. “Their awfulness excites me. Their horrible ‘I’ll lie here while you do whatever you want to with me’ sort of attitude. If they can be said to have such a thing as an attitude. They’re just disgusting human beings. The dregs. The pits. That’s what excites me. They oughtn’t to be allowed to go on existing. They’re hardly part of the human race at all.”

  Roddy’s instinct was to try to cool it.

  “To each his own choice of vocation,” he said lightly. Denzil Charlton’s face twisted.

  “They don’t choose it. They’re fit for nothing else, capable of nothing else. Those whores are down there in the sewer because it’s their natural habitat.”

  “I’d have thought the best thing was not to go within a mile of them if you felt like that.”

  “Do you think so?” Denzil felt in his pocket. “I keep a knife. Sometimes when we’re . . . at it, I get the idea that when we’re done—when I’m done, because the whore is just done to—I’ll take the knife and I’ll plunge it in when she’s lying there, like a lump of dough, plunge it into her and do a nice little surgical job, just like Jack the Ripper used to do.” They were passing a streetlight, and the knife glinted dangerously in his young hand. It was a stubby, substantial knife, not something for a lethal slide through the ribs into the heart, but seemingly made for cruder work entirely. “Feel it. Feel how sharp and tough it is.” Roddy shook his head quickly and looked away. “Eviscerate—that’s a lovely word, isn’t it? Much nicer than disembowel—though perhaps that is closer to the nature of the operation. You know, I understand him, old Jack. I know how he felt, what he wanted to do. He was performing an act of public hygiene.”

  They plunged down into the underground.

  “I’m for the Bakerloo Line,” said Roddy, as Denzil Charlton made for the Piccadilly Line. He strode away, telling himself that he had never been happier at parting from anybody. Was the man a psychopath or a tease? If he was the latter he had never failed so entirely to pick up any signs of humor or fun.

  But when he sat in his carriage and began analyzing his feelings in the cool, detached way that he had, he started to wonder if the emotion he had felt at the young man’s revelation of his instinctive urges was not nausea and disgust, as he had thought at first, but excitement.

  • • •

  It was eight years before the two men met again. They both lived in London now, but they moved in very different circles, one in banking, the other in law. It was at a charity dinner in Wimbledon, one overheavy with male eaters, that Roderick Macmillan, about to sit down, found he had men to the right and left of him—a situation he disliked. To his right was a very dull local councillor whom he had been bored by at previous dinners and receptions. Looking down at the tag to his left he saw in pseudo-Gothic script the name Denzil Charlton.

  He looked up sharply as the man slipped into his place. A glance of mutual recognition passed between them.

  “Long time, as they say, no see,” said Charlton easily.

  “Yes. . . . Sad shortage of ladies here tonight,” said Roderick, as his social contribution.

  “Does that worry you?” asked Charlton, with the suspicion of a sneer. “Have you brought your own lady along?”

  “No,” admitted Roderick, wishing he’d avoided the topic of women entirely. “My wife should have come but our little girl has teething problems, and she preferred to stay at home.”

  “Tough.”

  “Perhaps not so tough,” said Roderick, looking round the dull assembly. They both laughed. “And you?”

  “No lady. No wife, and no other kind of lady.”

  They set to quietly on the soup, which was unidentifiable.

  “Wife, little girl, obviously prosperous—you’re climbing up the greasy pole gracefully I presume?” asked Denzil, always with that suspicion of a sneer.

  “Moderately gracefully. So much is changing in the legal world that the goalposts are shifting the whole time.”

  “Same thing in banking. Technology keeps us all on our toes. And there’s always the fear that out there some computer whiz kid is lurking who is two or three steps ahead of us in the technology game.”

  “Frightening. That’s not something we have to worry about in the legal profession.”

  “No. . . . But there’s one way in which both professions have changed together.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re no longer respectable in the way we used to be. No one trusts the professions as they once did. Bankers used to be super-buttoned-up, and so did lawyers. The breath of scandal or malpractice and no one wanted to know them. Now . . .”

  Roderick nodded thoughtfully.

  “Now. . . . Yes, you’re right. Bankers and solicitors are disappearing with the loot all the time, or being caught with their hands in their clients’ funds.”

  “Not to mention their private behavior,” said Denzil Charlton. Roderick Macmillan ate on in silence. Denzil smiled at his caution with a relish he could not bestow on the food.

  “You know, I think it’s a pity, in a way,” he went on. “That the old taboos are falling by the wayside, I mean. They made for such a piquant contrast, and gave such a delicious sense of danger to private vices. The Victorians had it right after all. Whatever happened to reticence? To discretion? Soon we’ll have lawyers pleading in court in blond wigs and miniskirts and special gay bankers to advise minorities on their financial problems. Takes all the zest away from vice.”

  “I should have thought there were some vices that still had the zest of danger attached to them,” said Roddy, a tiny choke in his voice. Denzil laughed heartily.

 
“Ah, you’re referring to my secret fantasies about whores. Maybe, maybe. Though this is the eighties, old son. You can talk these days about people who aren’t worth the airspace they take up, you can talk about a class that shouldn’t be allowed to breed. That’s another old taboo that has gone. . . . Though I admit that some other aspects of my fantasy are best left unspoken even now.”

  “There was a case . . . last year . . . of a prostitute in Swansea who was . . . cut about . . . in the way you . . .”

  “Really?” Denzil came back, imperturbably cheerful. “Never been to Swansea. Don’t fancy it. I imagine the whores as being dark, gnomelike creatures with impenetrable accents, hangovers from the Celtic hegemony. Am I right? But I say, it proves one thing, doesn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “There’s others share my instincts about what should be done with these scrubbers. But perhaps you know that already. Eh, Roddy? Did you know that already? Do you feel it yourself?”

  Roddy was actually glad that, at the head of the table, a local nonentity had got up to speak.

  • • •

  In the darkness he sat on the bed trying not to think of the thing beside him. The thing he had made—the hideous, bloody thing. And trying not to think, too, of the excitement he had felt as he did it. It was not to be thought of, it had to be put behind him. The important thing was now to be practical. The only thing that mattered was getting away.

  But not just getting away—getting back into his hotel room as well. The dingy light in this dismal whorehouse would help. And people didn’t look at you closely in brothels. Clients didn’t like it, nor the girls particularly: it made the whole thing look too much like a slave auction. But once he got back to the hotel? It was not a hotel he had ever stayed at before—one of the government’s economy measures. It was now after midnight. Would it have subdued lighting in the foyer and the corridors? Some did, some didn’t.