Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Less lively?’

  ‘Aye–much more thoughtful, brooding like. Hardly ever cracked a joke, and if he did it was bitter, like as not. O’ course I don’t want to exaggerate: now and then you’d get sparks out of him–he’d tell a good story, he’d chat up one o’ the lasses, or go to t’pub wi’ the lads. But it wasn’t often. He hadn’t the heart, like he had before.’

  ‘What do you think it was changed him?’

  ‘ ’Appen it was t’war, ‘appen it was his marriage breaking up, ‘appen it was this new wife. That’s what most put it down to. Aye, I’ll have another, if you’re ordering. . . . Ta. Yes, he used to make some pretty nasty remarks about wives and nagging, did Walter, after he came back.’

  ‘He was still foreman, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Oh aye. But he wasn’t a good one. Not that he wasn’t a marvel with machinery, a real wizard–aye, he was still that. But he couldn’t organize people anymore. He forgot things, forgot faces, nothing really ran like it should. It was like he had something on his mind the whole time.’

  ‘Perhaps he was thinking of his writing?’

  ‘Well, he shouldn’t have been, should he–not in firm’s time? Any road, he wasn’t writing. Some o’ the chaps’d ask him, joking like, and he’d say: “I’ve given that there up. The depression’s gone out of fashion.” I don’t think he ever set great store by it.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Well, there was one chap there was a reading type o’ chap–got into Parliament later, the ambitious type, you know–and he’d say: “What did you say this or this for, Walter, in The Factory Whistle? You know that’s wrong. You know that’s not how a lathe works.” An’ ‘e’d say: “Them books isn’t for the likes o’ you, Jack. They’re for folks down South, who don’t know a lathe from a loom.” No, he were never puffed up about his writing, wasn’t Walter.’

  ‘You say he talked about his home life sometimes?’

  ‘Oh aye, off and on. Everybody does, some time or other, over a pint.’

  ‘Do you think he was happy?’

  ‘I know damn well he wasn’t–whatever that toffee-nosed bitch his wife may say now. From what he let drop I’d say she was on at him morning, noon and night. I reckon he was trapped at last, like a good many others.’

  ‘Trapped? How could she have trapped him?’

  ‘I reckon she told him the youngest boy was his–worked on him that way. Because he was soft underneath, was Walter. Perhaps she knew he wanted a son, perhaps she said her first marriage broke up because her first husband found out he wasn’t the father.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Well, there must have been something of that sort. Because I mind one night, just a few weeks before he left t’mill for good–and by gum he looked sick then, more like a shadow than the man he was before the war–well, we were all out wi’ a lad as was getting married in a rush, you know. And Walter, he looked in his glass, all evening, proper gloomy-like. And just before he went, he said: “Funny,” he said. “I nearly got caught like that, when I was seventeen. And to think I was such a fool as to let it happen when I was thirty-five!”’

  The Railway Hotel, Oswaldston, 6 June.

  ‘Yes, he was my patient. Really sad case, that, because he’d been a fine man. They should never have let him into the RAF–can’t think why they didn’t spot it. Anyway, his years there can’t have done him any good.’

  ‘There was no hope of saving him?’

  ‘Not by the time I saw him. If we could have got him to a warm climate we might have kept him alive for a year or two more than we did. But that was ‘forty-seven: you know how difficult travel was then. And there was no money to send him. Anyway, I don’t think the chap wanted to live.’

  ‘You mean he wouldn’t have liked to be an invalid–having been so healthy all his life?’

  ‘That, partly. He had no resources. He fretted in bed–he was used to doing things, living a practical life. But then, I don’t think he was happy anyway. “Do your worst, Doc,” he’d say: “Put an end to it. There’s nothing coming to me that’ll be worse than her yak-yakking all day.” Shouldn’t tell you this, but when you’re retired there’s nothing much they can do to you, is there? No, I’d say that wife of his was as unsuitable a sick-nurse as you could find.’

  ‘So he hadn’t much fight in him?’

  ‘Not an ounce. Just waiting for the end. You know, he sent me with a message to his first wife before he died. I didn’t like doing it–seemed a bit hole-in-the-corner, you know–but he said if I didn’t take it, no one would.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘He just said: “Tell her: ‘You always did say I did daft things if you weren’t around to stop me.’ ” It wasn’t very romantic, but you know, when I told her, she cried her heart out. I say, will you have another beer?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Greg.

  CHAPTER XVII

  HAPPY FAMILIES

  AFTER WALTER MACHIN’S last doctor had left the Railway Hotel, Greg remained on his stool by the bar, sunk in thought. He had heard (and drunk) so much in the last few days that his mind was a haze of impressions and conjectures which refused to sort themselves out or lead in any one direction. And he was tormented by the idea, by the conviction, that he had missed something. Somewhere, he told himself, somewhere there had been an indication–what was it? A contradiction, an unlikelihood, a piece of the jigsaw which glared out with a contrasting colour nowhere else evident in the picture. Something, in one of these conversations over the last few nights, had gone past him, and the momentary uneasiness it aroused had been forgotten. How was it to be dredged up again?

  Greg remained perched uneasily, staring down into his glass, feeling like a juggler who suddenly finds he is keeping eleven balls in the air instead of ten, and wonders where on earth the other ball has come from.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ said a voice brightly. ‘I thought teachers didn’t go drinking in pubs.’

  ‘You’re way out of date,’ said Greg automatically; ‘nowadays we do nothing else.’ He turned to see the plain little face of Margaret Seymour-Strachey, surmounted by a fawn, church-going hat of the dreariest kind. She had clearly been out for the evening.

  ‘What will you–?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, with something like a simper. ‘I have horribly expensive tastes.’ Horrible, anyway. She ordered a snowball, and fumbled in her bag for the price of it. The movements of her hands were quick, nervous, not well controlled, and she dropped a five-pence piece on the floor. ‘I’m just glad to see a face I know,’ she said when she had retrieved it. ‘I’m not used to coming into a pub on my own. We married women have it so good, really, if we only realized it!’

  ‘Shall we move over there?’ suggested Greg, nodding to a vacant corner and hoping his intentions were not mistaken: he aimed at cosy conversation rather than anything intimate. The speed with which Margaret Seymour-Strachey accepted his offer suggested she was desperate for someone to talk to.

  ‘Could we, do you think?’ she said. ‘It is awfully bright here, isn’t it?’

  When they had settled themselves in their corner, she showed every indication of making the conversational running: she was chirpy, sparkling–almost too much so, as if tensed up.

  ‘I felt I had to come in and have a drink, because I did need one so. Isn’t it awful? I’ve been to the Blackburn Literary Club–such an interesting talk, but very high-powered. It was on Harrison Ainsworth and The Lancashire Witches. I do get rather fed up with The Lancashire Witches and Mist Over Pendle, but there you are. I wasn’t going to go, but . . . ’ She subsided into silence over her snowball. To Greg she didn’t seem to be making much sense–saying whatever came first into her head and contradicting herself. Maybe behind the gush there was something she wanted to say but wasn’t brazen enough to bring out too openly. Into the pause he slipped a tentative completion of her sentence:

  ‘But you felt you had to get out?’

  She shot him
a sharp little gaze–as if unsure as yet whether he was friend or foe. But seeing a look of sympathy, she replied: ‘Yes, that’s right. Being in the house was beginning to seem like being in Broadmoor, you know? But there–I don’t want to burden you with my troubles.’

  ‘Oh, not at all,’ said Greg guilelessly. ‘I realize Mrs Machin can be difficult.’

  ‘Difficult! She can be bloody impossible!’ The words had come out with a distinct tang of broad Lancashire, but she immediately withdrew into her pseudo-Southern gentility. ‘But there, I know what a friend you are to Mother.’

  ‘Hilda, really,’ said Greg. ‘I only got to know your mother-in-law through visiting at the house.’

  ‘Oh, is that so? Mother always emphasizes what a special friend you were to her too. But perhaps that’s one of her ways of annoying me. She almost seems to want to suggest that. . . ’ She stopped in embarrassment.

  ‘That she has a handsome lover fifty years her junior?’ suggested Greg.

  ‘Well, yes, actually. Not that I ever believed her–not for a moment. Of course I know why she says things like that: it’s to make me feel bourgeois, provincial, conventional, inhibited–the complete little woman! That’s why she cuddles my children the whole time–she’s trying to say I lack warmth.’ Her face flushed with anger. ‘Well, if that’s where warmth gets you–a lonely old age, with your only pleasure making trouble for other people–then I’m glad I’m cold!’

  Greg felt suddenly sorry for her: she had none of the confidence of Hilda Machin in repelling the sort of attacks Viola was so expert at mounting. ‘Don’t you think,’ he said, ‘you’re reacting in just the way she wants?’

  ‘Yes, I am, I know, and I can’t stop myself! My God, what sort of life must her husbands have had?’

  ‘Not too good, I’ve heard,’ said Greg, not adding that he had just been grilling the doctor who signed her second husband’s death certificate. ‘You realize she’s trying to be unbearable so that your husband sees they get a move on with her house?’

  ‘Did she tell you that? How rotten of her to spread the family troubles all round the town. Not of course that you would . . . ’ She subsided into silence at her tactlessness, and then something like a sob escaped her. ‘Well, she’s certainly succeeding, if that’s what she wants. She should be able to move in by the end of next week, and I’ll never be so happy as when I wave her goodbye at the front door. I have been on at Desmond about it, as a matter of fact, which I suppose is what she wanted. My husband has plenty of influence when he cares to use it,’ she concluded with naive pride.

  ‘He’s in insurance, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. He has a wonderful head for business. They think the world of him at the Northern. But nobody seems to value a good business brain these days, do they? That’s why the country’s in such a mess, that’s what I always say.’

  Once more Margaret Seymour-Strachey’s words seemed to come from the front of her head, and to be as contradictory as words usually are when they don’t represent what one is really thinking about. What really was her husband’s reputation with the Northern, Greg wondered? Margaret Seymour-Strachey’s mouth was now working convulsively, and her eyes becoming distinctly swimmy.

  ‘So she’s been doing it to hurry things on, has she? I half suspected it, but I wasn’t sure.’ Suddenly the words rushed out in a jumble of grievance and anger. ‘She’s always behaved like a–like a pig to me. Do you know she said she wasn’t coming to our wedding right up to the last moment, and when she did consent to come she behaved as if all the guests on my side were mud beneath her feet, though our family’s always been very well thought of around here, as I’m sure you know, and my father could have bought her up a hundred times and not noticed the difference, and what was her father in New Zealand I wonder, some sheep dipper or other I wouldn’t mind betting–you know the type that went to the colonies then–or perhaps he was a convict!’

  She finished breathlessly, and Greg refrained from enlightening her on the history of New Zealand. She took another sip of her drink, and (her mouth still working convulsively) she went on.

  ‘You know, I gave her that room to herself when she came to us, because I thought it would be better, and she treated me like a servant–well, you saw, didn’t you?–and when she’d got all the fun and sense of power out of that little game she started coming down with us. Said she wanted to watch television, though she didn’t watch–just sat there making sarcastic remarks or calling the children to her and giving them sweets and kisses-it’s disgusting. I said, “For God’s sake, Desmond, hire her a television,” but he said no because we’re not well off, not well off at all, and we’re having to keep her, she hasn’t offered a penny, not that we’d accept of course, and anyway Desmond said there wasn’t any point because if we got her a television she’d think of something else, want to play cards or something, and that would be worse–and he’s right, it would, because a game of bridge with her is like the cold war all over again.’

  She subsided and looked around the bar to see if she was making an exhibition of herself. Seeing everyone engaged in their own private confessionals, she sipped her drink with renewed confidence.

  ‘So she’s been coming down with you, has she?’ asked Greg.

  ‘That’s right. Then last night she said she wouldn’t come tonight because there was nothing on–she’d have a quiet night in her room. So I decided not to go to the Literary Club but to stay at home. But she must have heard me say so, because at seven she came down and said she’d overlooked this marvellous Stockhausen concert on Two–well, I just put on my coat and flung out of the house. . . . And I’m not going back until television’s over!’

  Her eyes were now full of tears of rage or self-pity, and she turned and fumbled in her bag. ‘Would you get me another?’ she asked Greg, handing him a pound note.

  When Greg returned with the snowball, Margaret Seymour-Strachey had shifted her position so as to be better shielded from the rest of the Saloon Bar, and it was clear that she had not managed to get control over herself, for she was now sobbing away quietly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind. I don’t know why I should burden you with this and make an exhibition of myself in front of everyone.’ A louder sob broke out. ‘But I can’t help it! I just can’t bear to go home! My own home, and I love it, and I just can’t face it! I’ve had three weeks of being ordered about, laughed at, sneered at, talked over the head of, ignored. And I can’t stand any more of it! I’m not strong. I’ve never been strong. Do you think I’m having a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘I’m sure it isn’t as bad as that,’ said Greg, who wasn’t–who was, in fact, marvelling at the effect of three weeks of Viola, and wondering whether there couldn’t be more to it than just that. ‘Still, couldn’t you get away from it for the next week or so–till she’s gone back?’

  ‘If only I could,’ sighed Margaret Seymour-Strachey. ‘Take the children and get right away.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you? It sounds as if she could cope all right on her own.’

  ‘Oh, she could cope. But where could we go?’

  ‘Down to London–or the sea. It’s not the season yet. Stay at a hotel.’

  ‘But that costs money. Do you know what hotels cost these days? We don’t have that sort of money to throw around. We’re really quite modestly off.’

  The dreadful genteelism for ‘hard up’ seemed to be wrung out of her. ‘Your family then,’ suggested Greg gently.

  ‘But they live here, in Oswaldston. If I took the children there it would be a real breach. Right out in the open. And that’s what Desmond absolutely doesn’t want because–well, because he’s her son, and so on.’

  ‘Haven’t you got some old aunt who could be suddenly ill and need you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t really. Anyway, if she were so ill it would look funny taking the children–and I’m not leaving them with her!’ For a moment her pale, uninteresting face lighted up with spite. ‘Sh
e’s so sexual, don’t you think? Do you know, she’s got the idea that her first husband would like to marry her again!’

  ‘What!’ said Greg. So Gerald’s girl-friend had been right! An undue pressure of interest had come into his tone (almost as if he were interested in the position himself), but Mrs Seymour-Strachey did not notice. Greg leaned forward conspiratorially, as if one touch of malice made the whole world kin. She went on: ‘But it’s funny too, isn’t it? She’s convinced he’s just waiting for a sign to pop over and propose!’

  ‘What makes her think that?’

  ‘Desmond told her his father suggested a meeting, and that’s what she read into it. It’s pathetic really.’

  ‘You don’t think she could be right?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Desmond says it was the woman he lives with–isn’t it awful, at his age!–who really suggested there should be a get-together. Though he says he’s always very interested in her, and asks about her a lot. But I don’t think he would be so stupid!’ She giggled. ‘ “Once more into the breach, dear friends.”’

  ‘He could be interested in her money.’

  ‘It would have to be that, wouldn’t it?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘If it were true, she’d have to be protected against someone like that, wouldn’t she?’

  • • •

  Greg offered to see Margaret Seymour-Strachey home, but she said she was much better now, and it was such a relief to get things off her chest like that. ‘And I’m not sure Desmond would like it if he saw us,’ she added with another little giggle. ‘And heaven knows what Mother would say if she saw!’ She raised her chin a little, and a hard look came into her eyes. ‘If she’s downstairs when I get home, I’m going straight up to my bedroom!’

  When he got home to his flat, Greg did not go straight into his bedroom. He switched on a few lights, took off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves, then he pottered around the kitchen making himself a good-night mug of milkless tea. The quiet, tedious activity helped to get some of his chaotic impressions from the evening into some sort of order. Then he walked around the little living-room, cradling the mug in his hands, and thinking. After a time he switched on the television. Some royal anniversary, death, separation or divorce was being made the excuse to trot out a lot of cheap old newsreel footage, but it didn’t matter what was on. Greg was of the generation which found television very good to think during, and he let his mind range freely over what he had recently learned.