A NUT, OF course. With shaking hands, Imogen listened in horror. The sort of nut who gets his pleasure from kicking those who are down: who thinks it is fun to make an already despairing widow feel even worse.
Only as it happened he hadn’t made her feel worse. He had made her feel much, much better. At the words “You killed him!” a shaft of incredible, singing happiness had gone through her—a sensation more shocking and more inexplicable even than the accusation itself. For one dazzling, lurid second she was no longer a dreary, pitiable widow, but a glittering monster of wickedness. Come along, dear, I’d like you to meet my friend the murderess. Let them gape and stutter over that for a change. Let them gasp, and spill red wine down themselves, out of fear instead of pity. “Widow”, indeed.
Clutching the telephone to her ear, the crazy accusation still ringing inside her skull, Imogen was filled with a dizzying sense of change, of hope, of the Outside. There it still was, the crazy, hazardous, unpredictable Outside, just as it used to be, with its nut-cases, its enormities, its random bolts from the blue. This grey capsule of bereavement, in which she had been existing all these weeks as in a padded cell, was not all that was left upon the earth after all. Somewhere beyond its walls the silly old real world was still spinning. For one brief moment, it had been vouchsafed to her to hear again the whistle of its slings and arrows, to feel again the thrust and knobbiness of its muddled burdens.
The moment was gone almost before she knew it. She was back in the capsule again: crying again.
“A nut-case,” she sobbed angrily, slamming down the receiver. “As if everything wasn’t bloody enough—a bloody nut-case!”
*
“A nut-case,” Edith-next-door confirmed, pursing her lips over sweet, strong coffee the next morning, and nodding darkly at her neighbour who was now sitting, meek and bereaved, across the hearth from her—across what would have been the hearth, that is to say, if Edith’s home hadn’t been central heated throughout, with plastic daffodils and mummified grasses where flames had once leaped and flickered. It was ridiculously early for coffee really, only just after breakfast, but Edith liked her troubles fresh, and so the moment she realised that something new was amiss in the House of Mourning (which was how she currently described her next-door-neighbour’s home), she had raced for phone, coffee-pot and kettle in almost a single practised movement.
“You want to watch out for this sort of thing,” she was now advising Imogen, scooping sugar from the bottom of her cup with a sort of ladylike intensity of greed, and conveying, somehow, the impression that she had just been proved right about something. “You can’t be too careful, my dear … a woman on her own … lonely … unprotected. I should know. Do you realise, Imogen, that it’s been four years—four whole years!—since my dear Desmond passed on? Four years next Thursday …?”
This four years’ seniority in widowhood was something that Edith rather harped on, it seemed to Imogen. She brought it into almost every conversation, sometimes to comfort, sometimes to warn, and sometimes to hint, very gently, that Imogen herself wasn’t grieving quite enough.
“You’re so brave,” she would say, “and after only two months, too. Why, after two months I could do nothing but cry and cry. But you know, dear”—here she would start dabbing at her own eyes, peering sharply past the handkerchief to see if Imogen was dabbing too—“you know, don’t you, that there’s no need to keep a stiff-upper-lip with me. Go on—don’t bottle it up—have a good cry. Remember, I’ve been through it myself, I know just what you’re feeling.”
You don’t, though, Imogen would think sullenly. If you did you’d shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! While aloud, “Yes, Edith, I know,” she’d prevaricate, docile, and dimly guilty, and unable to summon up a single tear. And the funny thing is, she sometimes mused, your upper lip really does feel stiff.
But this morning, Edith was too much interested in the story she had just heard to bother with the etiquette of sorrow. She was full of advice and timely warnings.
“… Can’t be too careful,” she was repeating, knowledgeable and slightly competitive. “I used to get calls like that all the time. Every night for months: and sometimes in the day as well. Oh, it was terrible!”
Naturally. Everything—every goddam bloody thing—had been just that little bit more terrible for Edith than it now was for Imogen. Aware of inferior status in the complex hierarchy of bereavement, Imogen bowed her head over her coffee. Whatever it took to get calls “like that” every night and sometimes in the day as well, she, Imogen, clearly hadn’t got it. She had had only one call “like that” in eight weeks.
Like what, anyway? A spark of fight stirred in her, and she raised her head.
“They accused you of murdering Desmond? Every night?” she inquired innocently—and as she spoke, the sense of Ivor not being there—not listening, not knowing, not being amused—went through her like a sword-thrust. He’d always loved to take the mickey out of Edith-next-door, or to hear that Imogen had done so. Telling him about it afterwards had been part of the fun. From now on, if she cared to score off Edith, she’d be scoring alone.
“Imogen! What a terrible thing to say! Of course no one ever accused me of … of … What an idea! My own darling husband … so close we were … such companions … never a cross word …”
Ivor’s assorted cross words lashed across the conversation like the crack of a whip, and both women were struck silent for a moment, listening to them over the years. Booming across summer lawns … resounding from the frozen garage … reverberating loud and clear from landing windows. Where the hell’s my this? Who’s been using my that? Why the hell can’t you ever …? For four years, ever since she moved in next door, Edith must have been listening to this sort of thing over the hedge, storing it up.
It wasn’t fair. Ivor had been alive, dammit, all those years, whereas Darling Desmond had been safely dead. How can a live man possibly compete in patience and long-suffering with a dead one? Darling Desmond held all the aces, there under the green grass of the churchyard, smooth and lush by now, four years established, and perhaps with daisies growing. His cross words, whatever they may have been, were buried with him, and there would be no resurrection.
Hell and damnation! The half-suppressed sniffs, the gulping sounds from behind Edith’s poised handkerchief, warned Imogen that she’d done it again. She’d allowed the conversation to work round to Darling Desmond, and now here was Edith crying about him all over again.
Most crying is not only about someone, it is also at someone; and Edith’s was no exception. She was crying at Imogen, right on target. Look, the sobs and sniffles were saying, as plain as you please, look how I’m weeping for my dear husband after four whole years! Whereas you, after only two months … Parties … Hair-dos … Look at me, Imogen! Look! Real tears!
But Imogen wouldn’t look.
I won’t play, she was saying to herself, I’m keeping out of the game, I’m not competing. Let her win.
But was it a game? For one sick, terrible moment there flashed across Imogen’s mind the awful possibility that Edith’s ostentatious tears might, after all, be genuine? She might, after all this time, be truly still grieving? Look, ran this new and terrifying message, look, after four whole years you still do feel like this. You really do.
I won’t, said Imogen to herself, squeezing her eyes tight shut and clenching her fists in a strange, savage kind of prayer. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. Not for four years!
*
“And this is why I understand so well how you are feeling, dear,” Edith was concluding, blowing her nose and scrubbing at her red eyes. “You might think, perhaps, that by now I’d have begun to get over it … to forget. But believe me, dear, it isn’t so. The grief is as vivid to me now as on the day he died….”
Vivider, probably. You don’t really remember much of that first day, and what you do remember has very little to do with grief. A tap dripping. A porridge-saucepan soaking in the sink—for the last time, as it happens, because he was the only one who liked porridge; but this hasn’t occurred to you yet. The dawn lightens beyond the windows; it is morning, full day. There seems to be nothing to do, and so naturally you don’t do anything. The biggest non-event of a lifetime.
Had it been different for Edith, that first day of hers without Darling Desmond? Or is it, perhaps, the case that the weeks, and the months, and the years are all the time adding, by stealth, and little by little, every bit as much to a memory as they take away? Until, at last, the things that didn’t happen have grown like moss over the things that did; a soft green cushion on which the mind can rest at last?
What sort of things would she, herself, be remembering about Ivor, and her grief for him, after four long years? What kind of a man would he appear to her to have been, once four summers lay between them, four grey and harrassing winters; four holidays, perhaps? And all the new people—new friends, new neighbours, new window-cleaners, who had never known him? Beyond the lengthening barrier of the years, ever smaller, ever further away, what would Ivor’s tiny, wildly-gesticulating figure look like when she tried to hold it in her fast-receding gaze?
Not like Darling Desmond, anyway. On this, at least, she was resolved.
“He used to get into the most awful tempers,” she said to Edith, loudly and suddenly, and apropos of nothing. “The tiniest thing—one of the ivory chess-pieces out of its box—or if I forgot to order the peat for the roses….”
Edith stared, her mouth opening and shutting silently, while she sought vainly among her habitual repertoire of reactions for something that would do. There was nothing; and so she settled, at last, for being vaguely offended. Not that Imogen’s outburst had been an insult, exactly, but it was—well—ungrateful, in some complicated way. After all, if she, Edith, was prepared to understand so well how Imogen was feeling, then surely Imogen could at least go to the trouble of feeling that way?
“You’re overwrought, dear,” Edith diagnosed warily. “You’ve been doing too much. Why don’t you go and have a nice lie-down?”
Nice lie-downs were almost everyone’s remedy, when the strain of Imogen’s bereavement became too much for them. She couldn’t really blame them—bereavement is so non-stop, it never lets up; people have to have a bit of time off from it. And let’s face it, if you aren’t lying on your bed, then where are you? Somewhere else, of course; it gets on people’s nerves, after a while.
*
This, really, was the wonderful thing about having the house to herself at last: she was on nobody’s nerves. How wonderful to be able to saunter up the stairs, and down again, in and out of the kitchen, without anyone saying What are you looking for, dear? What do you want, dear? Do you mind getting your feet off my nerves, dear?
You don’t want anything, that’s the whole trouble. You want to want things again, in fact you wander about trying to find something to want—a newspaper, perhaps; some half-finished knitting; an orange. You don’t really want these things, but all the same there is a faint vestigial stirring of discontent when you find the oranges are all gone. Better than nothing.
Back into the kitchen again. Open the door of the fridge, and stare in, and wonder, supposing you were hungry, what would you actually want for lunch?
Not pâté, anyway. Jars and jars of it, all brought by nice people who wanted to give something a little more practical than flowers, and not as heartless as theatre tickets.
“Delicious!” Dot had said, reprovingly, storing the fourth jar away with the rest at the back of the fridge, “and so kind of them.” But she hadn’t eaten any of it, either.
Out of the kitchen, then, and up the softly-carpeted stairs. How lovely to steal about like this, without purpose, and with no one demanding your reasons! To drift from room to room: to stand vacantly, for minutes on end, at the bedroom window, staring down at the sodden lawn where Ivor’s barrow of dead leaves still stood, unemptied, just where he had left it that last afternoon. For two months it had waited, silently grinding its wooden feet deeper and deeper into the wet turf as the weeks went by. By spring, there would be neat, dead little rectangles of impacted earth among the new, tender grass, unless someone moved the barrow, and of course no one would.
How lovely to stare, unperturbed, at the slow decay of things, with no one at your elbow saying don’t brood, dear, don’t worry, dear, everything’ll be all right, dear, just relax, dear, and if you leave it out there much longer, dear, it’ll rot.
Well, of course it will. Do you think widows don’t know about Entropy? They know better than anyone, actually, even the ones who have never heard of the word.
How lovely not to be watched and worried over. To be able to sit hunched on the edge of the big double bed, your face empty, your jaw slack, and no one coming in and saying Are you all right, dear? To be able to kick your shoes off, to walk on tiptoe for no particular reason, feeling the thick pile of the carpet Ivor had spent two hundred pounds on between your toes. To make faces at yourself in the long mirror, tongue lolling, nose all scrunched up, eyes pushed up at the corner like a mongol. Yah, you ugly creature! You hideous, miserable creature, Yah!
“Step! I say, Step, whatever are you doing?”
In utter confusion, her face a kaleidoscope of hastily-reassembled features, Imogen whirled round.
“Robin!” she cried, half-laughing in her shock and embarrassment, “What on earth …? I thought you were in Yorkshire…?”
“Do you often practice for beauty-competitions when you’re on your own?” Robin enquired with interest, moving forward into the room to give his stepmother a perfunctory hug. Then, holding her away from him: “What’s the matter. Step? Aren’t you pleased to see me?”
Imogen looked up at her stepson warily. A six-footer like his father; and broad with it: but there the resemblance ended. Instead of Ivor’s shaggy lion’s mane, Robin’s hair was dark and straight and smooth, and already thinning on top. The heavy shoulders, powerful and bull-like in the father, made the son look merely overweight. Although he was only a year or two past thirty, his body was already running to fat—and at these tiny, preliminary signs of future middle-age, Imogen felt a little twinge of sadness, as at a fresh, tiny bereavement.
His face, though, was as boyish as ever—rosy, beaming, and imperturbable, just as it had been when Imogen had first met him, nearly twelve years ago: she a nervous, strung-up prospective stepmother, he an amused, unruffled, infinitely tolerant undergraduate in his second year.
“I’m going to call you ‘Step’,” he’d informed her, after a careful scrutiny (so it seemed to Imogen) of her every inadequacy, from her flushed face and wilting hair (it had been July, and a heat-wave) to her white pointed shoes that hurt, and were already smudged with green from the immemorial lawns across which Ivor was privileged, as a Senior Member, to walk, and to escort her, introducing her to the glories and honours of his status in the University.
“‘Step’”—Robin tried out the word experimentally, and nodded. “Is that O.K. with you? This way, you see, we bypass the Mummy-Mother-or-Ma thing. And since I’ve already got a Mummy, a Mother, and a Ma …”
Imogen saw his point, and smiled; and from that moment a firm friendship sprung up between them which had withstood, somehow, eleven years of almost non-stop family rows.
For Ivor’s charm, so potent in the world at large, seemed to be brought up short as against a brick wall when it came to dealing with his own son. Impervious to blandishments, unperturbed by rage, Robin had seemed to take a delight, from his earliest years, in annoying his father to the limit, and then getting out from under just before the explosion. Someone else, of course, was left to take the brunt of it—usually Imogen.
“Robin, why do you do it?” Imogen had once protested—it was when Robin had chucked his Dip. Ed. in the middle of the second term, and had then turned up at home, carefree as springtime, to borrow money.
“It seems they won’t keep on my grant, now I’m not there,” he’d explained, aggrievedly; and then, while the house rocked to the repercussions of this remark, he’d slipped out to the garden shed to tinker with his bicycle. Imogen found him there, an hour later, eating Coxes from the apple-racks, and reading Private Eye.
“Why can’t you at least be more tactful?” she’d pleaded with him. “It’s as if you’re trying to madden him. Why do you do it?”
A reasonable question: but Robin had just given a little laugh.
“Like father, like son,” he’d said lightly, through a mouthful of apple: and Imogen had been left to conclude that he was joking. For what could possibly be found in common between Ivor’s sky-ride to glory in the University firmament and Robin’s aimless teetering from one failure to another on the lowest rungs of the academic ladder?
Anyway, that’s what he’d said; and then, while all hell still raged at home, he’d cycled quietly away to wheedle the required sum out of his sister Dot, and had vanished with it to Istanbul for months and months. By the time he reappeared, there was so much else that was new, and worse, for his father to be angry about, that the original misdemeanour quite faded from recollection.
This had always been the pattern: as Robin’s current tiresomeness escalated, so did the past tend to get forgiven. Or perhaps not so much forgiven as wearily obliterated: the day came, at last, when Imogen realised that the battle of father and son was over: Ivor no longer cared. After all, success was by now coming to him from so many directions that he hardly needed a successful son as well. And anyway, Imogen told herself, you can’t go on worrying for ever. By the time delinquent sons are nearing thirty, most parents have surely given up trying to be proud of them, and are merely thankful that they are still alive—if they are—and that all the things that almost happened to them, didn’t.
And now Ivor was dead: and here was Robin, smiling, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, his same old nineteen-year-old smile (or almost): and asking her, reproachfully, if she wasn’t pleased to see him?
“Is it some girl?” she asked him warily. “Or is it money? You do realise, don’t you, dear, that until we get Probate …”
“Step! You mercenary old monster! As if I’d mention the sordid subject of money ‘at a time like this’—as your precious Edith-next-door would put it! Honestly, Step, you must think I have a heart of stone! Right first time—I have. But all the same, it’s not money. Not this time. What I was wondering, Step dear, is whether it wouldn’t be a good idea, now that Dad’s popped it, for me to come back and live at home? What think you, Step? Good idea? Yes?”