The War Widow Read online

  So I took control in the only way I knew how and paved the way for an easy – and permanent – conclusion to this ridiculousness for both of us by wrapping the moment in yet more layers of politeness. I gave him a broad smile and said brightly, “Actually, I understand perfectly. No, really I do. Fame and fortune is all very well, but not when you want a bit of peace in which to get on with the day job?”

  I saw him nod. “Exactly,” he said. “Thank you.”

  There didn’t seem much to say after that. I thought he would be glad to have it so easily laid out that I understood and he would get the privacy he required but I found instead that my smile had made his brows furrow again. Apparently he’d read my withdrawal beneath its cheerful mask and he was puzzled by it. Quite simply, I couldn’t get away from him today without causing some upset first.

  Instinct made me slide hastily into a firm utterance of goodbye and then things went from bad to worse because he seemed determined to end things on a friendlier note after all and in the midst of the confusion of awkwardness and platitudes we ended with a swift step in to touch cheek to cheek.

  I don’t honestly know who initiated it. I thought he had but there was that briefest telltale hesitation from him as I automatically reciprocated that gave me time to realise that I really had got it wrong this time. Or perhaps I hadn’t. Perhaps he’d done it in that awful impulsive way people have of assuaging their conscience when they’re a little bit ashamed that you’ve guessed they really just want to be shot of you and end up accidentally lurching into warmth instead. Perhaps it was simply a reasonably appropriate way to mark the end of a social outing as new acquaintances might do.

  Whichever way it was, it didn’t exactly warrant the reaction I had. After all, I’d made this gesture all the time at home both in greeting and farewell with clients at the various events in the gallery. At the Cirencester gallery I mean. In the north, women simply shook hands like sensible creatures and saved themselves the trouble of getting it wrong. In Cirencester, this would have all just been an embarrassingly mishandled version of a familiar social norm. The feel of his touch to my arm, the automatic lift upwards to draw closer, that brief ordinary moment of confusion as one or other of us had to dictate which cheek was presented, even the accidental little intake of breath at the moment of contact and with it drawing in the faintest hint of the scent of his skin, followed by the oddly prolonged sense of suspense before one or other of us finally withdrew … It was all so familiar.

  In a way this was the problem. We might have done this before. This all told me that this was a man who was used to observing this kind of social etiquette too. And yet even this needn’t have really been a cause for alarm. After all, logically speaking, I already knew this. His accent was non-descript and could have originated from anywhere vaguely southern. His car was from Brighton. He had as much right to belong to that cultural tradition as I did.

  When I drew away with the beginning of embarrassment that must verge on laughter because it was funny how this latest bit of confusion really had crowned all the rest, I saw his face. His eyes lifted. He was embarrassed too but in a different way. He saw my shock. Instantly my mind was tripped into trying to match his dimly lit features to the pattern of some inconsistent memory. In its way, this was the same infuriating trick that daylight persisted in playing with visions of my husband. But if this was an echo of the past, it was a puzzling one. He wasn’t wearing a scowl to match the harsh demands of those men who stalked every shadow in my mind. He was looking like an attractive, capable man who had just seen his mask exposed and was calculating how best to explain the joke.

  And above it all, like a persistent tone playing a darker note that had for a while slipped by unnoticed, I discovered that his hand was still gripping my arm.

  Firmly so.

  I felt the moment that he registered the shift in my attention. I felt the tightening in his concentration too and the faintest echo of his heartbeat transmitting from his fingertips through the layers of my sleeve. His grip held me sternly on the spot before him. I could only stare, fascinated, as that mouth hardened. It slid on towards speech. As it twisted from there inexorably to frame a question, I knew that this was the point where it became a demand. It would be the same one I had experienced in that Lancaster shop doorway. And this time I would have to fight for my soul as well as my body.

  Adam’s voice said roughly, “What on earth have I said to make you look like that?”

  ---

  Oh. That most certainly was not the question I had been expecting.

  This one belonged to a man who was only entirely wounded by whatever he saw written on my face.

  Oh no.

  Whatever offence I had given him earlier, this crime was worse. Mortification rose far beyond the shame of repeatedly mishandling the consequences of a bad exit from a tearoom. That was humbling enough but regardless of what had come before and what must certainly come after, I couldn’t imagine anything would ever again be as crippling as this moment; this instant of finally having to accept that the police and the doctors and everyone were right. Reality was not a fixed mark for me. I truly could not rely on the accuracy of my own mind.

  This day had been exhausting. My voice was a taut rush. “You’ve done nothing.” I’d broken contact with his hand a moment before. Now I was blinking rapidly and backing away. “Nothing at all. I’m so sorry. I must get on. Goodbye.”

  And I left him standing there at the telephone box. I could feel him staring after me all the way to the corner by the pier.

  Chapter 5

  It wouldn’t exactly be surprising if I found it distressing to discover this question mark hanging over my sanity. But actually, I did still have my wits enough to know that it wouldn’t be unusual for anyone in my circumstances to be reacting a little nervously, particularly coming as it did after a day spent braced to meet the terrors of my first tentative steps towards uncovering Rhys’s last actions only to discover nothing but my personal grief. And in truth, this wasn’t why I was upset.

  I was distressed because I’d wounded an innocent man and there was in my history a very small, very insignificant part of me that nursed an insecurity far older than abrupt encounters with moving buses. It was a part that had instead everything to do with that old lack of faith in my value to the world.

  Sometimes I feel that the belief I am generally found to be harmless is my most durable merit. Only today I hadn’t been harmless at all. I’d taken what ought to have been a pleasantly peaceful afternoon for a fellow guest and ruined his day with my own irrational anxieties. The experience humbled me, and it brought me face to face with an uglier aspect of myself. And now I was ruining his evening too.

  This was because it became very swiftly became clear to me almost as soon as I entered the lounge after dinner that our resident famous person had completely wasted his time asking me to keep our shared journey a secret. The other guests already knew. I’d seen Jim’s smirk. They knew it hadn’t merely been a kindly passerby who had taken pity on me when I’d missed the last train. And what’s more, the fact that this information had been deliberately omitted from Adam’s own description of his day wasn’t simply taken as a reflection on me and left to rest at that. They were delighted to have the excuse to tease him about it.

  I was reading the same paragraph for the fifth time when I overheard Mrs Alderton drawing Adam out from behind his newspaper long enough to confirm that he had driven to Devil’s Bridge today and that yes indeed he still had fuel for his car. Then Mary said something about it being a long way to go and that good company might have made all the difference. I don’t think she was really making a jibe at me, at least not completely; I imagine she was merely hinting that Adam should invite her and her sister along with him next time but her challenging manner of asking was more than a little intimidating. Her bold way of talking belonged to a woman who was in the habit of confronting what she wanted. Since her recent past must have been not entirely dissimilar to m
ine and by that I mean it must have featured war, I thought she was, if it wasn’t unkind to say it, the sort of woman for whom the war had meant liberty, frivolity and adventure; and she hadn’t yet decided whether peace was going to rank on the whole as an improvement.

  I already knew what peace meant for her older and colder sister, Mrs Alderton. It meant a tearing race to snare Mary a wealthy husband. And at present that meant steering the room away from a discussion on Jim’s experiences on manoeuvres in Burma and back onto the subject of Devil’s Bridge with delicious details of the site’s awful heights.

  She did it because she thought Adam might join in. Instead she had Jim’s account of nauseating plunges, relentlessly roaring water and crushing swoops onto the rocks. Now he was sharing the spectacle of the first viewpoint that looked out at the falls beneath the three bridges. Mrs Alderton was disappointed because while Adam clearly ranked as a desirable conversational partner, Jim Bristol, only a lowly civil servant and an infantryman before that, very definitely did not.

  I distracted myself from it all by talking to the little boy who was kicking the leg of the chair beside me. He was tired and wishing he hadn’t been lured in here by the Miss Bartlemans since they were now being old and boring. His mother seemed to be desperately praying that no one would say anything about certain guests being better fitted for boarding houses before she managed to get him away to bed. They were the perfect distraction for me. I was just in the throes of discovering young Samuel was a fellow artist and quietly attempting to interest him, rather unsuccessfully I might add, in the gift of a few bits and pieces I kept at the back of my sketchbook when I noticed that Jim was watching me.

  He watched me slip the sketchbook back into my bag and then he very deliberately turned back to Mary and began revisiting every dip, every plunge of the crashing waters in vivid, untamed detail. It made my head spin but not because of his passion for the waterfalls. It was because it felt horribly like Jim was punishing me for the lie over the sketchbook; the one where I’d told him that I didn’t have it with me today. It felt like he blamed me for leaving him on the train and that he must have enjoyed betraying this second lie to these two woman because he knew what they would do with it. It felt like he must know too what the endless revisits to the scene of that awful drop would mean to me so was describing them deliberately.

  My distress came also from fearing that I was being unkind in my present judgements about him and he was as blameless here as the last man had been.

  It was then that Adam abruptly decided to speak. He dropped his newspaper to say loudly, “Yes Mary, it was a long way to go by car.”

  His interjection was rough. It burst onto the room like it was wrenched out of him against his better judgement as his resistance was finally eroded by their incessant probing on the subject of that fated decision to allow me along on his drive. The truth is it actually came when he might have just as easily remained silent. They weren’t talking about him any more. They had been distracted by a longer, more delightfully detailed account from Jim of the claustrophobic depths of the gorge and the weight of the falling water and the branches and debris being soundly shattered in the roaring maelstrom at the base.

  Then Adam added this rather helplessly, “And indeed you were right about the other bit too.”

  He meant the part about good company being a useful addition.

  I knew I deserved it, but somehow I’d never have expected this man to be intentionally cruel.

  I stayed just a few seconds more, long enough to hear the wireless silence everyone with a report on the Royal Wedding and to observe the solemn toast to the newlyweds as instigated by the Miss Bartlemans, and then I retreated to my room.

  The only truly disconcerting element that followed me from the lounge was that the dignity of my quiet exit didn’t stop me from accidentally leaving my borrowed library book behind as I hurried away.

  ---

  The loss of Jane Eyre was the real punishment for my mistakes that day. I felt it particularly at three o’clock in the morning when I gave up on sleep just as I had the night before and the night before that. It was proof of why I ought to have been grateful to Adam for his interjection. No one here can have known – with the exception perhaps of Jim Bristol – about Rhys’s fall from that bridge. They didn’t know that every fresh mention of those branches churning in the depths hurt my mind and flooded it with visions of my husband’s broken limbs doing precisely the same thing. They wouldn’t know that I would have traded almost anything not to be driven from the lounge to my room with that image in my head. It had been hard enough getting to sleep of late without the stresses of that place stalking me in my dreams.

  As it was, I ended up climbing out of bed to wrap a housecoat over my unnecessarily elegant nightdress for a prowl about the darkened corridors back down to the lounge. The nightdress was an unhelpfully extravagant birthday present from my mother designed to reawaken my femininity after the divorce – thoughtful, generous and, in that way only mothers can achieve, it had the dispiriting effect of making me feel like I must routinely look like a shapeless sack where I had thought myself quietly sophisticated.

  The lounge opened off the marble-clad entrance hall. It was an ornate box with no windows that was tucked in the space between the wide sweep of the staircase, the long range of the kitchens at the back and the dining room that overlooked the seafront. It had a deep carpet and heavy plasterwork framing the ceiling and a very grand arch that let patrons through to the dining room. The pictures on the wall harked back to the time when the educated classes were getting particularly excited about imaginary classical ruins. The furniture was equally antiquated and smelled faintly of stale potpourri. In the dim light cast from the reception desk everything was a grey shapeless clutter, which unfortunately didn’t include my book.

  A burst of tired frustration hit me hard then. It served me right, I thought viciously, for presuming that the century since its publication would protect Jane Eyre from the same interest excited by the work of a Mr A. E. Woolfe. That book, I could see, was lying abandoned on a footstool where I suspected it would remain until the next time it was required for the ongoing campaign to impress the author. I was tempted to take it, but realised that as well as being tantamount to open warfare with Mary, the act would be bound to give the other guests the delight of deciding that I too was vying for his attention. So instead I took the well-thumbed remains of a newspaper and climbed the darkened stairs again.

  It was when I put the key in the lock that I happened to notice Jane Eyre lying innocently outside my door. It was propped against the doorframe where some kind soul had placed it and I had simply missed it before.

  At least that was what I realised about five ludicrous minutes later, once I’d finished worrying that someone was playing tricks on me and had scoured the shadowy doorways for their presence.

  I read for a while, blinking through the eternal sparring of its heroine with her will, her hardship and indeed her master, wondering whether a book filled with heartache and loneliness was really the right kind of reading matter for someone on the brink. But then, lulled by its comfortingly familiar tones, I actually managed to doze a little and when I stepped out of my room for an early breakfast, I was surprisingly rested. It was a good job too because this morning promised to be just as difficult as the last; although at least it wasn’t expected to involve yet another cramped train ride.

  “Good morning.”

  Adam had stepped out of a room two removed from mine. He was dressed in the same style as the day before; a pair of tough-looking trousers that had probably been very expensive once and a warm jumper that on any other man might have been purposefully chosen to enhance the colour of his eyes. Clearly today was expected to involve more walking.

  “Morning,” I returned formally and shrugged off the impulse that made me think to wait while he set his key to its lock.

  But today it seemed he thought I should because I heard a short mention of
my name as he stepped quickly down the carpeted corridor to join me and then a brief uneasy quirk at the corner of his mouth followed by: “I think you must have—”

  The revelation of what I must have done now was interrupted by the unusually disorderly arrival of Mrs Alderton and her sister as they clattered down the stairs from the upper floor. Judging by the younger woman’s urgent hushing movement with her hands and the few words that drifted down the length of the corridor, we’d met them at the end of a fierce lecture. Mrs Alderton only seemed to be satisfied by Mary pursuing us down the stairs, across the foyer and flinging herself down into the spare seat at the breakfast table that Adam was claiming. Once there, she promptly helped herself to a portion of his paper. I saw him shrug and take his seat. Then he quietly offered to exchange a different part of the paper for the piece she’d taken, which had consisted of dry numbers from the stock exchange, and it made her smile.

  My breakfast became isolation then, wonderful and tranquil isolation. No one cared about me. Whatever had been building in the undercurrents in last night’s conversation appeared to have been miraculously relegated to the status of old news today. No one was going to be required to drive me anywhere and none of the guests had any cause to speak to me, alarm me or otherwise disturb my peace when I then took my walk through town. I was free to think only of the rhythm of my footsteps and how they had carried me many times before to this familiar secluded street.

  Chapter 6

  The houses in this part of town were set in steep terraces that must have originally sheltered the town’s shipwrights. My sharp rap on the metal door knocker was lost in the musical jingling as boats and their yards shivered in the light breeze at the nearby harbour. Those two men and their demands might never have existed. The only footsteps I heard were the muffled ones that approached in the passage behind the blue front door.