The War Widow Read online

  They belonged to the aproned figure of Sue Williams. My ex-mother-in-law.

  Rhys’s mother was pretty and plump in the manner of the quintessential housewife in an advert for baking powder and she stared at me from an armchair that was well-hung with doilies. It was placed in the corner of a small room made dark by heavy burgundy wallpaper and thick curtains that might have easily been blackout curtains left over from the war. I suppose she must have been in her late-sixties by now. She looked younger. “Well,” she said finally. “It’s a long time since I last set eyes on you.”

  “It is,” I said and settled on the settee, wondering if the stuffy shadows replayed the old scenes as vividly for her as they did for me. It took bravery of many different sorts to come here. “It is. How are you?” Then I felt like an utter fool. How exactly should she be, given what had happened.

  “Well enough,” she said, and reached for a half-drunk cup of tea. It seemed she did recall those old scenes.

  I smiled one of those sympathetic smiles that are nothing to do with happiness and made some stilted offerings of regret, which were received graciously but coolly, and tried to remember what I had come here for. I was glad at least that her husband was not present. That man was like a cumbersome caricature of his son; the same forceful personality and strong features, but without the brightness of mind which marked his son. Had marked his son.

  Seeing her like this abruptly brought it home to me. If there had been any lingering doubts about whether or not he had really died that day, they couldn’t survive this visit. Rhys would never have let her suffer like this. It came as a violent little shock somehow. Perhaps I really had never quite accepted it before now.

  Her softly accented voice covered my stumbling halt. “So, you’re here to read the condolence messages?” She swept a collection of cards off a gloomy dresser and passed them to me without leaving time to demur. I had to carry them to the small shaded window to make them out. They were a varied bunch, some inclined towards mourning and some treading a fine line nearer disbelief. All expressed sympathy and care to the parents of a lost man and they did not remotely make for easy reading.

  One in particular caught in my hand. It was written in elegant curls and it read; ‘We each want to make our mark, to stand out a little from the rest and Rhys did just that. He always will. I will miss him.’ and an indecipherable scrawl that I knew must read ‘Gregory Scott’.

  “What is it?”

  I turned in the light from the window to find Mrs Williams staring at me. “Oh, Sue,” I said, shaken into a guilty realisation of what this visit must mean for her. “Gregory called me the day after I heard the news. He wondered if I would help him go through the prints Rhys had kept for him from that project they did together but I said I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”

  I stopped short when I registered the hurt that had passed over his mother’s face. Gregory was one of Rhys’s oldest patrons. When he, Rhys and I had first been introduced I had still been a young painter studying classical lighting techniques under the tutelage of my long-suffering uncle at the old man’s gallery in Cirencester. That had been twelve years ago. Six months after that, Gregory had been signing his name as the witness on my marriage certificate. And a year after that, Gregory had performed the next in a long line of introductions by bringing a famous critic to the launch of Rhys’s one-man show. This critic had promptly dubbed Rhys the Most Promising Photographer to Emerge from the Depths of Wales and I might add that Rhys had mildly resented this title. He hadn’t particularly liked being considered only promising.

  “Oh, Sue,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry. I’m letting you think the unforgivable.” I moved back to my seat before adding firmly, “Gregory didn’t mean that I should march over the gallery threshold as if I’d never left. He wasn’t thinking about retrieving his old sporting photographs; he was thinking that we should do our utmost to honour the work that Rhys had done with him. Whatever else happened between Rhys and me, however our marriage ended, I could never forget the sheer beauty of his talent and the important part that Gregory played in it.”

  This determined eulogy did far more to smooth the waters than any wild outpourings of emotion could. Her demeanour transformed and she showed the bright cheerfulness of the truly bereaved. “I know. And you’re right; Gregory was the friend Rhys needed. I remember the rows when Rhys first told his father he was going to pursue photography rather than engineering.”

  I also remembered the other rows, like the one in this house that last summer before Rhys left us all for the war and the other one in our Cirencester home when he came back again. Looking back now, it amazes me that I had let his creative impulses dictate my life for so long. If I was looking for proof my judgement was poor, this was it. Not, it must be said, that I mean to imply that I call his going off to war one of his impulses.

  His decision to lend his considerable skills to the Army Film and Photographic Unit was a raw opportunity to test his talent against the grittiest subject matter of all. The war was the muse to end all muses, and even I can admit that he had never lacked the kind of resolve a person must need to face the long years of hard work and utter bravery of sustained conflict. It could have changed him like many other men, but it didn’t. When he came back he only brought with him a new muse, a revitalised urge to create and the expectation that his wife would once again give way to the weight of his point of view and compromise as she always had; which really meant redrawing every fresh line, reforming every fragile emotional boundary that previously had been the last one I’d thought would never be crossed.

  The surprise I think was for him, because he came home to a wife who understood herself a little more clearly. The war for me had come as a glorious respite. The hardships and terrors of bombing were nothing. War gave me the solitude I needed to rediscover a sense of balance and to break the old patterns so that by the time Rhys came back again I was a little more capable of perceiving where I was right and a little less wedded to the idea of sacrificing everything for the sake of his art.

  Or perhaps I was still shackled. He came back as demanding as ever. I won my little victory by divorcing him. But he got to stay in our beautiful home while I scuttled meekly away to the north of England and my parents like the dreary little cast off I’d always played. And yet, feeble as it might sound, it had seemed right at the time. Even before the war I must have had opinions. After all, our rows were always pretty heated affairs. But this wasn’t an argument I would have even attempted to win, for my own sake rather than his. Anything else would have felt painfully like revenge.

  “He left a note, you know,” his mother suddenly announced.

  Before the divorce she had liked me well enough I think – though without children, what was the point of me? – but Sue Williams was a woman who was fiercely committed to the idea that it was a woman’s duty to maintain the appearance of happiness even when it was absent. I think I’d offended her more than anyone by suddenly deciding to set my own desires above the luxury of continuing to care for her flawless, incomparable son.

  Today the acrimony of my sudden departure was like a shadow that faded in and out of her manner as she wavered, quite reasonably, between despising me for being the woman who had walked away from her son, and treating me as the only other woman who had known him intimately enough to appreciate the full horror of his loss. Her lightness of tone now was so far along on the scale of control that it practically met devastation coming the other way. She told me, “He left a note but the police have it so you can’t see it. He just said sorry. No explanation or anything. Just sorry.”

  Behind it all, I think her voice cracked and I nearly put my hand out to her but she raced on. Her eyes were held wide open and they glittered in the dim light as she rushed into saying, “He only visited us a few weeks before, and he seemed fine, absolutely fine. He’d just opened an exhibition in the gallery so he was tired of course but nothing that …” Her voice suddenly deepened. “Nothing that could impl
y he was thinking of—” Devastation really did show itself this time.

  It was beginning to tell on me too. Rhys belonged to that set of artistic temperaments that verge upon genius. He had been prone to bleak periods of self-doubt and foul moods, and the run-up to a new exhibition had always been our most fraught time. But stubborn, beautiful, magnetic, inspiring and exacting though he was, no one could ever pretend that the stress of a new exhibition would have been sufficient to drive him to this lonely end.

  Instead, this dark heavy room was filled with the echoes of his presence. His personality lingered in the gramophone in the corner and in the terrible prints his mother kept on the wall in a kind of merry defiance of his lectures on taste. He lurked in the desk where I knew she had written her regular fortnightly letters to tell him the news.

  I asked, “In this last visit did he say anything about any kind of harassment or some sort of trouble or anything? Anything at all? I mean, are you really sure that this note meant that he was planning to …?” I trailed off helplessly, not at all sure I could justify this crime of interrogating a recently bereaved mother and not even sure I wanted to ask any more. In the midst of all the real grief for the loss of his life, it felt intensely selfish to have come here for the sake of worrying about the difficulties of quietly going on living mine.

  Her reply was a flat croak. “You mean to ask if anyone was pressurising him? No. One of the people who saw him there was Mrs Thomas from next-door’s sister’s girl. She was out for dinner with her new husband. She actually called in barely minutes after the police came knocking on my door. I told her she was a fool and a liar. She told me she wished she was. He was … alone.”

  The way she said the word alone made the shadows of that desolate bridge in the night time loom now from the corners of this gloomy room. Her son’s isolation in his last moments was her own loneliness now.

  Then she beat the shadows back with a stern little shake of her head. She was a stronger woman than I. “He said nothing about any trouble. Nothing. He talked about his future projects and the latest one which was a new little collaboration with a newspaperman who was proving a touch unreliable but nothing of any note. The police asked about shell shock, and at the time I didn’t really know how to say for certain it wasn’t, but I’m sure now he never gave me any sign.” She paused and looked uncertainly at me; focussing on me, I think, for the first time. Her voice was suddenly a little firmer, a little harder. “He did mention you at one point, but I don’t think it was anything important.”

  My heart began to beat.

  There was another pause and I began to worry that I would have to decide whether to prompt her or to let it pass but then when she spoke I realised that her hesitation had only been because she was carefully editing his phrasing. I was sure Rhys would not have put it so politely. “He said you were going to try to take the gallery from him.”

  Sue Williams gave a brief pursing smile at my exclamation. “You’re in Lancashire for now aren’t you? Your sister told him – she’s still in his neighbourhood isn’t she? – that you’d started dabbling again. Perhaps Rhys thought you might want to come back. I don’t know. He wasn’t very clear about it. But I told him that you wouldn’t; you couldn’t. Not that you mightn’t have the right but I was sure even you wouldn’t be so cruel as to take the rug out from under his feet, not when he had such talent.”

  I was thinking; dabbling?

  My voice was perfectly measured. “I don’t want to go back there; I thought you knew that. I’m sure he knew that. Gregory certainly did. He wasn’t remotely surprised when I refused after he called the other day. So I can’t imagine what Rhys thought could possibly have changed my mind.”

  Her odd little pursing smile came and went again. I’d actually surprised her. Rightly or wrongly, she had expected me to be quietly bewildered by Rhys’s doubts. Now I was decisive and clear. The funny thing was that Sue gave the distinct impression that she approved of the change. She even made me wonder if she might have liked me better had I been like this in the days of my marriage.

  It made me think if this was a new me I must be getting things very wrong indeed.

  Or perhaps this was just the old patterns repeating themselves. I hadn’t broken them as much as I had thought. These people had always made me feel terribly guilty. They’d always made every desire of mine feel somehow like a selfish whim; even in the days when I’d been an optimistic young thing and the desire had been to love their son.

  Now I was feeling the shame of coming here and burdening this woman with my questions when I ought to have been displaying the grief she was looking for in the ex-wife. I felt guilty for forcing her to acknowledge I was the survivor when Rhys had died. I felt guilty for thinking she was the sort of person that would think like that when she and her husband were probably perfectly decent and it was only my own petty resentments that made me so inadequate here.

  I saw her glance at the clock. It made me realise I should leave before her husband came home. I shouldn’t have come here, knowing what I was facing. I should never have imagined that I could withstand this encounter with the past.

  Of course, if I hadn’t been trying to deal with an appalling threat, I would never have been desperate enough to have come here at all.

  Very carefully, I rose to my feet and stepped down the passage. The door opened. I would have to step outside but first I concentrated specifically on the selfish whim of wishing not to be persecuted in my ex-husband’s name. I made her squint against the unaccustomed light. “Just one more thing, if I may? Have you had any unexpected visitors? Anyone else asking questions?” I knew the answer before she even spoke. There never were going to be any witnesses to confirm my story.

  There was a pause, and then she added with a terrible blandness; “If they find his body, I’ll let you know. For the funeral.”

  That was supposed to be her final word. It had every right to be her final word. But as she prepared to shut the door, I paused and turned back, asking entirely on an afterthought:

  “Was there a film in his camera? The one they found in the riverbed, I mean?”

  Her expression blanked and for a moment I thought she was going to close the door before she conceded, “Yes. I think so. We were shown some pictures at one point so I suppose there must have been; yes. The police still have it.” Then her face wrinkled and I realised with a sudden pang that I thoroughly deserved to feel guilty this time because I’d made her cry. She added, “I can’t bear the thought of his beloved things lying in a storeroom somewhere. I wish you hadn’t reminded me. I suppose I could ask for them back but I just can’t bear that either. I wish you hadn’t reminded me.”

  I put out my hand to her then. I gave her fingers a little squeeze. I was sorry. I really was sorry. For all of it.

  ---

  I’d been sustained until now by the belief that I was pursuing something that might yield my escape. Now I’d paid this visit and discovered nothing except guilt and the very bitter truth that after this I had absolutely no purpose at all. If I wasn’t careful, I’d find myself forming a new plan, any plan, even to the extent of sneaking off into that impenetrable gorge and personally scouring beneath every rock within about four miles for Rhys’s body; just for the sake of doing something, anything rather than giving up.

  I was hurrying once more down that increasingly familiar street that led to the pier and the turn to the hotel. It was colder here. The buildings at the left hand side were extraordinary. They belonged to the university and were a long line of insanely tall towers and halls that had all the magic and style of a misplaced Arthurian castle. They cast a long shadow but it wasn’t this that made me cold.

  It was because there on the far side of the road, under the calm gaze of the towering university buildings, stood a black Morris Eight.

  I’m not even sure which was worse; the fact that the car was there at all, or the knowledge that I had been wandering about all morning with barely a thought for where i
ts owners were. I glowered at it for a moment, disbelieving; trying to convince myself that it wasn’t just a coincidence; this wasn’t another needless panic about a perfectly common breed of car. I didn’t need to debate with myself for long. Even with the risk of further embarrassment, the case for inaction wasn’t one I was going to win.

  I did at least pause long enough to take the precaution of scanning the street in case someone should be watching or even worse there was some sign of the owners, innocent or otherwise. About a dozen more swift cautious glances at the street, the buildings and behind me – always behind me – as I crossed the road told me that no one was around. No one was watching. There was no one in the car either. I made sure of that. The whole place was so still, the only sound of movement was of the distant wash of the tide on shingle.

  The black car stood there trying to look innocent. I glared at it. It felt like an extension of the meeting with Rhys’s mother. Faintly unreal, like it was manipulating my emotions purely for the purpose of challenging my resolve. The difficulty began with the fact that I had no memory of the licence plate, not even of one digit. Somehow I’d thought the image of it would pop up in my mind as clear as day the moment I needed it. The letters on this vehicle’s plate proved that it had not been registered in Gloucestershire, but this taught me nothing when I realised any old car might well have moved home many times since its original registration. I cupped my hand to the glass and peered inside, trying to see if there was any sign of the owner’s identity. I believe I was expecting to find a photograph of me or something else profoundly obvious but there was nothing of the sort, of course.

  A newspaper lay curling on the back seat but bar it being a tattered edition of yesterday’s local newspaper, it wasn’t conclusive evidence of anything. A tin of sweets had fallen to the floor but I wasn’t remotely confident that the memory had been accompanied by a particularly strong scent of liquorice. I moved round to the other side and cupped my hand again.