The Habit of Widowhood Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Cupid’s Dart

  The Habit of Widowhood

  Post Mortem

  Soldier, from the Wars Returning

  My Son, My Son

  The Stuff of Nightmares

  Balmorality

  Living with Jimmy

  If Looks Could Kill

  Happy Christmas

  Reader, I Strangled Him

  The Gentleman in the Lake

  Dog Television

  The Women at the Funeral

  Perfect Honeymoon

  Called to Judgment

  More Final Than Divorce

  INTRODUCTION

  It is difficult to imagine today the excited anticipation with which the turn-of-the-century reader awaited the next exploit of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand magazine or (more, because a criminal hero was rather shocking) the next felonious enterprise of Raffles and Bunny. Nowadays, outside of the wonderful Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the crime short story gets published only occasionally in newspaper supplements and glossy monthlies. The formula of the character or the duo who run through a series of adventures or feats of detection is used by hardly anyone—though what a good formula it is!

  And what opportunities the short story offers to the writer who is willing to learn to operate within its disciplines. It is, first of all, a medium in which every word has to be made to tell: a paragraph in a short story equals, sweat-wise, three or four pages in a straightforward crime novel. Economy is the watchword, and it involves weighting every word so that it will have maximum impact or carry the greatest number of possible implications. It is the opposite of the word-processing writer’s disease: burbling on about nothing very much because it’s so easy.

  Lacking the wider canvas of the full-length crime novel—especially nowadays, when “full-length” is very long indeed—the short story is closer to a snapshot than to a movie. The significant moment is explored in depth, the single relationship or predicament is illumined, the crisis highlighted that will lead to violence. Because the crime short story these days is seldom a whodunit, the writer can go in depth into sad or horrible lives without fear that he is “giving away” a solution. And, perhaps above all, he can change tone from the ironic to the terrifying, with a hundred nice gradations in between, and he can choose the kind of story he wants to write, from the humorous send-up to the serious exploration of the criminal mind. Once you have accustomed yourself to the tiny canvas the number of different effects you can achieve with the small brush is amazing.

  Tastes change. The sort of people who clamored for the latest Holmes story had different needs and lifestyles from the people a generation or two earlier who clamored for the latest number of a Dickens novel. Perhaps the people who get on the Underground or subway and open up their Jeffrey Archer or Barbara Taylor Bradford at the page they’d got to when they reached their destination the day before will someday come to realize the greater variety of the short story, the wide range of stimuli it can encompass, the number of worlds it can open up. Let’s hope so.

  R. B.

  CUPID’S DART

  I smile sometimes when I read articles in the newspapers about arranged marriages in the Asian community. I read a lot now—well, I suppose I always did, but I read different things now: newspapers, magazines, things that tell me what life is like, what goes on in the world. So when I read about arranged marriages I smile, because the writers always seem so complacent: this is a strange, foreign custom, they seem to be saying, which is quite alien to our native, white tradition. Yet my marriage was arranged as surely as any Moslem girl’s, and I went into it with as little knowledge of my husband-to-be.

  Oh, I had seen him before. I gather from the articles that in some, extreme cases, the first a Moslem bride sees of the man is at the ceremony. In my case Mr. Hatfield had been to tea. I remember my mother telling me of this in advance: “We’ve invited Mr. Hatfield, from church, to come to tea.” I remember feeling vaguely bewildered as to what inviting someone to tea entailed. Was it a verb or a noun, how was it spelt? I was eighteen at the time.

  I sometimes wonder how it came about that I slipped so entirely through what the newspapers call “the welfare net.” And it wasn’t simply the social workers who were unaware of my existence: school inspectors, the local government bureaucracy, the national bureaucracy, all—it emerged later—were quite unaware that at 41 Wilton Grange Avenue there was living not only Mr. and Mrs. William Derbyshire, but also a daughter, Jessica. Certainly no neighbor ever felt worried enough about me to contact the authorities, but then, this was London, where neighbors keep themselves to themselves. And what was there to be worried about?

  I think the reason for my nonappearance on registers and lists, voting rolls and official records, was partly my parents’ reluctance that I should, partly the circumstances of my birth. I was born on the island of Madagascar, where my father (who was over forty at the time of my birth, as was my mother) held some sort of official diplomatic post—I think he was British Vice-Consul or something of the kind. He was not an effectual man, not one likely to be a success in any job requiring decision-making or organizational skills. I think he disliked the place, and that the sun got to him (“Sit in the shade, dear, it’s much safer,” my mother always used to say to me on summer days). Anyway, it seems he became slightly odd, and was retired with a pension in 1969, when I was eighteen months old. So they returned home by cargo ship, and bought a house in Wilton Grange Avenue, and if they never consciously decided to keep my existence a secret, and I really don’t think they did, then they certainly never advertised it to officialdom either.

  I think coming home to Britain at the height of the permissive revolution (something I knew nothing about at the time, of course, though I’ve read a great deal about it recently) strengthened the feelings they already had about the world. Here was a strange land of miniskirts and pot, of flagrantly explicit pop lyrics and men saying “fuck” on television. (It is a word I cannot say, only write, even now.) I think they saw Britain from the start as a place of corruption. This went hand in hand with various other oddities, or what would have seemed like oddities to people at the time: a drab, evangelical religion, a preference for homeopathic medicine (I was on no doctor’s register throughout my childhood), a refusal to own a television or take a newspaper. Not criminal, any of these things, or even outrageously odd—but they added up to a rejection of the world around them. So did their failure to send me to any kind of school, or to procure me any sort of companionship of children of my own age. There was them and me, in the house, alone.

  I was, as they used to say about genteel girls long ago, “educated privately at home.” They must have taught me to read, and to add up and subtract. Then they just let me loose on the faded, musty collection of books that was dotted around the house: Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, Five Go Adventuring Again. There were elementary books about flowers and plants, religious books with pictures of a brown-bearded Christ, there was a globe, and a wall poster of the monarchs of England from 1066 to George V (it had been printed, of course, in their childhood). If I showed any curiosity about anything they answered my questions. If the question was historical, their answers would have the flavor of a late-Victorian history book: Queen Elizabeth rallying the troops at Tilbury, the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eto
n—that kind of thing. If my questions were geographical, their answers would be flavored by a sort of controlled distaste for foreign countries that could not really be called chauvinism, since they exhibited the same sort of controlled distaste for Britain and the British.

  So that was my childhood. We had a wireless, and sometimes we listened to it—the midmorning story, or Your Hundred Best Tunes. At moments of national crisis (elections, the Falklands war) we listened to the news, though I never remember my parents commenting on it afterwards. In the evenings we sometimes played draughts, or did an old jigsaw puzzle. In the garden, if it was fine, I might do some weeding or planting, or make friends with the neighbors’ cat if I was shielded by a bush. We had no animal, because my father thought them inherently filthy and a source of disease: he got angry when a dog peed against our front gatepost, and the other thing he referred to as “feces” with an expression of distaste so strong as to be obsessional.

  It was, I recognize now, an extremely boring childhood. I did not see it like that at the time, because I had been conditioned to boredom from my earliest years. If I read in an Enid Blyton story about children who got together and had fun and adventures, I knew that this would not happen to me and accepted the fact. I was different, and I had Mummy and Daddy, who protected me from harm and kissed me on my birthday.

  When I left the house it was to go to church. Quite early in my childhood my parents began to go to the Congregation of the Divine Elect. This was a tiny group, meeting in what was not much more than a stone-dashed hut, which followed its own doctrines and made its own disciplines. It was nearly two miles away, and as we had no car and my parents disliked using public transport, we walked there on Sunday mornings, me in one of my much-washed print dresses, and when it was over we walked back again, through the streets of South London. I don’t remember ever being told to keep my eyes on the pavement as I walked, but my parents did and so I did. But I did see out of the corners of my eyes hints of the world: dirty children playing and laughing, newspaper hoardings shrieking sensational stories I could barely understand, black people, people who took off their clothes in the summer sun, young people holding hands. They remained hints only, for on the whole I refrained from asking questions. I was not an incurious child, but I had learnt that my curiosity was never really satisfied by my parents.

  I cannot say what the Congregation of the Divine Elect believed in. To their credit they did not believe that they were the divine elect, merely by the fact of their making their way to that ugly little box in the side street in Croydon. Nevertheless they were extremely interested in probing who were the elect, for, like most nonconformist sects, they did not regard it as presumptuous to scan the ways of God, and many of them over the years convinced themselves that they had got to know his likes and dislikes quite well. There was no regular minister, and a different member of the Congregation led the meeting (they preferred not to call it a “service”) each week, interrupted by anyone who felt called upon to bear witness or testify—usually to some example of God’s goodness to him, or punishment of him, or some revelation personally vouchsafed during the past week. We had just one hymn, from a meager, roneoed collection, and we went our ways soberly at the end. I can’t say it meant much to me, but it made a change.

  And so the years passed. I began reading different books—Kidnapped, Berry and Co., Oliver Twist. And as well as reading, I began to like music. I was allowed to listen to concerts on the wireless, though I think my parents got little pleasure from them themselves, and it was never suggested that I might learn an instrument. My body grew and there were strange changes in it which frightened me at first. But my mother merely said, shortly and dryly: “It’s natural. It always happens.” So I suppose I stopped being afraid.

  I reached eighteen without being aware that there was anything special about being eighteen. If any coming-of-age was celebrated in any of the books in the house, it would have been a twenty-first. So I became legally adult and eligible to vote (except that I was on no electoral rolls) without anything being said about it. But my parents (who were now old, even I could see that) registered that time was passing. It was about three weeks after my birthday that my mother said, apparently casually:

  “We’ve invited Mr. Hatfield, from church, to come to tea on Friday.”

  At the time I merely nodded, being uncertain, as I said, of what coming to tea implied, and not being sure either which of the Congregation’s members Mr. Hatfield was. In the course of Friday I discovered what having someone to tea implied, for my mother’s preparations, though modest, were undoubtedly special. She bought a small brown and a small white loaf, cut them more thinly than usual, and spread some with something called Sandwich Spread, some with salmon and shrimp paste, and some with an egg mayonnaise which she had concocted herself. She also brought out a jam sponge which had been bought at the local supermarket (I had never been myself to a supermarket, but my mother or my father always did the weekly shop there, I think because they liked the anonymity). This sponge she cut up early on, so that the edges of the slice I had at tea were already slightly crisp. All these preparations were done rather clumsily, as befitted a ceremonial meal that was thirty or forty years out of date. Everything was already set out, waiting only a fresh brew of tea, when Mr. Hatfield arrived.

  He was a man in his fifties whom I had seen my parents exchanging the occasional word with after the Sunday meeting. He was stout, decidedly so, but he seemed well-meaning, and had a little goatee beard. The Congregation disapproved of display in dress (it was easier to say what the Congregation disapproved of than to say what they believed in), but for this tea Mr. Hatfield was besuited, undoubtedly tidy and spruce, and even sported a white carnation in his buttonhole.

  Oddly enough what I remember about that occasion was our tea service, which I sat looking at much of the time. I compared this tea with great social occasions in books, and I saw that our tea service wasn’t up to par: each cup and saucer suffered from small chips or cracks, and the colored pattern was dingy; only the slops basin, hardly ever used, had any freshness.

  Mr. Hatfield talked mostly to my parents, and even with them things were not easy. My mother and father had few topics of conversation because they had few interests. Eventually when they got on to homeopathy things went more easily, my father having some expertise in that field. Occasionally Mr. Hatfield would address a remark to me.

  “I hear you’re fond of music.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I have a very old record player, but I’ve not acquired a great record collection, I’m afraid.”

  I nodded, not seeing the relevance of this. I wondered what time a coming to tea ended, because there was something I wanted to hear on the wireless that evening.

  In another interval in the conversation he said:

  “Do you enjoy cooking?”

  That puzzled me rather. I didn’t see how one could enjoy cooking, which in our household meant the provision of meals. However, I said, “Yes, I do quite enjoy cooking,” in my clear, old-fashioned way, and that seemed to satisfy him.

  He went at six, saying he had to attend a meeting of the Elders of the Congregation. I was pleased, because I wanted to listen to Lucia di Lammermoor, relayed from Covent Garden. I had very little idea what seeing an opera would be like, but I loved hearing them. I now knew what having someone to tea meant, and I put Mr. Hatfield from my mind.

  Until, that is, five or six days later, when my mother came into the sitting room, where I was reading in the light of a rather dismal day.

  “Jessica, your father and I have been giving a lot of thought to what is to happen to you after we are gone.”

  I knew that “gone” meant “dead” in my mother’s language, and she rather frightened me.

  “Can’t I go on living here?”

  “We don’t see how. Your father’s pension dies with us. You see, we have . . . we have had an offer of marriage for you—from Mr. Hatfield, at church.”

&nbs
p; I knew then and there that this was something that they had arranged themselves. I also knew that, in their way, their motives were well-meaning. I sat quiet for some moments, grateful for my book to look at.

  “Marriage?” I said at last. “I don’t really understand what that means.”

  “It means you would live with him as man and wife. Like Daddy and me.” She added rather awkwardly: “Mr. Hatfield will show you what it means.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Your father and I think you should accept. For your future.”

  I thought for a few moments more. Mr. Hatfield had seemed a fairly amiable man. Perhaps if I had been more used to choice I would have been better equipped to say no, but my life had had few alternatives, and fewer still where I had been the one who decided.

  “All right,” I said.

  Oddly enough, I did not see Mr. Hatfield again in the days before the wedding. Presumably he did not think it worthwhile to get to know me better. I suspect he was spring-cleaning his house, which had doubtless been neglected in the years since his first wife died. The wedding was set for a fortnight after my mother’s announcement to me (that was what I felt it amounted to). Toward the end of that time they packed my clothes and a few other personal things into two very old suitcases. These my father took round to Mr. Hatfield’s house on the day before the wedding. I wondered how I would do without the books.

  I married Mr. Hatfield, in fact, twice. The Congregation was not legally entitled to perform the sacrament of marriage, so we had to go through a Registry Office ceremony first. It was not much of a ceremony (but then neither was the Congregation’s), but I did learn for the first time that my husband’s Christian name was Felix. The Registry Office, a little off our route, was still only five minutes from the Congregation, and we walked on there—Mr. Hatfield, my parents, and me, me in one of the two or three faded print dresses I wore regularly to church. Mr. Hatfield wore the suit he had worn to tea with us, now with a brilliant red carnation in his buttonhole.