The Habit of Widowhood Read online

  The Congregation had had a bit of trouble over their marriage service, or meeting as they called it, the last one having been over twelve years previously, and what they came up with did not have a great deal of shape to it. First there was a hymn—“For All the Saints.” The Congregation sang remarkably badly for nonconformists. Then Mr. Potts was moved to share with us a feeling which he suggested was divinely inspired and which had come to him in the course of the week: this, I gathered, was that our union would be long, happy, and fruitful. Then the leader for that week led us in a rather bare version of the marriage service, in which I promised to love and honor Mr. Hatfield, and he promised to do the same by me. Then, thankfully, it was all over. There was tea afterward (there was a gas ring at the back of the church), and someone had brought along a supermarket cake. Everyone quietly wished us well. I don’t remember any of them showing signs of embarrassment but I am not sure I would have recognized what embarrassment was.

  Quite soon we went home—only of course it was a new “home.” My parents walked with us for five minutes, but then we all stopped and it was indicated that Mr. Hatfield and I would now turn off. Both my parents kissed me, increasing my sense of this as a special day, and my mother told me to be a good girl. Then Mr. Hatfield and I continued on our way in the bustle of early evening, through strange streets that were yet very much like the streets I already knew. Mr. Hatfield made sober conversation. I already had a slight sense that there was a difference between the public Mr. Hatfield and the private one, though it was not something I could pin down in words. He said it had been a very moving service, that Mr. Potts had spoken most impressively, that the good wishes of the Congregation had been most gratifying. I said yes to all these propositions. Quite soon we arrived at 10 Mafeking Terrace, Mr. Hatfield’s home.

  You will perhaps not realize how strange it felt, going into this house. You see, I had never, in my memory, been in anyone’s home other than my own. It was spotlessly clean, but the furniture was old and very shabby. Mr. Hatfield, I learned later, was a commercial traveler, and not well off. I saw my cases in the hall, and when we went through into the dining room I saw the table laid for two.

  “Just a modest meal,” said Mr. Hatfield, “something I can heat up in the oven.” He smiled with a hint of roguishness. “An intimate meal for two.”

  He went over to a wooden box in the corner and pressed a button. In a moment, astonishingly, a talking face appeared on a screen. This must be television, which I had heard about but never seen. I stood there in the middle of the room, looking, entranced.

  “Just hear the news headlines.”

  I did not register what they were talking about, only that here was a handsome man and a pretty woman telling us things. After a minute or two Mr. Hatfield went to turn it off, but he saw me still transfixed by the pictures, and he took himself off to the kitchen. As I watched, things gradually began to make some sense: there was a war somewhere abroad, there was a football team playing another football team, there was the Queen (I recognized her) opening a bridge somewhere in the North of the country. All in enchanting pictures. It was as good as a book.

  When it was over Mr. Hatfield turned it off. It became a box again. He said: “Perhaps you’d help me serve up dinner.”

  I went with him into the kitchen, which like the rest of the house was clean but shabby. The dinner certainly didn’t need much serving up. It was in the oven in two silver dishes—each one holding the whole meal: roast beef, roast potatoes, carrots and peas, all in a rich brown gravy. I know because I read the cardboard container it had come in. I thought it was wonderful. We transferred it on to our plates, and carried it through to the dining room. “Soon you can cook me really nice meals,” said Mr. Hatfield, smiling encouragingly. I did not see any point at all in all the preparation that cookery usually involved when you could get lovely meals like this. But I nodded—I nodded a lot that day.

  While we ate, Mr. Hatfield made little dribbles of good-humored conversation, with sometimes the odd roguish joke which I did not then understand. But I think he saw my eyes straying sideways to the television box in the corner. I was wondering whether it was quiet because there was nothing on it or because he had switched it off. He saw my fascination (I realize now that he was a kindly man), and when we had eaten a sponge pudding with syrup over it, also from a cardboard container I had seen in the kitchen, he switched it on again.

  This time it was even more wonderful. It was what I now know was a “soap”: people in a street, quarreling, laughing, drinking, kissing. It was like suddenly seeing the world. I sat on the sofa, and when he had washed up the plates Mr. Hatfield sat beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders, and when the people on the box kissed he bent over and kissed me on the cheek—not on the lips as they did, because I did not turn my face away from the screen. After the people in the street there were American policemen, and then people playing some sort of game. It was wonderful, enthralling.

  “I don’t think your parents would approve,” said Mr. Hatfield.

  I did’ not know whether or not they would approve, but I did know they would not themselves have watched.

  At half past nine Mr. Hatfield pressed the switch again.

  “Time for beddy-byes,” he said, with a funny wry smile and a spark in his eyes. I nodded. I went to bed around that time as a rule, and I presumed the television people must close down then.

  I saw in the hall that the small suitcase with my night things and a change of clothes had gone. As we went up the stairs, Mr. Hatfield put his arm around my waist, which I did not like but did not know how to stop. In the bedroom the light was already on, and I saw that my nightdress had been laid out on an enormous bed. I waited for Mr. Hatfield to go, but he did not. He shut the door, and then came over and began fumbling with the buttons at the back of my dress.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  I did not know what to do. I couldn’t tell him to go away in his own house. I took my nightdress and went over to a dark corner, where I removed my dress and petticoat as modestly as I could, then put my nightdress on and removed my other clothes. I knew that Mr. Hatfield had not gone away and I did not want to turn round, but in the end I did not know what else to do.

  It was horrible. He had taken all his clothes off, and I saw that he was not made like me. As I watched, my heart beating fiercely, the thing beneath his fat belly began rising and growing big.

  “Look! Cupid’s dart!” he said, with a dreadful jollity. “I’m going to teach you all about it.”

  I don’t know how I managed to endure it. Somehow I seemed to detach my mind so that I could relax. I must have seemed quite limp, dead, as he led me to the bed, pulled up my nightdress and began doing what he wanted to do to me. But if my mind was in another place it was also, or part of it, screaming with nausea and humiliation. He switched out the light from beside the bed, and I felt him on top of me, and part of me was howling with terror and pain, part of me wanting to vomit. But I just lay there, even when, not long afterward, he came at me again. He had been long without a wife, I now understand. Eventually he did it again—we had not exchanged a word in the meanwhile—and soon he lay over on his back and went into a sound, noisy sleep.

  I lay there, crying a little, but totally passive. But the part of my mind that had screamed with nausea knew that something had to be done. Something had to be done so that this would never happen to me again. I lay there thinking, wondering. Then I got up very quietly and somehow found my way to the door. Once outside I closed it, and fumbled round the wall until I found the landing light. Then I went down to the kitchen. In the drawer where the cutlery was I looked at and felt two or three long knives. They were old but kept sharp. I remember feeling a terrible calm. I took one of them, switched off the kitchen light, and then slowly made my way upstairs. I could hear the snores of satisfied sleep, louder and louder. I opened the bedroom door and left it open, so that the dim light from the landing would assist my aim. I gently pulled ba
ck the blanket and sheet that he had over him, surveyed the plump body, then raised the knife and plunged it into his stomach, into his Cupid’s dart, one, twice, again and again, pushing him back when he tried to raise himself, screaming with agony (screaming as I had wanted to scream) until finally I plunged it into his heart.

  I did not look at him again. When he was quite still I took the little suitcase that he had brought up, and the clothes I had taken off before the terrible experience. I went down to the kitchen, took off my nightdress, which was hideous and sticky with our bloods, and bundled it under the sink. Then in the dim light from the landing (I wanted no light now) I found my toilet bag, took out a flannel, and washed myself in the sink. Then I put on my clothes again. I was quite calm still, but I knew I had done something unusual and I knew I could not go back to my parents’ home again. I remember wondering where poor mad Lucia had stabbed her husband.

  I repacked my suitcase. The handle was sticky, so I washed it clean. In the hall it was lighter. On an impulse I went into the dining room and pressed the button on the television. The picture was of naked bodies, writhing together, so I switched it off. I found my coat in the little cupboard and put it on. The jacket of Mr. Hatfield’s suit was in there too, and I felt inside it and found a wallet. There was fifty pounds in it, so I took that. I knew I would need money, though I knew what nothing cost. Then I took up my little suitcase, opened the front door, and went out into the street.

  • • •

  It was more than three weeks before they found me. The first Sunday when we were not at church my parents wondered a little but did nothing. The second Sunday they went round to the house, but found it dark and locked. On the Monday my father walked to the paint firm for which Mr. Hatfield worked. He found that Mr. Hatfield had intended to take ten days off after the wedding, but that he had been expected back that day. The people there found my father very odd. They knew Mr. Hatfield had been about to marry a young lady he hardly knew. He had always been a meticulous man where work was concerned. By the end of the day they had called the police.

  The police were hampered by the fact that my parents had no photograph of me. No visual record of my existence. They talked to them, talked to neighbors who had seen me in the garden, talked to members of the Congregation. I think they quite soon understood the situation. They realized I had nobody to go to, no place I knew where I could find refuge. They were used to the problem of homelessness. They knew I would be sleeping rough.

  I greatly enjoyed those weeks, most of the time. When I left the house in Mafeking Terrace I walked through the night, following signs toward the center. I had read Oliver Twist and I knew that London, real London not suburbia, was the place to lose yourself in. As light came up I often stopped to look in shopwindows, noticing prices. Later I would linger by shops with televisions on in the window, seeing the shadows of the world on the dancing screens. But now I too was in the world. Sometimes, where there were seats, I rested, watching the world go by.

  How I gravitated to a place where there were others like me, people with no homes and no futures, I don’t remember. But I recall a man sitting with me on a bench somewhere, very shabby and kind, and telling me that under the bridges near the Festival Hall there was “good sleeping” to be found. I had heard concerts from the Festival Hall and I suppose the name lingered in my mind. Somehow, days later, I found my way there. I had already learnt more than I had in a lifetime before. I knew about drugs. I knew about people who had in earlier years been in mental hospitals, but were now on the streets. I understood what prostitution was. I had never realized before that there were child beggars today—I had thought that was Dickens’s London, long past. Now I met them, talked to them.

  Around Waterloo Bridge people were very kind to me. “You’re the sort of kid who doesn’t know she’s been born,” one of them said to me. He lent me two cardboard boxes, for the nights. He taught me to take good care of my money. I met people, talked to people. Many of them came from homes much worse than mine. Many of them drank, and fought. Once I met an Asian girl who had been forced into an arranged marriage, and had run away from it. I did not exchange stories with her, though. She was very disturbed. She frightened me. Soon I was known: people called me “Jess” and smiled at me. I was with them and of them, and even ate like them—delicious slices of pizza, things called kebabs, curries from cardboard boxes, anything we could retrieve from the rubbish.

  I think it was my little suitcase that marked me out for the police. Most of them had plastic carrier bags. I still had five pounds left of the fifty when a policeman came up to me in one of the windy walkways around the National Theatre and said:

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jessica Derbyshire,” I said without thinking. But I believe that even if I had thought I would have said the same. I knew a life as good as that could not last.

  He was very kind—all of them were. I think enough was known about me for them to understand how it had happened. He did not summon help, or handcuff me, but walked with me to the nearest police station, talking and asking me questions. Then it all began—interviews, medical examinations, psychiatric examinations. I was in jail on remand for a while, but it wasn’t really unpleasant. I learnt a lot there.

  My father came to visit me. He said: “It was difficult to know what to do for the best,” and “This is killing your mother.” It looked as if it was killing him too, so the next day I wrote him a note saying I would understand if he did not come again, and he did not. It was odd how easily I could do without the only people I had ever really known.

  The trial was funny. It was very short because, as people kept saying, “the facts were not in dispute.” Everyone seemed to go out of their way to say nice things, or pitying things, about me. One of the policemen described me as “very gentle.” At the end of it I was sent here.

  I like it here. I’ve learnt a lot, as I did in prison. I don’t mean school things, though I do have a teacher who comes in to teach me the usual things that most children learn in schools. She is alternately surprised at the things I don’t know, and the things I do. No, I meant I’d learnt a lot from the people, the inmates and the staff. I count almost all of them as my friends, so the words “criminally insane” can’t in fact be as nasty in meaning as they sound. Some of them are so disturbed that communication with them is difficult. Most of us, though, can talk about ourselves and what we have done, and help each other.

  My teacher has tried to tell me about “the facts of life,” but I always stop her. Those things are going to have no place in my life. I have a special friend here, a young schizophrenic, and in his good times we talk a lot, and we sit and hold hands. Nothing more, of course. The facts of life that I am interested in I started to learn when I shut the front door of the house in Mafeking Terrace, and I’ve gone on learning under Waterloo Bridge, in prison, and here. I know whatever happens I will never stop learning.

  My psychiatrist says I may soon be ready to go out into the community again. He says it was not the intention of the court to shut me away for the rest of my life. He says it would be unwise for me to return to live at home, and I agree with him. He thinks I may be able to qualify for university, or for special training of some kind. We talk a lot about this, and I can see lots of possibilities—in fact, one delightful possibility after another: it is very difficult to make choices, with the little knowledge of the world that I have. But it’s good to have someone who has confidence in me. He says things like: “You’ve got a real talent” and “Anyone can see that you’re not a threat to the community.”

  I hope and pray he’s right. God grant he’s right.

  THE HABIT OF WIDOWHOOD

  When my great-great-grandmother married her first husband in 1867 the felicitations on the event from the burghers of Eastbourne were unfeigned. People were used at that time to unions between elderly men and young women, and viewed them in a light rather different from that in which they would be seen today. “Everyone v.
kind,” she noted in her diary. This diary was entrusted to me by my grandmother (who was “Australian respectability” personified) with a meaningful glance and instructions that it was For My Eyes Only. I am a crime writer, one of Australia’s surprisingly few, and she knew it would interest me. When my great-great-grandmother’s first husband died, six weeks after the marriage, people were also kind: the Victorians had a great range of euphemisms to cover procreation, childbirth, and dying, and the most common one used about his death, and that in lowered tones, was that it was difficult at his age to keep up with a young wife. My great-great-grandmother noted this down in her diary, and rather gave the game away by adding an exclamation mark.

  For the diary, though usually brief, is unusually honest. Ten days before his death she had noted in that diary: “Talked to Ernest of s. bliss. V. interested.” A week before his death we read: “S. bliss. Ernest v. excited.” And on the day of his death: “E. died after s.b.” Modesty forbids that I speculate on the precise nature of “s. bliss.” I take it to be either secret or supreme bliss. Anyway, whatever it was, it did for poor old Ernest.

  So there was Maria Halliwell, née Chalmers, a widow and comfortably off. People said (she noted in her diary) that if she should be in an interesting condition, it was a comfort that she would be well provided for. Others said that no doubt after a suitable interval she would find a husband more her own age. But Maria was not pregnant, and after ten months of widowhood she married Charlie Ferneyhough, a respectable haberdasher, who at sixty-eight was no nearer her own age than her first.

  This time I get hints from the diary that comment was less kind. What seemed prudent when done once began to seem mercenary when done a second time. She records (again with that exclamation mark!) that he was advised by his friends not to overdo things, to go steady, and so on. Such well-meaning advice met with its usual response. Three months after leading Maria down the isle of All Saints’ Church, Charlie Ferneyhough was a dead man.