The Widow's Tale (2 page)

I
walked over to Cley this morning, along the raised bank that swings out towards the water, then round to the east and south in one long crescent. The whole thing can’t be more than a couple of miles in total, but for some reason it felt like quite an achievement, and required a fair bit of self-goading before I’d actually set out.

The walk itself was fairly unremarkable, except for the fact that I couldn’t stop yawning. Perhaps it was some response to the cold, fresh air. Yawning, as I understand it, is linked to one’s oxygen intake. But it quickly became quite ridiculous; like some peculiar compulsion. And something over which I had absolutely no control. After about the sixth bout I began to worry – that I’d end up in some hospital for compulsive yawners … or the subject of some TV documentary. ‘The Woman Who Can’t Stop Yawning’ or something along those lines. Even now, as I bring it to mind, I can feel another one creeping up on me.

I was pretty much the only person out there, bar some old chap with an equally ancient dog trotting along behind him – some unidentifiable mix, which I stopped and chucked under the chin for a minute. The poor bugger looked all in, and just determined to get back home and conk out in front of the fire. After I’d said goodbye and
carried on I felt myself to be slightly lacking, as if I too should have a dog with me. A woman walking on her own looks a little … singular. Whereas if you’re swinging a lead and you have some mutt bounding back and forth and sniffing hither and thither, one seems to make more sense, visually.

If I’d left London in less of a hurry I might have arranged to borrow a dog off a friend. Assuming, of course, they’d’ve trusted me with it, which is by no means certain. There should be places where you can go and rent a dog – just for the weekend. I’m sure the dogs would be quite happy with the arrangement, as long as you could reassure them that there’d be plenty of walkies.

There was a beautiful black lab out by the quay yesterday afternoon being dragged around by some dreadful woman. Titus, it was called. No one within half a mile could have been in any doubt about that. Can you think of a more pretentious thing to call a dog? I was half inclined to offer to buy the poor creature off her. She didn’t seem especially enamoured of it. Then I considered just following her around until she tied it up outside a shop and nabbing it. I’m sure I could have made him happy and if caught, I’d anticipate a degree of leniency once the whole Titus thing was explained. I would’ve given him a proper name, like Barney or Bernie. Though I will admit that the idea of picking up a dog’s poo and carrying it around, like a dog’s own official poo-carrying servant, does make me want to retch. But it might just be worth it – for the company. And the unconditional love.

Anyway, I finally limped into Cley, no longer yawning but feeling a lot more tired than I probably ought to. And was sorely tempted to head straight for the boozer and have a little pick-me-up. Why not, for heavens’ sake? I’m on my holidays. Unfortunately, I’ve currently got a strict no-drinking-at-lunchtime policy. In fact, I do my level best to put off the day’s first drink until after 6 p.m., which some days, let me tell you, is near-impossible.

Christ knows how I’d’ve got through the last three months without alcohol. I probably wouldn’t. I’ve got various pills in case of emergency – all properly prescribed and entirely above board. I keep them with me, or pretty close at hand, but I’d rather not if I can help it. I fully appreciate how I’m using booze to ‘self-medicate’, as a friend rather charmingly described it. But at least it’s a drug with which I’m familiar. I know how it works and how to administer the appropriate dosage. And hopefully when to stop. But I can’t pretend that there aren’t some days when I start looking forward to that little sock to the head before I’ve even finished my breakfast, and think about it another couple of dozen times before six o’clock finally rolls around.

I stopped outside the smokehouse and peered in at all the smoked mackerel, smoked eel, etc. And all the pâtés and stuff they do these days. John was a big fan of smoked fish. Not that his was a particularly sophisticated palate. He would’ve eaten an old boot if it’d been smoked for long enough – and had a dollop of mustard or horseradish next to it.

I stood there, gawping through the window until I realised that someone in the shop was watching me. So I scuttled off over the road to the deli and had a wander among all those very expensive vegetables in their little wicker baskets and the jars of exotic pickles and hand-crafted biscuits, etc. They had a pretty impressive cheese counter, including a great hunk of Roquefort, to which I’m particularly partial. But I couldn’t be doing with all the ordering and the chit-chat with the woman in her linen apron. I just knew that she’d be of the opinion that running a deli should involve a great deal of chatting. So I kept my head down and crept out of there.

For a while I just stood on the pavement. Having decided that I wasn’t going to patronise either the smokehouse or the expensive deli and having barred myself from the boozer, I had very few options left, apart from turning round and doing the Widow’s Walk back across the levee, when a little bus came bobbing down the lane.

I wouldn’t have known that the bus actually stopped in the village if some old dear hadn’t been standing a few yards ahead of me with her hand out, so the bus pulled up right next to us. The old girl jumped on and for a moment the bus driver and I just stared at each other.

‘You getting on?’ he said.

And the next thing I know I’m parking myself among all the old grannies as the bus hauls itself up the hill.

It felt quite odd. I can’t remember the last time I took a bus anywhere. This one was called a Hopper – something between a minibus and a full-size affair. It looked rather
boxy, with a too-high roof which, to the people we passed, I’m sure made us look like a bunch of loonies or some old dears on a day trip out from a retirement home (which perhaps isn’t that wide of the mark).

I looked around at the other passengers. An oldish woman on the other side of the aisle smiled back at me.

‘I don’t usually go on buses,’ I wanted to tell her. ‘I’m not … you know …
poor
or anything.’

Actually, there’s probably a decent PhD paper to be written about bus travel. Perhaps not so much in Britain, but certainly in the United States. Out there, particularly in the cities, taking the bus is a sure sign of impoverishment. Then there’s at least thirty thousand words to be written about how the bus featured in the Civil Rights Movement in the late fifties – Montgomery and Rosa Parks and all that. And all the associations that ‘Getting on the bus’ had, and possibly still has, for political rallies and demonstrations. Not to mention the whole romance of sweeping across the country on a Greyhound. I don’t imagine there’s an equivalent here. Britain’s not quite big enough to lose yourself in. Although, God knows, I’m doing my best.

But I have to say that as we rolled along I felt … in fact, I’m not at all sure what I felt exactly. Only that it wasn’t unpleasant. I certainly didn’t feel quite as conspicuous or solitary as I have done lately.

‘Ye gods,’ I felt like saying, ‘I’ve only been here five minutes and I’m practically a local.’

This evening I took the scissors and cut off the lead to the TV. If it’s there I’ll always be tempted to turn it on, just as a distraction. This way, that temptation has been removed.

It was a symbolic little act, executed in the heat of the moment. But I checked – twice – to make sure it wasn’t actually plugged in before making the snip.

T
he young slip of a policewoman who turned up on my doorstep three months ago would, I think, have preferred to have imparted the news indoors. In fact, I know she would because she suggested several times that we step inside, but I refused and insisted she tell me there and then what she was doing knocking on my door at that time of the morning.

Perhaps corralling people into their houses prior to delivering bad news was something she’d been taught at Police College out at Hendon or wherever they go these days. You can see their reasoning. You don’t want people running up and down the road, screaming, first thing in the morning if you can possibly help it. But I stood my ground and raised my voice to such a pitch that she must have weighed up the options and deduced that, at this rate, forcing me back into the house was likely to cause more commotion than the very commotion she’d been trained to avoid. So she let me have it, as they say. Right between the eyes.

Several times, over the last few months, in those little breaks I occasionally take from feeling sorry for myself, I’ve thought of that young policewoman and what a dreadful responsibility that must have been – for a girl her age to have to tell a woman thirty-odd years her senior
that her husband is not coming home.

A couple of things will always stay with me. Firstly, after she’d finally got round to telling me what had happened, just how strangely the world around me proceeded to behave. The very air seemed to bend and buckle. The walls of the house … the trees out in the garden … the car parked on the drive were all of them gripped in this same tremendous convulsion, as if their physical being was suddenly called into question – or their molecular structure undermined.

The other thing I remember is a terrible urge to barge past the policewoman. I remember looking over her shoulder and up into the sky. Did I imagine that’s where John was? In the lower ether, somewhere between this world and the next? And that if I hurried, and somehow managed to jump high enough, I might yet catch him – and stop him from abandoning me?

I’ve no idea. I don’t imagine I had much more idea then. Whatever drew me away from the house seemed to have very little to do with me. What stopped me was the policewoman, who, to give her credit, was pretty bloody strong. Perhaps that’s something else they teach you at Police College – how to position your feet to withstand the not inconsiderable force of the newly bereaved.

As she held me I noticed, for the first time, a male colleague standing a few yards behind her. So it turns out that even if I’d managed to bundle past this young woman I would’ve been rugby-tackled within another yard or two. And all my moaning and wailing would’ve been
confined to the actual garden, beneath fourteen stone of policeman, among the buckled air and the unreliable trees.

That first convulsion was followed by others – almost like after-shocks – which came around every five minutes or so. One part of the brain seemed to grasp what had happened straight off the bat. But some deeper part of me clearly failed to take it in. As the hours passed the shocks’ frequency slowly diminished, but their force was stubbornly maintained.

The whole emotional turmoil was soon stifled by the arrival of friends and family, whose very presence seemed to dampen things down. Then you become preoccupied with the need to get in touch with those people who aren’t yet aware of the situation. And distracted with the necessary tea-making for all these people who’ve suddenly filled your home.

The next four or five days were all focused on the funeral. And, not surprisingly, the day itself is the next big spike in the emotional graph. What I’m about to say will, I’m sure, sound quite idiotic. Well, there you go. If nothing else, it might serve as a reminder of how, in such times, the sensible and the completely bloody ridiculous have a tendency to coexist.

I’m not sure how consciously I ever thought it, but there’s no doubt that I took some solace from the fact that John would be there, at the funeral. In a way, I imagined we’d be reunited. Isn’t that just about the craziest thing
you’ve ever heard? And of course, he
was
there. Almost within touching distance. With nothing but a half-inch of timber separating us. But we certainly weren’t about to be reunited. And when, at the end of the service, they took up that coffin – the one I’d personally picked out of the brochure – and the music started up again, and they began to carry him out of the church, even before we’d gone anywhere near the chapel of rest, with all its automated rollers and mechanised curtains, the actual removal of this man from my life struck me like a ton of bricks. And I heard myself shouting. And, again, found myself being held … being restrained. And that’s when I knew that this really was the end. And that he was never coming back to me.

Yet, an hour or two later, there you are at the reception, keeping an eye on the catering (the
catering
, for Christ’s sake!). And a day or two later, you’re having meetings with accountants and solicitors. Doing Death’s administration. It goes without saying, of course, that all these days are punctuated with spontaneous fits of tears – some private, some not so private – but everyone around you conspires to keep you busy. Which at some point is going to have to involve sorting out the house … or, specifically, sorting through his belongings. So, at first, I just filled a few black bags with his clothes (most of which I’d never particularly liked anyway) and bundled them off to the charity shop, and dragged a few more bags up into the attic to be sorted out later, so that they were out of sight. Then, again unconsciously, I simply set my sights on getting through
to the end of the year. On getting through Christmas. Because, as people never tire of telling you, Christmas will be the time you miss him most.

So, having shrieked and screamed in the very first instance, and having been endlessly hugged and patted by what felt like the world and his wife, then helped up the aisle to see him off, and having crawled through the year’s darkest days to the right side of the winter solstice (when I could at least tell myself that the days were getting longer and that there was sunshine and warmth somewhere up ahead), I found myself standing in a New Year. And it suddenly dawned on me that that was not the end of it.

I had somehow allowed myself to imagine that my reward for enduring the hell of those first few weeks of bereavement would be some sort of relief, or even reprieve. That John would be returned to me and I could tell him just how miserable his absence had made me. And we would just sort of muddle through from there. But sometime in the first few days of January it suddenly came home to me that there was to be no reward, no reprieve. There would just be as many years of bereavement as I could stand, stretching off into the future, in my new, husbandless life.

I was lying in bed this morning, drifting about in that rather uncomfortable zone between sleeping and waking, when I remembered a few bits of food I’d left out in the kitchen the night I bolted. And the milk, etc. in the fridge that would soon be going off. Luckily, the lovely Lynn will
be calling in this afternoon to do her bit of cleaning, so when I finally dragged myself out of bed and dressed I rang and left her a message, warning her of the sort of scene which was likely to confront her, so that she didn’t panic and call the police.

Since pitching up here I must’ve received a good dozen or more texts and messages, expressing varying degrees of concern. As luck would have it, the village is a genuine blackspot, re mobile reception, and the only place you’re sure to get a signal is the grassy mound just back from the quay. So I have the perfect excuse not to actually speak to anybody. The phone has rung only twice, when I’ve inadvertently strayed into civilisation’s range, way out on the marshes. But on both occasions I’ve just let it ring until the answering service clicks in.

I’ve sent texts or left messages for any people that matter, explaining that I’ve decided to get out of town for a few days and that I’m completely hunky-dory, which is therefore only half a lie. There are no doting sons/daughters/brothers/sisters. And, frankly, most of my friends and acquaintances are a bloody shower – an opinion which I am using as an excuse for not giving much more than a damn about hurting their feelings. I can’t for the life of me think how I managed to gather about me such a bunch of second-rate and hopeless individuals. The only one that I truly care about – the only one guaranteed not to look back at me as if I’m speaking bloody German, no matter what I have to say – is Ginny. And right now even she’s no use to me.

Just after breakfast, for the first time since I got up here I dared to peek in my diary, just to check that I hadn’t missed some important appointment. One or two things might require a little shifting and shunting. But, to be honest, there’s nothing earth-shatteringly important. In fact, I’m beginning to appreciate that my running away up here will create very few waves at all.

It’s death’s intransigence that’s so hard to swallow. That’s the brick wall you keep coming up against. The death arrives, all done and dusted. And, frankly, how you deal with it is neither here nor there. There’s no negotiation. No higher court to whom you can appeal.

About two o’clock this afternoon I had a little stroll out on the saltmarshes, which is fast becoming my daily constitutional. Just half an hour or so’s wandering about under that big grey sky, with nothing between me and the horizon except the odd long-abandoned fishing boat.

Most of the modern boats are penned in together by the side of the creek, just a couple of hundred yards from the village. Evidently, January is not the prime month for sailing, so they don’t seem to be doing much right now, except keeping their heads down and weathering the winter, a bit like me. You have to walk a fair old way to leave behind the mad rattle of the lines on their masts. Some days I can almost convince myself that it’s a sound of which I’m fond. I try and tell myself how very evocative and atmospheric it is. Other times, I’m not so sure, and
you can be seemingly miles away and the wind will suddenly pick up, and that mad rattle will be upon you and it can send a chill right down your spine.

I was mooning about out there just now when I remembered going for a walk with my mother and father when I was little – no more than six or seven years old, I’d say – on the moors somewhere, most likely up in Yorkshire where my father’s family originally came from. I remember running off and finding some little hollow – a shallow little trench, but quite natural and lined with grass.

I remember lying down in it, and being able to hear the wind roaring above me, but my being perfectly sheltered from it. I’m sure I couldn’t have lain there very long. Just long enough to appreciate how wonderfully out of the way I was, as if I had found a little fold in the landscape. But I felt I could happily lie there until the end of time.