The Widow's Tale (6 page)

T
he wind is up. It's got all the dogs barking and the whole village is rattling about, with bits threatening to go flying off. It makes me appreciate just how exposed we are out here. It seems to be coming from the north-east, which might explain why it's so bloody freezing. A couple of hours ago that wind was picking up speed across Siberia.

I went out for a walk this morning. The first half was fine. I fairly flew along. I was wearing my big coat and felt pretty confident that if I leapt in the air and held my arms out I would've covered a good fifty yards or more. Coming back was more of a struggle and took at least an extra half an hour. I heaved into it with my shoulders, like a sumo wrestler. And found myself getting quite irate. At one point I got so worked up, I heard myself swearing into the teeth of the wind. Although who or what precisely was the focus of my ire was not immediately clear to me.

I've extended my little lease for another week or so. Hopefully by then I'll be right as rain. If not, I shall demand compensation. I shall sue.

Conjuring up a proper hot bath is still proving to be a gargantuan effort. I now have the heater switched on right round the clock, and when I feel the need to immerse
myself in hot water coming upon me, I fill the kettle and put a pan on every hob. You should see that electricity meter spin.

But sooner or later there comes a point when you have to commit and actually turn the bath's tap on. The most I've managed is three lots of pans and kettles in with the bathwater. Any more is just too much traipsing up and down the stairs. This morning, as I stood over the cooker, waiting for the last round of pans to come to the boil, I began to wonder whether the water already in the bath wasn't actually cooling quicker than the water I was heating up.

I
t's like an ache. Or a sort of emptiness. I begin to see the sense in the wearing of black – a widow's weeds. It warns the rest of humanity that you're a-comin'. Like a bell or a big black flag. It also makes you look on the outside how you feel on the inside. Wretched. Bleak. Blasted. As if death is on you. Which I think it probably is.

If I was young I'd want to keep the old folks as far away from me as possible. You wouldn't want them around, reminding you how decrepit you may one day become. I'd herd us all up and drive us off the nearest bloody cliff.

I passed a couple of schoolgirls waiting for the bus this morning. They were chatting – about their hair and the advantages of having it long, because then you can do so many different things with it, and so on. I don't know how old they were. Fourteen or fifteen maybe. Two sweet little things, who'd obviously got up an extra hour early just so they could primp and prettify themselves. But they had that little glint in their eye, as if they'd only recently discovered this secret new currency and that, as things turn out, they were in possession of quite a haul.

I wanted to tell them to enjoy it. But to be careful. Not to put too much stock in other people's opinions, when it's based on nothing more than how you look. Because if you do and you begin to judge yourself and others by no
better standard than how much interest you can stir up in men and boys, there'll come a day soon enough when you find your value slipping. And you'll begin to wonder where the hell you go from there.

What on earth they would've made of me I have no idea. Some aged old crow, no doubt. When I was a girl I remember having the nerve to ask one of my teachers – who seemed impossibly ancient – how old she was. She told me she was thirty-four.

S
ometime in late November, about six weeks after John’s death, I was walking home from the shops when I passed a youngish woman leaning over her buggy in which a toddler was having a bit of a gripe.

If I described the woman’s hair as being lank or the sort of clothes she was wearing I could easily suggest what class she came from. But why bother? The fact is she was poor, or a good deal poorer than I am, and to all intents and purposes from an entirely different world.

She had her face right up to the child’s face – a little trick which I’d soon discover was a favourite of hers. She might even have been swearing at the child. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that, as I passed, I happened to glance over, just as her little tirade was drawing to a close. The woman was straightening up. The child was clearly still quite cheesed-off. And, almost casually, as if to complete proceedings, I saw the woman take hold of the child’s upper arm between her thumb and forefinger and give that infant flesh a sharp little nip.

The child burst into tears. Not surprisingly. It took me a moment to properly register what I’d just seen. I had to rerun it in my mind a couple of times, to be sure. But by the time I’d stopped and looked back, she was pushing the buggy behind me. And she must have had an inkling
that I’d seen her, because she had her eyes on me.

I said something like, ‘What on earth did you just do?’ I may even have sworn. I’ve wondered more times than I’d care to mention, that if I
had
sworn, whether that would have been sufficient provocation and how things might have been different if I had not. So I might have said, ‘What the hell did you just do to that child?’

The young woman stepped around the buggy and headed towards me. She was on me in no time at all. But it was the way she had a quick glance over her shoulder, to make sure that nobody was coming up behind us, that made me think that I was in trouble, and in that instant I felt all my moral outrage evaporate.

‘And just what the fuck has that got to do with
you
?’ she said, and jabbed me hard, just below the collarbone, for emphasis – a sharp little poke which I can still feel as I write this down.

And I knew straight away that she was quite capable of beating the hell out of me – and quite possibly killing me. I had this overwhelming sense of vulnerability. I found myself trying to work out how far I’d have to run to reach safety and where on earth that place might be.

I can’t particularly remember the rest of our little exchange. I don’t imagine I made much of a contribution. It consisted mainly of her telling me to mind my own fucking business, combined with a stream of quite personal insults. (Well, I suppose if you’re going to insult somebody you might as well make it personal.) But as she carried on I had the distinct impression that she
was working herself up into a state. As if, now that she’d finally found a legitimate target for whatever anger she’d been carting around all day, she might as well offload as much of it as she could. The longer her little rant went on, and the more I looked into her eyes, I had the sense that she was also gearing herself up for a small explosion of violence – a grown-up version of that little nip she’d just delivered to her child.

But just as she’d glanced over her shoulder before approaching me, I now saw her glance over mine. And I thank God that she must have seen someone coming towards us, because she suddenly stalled. Her little onslaught was suspended. And as a parting shot, she leaned right in towards me.

‘I’ll see you
later
,’ she said, and jabbed me in my chest again.

Well, I scurried off up the hill just as fast as my little legs would carry me, and as soon as I got home I locked and bolted all the doors. And I didn’t mention it to anyone for two whole days, and then only to Ginny. I think perhaps I was ashamed – at how frightened she’d made me. Like a bullied child, I’d thought that if I did actually tell anyone it would somehow only make things worse, to have things out in the open. And that by keeping it to myself I might somehow contain it. When, in fact, as I say, what I really wanted to keep secret was my shame.

When I finally spilled the beans Ginny insisted I go to the police and report the incident. And when I refused she appealed to my sense of morality – those same morals
that had so quickly deserted me when that crazy woman stepped up to me. I should contact Social Services, Ginny said, because if she’s prepared to treat her child like that in public, then how the hell might she be treating it behind closed doors?

All of which did nothing but make me feel even more awful. The truth is I was terrified of ever seeing the dreadful woman again. She’d looked into my eyes and known that she could trample all over me. So I made Ginny swear not to tell another soul and from that point on whenever she started haranguing me about it I’d immediately get all emotional, until she left me alone.

There’s no doubt that if I’d had John around I wouldn’t have felt quite so frightened. In the first instance, I’m sure, he would’ve flown off the handle and, just like Ginny, insisted I do something about it, etc. But at the close of the day when the lights went out he would’ve been there, in the dark, beside me. Someone for me to hide behind.

As it was, I became quite obsessed with her. And, as well as avoiding the street where I’d happened to encounter her, I drew in my mind a half-mile radius around it and created a no-go zone. Returning home from a bit of shopping I’d have a quick look all about me, to make sure she wasn’t there, taking note of where I lived … just as I looked left and right before leaving the drive on my way out. And lying in bed, alone, I’d imagine her creeping round the garden, and trying the windows. Now just how screwed-up is that?

I managed to bestow on her a kind of omniscience. She
knew what I was thinking – was right there in my head with me. And the only solace I could find was that young policewoman who’d told me about John’s death.

She’d be used to dealing with such people, I reasoned. She wouldn’t be frightened. And in the midst of my deepest panics I’d comfort myself by thinking that if I was still half as terrified when I woke the following morning, I’d ring her up and tell her all about it – the equivalent of running to my mother and telling her how beastly some big girl had been to me at school. The obvious difference being that the policewoman was young enough to be my own daughter.

Rather contrarily, the other little scenario I sometimes envisaged was me going in search of my assailant. Finding out where she lived and stalking her for several days. And then, when she was least expecting it, I would leap out of the bushes and punch her square in the face. Knocking her senseless.

‘How’d you like that?’ I’d shout down at her, ‘you disgusting little witch.’

N
ot a good day, by any means. Christ, and I'm not even halfway through it. Went into Holt to buy my Holbein. Things got off to a bad start when I bundled into the bookshop only to discover that David and Jenny, my future best friends, had been replaced by a young man in his twenties, who was engrossed in some weighty novel and looking very stern and full of himself.

To be fair, he could have been a happy, charming young fellow and I would've felt the same level of animosity towards him, since he'd wheedled his way into the role of second lieutenant that I had in mind for myself. Anyway, I very nearly asked after David and Jenny by name. Which would have made me look pretty stupid. I wonder how I would've got myself out of that little hole?

Then I went over to the Art section and looked high and low but couldn't find my precious Holbein. I kept thinking I must've got the wrong set of shelves, but I hadn't. Convinced myself that perhaps it had slipped down the back somehow and I started pulling out great stacks of books and piling them up on the floor. And I could see that young Johnny over at the counter suddenly wasn't quite so gripped by his bloody Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and kept peering over at me, to see what I was playing at.

I thought perhaps on my last visit I might've put it back
in the wrong place, i.e. unalphabetically. But I checked the whole damned section without the merest whiff of it. And I began to wonder if I'd perhaps hidden it away myself, in a secret location, to avoid anyone else buying it in the meantime, although I knew that that wasn't it. I even briefly imagined that the old duffer who'd asked about the picture on the wall – the chap that Dave and Jenny and I had all had a good old laugh at – had come back and, out of sheer spite, bought my Holbein, and was, at that very minute, feeding it, page by page, into the flames of his own little bonfire, and warming himself on my misery.

I should've just bought the bloody thing when I first saw it, instead of going through this stupid bloody ritual. I knew I wanted it. It cost next to nothing. True, I already have a perfectly serviceable edition of his prints at home somewhere, but I really did want a copy up here for my widow's cottage. I would've put it on the mantelpiece. It would've been a little talisman – a touchstone. And right now I need as many touchstones and talismans as I can possibly get.

I asked young Dostoevsky if he'd happened to spot it. He hadn't, but suggested that maybe someone had bought it since I last popped in. Well it was all I could do not to throttle him. But honestly, what exactly are the chances of one of the dozen or so people who've visited that shop in the last couple of days actually picking out my Holbein from the many thousands of books which line the shelves? And deciding to buy it? Unless it is indeed some awful
cosmic conspiracy to try and make my life just that little bit more awful than it has been up to now.

I wandered around Holt in a state of quiet distraction. Of course, as soon as it became clear that I wasn't about to get my hands on that Holbein it was but a hop, skip and a jump to the absolute conviction that it was the only thing in this world that I wanted/needed. And I felt myself carrying around within me this Holbein-shaped hole. Without it I would be bereft. Hang on a minute! I'm bereft already. OK. It's not that my not having it would make me bereft. It's the fact that if I'd actually found it/bought it/owned it, some tiny fraction of my pain might have been erased.

And it's not as if just any old book of Holbein prints will replace it. Because now it is not about Holbein or even that particular edition, but that particular individual book. Well, I'm going to have to change the bloody subject, because this isn't helping. My point is that it needs to be the book that I saw the day before yesterday. And if it doesn't magically reappear in the bookshop in the immediate future, then I honestly don't know what I'm going to do.

To make matters worse I had a prang on my way home. Some of the lanes round here are so bloody narrow. I'd spotted another car coming towards me. So I did the decent thing and pulled over into one of those little passing places. And the arrogant bastard just flew straight by, without even raising a hand to say thank you. I must've been so annoyed, what with him and the bloody
Holbein, that when I pulled away I did so with just a hint of irritation and caught the nearside wing in the hedge. And when I reversed, to try and extricate myself, I was perhaps a little cavalier with my steering and I heard the distinct clunk of car making contact with something solid, hidden away beneath the foliage. And the more I went backwards and forwards and lost my temper the more scraping and squealing I could hear as the car rubbed up against whatever was in there.

When I got back to the village I didn't have the nerve to have a proper look at it. I just parked it right in the corner, with the damaged wing facing the bushes so that no one else could see it either. Perhaps if I leave it there long enough and do my best not to think about it, it might miraculously heal itself.

To try and calm myself down I went for a tramp out along the saltmarshes. I'd gone about half a mile before the whole path was blocked with bloody twitchers. I've spotted the odd one or two hanging about since I've been up here but today they were out in full force.

It's never struck me before but they really are a sort of ornithological paparazzi, with their telephoto lenses and their waistcoats with all the little pockets and sandwiches and their little fold-up stools.

As I squeezed past them I thought to myself, I am not going to ask what all the fuss is about. They're like children. It would only encourage them.

The other day, someone in the village told me how,
not that long ago, a bunch of birders gave some tiny bird they were chasing a seizure. It'd wound up in Norfolk by mistake and before you knew it word got round the twitching community and whole minibuses of them were spilling out onto the lanes. And they chased the little thing up and down the place with such determination that in the end its poor little heart just packed in. So they all had to climb back in their minibuses and go home again.

Apparently, the really rare birds that everyone gets so excited about are just an anomaly. They've been blown off course by some freak wind, so they're not even in pairs. Which means there's no prospect of them breeding, and no chance of them being blown back from whence they came. So they're just stuck out here, on the winter marshes of north Norfolk. A situation which has an eerie familiarity to it.