The Long Shadow (2 page)

“N
O, HE DIED
two months ago,” she said; “I’m a widow,” and she waited for the tiny recoil behind his eyes, the twitch of unease, as he adjusted himself to the embarrassment of it. What
do
you say to middle-aged widows who turn up at parties so indecently soon? What do you talk to them
about
?
Is the weather a safe topic? Or the state of the country?

I
don’t know either, Imogen wanted to scream at him.
I
don’t know what you’re supposed to say to me, or what I’m supposed to answer—or anything. This is the first time I’ve been anywhere since Ivor died, and I wish I’d never come, I wish I was safe at home being miserable. What a fool I was to let Myrtle persuade me, I might have known it would be like this….

Myrtle wasn’t really to blame, of course. Her intentions had been of the kindliest.

“It’ll take you out of yourself, darling,” she’d insisted. “After all, Ivor wouldn’t have wanted you to go on grieving for ever….”

*

Like hell he wouldn’t! To Ivor’s vast, irrepressible ego, for ever would have been all too short a tribute. He’d have loved to imagine that Imogen would grieve for him for ever, miss him for ever—indeed, that everyone else would, too: pupils, colleagues, neighbours; even his former wives and mistresses. All of them, all tearing their hair, rending their garments, flinging themselves on his pyre in an abandonment of grief. That’s what Ivor would have liked, and Myrtle, of all people, must know it.

But of course, you couldn’t expect her to mention it, any more than Imogen herself was mentioning it: and so, “No, I suppose he wouldn’t,” she’d lied, and had begun worrying about what to wear.

After all, it might be fun. It might, for a few hours, make her feel like a whole person again instead of the broken half of a couple.

It didn’t, though; and it wasn’t fun. By now, after nearly two hours of it, she felt not merely like a half person, but a half person who has been bisected vertically for an anatomical
demonstration
… all the raw, bleeding ends on display as the audience files past, each in turn peering with fascinated horror.

Over the rim of her glass, Imogen stole a look at her companion. Short, bearded, ten years younger than herself (as most men seemed to be these days)—already she could see the “Let-me-out-of-this” signals flashing behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Any minute now. Myrtle (attentive hostess that she was) would be undulating along, all smiles, to mount yet another rescue operation. The fourth.

*

How long would it go on being like this? How long would the people she was introduced to stand in twitching silence, gulping back their opening gambits, washing their minds clear of funny stories? How long would she go on being an embarrassment and an obscenity wherever she went?

Embarrassment. Looking back over these past awful weeks, Imogen sometimes felt that the embarrassment had been worse than the grief: and there was no outlet for it in tears.

The hushed voices. The laughter that died as you drew near. The careful topics of conversation, picked clean of all reference to husbands, funerals, car-accidents, professorships, love, happiness, unhappiness, men, women, life…. It didn’t leave much.

*

Worst of all, perhaps, was the apparently unending procession of people who, incredibly, still hadn’t heard, and had to be clobbered with the news in the first moment of meeting. Had to have the smiles slashed from their faces, the cheery words of greeting rammed back down their gullets as if by a gratuitous blow across the mouth. There they would be, waving from across the road, calling “Hi!” from their garden gates, phoning by chance from Los Angeles, from Aberdeen, from Beckenham…. One and all
to have their friendly overtures slammed into silence, their kindly voices choked with shock. One after another, day after day, over and over again: sometimes Imogen felt like the Black Death
stalking
the earth, destroying everything in her path.

Just as, in a small way, she was destroying Myrtle’s party right now, standing here in her bubble of darkness, grinning her
death’s-head
grin, reaching out with black fingers to everyone who came near….

Stop it, you fool! Stop it! Smile at him. Say something. As if he cares. You came, didn’t you? You’re Myrtle’s guest, aren’t you? Then do your bit…. Pull your weight….

*

A heavier weight, of course, than heretofore. She was that hostess’s nightmare now, an Extra Woman: and tonight, on top of being Extra, she wasn’t even enjoying herself. Extra Women should enjoy themselves like mad, it’s the least they can do.

“Lovely party, isn’t it?” she yelled above the noise—and then checked herself. Maybe widows
should
n’t
be finding parties “lovely”? Would this bearded person disapprove, think her
heartless
…?

He was merely looking more frightened than ever: and,
humiliating
though it was, Imogen could not help being relieved to see Myrtle bearing down upon them, diamond earrings a-quiver, smile still in place.

“Darling, you
must
meet Terry,” she urged, steering Imogen with a light, steely hand away from her current victim and towards her new one. “Terry’s mad about Dutch Elm Disease, you know…. Terry, I want you to meet my great friend Imogen. She… she …”

*

She’s a widow, that’s what she is. With wooden detachment, Imogen watched Myrtle’s social aplomb faltering before the task of finding something intriguing to say about Imogen: something at least as amusing as Dutch Elm Disease.

She gave it up.

“Terry—Imogen. Imogen—Terry,” was finally the best she could do; and then retreated as if from the scene of the crime.

*

It was careers this time—Does your husband work at the University?—but it could just as easily have been holidays, or football, or Cordon Bleu cookery. There seemed to be no subject in the world, however seemingly innocuous, that didn’t fetch up against your bereavement with a sickening thud in about two minutes flat. And it was worse than ever this time, for this Terry person was even younger than the others had been—a Ph.D. student, Imogen guessed, at the beginning of his first year—and
correspondingly
shy. So shy, indeed, and so socially inept, that he didn’t merely twitch when he learned of Imogen’s recent widowhood, he nearly jumped out of his skin. His head jerked backwards on his long, crimsoning neck, his wine slopped from his glass on to his trousers; bending to scrub them, he couldn’t find his
handkerchief
; and Imogen, trying to come to the rescue, couldn’t find hers either.

I must go, she thought, fumbling, with face averted, in her handbag, pretending to be still searching. I must go, I can’t bear it here, I can’t bear all these people. Ivor will be furious, he hates to leave parties early, but…

But Ivor is dead. Ivor neither knows nor cares what time you leave the party. He will never care again. You can leave exactly when you please.

Go on, then. Go right now, without even saying goodbye, and see who cares.

*

The quiet tree-lined roads that lay between Myrtle’s home and Imogen’s were almost deserted even at this comparatively early hour. It was a moonless night, heavy with moisture, and very still. Her feet, in their thin shoes, slithered among the drenched November leaves—slithered and skidded in the wet roadway just as Ivor’s car must have done, on just such a night as this, as he drove—too fast, probably, and showing-off for the benefit of any anonymous passer-by who might chance to be on the motorway
at half past one in the morning. Showing off what his new car could do—what
he
,
at nearly sixty, could still do. He, the ton-up Professor; immortal whizz-kid, beloved of Zeus, thus had he met his end.

It was barely ten o’clock when Imogen reached home, but the house, looming against the starless sky, was in darkness.

Well, of course it was. If you don’t switch the lights on when you leave home in the bright afternoon, then they won’t be on when you get back at night, will they?

But it hadn’t always been like that. Not so long ago, lights had gone on as effortlessly in this house as the grass grows. Ivor never switched lights off, he hated that kind of cheeseparing frugality, and so by now, by ten o’clock, there would once have been a blaze of light from every window, the tall house lit like an ocean liner ploughing through the night sky, with Ivor on board.

Imogen shivered. As she pushed open the garden gate, a little scutter of drops from the overhanging bushes flicked over her hair and shoulders. In the darkness under the porch, she fumbled for her key, found it, fitted it into the front door. Then, with a tiny bracing of the nerves, like a bather stepping down into icy water, she pushed open the door and went inside.

*

They had all gone now: the relations, the lawyers, the neighbours, the family friends. Even her stepdaughter Dot, child of Ivor’s first marriage, had gone; she had left this morning. Left properly, that is, after eight weeks of commuting back and forth between her own home and Imogen’s in a delightful whirl of conflicting duties. Dot liked duties, they made her feel secure and
indispensable
; and conflicting duties were the best of all, putting her straight into the spiritually-propertied classes, a sort of emotional tycoon, needed and wanted everywhere. Even Herbert, her husband, started wanting her when she’d been away long enough for the house to get in a real mess and for the little boys, Vernon and Timmie, to have no clean clothes to go to school in. “When are you coming back, Dot?” he’d say, reluctantly pleading: and then,
no sooner had she been home for a day or two, and the family beginning to take her for granted again, than she remembered how much her stepmother still needed her, how indispensable she was for sorting her father’s things.

“I remember
that
:
that’s Mother’s,” she’d say, in hushed, almost religious tones, scooping up this or that as she stalked
eagle-eyed
round the house. Or, “Aunt Bertha gave him those; I feel sure she’d have wished them to stay on our side of the family.”

“Shouldn’t Robin be getting some of them?” was the only objection Imogen had raised to Dot’s simple system of allocation; and Dot had replied, with some asperity, that if her young brother wanted a finger in the pie, then he should turn up occasionally and help with things, instead of disappearing straight after the funeral and not even bothering to write.

Fair enough. But Robin was like that, she hadn’t expected to see much of him. From now on, she wouldn’t be seeing much of Dot, either; the sixty-odd miles to and fro to London from here were a lot, now that the main crisis was over. The neighbours were thinning-out, too; they had been wonderful, all of them, at the beginning, telephoning and calling at the house to ask if there was anything they could do. During those first days, kindness had hit the house like a tornado, but now, at last, the flood was receding: the storm-centre of benevolence had moved on, away from this house, somewhere else. Even Edith Hartman from next door had at last stopped popping in with cups of tepid Oxo and soothing stories about people who had died of cancer recently.

Tonight, for the first time, Imogen was going to be absolutely alone. For nearly a minute, after closing the front door behind her, she stood quite still in the pitch dark and the silence, waiting for loneliness to strike. It was like waiting, when you have stubbed your toe against a rock, for the pain to begin.

*

She felt nothing but an overpowering thankfulness. Peace at last! The voices, the luggage, the bedlam of comings and goings; the tears, the mealtimes, the arguments—they were all over. Silence, solitude and peace were at last to be hers.

And Ivor. There was room for Ivor again, now that everyone was gone. When she had taken off her coat, and changed from her teetering party shoes into soft slippers, she set off on a tour of the house, trying to recapture him. Room by room she wandered through her empty home looking at things: touching his books, his desk, his great leather armchair, and sniffing at the heavy bronze ash-tray where the ash from his pipe still lingered: cold as his own ashes, and almost exactly the same age. And as she padded across the carpets, and over the rich, exotic rugs that he had brought home like the spoils of war from all over the world, she felt as if it was she who was the one who was dead; the ghost returning to its old haunts. Her feet, as she moved, made scarcely as much noise as the autumn leaves outside.

The kitchen, clean and gleaming, as Dot had left it this morning. The drawing-room, already like a museum with disuse and with the weeks of hushed voices and solemn deliberations. The
dining-room
, no longer the scene of candle-lit dinner-parties for Ivor’s important friends, but become a sort of office, the headquarters for the business side of grief. The long refectory table was piled high with the letters of sympathy, condolence and eulogy that had come in from all over the world.

*

How Ivor would have loved being dead! It was a shame that he was missing it all. How he would have loved to watch the letters pouring in, day after day, by every post, in their tens and in their dozens, each one a tribute to himself. Imogen pictured him
gathering
them up in handfuls off the mat, pretending indifference. “I’ll have a look at this stuff later,” he’d have said, elaborately
off-hand
; and then, secretive as an alcoholic, he’d have slipped off with them into his study. And once inside, with the door closed, how he would have fastened on them, face alight, unable to tear them open fast enough….