Authors: Celia Fremlin
Slowly, Imogen folded the last letter, laid it back on the pile with the rest. These, then, were Ivor’s memorials: golden memories
engraved
upon a thousand hearts: outpourings of admiration and of love from all over the world. This was what was left of him.
And somewhere beneath it all, buried deeper than in the deepest grave, lay the real man.
A sense of loss, total and irretrievable, overwhelmed her, and laying her head down among the scattered papers, she felt her cheeks soaked in tears.
“Oh, God,” she murmured—and this was the nearest thing to prayer that Imogen had ever uttered—“Please God, don’t let me ever forget what a bastard he could be.”
I
T WAS THE
grandfather clock striking midnight that roused her.
She should be writing answers to these letters, not crying over them. In two whole months, she and Dot between them had answered barely a third; and they were still coming in.
“Ten a day,” Dot had proposed, in the heavy-handed, no-
nonsense
style that had kept her husband working late for years. “If we each answer ten a day, Imogen, then they’ll be done in—let’s see. Twenty a day is a hundred and forty a week … that’s a month, then. Just over a month….’
Soon, though, it began to appear that
five
a day might have been a more realistic target … then three … and then two; and at this point the actuarial calculations became so depressing—the whole thing extending, it seemed, over the best part of both their
lifetimes
—that Dot decided that what was needed was a System. Hence the in-trays, and the cardboard boxes, and the slips of paper saying things like “To be answered before Dec. 7th”; or “Friends, current”; “Friends, Miscellaneous”; “Publishers etc., except for Charlie”; and “The Australian Lot”. Imogen found the principle of classification beyond her; but she could see that it was easier than actually writing the letters.
In the last resort, there is only one way of getting something done, and that is to do it. This was something you couldn’t really explain to Dot. She took after her mother, Ivor always used to say; which may or may not have been true. In all these years, Imogen had never actually met this earliest one of her predecessors, and so these paternal accusations were hard to assess.
Rubbing her eyes, still stiff and sore with crying, Imogen reached out blindly for the topmost letter of the nearest pile. “Take the one nearest you”, they always used to say when you were a child at the
tea-table; and really it was good advice. Whatever this topmost letter was, important or unimportant, easy or difficult, urgent or otherwise, she would answer it—just simply answer it—here and now. Thus would be removed the awful burden of deciding where to start.
*
It
would
be this one! Well, wouldn’t it?—and no more than you deserve, my girl, leaving the thing to Fate like that. And you the wife of a Classics Professor, too—all those Greek plays. You, of all women, should know the kind of thing Fate gets up to when the Gods are no longer on your side….
The
widow
of a Classics Professor, she corrected herself; and began to read. Twice, and then a third time, she read through the five closely-written pages; and then stared, for nearly a minute, at the heavy velvet curtains that shut out the night beyond the big windows.
At last, drawing the writing-pad towards her, she picked up her pen.
*
“Dear Cynthia,” should she say, or “Dear Mrs Barnicott”? What
do
you call your husband’s ex-wife—the second one—who in
thirteen
years has scarcely exchanged a word with you? Riffling back through the blue airmail pages, Imogen sought some clue to the etiquette of the thing, but there was none.
“My dear—” the letter had started; “My dear, words cannot express …”
A good reason, one might have thought, for using fewer of them. Five
pages
!
Still, here goes….
She had intended it to be a short letter: short and dignified, and in as marked a contrast as possible to Cynthia’s own maundering hyperbole. But now here she was, herself, already on her third page, and still with almost everything to explain—or to avoid explaining.
“No, of course I don’t find it strange that you should still love him,” she wrote, “and I’m sure that in his heart of hearts he knew you did….”
Of course he knew, the old so-and-so. Knew it, and gloried in it, as he gloried in anybody’s love, any time. He just didn’t want to have to bother about it, that was all; and of course, with ex-wives there was the money thing, too, complicating the nostalgic glow he’d have liked to have felt about them.
“… As you say, some decision will have to be reached about the continuance of your alimony,” wrote Imogen rapidly, as if the issue would dissipate itself into thin air if only she set it down fast enough: “… I am sure the Executors have the matter in hand, and you will be hearing from them shortly….”
You should be so lucky! “Shortly”, indeed. It’ll take months and months, money things always do, as you, dear, should know better than anyone. How many years was it before you finally got Ivor pinned down over the maintenance?—Five years?—Seven? Nearly half of
my
married life with him, anyway. If you knew what he used to
say
about you, dear, at breakfast time, which was when your nagging letters mostly arrived. I used to watch the nice crisp bacon I’d cooked congealing on his plate, and the perfectly-fried egg chilling to leather…. And now you have the cheek to write me a letter of condolence.
Oh, well. On we go.
“… While I do understand how you feel, I don’t really think that any purpose would be served by your coming to England just now (My God, I’ll kill her!), and although I appreciate, and am moved by, your suggestion that Ivor would have liked us to mourn his loss together …”
Yes. It would have been rather Ivor’s thing: his wife and his ex-wife sobbing broken-heartedly together over his demise. Maybe Number One would like to come along, too, from her Home for Inebriates or whatever, and make up a threesome?
O.K., so Ivor would have liked it. But then he won’t be here, will he, dear? It’s whether
I
like it that counts now,
I’m
the one who’ll have to meet you at the airport, put clean sheets on your bed, ask you if you’d like hot-water-bottles, cocoa, cornflakes…. And then there you’ll still be, next day, and I’ll have to talk to you,
pass you the marmalade, think what the hell to do with you. And you’re bound to want to stay for weeks and weeks, coming all the way from Bermuda, £400 return, isn’t it?
It isn’t that I hate you, dear, it’s just that I don’t want to have to bother about you. Just like Ivor….
*
Just like Ivor. How Ivor would have laughed if he could have known of the wicked asides that kept coming into her head while she wrote her correct and decorous letter. She imagined the low rumble of laughter as he leaned over her shoulder, reading what she had written. She seemed to hear his rich, mocking voice
suggesting
outrageous postscripts and addenda:
“Send her a row of kisses from me,” he’d have said, in the special jeering voice that he reserved for making reference to his former wives. “She won’t know, will she, that ‘X’ is the ideogram for ‘Get lost’ in Old Akkadian. Look—like this—it represents a falling man being thrust away over the threshold….”
How they’d have laughed over it together, she and Ivor—might, indeed, have actually put the row of X’s, giggling like schoolchildren as he egged her on. Jeering at his ex-wives was something that Ivor and Imogen loved to do together, they were so good at it: it was like one of those brilliant ball-room-dancing partnerships. Somehow, it brought them very close.
Never again. She could never be funny and wicked like this with anyone but Ivor. Funny, outrageous, in fits of heartless laughter, ruthless with love….
Hell, she was crying again! She was sick to death of crying, and here it was starting all over again, the tears dripping soppily down on to the letter making it look all blotched and pathetic.
Stop it, you fool, stop it!
Pathetic. A pity Cynthia couldn’t be here watching, it would have warmed the cockles of her cliché-ridden little heart. The poor lonely widow, sitting in her empty home long after midnight, sobbing her heart out over stupid jokes that nobody would ever find funny again.
*
It was perhaps half an hour later—somewhere between one and two o’clock in the morning—when the telephone began to ring: and at first Imogen, in a stupor that was half misery and half sleep, fancied that it was morning: that she had overslept, allowing the bustle and clamour of the day to get ahead of her—doorbells, telephones, laundry-men, neighbours. She made as if to leap out of bed—and only then discovered that she wasn’t
in
bed. Had, in fact, never gone to bed at all last night … Lord, it still
was
last night …!
Sitting up writing letters…. Yes, that was it. The unfinished letter to Cynthia still lay in front of her on the table….
Ring-ring … Ring-ring … on and on. Who could it be, ringing at such an hour? And with what sort of news to impart? Imogen wasn’t afraid of bad news as a normal person is afraid. She felt immunised by grief from any further grief, and so she picked up the receiver without a tremor—with scarcely a twinge of curiosity, even. If they had said, “Your sister in Australia is dead”, or “Your stepdaughter Dot is dead”, or “Your stepson Robin”, or one of the grandchildren—she would just have said “Yes, I know”.
It was something of a shock, though, when they didn’t say any of these things. It made it hard to concentrate. “Mrs Barnicott?” the voice kept saying, “That
is
Mrs Barnicott, isn’t it?”
A man’s voice. A young man—no, a boy, really … and as he went on talking, Imogen’s mind gradually began to clear.
“At the party …?” Of course. Myrtle’s party. That dreadful party last night—tonight—this evening—whenever it was. Who, though …?
“Yes … of course I remember …” she hazarded, playing for time: and then, suddenly, she
did
remember, and her voice stiffened with embarrassment as it all came back to her.
“You’re—we were talking about Dutch Elm Disease?” she ventured, guardedly.
“No, actually.”
Unhelpful, but factually correct. It was Myrtle, not he, who had said that he was interested in Dutch Elm Disease. Mad about it, she’d said.
Imogen tried again.
“You’re—you’re Terry, aren’t you?” she said, pulling the name out of the medley of her recollections. “You’re—”
“No, actually,” he said again, and this time even more
unhelpfully.
“The name is ‘Ten’, ‘T-E-R-I …’”
“Oh.” The amendment, it seemed to Imogen, provided singularly little opening for further conversation. “I hope your trousers were all right?” she floundered on, inanely—but the whole thing seemed so insane, and especially at this time of night—“The wine, I mean …”
What an idiotic conversation! People had no
right
to make you behave so idiotically.
“Yes. They’re O.K.”
Deadlock once more. Imogen could hear his breath gathering itself together as whatever it was he’d really rung up about came thrusting upwards towards his vocal chords.
“Look, Mrs Barnicott, what I wanted to tell you … That is, I wanted to apologise, actually. I mean, the way I freaked … the wine and that. I’m sorry …”
“That’s all right,” said Imogen, a trifle frostily. Why couldn’t he leave the unfortunate incident alone?
“You see,” he was continuing—making matters worse with every syllable—“it was a shock, you see, when you told me that your husband was—that is, when I realised you were—”
A widow. O.K., O.K. Did the young fool imagine that she didn’t
know
which was the word that had thrown him? Of course he’d been shocked, everyone was. But did he need to ring up at two in the morning to say so?
She braced herself against his pity as against the recoil of a swing-door. The pity of the unscathed young is the worst of all.
“Yes, I’m afraid—” she was beginning, cold and retaliatory—and then, suddenly, she realised that her caller was still speaking.
“You see,” he was saying, “I hadn’t realised who you were at first—Myrtle introduced us by our Christian names only, if you remember, and of course it didn’t convey anything to me. It was
when you told me your
other
name, and who your husband was—that’s what threw me. You see, Mrs Barnicott, it just happens that I know rather a lot about your husband, and about the
circumstances
of his death. And one of the things I know is that his death wasn’t an accident. And you know it too, Mrs Barnicott: you know it better than anyone, because you killed him.”
A
NUT, OF
course. With shaking hands, Imogen listened in horror. The sort of nut who gets his pleasure from kicking those who are down: who thinks it is fun to make an already despairing widow feel even worse.
Only as it happened he hadn’t made her feel worse. He had made her feel much, much better. At the words “You killed him!” a shaft of incredible, singing happiness had gone through her—a sensation more shocking and more inexplicable even than the accusation itself. For one dazzling, lurid second she was no longer a dreary, pitiable widow, but a glittering monster of
wickedness
. Come along, dear, I’d like you to meet my friend the
murderess.
Let them gape and stutter over
that
for a change. Let them gasp, and spill red wine down themselves, out of fear instead of pity. “Widow”, indeed.
Clutching the telephone to her ear, the crazy accusation still ringing inside her skull, Imogen was filled with a dizzying sense of change, of hope, of the Outside. There it still was, the crazy, hazardous, unpredictable Outside, just as it used to be, with its nut-cases, its enormities, its random bolts from the blue. This grey capsule of bereavement, in which she had been existing all these weeks as in a padded cell, was not all that was left upon the earth after all. Somewhere beyond its walls the silly old real world was still spinning. For one brief moment, it had been vouchsafed to her to hear again the whistle of its slings and arrows, to feel again the thrust and knobbiness of its muddled burdens.
The moment was gone almost before she knew it. She was back in the capsule again: crying again.
“A nut-case,” she sobbed angrily, slamming down the receiver. “As if everything wasn’t bloody enough—a bloody nut-case!”
*
“A nut-case,” Edith-next-door confirmed, pursing her lips over sweet, strong coffee the next morning, and nodding darkly at her neighbour who was now sitting, meek and bereaved, across the hearth from her—across what would have been the hearth, that is to say, if Edith’s home hadn’t been central heated throughout, with plastic daffodils and mummified grasses where flames had once leaped and flickered. It was ridiculously early for coffee really, only just after breakfast, but Edith liked her troubles fresh, and so the moment she realised that something new was amiss in the House of Mourning (which was how she currently
described
her next-door-neighbour’s home), she had raced for phone, coffee-pot and kettle in almost a single practised movement.
“You want to watch out for this sort of thing,” she was now advising Imogen, scooping sugar from the bottom of her cup with a sort of ladylike intensity of greed, and conveying, somehow, the impression that she had just been proved right about something. “You can’t be too careful, my dear … a woman on her own … lonely … unprotected.
I
should know. Do you realise, Imogen, that it’s been four years—four whole years!—since my dear Desmond passed on? Four years next Thursday …?”
This four years’ seniority in widowhood was something that Edith rather harped on, it seemed to Imogen. She brought it into almost every conversation, sometimes to comfort, sometimes to warn, and sometimes to hint, very gently, that Imogen herself wasn’t grieving quite enough.
“You’re so
brave
,”
she would say, “and after only two months, too. Why, after two months I could do nothing but cry and cry. But you know, dear”—here she would start dabbing at her own eyes, peering sharply past the handkerchief to see if Imogen was dabbing too—“you know, don’t you, that there’s no need to keep a stiff-upper-lip with
me.
Go on—don’t bottle it up—have a good cry. Remember, I’ve been through it myself, I know just what you’re feeling.”
You don’t, though, Imogen would think sullenly. If you did you’d shut up, shut up, shut up,
shut
up!
While aloud, “Yes, Edith, I know,” she’d prevaricate, docile, and dimly guilty, and
unable to summon up a single tear. And the funny thing is, she sometimes mused, your upper lip really
does
feel stiff.
But this morning, Edith was too much interested in the story she had just heard to bother with the etiquette of sorrow. She was full of advice and timely warnings.
“… Can’t be too careful,” she was repeating, knowledgeable and slightly competitive. “
I
used to get calls like that all the time. Every night for months: and sometimes in the day as well. Oh, it was terrible!”
Naturally. Everything—every goddam bloody thing—had been just that little bit more terrible for Edith than it now was for Imogen. Aware of inferior status in the complex hierarchy of bereavement, Imogen bowed her head over her coffee. Whatever it took to get calls “like that” every night and sometimes in the day as well, she, Imogen, clearly hadn’t got it.
She
had had only
one
call “like that” in eight weeks.
Like what, anyway? A spark of fight stirred in her, and she raised her head.
“They accused you of murdering Desmond?
Every
night
?”
she inquired innocently—and as she spoke, the sense of Ivor not being there—not listening, not knowing, not being amused—went through her like a sword-thrust. He’d always loved to take the mickey out of Edith-next-door, or to hear that Imogen had done so. Telling him about it afterwards had been part of the fun. From now on, if she cared to score off Edith, she’d be scoring alone.
“Imogen! What a terrible thing to say!
Of
course
no one ever accused me of … of … What an idea! My own darling husband … so close we were … such companions … never a cross word …”
Ivor’s assorted cross words lashed across the conversation like the crack of a whip, and both women were struck silent for a moment, listening to them over the years. Booming across summer lawns … resounding from the frozen garage … reverberating loud and clear from landing windows. Where the hell’s my this? Who’s been using my that? Why the hell can’t you ever …?
For four years, ever since she moved in next door, Edith must have been listening to this sort of thing over the hedge, storing it up.
It wasn’t
fair.
Ivor had been
alive,
dammit, all those years, whereas Darling Desmond had been safely dead. How can a live man possibly compete in patience and long-suffering with a dead one? Darling Desmond held all the aces, there under the green grass of the churchyard, smooth and lush by now, four years established, and perhaps with daisies growing.
His
cross words, whatever they may have been, were buried with him, and there would be no resurrection.
Hell and damnation! The half-suppressed sniffs, the gulping sounds from behind Edith’s poised handkerchief, warned Imogen that she’d done it again. She’d allowed the conversation to work round to Darling Desmond, and now here was Edith crying about him all over again.
Most crying is not only
about
someone, it is also
at
someone; and Edith’s was no exception. She was crying at Imogen, right on target. Look, the sobs and sniffles were saying, as plain as you please, look how
I’m
weeping for
my
dear husband after four whole years! Whereas
you,
after only two months … Parties … Hair-dos … Look at me, Imogen! Look! Real tears!
But Imogen wouldn’t look.
I won’t play, she was saying to herself, I’m keeping out of the game, I’m not competing. Let her win.
But
was
it a game? For one sick, terrible moment there flashed across Imogen’s mind the awful possibility that Edith’s
ostentatious
tears might, after all, be genuine? She might, after all this time, be truly still grieving? Look, ran this new and terrifying message, look, after four whole years you still
do
feel like this. You really do.
I won’t, said Imogen to herself, squeezing her eyes tight shut and clenching her fists in a strange, savage kind of prayer. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. Not for
four
years
!
*
“And this is why I understand so well how you are feeling, dear,” Edith was concluding, blowing her nose and scrubbing at her red
eyes. “You might think, perhaps, that by now I’d have begun to get over it … to forget. But believe me, dear, it isn’t so. The grief is as vivid to me now as on the day he died….”
Vivider, probably. You don’t really remember much of that first day, and what you do remember has very little to do with grief. A tap dripping. A porridge-saucepan soaking in the sink—for the last time, as it happens, because he was the only one who liked porridge; but this hasn’t occurred to you yet. The dawn lightens beyond the windows; it is morning, full day. There seems to be nothing to do, and so naturally you don’t do anything. The biggest non-event of a lifetime.
Had it been different for Edith, that first day of hers without Darling Desmond? Or is it, perhaps, the case that the weeks, and the months, and the years are all the time adding, by stealth, and little by little, every bit as much to a memory as they take away? Until, at last, the things that didn’t happen have grown like moss over the things that did; a soft green cushion on which the mind can rest at last?
What sort of things would she, herself, be remembering about Ivor, and her grief for him, after four long years? What kind of a man would he appear to her to have been, once four summers lay between them, four grey and harrassing winters; four holidays, perhaps? And all the new people—new friends, new neighbours, new window-cleaners, who had never known him? Beyond the lengthening barrier of the years, ever smaller, ever further away, what would Ivor’s tiny, wildly-gesticulating figure look like when she tried to hold it in her fast-receding gaze?
Not like Darling Desmond, anyway. On this, at least, she was resolved.
“He used to get into the most awful tempers,” she said to Edith, loudly and suddenly, and apropos of nothing. “The tiniest thing—one of the ivory chess-pieces out of its box—or if I forgot to order the peat for the roses….”
Edith stared, her mouth opening and shutting silently, while she sought vainly among her habitual repertoire of reactions for
something that would do. There was nothing; and so she settled, at last, for being vaguely offended. Not that Imogen’s outburst had been an insult, exactly, but it was—well—ungrateful, in some complicated way. After all, if she, Edith, was prepared to
understand
so well how Imogen was feeling, then surely Imogen could at least go to the trouble of feeling that way?
“You’re overwrought, dear,” Edith diagnosed warily. “You’ve been doing too much. Why don’t you go and have a nice
lie-down
?”
Nice lie-downs were almost everyone’s remedy, when the strain of Imogen’s bereavement became too much for them. She couldn’t really blame them—bereavement is so non-stop, it never lets up; people have to have a bit of time off from it. And let’s face it, if you aren’t lying on your bed, then where
are
you? Somewhere else, of course; it gets on people’s nerves, after a while.
*
This, really, was the wonderful thing about having the house to herself at last: she was on nobody’s nerves. How wonderful to be able to saunter up the stairs, and down again, in and out of the kitchen, without anyone saying What are you looking for, dear? What do you want, dear? Do you mind getting your feet off my nerves, dear?
You don’t want anything, that’s the whole trouble. You
want
to want things again, in fact you wander about trying to find something to want—a newspaper, perhaps; some half-finished knitting; an orange. You don’t really want these things, but all the same there is a faint vestigial stirring of discontent when you find the oranges are all gone. Better than nothing.
Back into the kitchen again. Open the door of the fridge, and stare in, and wonder, supposing you were hungry, what would you actually want for lunch?
Not pâté, anyway. Jars and jars of it, all brought by nice people who wanted to give something a little more practical than flowers, and not as heartless as theatre tickets.
“Delicious!” Dot had said, reprovingly, storing the fourth jar
away with the rest at the back of the fridge, “and so kind of them.” But
she
hadn’t eaten any of it, either.
Out of the kitchen, then, and up the softly-carpeted stairs. How lovely to steal about like this, without purpose, and with no one demanding your reasons! To drift from room to room: to stand vacantly, for minutes on end, at the bedroom window, staring down at the sodden lawn where Ivor’s barrow of dead leaves still stood, unemptied, just where he had left it that last afternoon. For two months it had waited, silently grinding its wooden feet deeper and deeper into the wet turf as the weeks went by. By spring, there would be neat, dead little rectangles of impacted earth among the new, tender grass, unless someone moved the barrow, and of course no one would.
How lovely to stare, unperturbed, at the slow decay of things, with no one at your elbow saying don’t brood, dear, don’t worry, dear, everything’ll be all right, dear, just relax, dear, and if you leave it out there much longer, dear, it’ll rot.
Well, of course it will. Do you think widows don’t know about Entropy? They know better than anyone, actually, even the ones who have never heard of the word.
How lovely not to be watched and worried over. To be able to sit hunched on the edge of the big double bed, your face empty, your jaw slack, and no one coming in and saying Are you all right, dear? To be able to kick your shoes off, to walk on tiptoe for no particular reason, feeling the thick pile of the carpet Ivor had spent two hundred pounds on between your toes. To make faces at yourself in the long mirror, tongue lolling, nose all scrunched up, eyes pushed up at the corner like a mongol. Yah, you ugly creature! You hideous, miserable creature, Yah!
“Step! I say, Step, whatever
are
you doing?”
In utter confusion, her face a kaleidoscope of hastily-reassembled features, Imogen whirled round.
“Robin!” she cried, half-laughing in her shock and
embarrassment
, “What on earth …? I thought you were in Yorkshire…?”