The War Widow. Lorna Gray
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He had been prone to bleak periods of self-doubt and foul moods, and the run-up to a new exhibition had always been our most fraught time. But stubborn, beautiful, magnetic, inspiring and exacting though he was, no one could ever pretend that the stress of a new exhibition would have been sufficient to drive him to this lonely end.
Instead, this dark heavy room was filled with the echoes of his presence. His personality lingered in the gramophone in the corner and in the terrible prints his mother kept on the wall in a kind of merry defiance of his lectures on taste. He lurked in the desk where I knew she had written her regular fortnightly letters to tell him the news.
I asked, “In this last visit did he say anything about any kind of harassment or some sort of trouble or anything? Anything at all? I mean, are you really sure that this note meant that he was planning to …?” I trailed off helplessly, not at all sure I could justify this crime of interrogating a recently bereaved mother and not even sure I wanted to ask any more. In the midst of all the real grief for the loss of his life, it felt intensely selfish to have come here for the sake of worrying about the difficulties of quietly going on living mine.
Her reply was a flat croak. “You mean to ask if anyone was pressurising him? No. One of the people who saw him there was Mrs Thomas from next-door’s sister’s girl. She was out for dinner with her new husband. She actually called in barely minutes after the police came knocking on my door. I told her she was a fool and a liar. She told me she wished she was. He was … alone.”
The way she said the word alone made the shadows of that desolate bridge in the night time loom now from the corners of this gloomy room. Her son’s isolation in his last moments was her own loneliness now.
Then she beat the shadows back with a stern little shake of her head. She was a stronger woman than I. “He said nothing about any trouble. Nothing. He talked about his future projects and the latest one which was a new little collaboration with a newspaperman who was proving a touch unreliable but nothing of any note. The police asked about shell shock, and at the time I didn’t really know how to say for certain it wasn’t, but I’m sure now he never gave me any sign.” She paused and looked uncertainly at me; focussing on me, I think, for the first time. Her voice was suddenly a little firmer, a little harder. “He did mention you at one point, but I don’t think it was anything important.”
My heart began to beat.
There was another pause and I began to worry that I would have to decide whether to prompt her or to let it pass but then when she spoke I realised that her hesitation had only been because she was carefully editing his phrasing. I was sure Rhys would not have put it so politely. “He said you were going to try to take the gallery from him.”
Sue Williams gave a brief pursing smile at my exclamation. “You’re in Lancashire for now aren’t you? Your sister told him – she’s still in his neighbourhood isn’t she? – that you’d started dabbling again. Perhaps Rhys thought you might want to come back. I don’t know. He wasn’t very clear about it. But I told him that you wouldn’t; you couldn’t. Not that you mightn’t have the right but I was sure even you wouldn’t be so cruel as to take the rug out from under his feet, not when he had such talent.”
I was thinking; dabbling?
My voice was perfectly measured. “I don’t want to go back there; I thought you knew that. I’m sure he knew that. Gregory certainly did. He wasn’t remotely surprised when I refused after he called the other day. So I can’t imagine what Rhys thought could possibly have changed my mind.”
Her odd little pursing smile came and went again. I’d actually surprised her. Rightly or wrongly, she had expected me to be quietly bewildered by Rhys’s doubts. Now I was decisive and clear. The funny thing was that Sue gave the distinct impression that she approved of the change. She even made me wonder if she might have liked me better had I been like this in the days of my marriage.
It made me think if this was a new me I must be getting things very wrong indeed.
Or perhaps this was just the old patterns repeating themselves. I hadn’t broken them as much as I had thought. These people had always made me feel terribly guilty. They’d always made every desire of mine feel somehow like a selfish whim; even in the days when I’d been an optimistic young thing and the desire had been to love their son.
Now I was feeling the shame of coming here and burdening this woman with my questions when I ought to have been displaying the grief she was looking for in the ex-wife. I felt guilty for forcing her to acknowledge I was the survivor when Rhys had died. I felt guilty for thinking she was the sort of person that would think like that when she and her husband were probably perfectly decent and it was only my own petty resentments that made me so inadequate here.
I saw her glance at the clock. It made me realise I should leave before her husband came home. I shouldn’t have come here, knowing what I was facing. I should never have imagined that I could withstand this encounter with the past.
Of course, if I hadn’t been trying to deal with an appalling threat, I would never have been desperate enough to have come here at all.
Very carefully, I rose to my feet and stepped down the passage. The door opened. I would have to step outside but first I concentrated specifically on the selfish whim of wishing not to be persecuted in my ex-husband’s name. I made her squint against the unaccustomed light. “Just one more thing, if I may? Have you had any unexpected visitors? Anyone else asking questions?” I knew the answer before she even spoke. There never were going to be any witnesses to confirm my story.
There was a pause, and then she added with a terrible blandness; “If they find his body, I’ll let you know. For the funeral.”
That was supposed to be her final word. It had every right to be her final word. But as she prepared to shut the door, I paused and turned back, asking entirely on an afterthought:
“Was there a film in his camera? The one they found in the riverbed, I mean?”
Her expression blanked and for a moment I thought she was going to close the door before she conceded, “Yes. I think so. We were shown some pictures at one point so I suppose there must have been; yes. The police still have it.” Then her face wrinkled and I realised with a sudden pang that I thoroughly deserved to feel guilty this time because I’d made her cry. She added, “I can’t bear the thought of his beloved things lying in a storeroom somewhere. I wish you hadn’t reminded me. I suppose I could ask for them back but I just can’t bear that either. I wish you hadn’t reminded me.”
I put out my hand to her then. I gave her fingers a little squeeze. I was sorry. I really was sorry. For all of it.
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I’d been sustained until now by the belief that I was pursuing something that might yield my escape. Now I’d paid this visit and discovered nothing except guilt and the very bitter truth that after this I had absolutely no purpose at all. If I wasn’t careful, I’d find myself forming a new plan, any plan, even to the extent of sneaking off into that impenetrable gorge and personally scouring beneath every rock within about four miles for Rhys’s body; just for the sake of doing something, anything rather than giving up.
I was hurrying once more down that increasingly familiar street that led to the pier and the turn to the hotel. It was colder here. The buildings at the left hand side were extraordinary. They belonged to the university and were a long line of insanely tall towers and halls that had all the magic and style of a misplaced Arthurian castle. They cast a long shadow but it wasn’t this that made me cold.
It was because there on the far side of the road, under the calm gaze of the towering university buildings, stood a black Morris Eight.
I’m not even sure which was worse; the fact that the car was there at all, or the knowledge that I had been wandering about all morning with barely a thought for where its owners were. I glowered at it for a moment, disbelieving; trying to convince myself that it wasn’t just a coincidence; this wasn’t another needless panic about a perfectly common breed of car. I didn’t need to debate with myself for long. Even with the risk of further