Fiona Barton - The Widow

There was a terrible atmosphere—George was standing in front of the fireplace staring at Glen, all red in the face. Glen was sitting in his armchair, looking at his hands.

“How’re you doing, George?” I asked as I passed him a tea.

“I’d be a damned sight better if this idiot hadn’t got himself involved with the police. Thanks, Jean. We’ve had the press knocking and on the phone morning, noon, and night. We’ve had to take the phone off the hook to get some peace. Your sister’s had the same, Glen. It’s a bloody nightmare.”

Glen said nothing. Perhaps everything had been said before I came in.

But I couldn’t let it go. I said, “It’s a nightmare for Glen, too, George. For all of us. He’s done nothing and he’s lost his job. It isn’t fair.”

Mary and George left soon afterward.

“Good riddance,” Glen said afterward, but I was never sure if he meant it. It was his mum and dad, after all.

My mum and dad came next. I told Dad on the phone to go to Lisa’s next door so they wouldn’t be bothered by the reporters and they could come through the gate between the gardens. Poor Mum, she opened the back door and came tumbling in like a dog was after her.

She’s lovely, my mum, but she finds it hard to cope with things. Ordinary things. Like catching the right bus to the doctor’s or meeting new people. Dad is very good about it, really. He doesn’t fuss about her “little panics,” as they call them. He just sits her down and strokes her hand and talks to her softly until she feels better. They really love each other—always have. And they love me, but Mum needs all Dad’s attention.

“Anyway, you’ve got Glen,” she used to say.

When she sat down, all pale and breathless, Dad sat with her and held her hand.

“It’s all right, Evelyn,” he said.

“I just need a minute, Frank.”

“Your mother just needs a bit of reassurance, Jean,” Dad had told me when I first tried to suggest they talk to the doctor. So I reassured her as well.

“Everything’s going to be fine, Mum. It’ll all get sorted out, you’ll see. It’s a horrible mistake. Glen has told them where he was and what he was doing, and the police will put it right.”

She looked at me hard, like she was testing me. “Are you sure, Jean?” I was.

After that, they didn’t visit. I used to go and see them.

“It’s too much for your mum to come over,” Dad said on the phone. I’d do her hair every week. She used to enjoy going to the hairdresser’s “for an outing” once a month, but she went out less and less after Glen’s arrest. It wasn’t his fault, but some days I found it hard to even like him.

Like the day he told me he’d seen my scrapbooks. It was a couple of days after he was released on bail. He’d known when he got home, but he waited. I knew he was building up to something. I could tell.

And when he found me looking at a picture of a baby in a magazine, he exploded.

My love of babies was obsessive, he said. He was angry when he said it. It was because they’d found my books at the back of the cupboard where I kept them, behind the water tank. They were only pictures. What harm was there in that?

He was shouting at me. He didn’t shout very often; he usually just closed down and stopped talking when he got mad. Didn’t like to show his feelings, really. We’d sit and watch a film together, and I’d be bawling my eyes out and he’d just sit there. I thought he was so strong at first, that it was manly, but I don’t know now. Perhaps he just didn’t feel things the way other people do.

But that day, he shouted. There were three little scrapbooks, each one filled with pictures I had cut out of the magazines at work, newspapers, and birthday cards. I wrote “My Babies” on the cover of each book, because they were. So many babies. I had my favorites, of course. There was Becky, with her striped Babygro and matching headband, and Theo, a chubby toddler with a smile that made me shiver.

My babies.

I suppose I knew Glen would see it as a dig at him, at him being infertile. That’s why I hid them. But I couldn’t stop myself.

“You are sick,” he shouted at me.

He made me feel ashamed. Perhaps I was sick.

The thing was that he wouldn’t talk to me about what he called “our problem.”

It wasn’t meant to be a problem. It’s just that having a baby was all I wanted to do in my life. Lisa next door felt the same.

She moved next door with her bloke, Andy, a couple months after us. She was nice—not too nosy but interested in me. She was pregnant when they moved in, and Glen and I were trying, so we had loads to talk about, lots of plans to make—how we’d bring up our babies, what color to do the nurseries, names, local schools. All those things.

She didn’t look like me, Lisa. She had short black hair all spiked up with bleached white tips and three earrings in one ear. She looked like one of the models in the big photos in the salon. Beautiful, really. But Glen wasn’t sure about her.

“Doesn’t look like our sort of person, Jeanie. Looks a bit of a flake. Why do you keep inviting her around?”

I think he was a bit jealous of sharing me, and he and Andy had nothing in common. Andy was a scaffolder, always away somewhere. He went to Italy once. Anyway, he went off with a woman he met on his travels and Lisa was left on her own, struggling by on benefits while she tried to get anything out of him for the children.

Lisa was lonely and we got along like a house on fire, so I went around to hers mostly, to save disturbing Glen.

I used to tell her the stories I heard at the salon, and she’d laugh her head off. She loved a good gossip and a cup of coffee. She said it was an escape from the kids. She had two by then—a boy and a girl, Kane and Daisy—while I continued to wait for my turn.

After our second wedding anniversary, I went to the doctor’s on my own to talk about why I couldn’t get pregnant.

“You’re very young, Mrs. Taylor,” Dr. Williams said. “Relax, and try not to think about it. That’s the best thing to do.”

I tried. But after another year without a baby, I persuaded Glen to come with me. I told him it must be something wrong with me, and he agreed to come, to support me. Dr. Williams listened and nodded and smiled.

“Let’s do some tests,” he said, and our treks to the hospital began.

They did me first. I was willing to do anything to get pregnant, and I put up with the specula, the examinations, the ultrasounds, the endless prodding.

“Tubes as clean as a whistle,” the gynecologist said at the end of the tests. “Everything healthy.”

Glen went next. I don’t think he wanted to, but I’d been through it all and he couldn’t really back out. It was awful, he said. They made him feel like a piece of meat. Samples, plastic cups, old torn porn magazines. All that. I tried to make it better by saying how grateful I was, but it didn’t work. Then we waited.

He had almost a zero sperm count. And that was the end of it. Poor Glen. He was devastated at first. He felt he’d be seen as a failure, less of a man, and was so blinded by this that perhaps he couldn’t see what it meant for me. No babies. No one to call me Mummy, no life as a mother, no grandchildren. He tried to comfort me at the beginning when I cried, but I think he got bored with it and then hardened to it after a while. He said it was for my own good. That I had to move on.

Lisa was brilliant about it and I tried not to hate her luck, because I liked her, but it was hard. And she knew how hard it was for me, so she said I could be the kids’ “other mother.” I think it was a joke, but I gave her a hug and tried not to cry. I was part of their lives and they became part of mine.