Lorna Gray - The War Widow

I don’t honestly know who initiated it. I thought he had but there was that briefest telltale hesitation from him as I automatically reciprocated that gave me time to realise that I really had got it wrong this time. Or perhaps I hadn’t. Perhaps he’d done it in that awful impulsive way people have of assuaging their conscience when they’re a little bit ashamed that you’ve guessed they really just want to be shot of you and end up accidentally lurching into warmth instead. Perhaps it was simply a reasonably appropriate way to mark the end of a social outing as new acquaintances might do.

Whichever way it was, it didn’t exactly warrant the reaction I had. After all, I’d made this gesture all the time at home both in greeting and farewell with clients at the various events in the gallery. At the Cirencester gallery I mean. In the north, women simply shook hands like sensible creatures and saved themselves the trouble of getting it wrong. In Cirencester, this would have all just been an embarrassingly mishandled version of a familiar social norm. The feel of his touch to my arm, the automatic lift upwards to draw closer, that brief ordinary moment of confusion as one or other of us had to dictate which cheek was presented, even the accidental little intake of breath at the moment of contact and with it drawing in the faintest hint of the scent of his skin, followed by the oddly prolonged sense of suspense before one or other of us finally withdrew … It was all so familiar.

In a way this was the problem. We might have done this before. This all told me that this was a man who was used to observing this kind of social etiquette too. And yet even this needn’t have really been a cause for alarm. After all, logically speaking, I already knew this. His accent was non-descript and could have originated from anywhere vaguely southern. His car was from Brighton. He had as much right to belong to that cultural tradition as I did.

When I drew away with the beginning of embarrassment that must verge on laughter because it was funny how this latest bit of confusion really had crowned all the rest, I saw his face. His eyes lifted. He was embarrassed too but in a different way. He saw my shock. Instantly my mind was tripped into trying to match his dimly lit features to the pattern of some inconsistent memory. In its way, this was the same infuriating trick that daylight persisted in playing with visions of my husband. But if this was an echo of the past, it was a puzzling one. He wasn’t wearing a scowl to match the harsh demands of those men who stalked every shadow in my mind. He was looking like an attractive, capable man who had just seen his mask exposed and was calculating how best to explain the joke.

And above it all, like a persistent tone playing a darker note that had for a while slipped by unnoticed, I discovered that his hand was still gripping my arm.

Firmly so.

I felt the moment that he registered the shift in my attention. I felt the tightening in his concentration too and the faintest echo of his heartbeat transmitting from his fingertips through the layers of my sleeve. His grip held me sternly on the spot before him. I could only stare, fascinated, as that mouth hardened. It slid on towards speech. As it twisted from there inexorably to frame a question, I knew that this was the point where it became a demand. It would be the same one I had experienced in that Lancaster shop doorway. And this time I would have to fight for my soul as well as my body.

Adam’s voice said roughly, “What on earth have I said to make you look like that?”

---

Oh. That most certainly was not the question I had been expecting.

This one belonged to a man who was only entirely wounded by whatever he saw written on my face.

Oh no .

Whatever offence I had given him earlier, this crime was worse. Mortification rose far beyond the shame of repeatedly mishandling the consequences of a bad exit from a tearoom. That was humbling enough but regardless of what had come before and what must certainly come after, I couldn’t imagine anything would ever again be as crippling as this moment; this instant of finally having to accept that the police and the doctors and everyone were right. Reality was not a fixed mark for me. I truly could not rely on the accuracy of my own mind.

This day had been exhausting. My voice was a taut rush. “You’ve done nothing.” I’d broken contact with his hand a moment before. Now I was blinking rapidly and backing away. “Nothing at all. I’m so sorry. I must get on. Goodbye.”

And I left him standing there at the telephone box. I could feel him staring after me all the way to the corner by the pier.

It wouldn’t exactly be surprising if I found it distressing to discover this question mark hanging over my sanity. But actually, I did still have my wits enough to know that it wouldn’t be unusual for anyone in my circumstances to be reacting a little nervously, particularly coming as it did after a day spent braced to meet the terrors of my first tentative steps towards uncovering Rhys’s last actions only to discover nothing but my personal grief. And in truth, this wasn’t why I was upset.

I was distressed because I’d wounded an innocent man and there was in my history a very small, very insignificant part of me that nursed an insecurity far older than abrupt encounters with moving buses. It was a part that had instead everything to do with that old lack of faith in my value to the world.

Sometimes I feel that the belief I am generally found to be harmless is my most durable merit. Only today I hadn’t been harmless at all. I’d taken what ought to have been a pleasantly peaceful afternoon for a fellow guest and ruined his day with my own irrational anxieties. The experience humbled me, and it brought me face to face with an uglier aspect of myself. And now I was ruining his evening too.

This was because it became very swiftly became clear to me almost as soon as I entered the lounge after dinner that our resident famous person had completely wasted his time asking me to keep our shared journey a secret. The other guests already knew. I’d seen Jim’s smirk. They knew it hadn’t merely been a kindly passerby who had taken pity on me when I’d missed the last train. And what’s more, the fact that this information had been deliberately omitted from Adam’s own description of his day wasn’t simply taken as a reflection on me and left to rest at that. They were delighted to have the excuse to tease him about it.

I was reading the same paragraph for the fifth time when I overheard Mrs Alderton drawing Adam out from behind his newspaper long enough to confirm that he had driven to Devil’s Bridge today and that yes indeed he still had fuel for his car. Then Mary said something about it being a long way to go and that good company might have made all the difference. I don’t think she was really making a jibe at me, at least not completely; I imagine she was merely hinting that Adam should invite her and her sister along with him next time but her challenging manner of asking was more than a little intimidating. Her bold way of talking belonged to a woman who was in the habit of confronting what she wanted. Since her recent past must have been not entirely dissimilar to mine and by that I mean it must have featured war, I thought she was, if it wasn’t unkind to say it, the sort of woman for whom the war had meant liberty, frivolity and adventure; and she hadn’t yet decided whether peace was going to rank on the whole as an improvement.

I already knew what peace meant for her older and colder sister, Mrs Alderton. It meant a tearing race to snare Mary a wealthy husband. And at present that meant steering the room away from a discussion on Jim’s experiences on manoeuvres in Burma and back onto the subject of Devil’s Bridge with delicious details of the site’s awful heights.