Lorna Gray - The War Widow

The surprise I think was for him, because he came home to a wife who understood herself a little more clearly. The war for me had come as a glorious respite. The hardships and terrors of bombing were nothing. War gave me the solitude I needed to rediscover a sense of balance and to break the old patterns so that by the time Rhys came back again I was a little more capable of perceiving where I was right and a little less wedded to the idea of sacrificing everything for the sake of his art.

Or perhaps I was still shackled. He came back as demanding as ever. I won my little victory by divorcing him. But he got to stay in our beautiful home while I scuttled meekly away to the north of England and my parents like the dreary little cast off I’d always played. And yet, feeble as it might sound, it had seemed right at the time. Even before the war I must have had opinions. After all, our rows were always pretty heated affairs. But this wasn’t an argument I would have even attempted to win, for my own sake rather than his. Anything else would have felt painfully like revenge.

“He left a note, you know,” his mother suddenly announced.

Before the divorce she had liked me well enough I think – though without children, what was the point of me? – but Sue Williams was a woman who was fiercely committed to the idea that it was a woman’s duty to maintain the appearance of happiness even when it was absent. I think I’d offended her more than anyone by suddenly deciding to set my own desires above the luxury of continuing to care for her flawless, incomparable son.

Today the acrimony of my sudden departure was like a shadow that faded in and out of her manner as she wavered, quite reasonably, between despising me for being the woman who had walked away from her son, and treating me as the only other woman who had known him intimately enough to appreciate the full horror of his loss. Her lightness of tone now was so far along on the scale of control that it practically met devastation coming the other way. She told me, “He left a note but the police have it so you can’t see it. He just said sorry. No explanation or anything. Just sorry .”

Behind it all, I think her voice cracked and I nearly put my hand out to her but she raced on. Her eyes were held wide open and they glittered in the dim light as she rushed into saying, “He only visited us a few weeks before, and he seemed fine, absolutely fine. He’d just opened an exhibition in the gallery so he was tired of course but nothing that …” Her voice suddenly deepened. “Nothing that could imply he was thinking of—” Devastation really did show itself this time.

It was beginning to tell on me too. Rhys belonged to that set of artistic temperaments that verge upon genius. 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.