The Widow's Tale (14 page)

It was the same haunting murmur, barely rising or falling from a monotone, with which I’d recited the Lord’s Prayer right through my childhood. The same shared taking-of-a-breath. What I had identified, in fact, was the tribal chant of the British Christian. And hearing it again – feeling it now resonate all around me – very nearly reduced me to tears.

The three priests, with their staff and candle, moved on. And at each cross a few words were delivered from the lectern. Most of the congregation bowed their heads, but I noticed one or two individuals, including a man in his seventies, who insisted on going down on one knee. Then there was a little more call and response between
the priest and the congregation. And, minute by minute, the focus slowly swung around the garden’s perimeter, like the invisible hand of a clock, with the story of the Passion echoing over the Tannoy system, and nothing but the rattling trees filling the space in between.

By the time the priests had moved on to the third or fourth Station I noticed a little girl over to my right. She was about five years old, all wrapped up in a thick little coat, with a matching scarf and hat. She’d found herself a twig and was using it to dig out the dirt between the flagstones – was happily chatting away to herself, and scratching and digging out the moss and dirt with considerable industry.

I remember being about her age, or possibly even a little older, and tugging up the long, rough grass at the bottom of the garden, and washing it in an enamel bowl. With real water that I’d insisted my mother pour out for me. Then tying it up on the wire fence for the sun to dry it. God knows what I thought I was up to. But I remember taking the whole enterprise very seriously. At lunchtimes in the summer holidays I used to inform my mother what I’d been up to that morning and how busy an afternoon I had before me, as if playing was a job of work.

The hand of the clock continued to slowly sweep around the crosses. And all the while that little girl kept digging between the flagstones, lost in her own little ritual. She appeared not to be paying any attention. But I couldn’t help but think that some of the talk of blood and sin and crucifixion was bound to seep into some corner of her
mind. And that, if nothing else, some day, fifty or sixty years hence, she might attend a church service of some sort and hear a phrase or simply the collective murmur of all those voices and it would stir up some feelings deep within her. Something to do with family and childhood, and even faith.

I
'm not entirely sure what I was hoping for over at the Slipper Chapel. If not necessarily the whole falling-away-of-scales-from-the-eyes routine then some glimmer … of something or other. Some sense of wheels beginning to turn.

If nothing else, it made me appreciate that I do rather envy the believers. I envy them their rituals and all the accompanying paraphernalia – their candles and rosaries and incense and all that bowing and genuflecting. And not least the coming together, in the actual service. In something ancient – or at least apparently ancient. Something bigger than oneself. Devotion really is a form of surrender, perhaps even self-abnegation. And over the last few months there has been many a time when I would have heartily welcomed the opportunity to escape myself, if only for a minute or two.

Whatever I was after, I'm almost certain that I didn't quite find it. I could, I suppose, have fallen to my knees and asked for salvation, but deep down I would've felt like such a hypocrite. I suspect it was the idea of the Stations that particularly drew me to it. I don't want to sound like some old crank but any ritual which incorporates a circle or a circuit must have at least half a chance of generating some sort of energy. I'm sure even the lowliest physicist would back me up on that.

I'm just a little frustrated that whenever I consider such things these days I seem to be doing so through the eyes of an anthropologist. I observe. I might even appreciate. But I can't quite seem to lose myself.

Anyway, it's fair to say that I arrived back home a tad disappointed. I bought the paper and boiled myself an egg. And as I sat there, carefully lopping off the top of the egg, I thought, ‘How about this for an austere little ritual.' With the salt and pepper waiting to be cast about the place and all the soldiers lined up in a neat little row.

They had some psychiatric academic on the radio this morning, banging on about something to do with ‘The Unconscious'. I managed to keep up with him for about five minutes before he completely lost me and I had to turn it off. To be perfectly honest, the whole thing was starting to freak me out.

I've always acknowledged that there exists somewhere within me something commonly referred to as The Unconscious, or an unconscious mind. I've always talked as if I accept that it is there. But I think perhaps I must have imagined some set-up whereby when I'm awake it's almost totally dormant. Like a lake, with all manner of ugly stuff brimming about in the cold, dark depths which thankfully only reveals itself when I'm asleep.

But over the last few months I've had to reassess this little model and, specifically, how, in certain circumstances, that part of the mind usually kept packed away in the bottom drawer can suddenly spring out and threaten to
overwhelm everything else. A week or two after John's death I caught myself staring at the cover of a newspaper. I realised that I couldn't make any sense of it – not even the headlines. For a second I thought it might be the onset of one of my migraine/blind-spot episodes. But it wasn't. I was looking … and I'm pretty sure I was seeing. But there was no comprehension to speak of at all. My own interpretation is that it was just that my mind had become utterly flooded with the stuff that's usually kept well out of the way. As if the reservoir of my unconscious had risen to such a level that it had seeped into the rest of my mind.

When I was at school I shared a room with a lovely girl called Sidney, though I'm sure that can't have been her real name. She was a rather timid little thing – terribly earnest and quite determined that she was one day going to be a Famous Mathematician. Little Sidney's problem was that she used to sleepwalk. I'd wake in the middle of the night and hear her pottering about the place. The first time she did it I thought she was just getting up to go to the loo, but after a couple of minutes I realised she was still footling around, so I turned the light on and found her on the floor, rooting about under the bed.

She was always at it – wandering up and down and banging into things. Or scratching at the walls, like some restless soul. Sometimes she'd chatter away to herself while she was in mid-sleepwalk. I once woke to find her standing at the window with the curtains wide open, nattering away like a gibbon. Which was pretty creepy,
let me tell you. And, since I used to find the whole thing rather fascinating, on this particular occasion I slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to her side. I'd learnt that whenever she went off on one of her little walkabouts it was best just to try and gently steer her back to her bed, without waking her. But this one time I crept over and I began to talk to her – these quite innocent little enquiries. To try and get her to tell me what was going on.

It sounds almost cruel, but it really was nothing but honest-to-goodness curiosity. It was as if some secret hatch had been left open. I felt like a psychic, talking to someone on the other side.

I can't remember now what it was she was ranting on about. I sometimes wonder what became of the poor little mite. I half expect to see her picture in the paper, next to a story about her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Maths. It really wouldn't surprise me. But I'll never forget that sense of her wandering through the caves and caverns of her own unconscious and me briefly having this string-and-tin-can telephone, through which I imagined she could report back to me.

God only knows the state of my own unconscious mind these days – what chasms of angst and swamps of melancholia are bubbling away down there. It must look like the bloody Somme. Or Nagasaki. And who knows if such a ravaged landscape ever really recovers. If I've grasped anything over the last few months it's that grief … or mourning … or whatever you want to call it, is not a continuum. Is not an arrow on a successful company's
sales chart, rising inexorably towards the north-east. You don't wake up each morning feeling a tiny bit better than the day before.

I fully anticipate that five years from now – or ten, or twenty, if I manage to last that long – I shall be shuffling through my garden, with a trug in one hand and a copy of
Woman's Weekly
in the other and, for no discernible reason, I will be struck again by the magnitude of John's death. And it will rip right through me and rend me asunder with just as much force as the day I first heard about it, three months ago.

R
ight up until the day I jumped into my car and shot up here John was still receiving a fair bit of post and even the odd phone call, as if he still moved among us. As if someone was trying to test my resolve.

It's mostly junk mail, of course. Or some flunky on the phone from some far-flung call centre who remains unmoved in the face of my protestations, convinced that I'm just trying to throw him off the scent. No,
really
, I feel like saying. I was there, at the bloody funeral. That was me, right down at the front.

For the first few weeks I replied to every note, politely explaining the situation. But after a couple of months, having received yet another letter from some credit-card company fishing for business – and possibly even a company I'd already written to the previous month – I would just scrawl ‘NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS. RETURN TO SENDER' across the front and march it straight round to the post box. And on one occasion, when I was feeling particularly tetchy, ‘THIS MAN IS DEAD'.

Since John's death/demise/unexplained disappearance I've received three batches of post from his old company. The first arrived in a large brown envelope, with a covering letter explaining that everything addressed
to him was being dealt with by the post room, unless it clearly had nothing to do with the business, in which case it would be forwarded to me. It's odd, but the arrival of that first small stack of letters provoked in me a sort of prurient excitement. What was I hoping for exactly? Some sickeningly explicit piece of pornography? Some note from a woman at the Edinburgh office who'd sunk one too many margaritas at some annual shindig and let John put his hand up her skirt?

The actual contents couldn't have been less racy – mostly invitations to industry junkets at various golf/racecourses. Or offers of discount gym membership. But in the second package there was one letter, handwritten, with the word ‘PERSONAL' in the top left-hand corner. That's what first aroused my suspicions – along with the fact that the stamps were Swedish. I wasn't aware that either one of us actually knew any Swedes. And as I opened it up I felt that same strange giddiness stir in me again.

It was handwritten. The signature was barely legible, so I flipped the letter over and just started skimming through the text. There was certainly no shortage of affection in its two or three pages. But it became pretty clear pretty quickly that there had been no hanky-panky. And, soon, that it was in fact from some Swedish chap, rather than some pneumatic blonde Swede-ess. Still, I didn't give up hope. Who knows? Maybe John and this Swedish chappie had been up to no good whilst in each other's company. Perhaps there had been a night out and
a late-night taxi into Soho. Or even just some shared confidences, which were currently outside of my realm. Again, I was disappointed. Some reference was made to a couple of drinks following a previous meeting. But Sven, or Henning, or whatever he was called, was now just getting in touch to ask if John was planning to attend the meeting in Stockholm. To which, the short answer was, of course, No. He was not.

Very strange. It was as if I'd unwittingly developed an appetite for sordid revelation. Something that might knock John's saintly reputation down a peg or two. Either that or I just wanted to hear about something that might even things out a little. Or rub a little salt in the wound.

So, I suppose, in the end I got my just desserts, etc. If you keep on scratching away at something you're almost bound to make it bleed. At our solicitor's behest I'd spent a couple of hours in John's study, trawling through his papers and trying to unearth one or two elusive documents. Had worked my way down to the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets and right at the back discovered an old cigar box with a couple of elastic bands wrapped round it, to stop the contents spilling out.

It may just be that I had too much blood pumping round my head to properly grasp the situation. But inside there was a small clutch of letters, all folded and refolded as if they'd each been read a hundred times. And I'd opened up the first one and was sitting down on the floor and reading it before I'd even taken a breath.

The tone might have been decidedly casual, cool even,
but reading between the lines it was pretty obvious how serious she was. She was quoting bloody Goethe, for Christ's sake. And talking about her favourite movies. She was modestly presenting herself as the most sophisticated woman ever to walk the earth.

And I suddenly worked out who this woman was. Who'd loved my husband. I was halfway down the second page before I even recognised her handwriting – that telltale, overly elaborate copperplate. The pen had put such pressure on the paper that I'd practically engraved the thing.

It was the barely concealed desperation that finally did for me. How much I clearly wanted him. And suddenly it all came rushing back – the dread of what life might be like without him. Please God, I remember thinking in those few weeks between our first meeting and the brokering of some unspoken contract. Please God, don't let me lose this one. This one's good and kind and decent. This is the man for me.