Bayley - Widowers House: A Study in Bereavement, or How Margot and Mella Forced Me to Flee My Home

WIDOWERS

HOUSE

A Study in Bereavement

or

How Margot and Mella

Forced Me to Flee My Home

JOHN BAYLEY

W.W. Norton & Company

New York London

N ow do eat it while its nice and hot, ordered Margot, putting a large lump of casserole onto my plate.

I have always disliked casseroles. During our forty-four years of married life Iris and I never made a casserole. Nor did we ever eat one, except under duress, if we were guests at a dinner party.

I was tempted to say rudely that I would rather eat it nice and cold. Instead I found myself rapidly picking the largest lump off the plateMargot at the stove had her back to meand stuffing it into my trouser pocket.

I had never done such a thing in over four decades of happy domestic eating, with myself usually the cook. I felt astonished by my own action: its rapidity, its pointless duplicity. Why was I behaving like this? Was it because I was different now?

That must be it. My instinct now was to escape, to evade, to elude whatever was pressed upon me, whether it was telephone calls or chunks of casserole.

But I could not escape back into my old self, because my old self no longer existed. In widowhood you lose not only your loved one but much of yourself. And there was no new one to take its place. Only this indistinct creature who had just put the dinner pressed upon him in his pocket instead of eating it, who was an object of solicitude and a prey to the whims of kindly women.

Widowers, like widows, are filled with self-pity. In my case, intensified as it had become, self-pity was the only recognisable trait left over from a previous personality. So I reflected in a wild way, as I manipulated the handkerchief in my pocket over the greasy lump of casserole. I used to be a different person: the person who had lived with Iris for forty-four years, so different from her and so separate, and yet so completely a part of what she was, of what together we were.

So instant is our process of thinking that while Margots back was turned to me as she bent over her immaculate stovenot like my weathered stove at homeI had an infinity of time to reflect on the fact that friends, however well you knew them, remained unstable and unpredictable creatures. I was frightened of Margot; I was wary of her, because I did not know what she was. She might get cross or irritable, amorous or lachrymose. Whatever she did or was would remain unknown to me. Ill or demented, Iris for me had been always the same, always my old cat. She determined my being.

Well, she was gone now. I could not be the one whom I had been, the one who was part of her when she died with Alzheimers disease. She had taken our two selves with her. I could see my old self clearly enough, but only as a fact of history, unrelated to what I seemed to have become.

And what was that? A new person? I did not feel in the least like a new person. Perhaps Margot was trying, even if unconsciously, to make me a new person: perhaps I was unconsciously trying to be one myself. But it didnt seem to be working. My last thought, as Margot turned back again from the stove, was that I was glad it wasnt working.

Indeed, I had become truly frightened of Margot. But that was highly unfair! I had known Margot for years and years. That is to say weIris and Ihad known Margot for years and years. One of her daughters had studied under Iris, who was then teaching philosophy at St. Annes College in Oxford. The daughter was not very satisfactory as a pupil, but Iris did her best, and the girl scraped a third. She was very fond of Iris, who always kept in touch with her and helped find her a job. Then she got married. Margot always insisted that Iris had somehow saved her daughter. Margot then took to asking us over to her house in Norfolk for the weekend.

It was a long and complicated drive, which I hated. I used to try to persuade Iris to beg us out of it with some kind of excuse, but Iris was too honest for that, and besides, she felt loyalty as well as friendship for Margot. She could never resist advances, however untimely and unwanted, from someone she had once helped, and who insisted on regarding themselves as pals for life. Also, we were both genuinely fond of the big, awkward, enthusiastic woman, who combined a natural gift of goodness and kindness with being slightly comical in everything she said or did. She could be overpowering and a bit exhausting, but, protected by Iris, I got on with her well enough.

Her husband, Guy, was a great help in all of this as well. Hospitable, as garrulous as she was but unanxiously genial, he always made the going easy. I seldom get on with men as well as I do with women, but Guy was an exception. He teased and patronised me a little in a way I enjoyed because he seemed to enjoy it, but he was always attentive and respectful with Iris, as if a bit in awe of her.

There was nothing much to do at their big house, and the country round about was unedifying. The children were grown-ups now and we hardly knew them, except for Iriss experience of the academically delinquent daughter, now a model mother. Margot used to drive us to see churches with immensely high ceilings ornamented with life-size angels. We duly exclaimed and admired, but after each church, I very much hoped that we would go home to tea, or to a relaxing drink and chat with Guy. Laughing heartily at my feeble hints in this direction, Margot used to herd us back into the car, and on to the next church. Her enthusiasm had no sense of time or distance, and when we got back at last, Guy would have several drinks inside him, and a box or two of Pringles.

In his time, he had obviously made quite a lot of money, but he had retired soon after we got to know them. Then suddenly and unexpectedly, he died. Margot was prostrate. One year, two years later, she was still a timid and uncertain shadow of herself. That was the time during which she became really close to usor rather, close to Iris. They saw each other in London, and Margot came to us as often as we went to visit her. Before that, she and Guy had almost always been the hosts.

I found it much easier to deal with Margot now that she was a widow. Without Guy, she was subdued and clinging, but easy to talk to, and pathetically eager to be told anything it occurred to one to tell her. We took her abroad once or twice, and that was quite a success. For a time, she lost interest in her house and in the household animals, to which she had once been so much attached. A cleaning lady from the village came every day to keep things tidy and to talk to her. When we visited her now, or when she came to us, we took her to the pub, where she and Guy never used to go.