The War Widow - Lorna Gray

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the doctors and nurses hadn’t minded at first if I didn’t know the answers. But those men, the pair on the foggy shopping street, had acted decisively when I failed to give them the response they wanted. There had been no violence from them. There had been no need. I had found myself being bustled with grasping fingers beneath each elbow towards the flank of a waiting car. I can vividly recall that moment. The memory is filled with the sheer debilitating agony of experiencing all that in a crowd and learning that that not one of the labourers, shopkeepers or besuited office workers scurrying by was even going to notice.

      It was like a very bitter repeat of an old lesson that I had tried very hard to forget.

      It had ended at the moment the car door was dragged open and I somehow slithered free and dashed round the rear to make my escape. Only to run slap bang into the path of the oncoming traffic.

      Adam was still waiting for my explanation so I gave him a carefully edited version. “I stepped out in front of a bus.” My lips formed a hapless smile. “Don’t worry; it was coming to a stop anyway.”

      “Good grief—”

      I added, “Oh, the bus wasn’t the problem. It was the rapid collision between my head and the pavement as I fell that did the damage.”

      “Good grief,” he said again. He stared at me for a moment. I watched the disbelief fade into other calculations as he read the proof in my face, in my manner and my general bearing. Then he was saying in an altogether harder tone, “And this was barely even a week ago? What on earth are you doing here? Why did I see you strolling about on the crown of a hill at the crack of dawn when you should be at home in bed being fussed over and generally well looked after?”

      I was hastily making calculations of my own. This was the most I had confessed yet to a stranger. Every other time that I had been drawn into speaking about my injury, the explanation had been forced out of me. It had been required by such people as the cab driver who had carried me away from the hospital, those people on the train and lastly the station master at Shrewsbury. Always, it had formed part of the aftermath of a dreadfully uncontrolled slide into panicked accusations. Now, for once, suspicion wasn’t directed at the person I was speaking to and I was, nominally at least, a willing participant in this conversation. It left me utterly unprepared.

      Finally, I said as mildly as I could, “My parents are abroad – in Paris in fact, as a kind of homage to the Ballets Russes who are disbanding or relocating or something like that, and I couldn’t possibly go to my sister.” I caught his look and added quickly, “She has far better things to do with her time than worry about me when she already has a hard-working husband and two very young children to care for.”

      It was easier to let him see that I was tired. It was the better part of my defence to play the hand of feebleness. Experience had taught me that much at least. It was after all a perfectly real symptom of a severe concussion and it was a wise fraudster who filled her excuses and explanations with something that passed as plausible truth.

      Because whatever else I said, I knew now beyond all doubt that I mustn’t let him see that I was frightened. That I mustn’t give anyone else the opportunity to encounter the same barefaced distrust that I had levied at about half a dozen people in the past two days and even now was trying to fix itself anew upon the dubiously friendly Jim Bristol after our strange conversation at the base of the waterfall..

      By contrast, this man wasn’t looking particularly friendly at all. He was asking, or rather demanding tersely, “Why aren’t you in hospital then? You can’t tell me your doctor willingly let you take yourself off like this?”

      I tried to think of a convincing lie, but I couldn’t. He wasn’t impressed.

      “This is downright insane, Kate. Why the devil—” He stopped when he saw my chin lift. I wasn’t helpless here. I had, I know, had a stiff lesson that sometimes people will do things that I can’t stop and can’t control, but that didn’t mean that I had to give up the fight.

      Besides, the people on the next table were listening in. They were pretending to be reading the menu but I could tell they were eavesdropping. The tilt of the nearest person’s head gave them away. Adam seemed to perceive this too. He leaned in with a lowered voice to say more earnestly, “Sorry. No wonder you look pale.”

      His was the one new voice in the sea of all the memories. I swear it was new. It didn’t fit the helplessness of that time when two male voices growled questions about my husband, followed by the doctors’ whispered consultations over my head with the police while my self-belief bled away into the stiff white sheets of my hospital bed.

      Because I had told the police. I wasn’t foolish enough to omit that sensible step. And besides they could see for themselves that I cringed in my hospital bed every time a door opened and I heard a man’s heavy tread approaching. But those passers-by at the bus stop had been thoroughly blind to my plight. No witnesses could recall my two men and the bus driver was adamant that he had seen nothing untoward until a lone woman had lurched into the road. And what did it matter that I could describe those two men, when there was no real proof that they even existed?

      All the same, the police had been very thorough. Their questions had begun in the usual way but very gradually even a person in my state had to notice that the kindly constables seemed to be pursuing something else, chasing an altogether different line of investigation which was perhaps even more dangerous than the incident by the bus stop had been. The tone of the policemen’s questions barely changed as they drew me to talk about my grief at my husband’s passing. I had mentioned it earlier myself so couldn’t claim it was unrelated now. In any case, they said, this particular event wasn’t actually decisive enough to count as unstable. Clearly I was perfectly sound in mind now. But wasn’t it possible I had experienced a momentary bleakness? An upsurge of desolation just as the bus had made its final approach? Apparently I should find it reassuring that the doctors didn’t think there was enough evidence for true instability; because suicide was illegal and therefore liable to end, if not in an untimely grave, then certainly with a spell in prison.

      If that hadn’t been awful enough, I had to lie there patiently while they tested a second theory in the course of their questions. And I fought it even more violently than the first. They asked me why I accepted so fully that my husband was dead. They were probing for a different kind of delusion, the sort where blind hope meets reality and the collision drives a person crazy. They needn’t have worried. It was impossible for me to believe that my husband was still alive. Because if he were; if this should have been unleashed on me because he was making some devious play of his own, it meant he had knowingly sent these men after me without even so much as a note of warning and I couldn’t believe my worth ranked so low with him as that. I didn’t dare. I was even more afraid of that idea taking root than all the rest put together.

      I was used to his indifference. I had in fact worked very hard since my divorce to teach myself that indifference was all it had been and grow wise enough to share some of the responsibility for that. I was even able to apply the same reasonableness to the fact that strangers had passed by the scene of my abduction without a glance. But this wasn’t an act of indifference. This was a man I had been married to. And he had loved me once.

      If Rhys should have willingly staged his disappearance and passed this violence on to me, this was something so indescribably evil it must question the very meaning of everything I thought he was, and everything I was too. It would shatter all my values, all ideas I’d nurtured of rediscovering empowerment and freedom since my divorce. It meant my sense of self-worth really did belong to other people – those men in the bus stop, the doctors, the police and more particularly my husband. And it was theirs to take away again.

      I couldn’t believe that. I wouldn’t. I’d left hospital that same day and given myself the only hope I could. I set myself the task of unpicking Rhys’s last movements. I’d come to Aberystwyth.

      ---

      This day, Adam was waiting for my answer. I pulled myself together and began working towards a peaceful exit.

      “Anyway,” I told him cheerfully. It wouldn’t help to overdo

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