A Careless Widow and Other Stories by V.S. Pritchett

Author:V.S. Pritchett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1989-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Things

I was out early practising my putting on the lawn, which I have brought pretty well to perfection. This was the first time I had had a chance to get out my clubs after a week of gales. They strike this jagged tip of south-west England first, tear through the leaning trees and send the fields and hedges streaming and the steep hills bowling across the map into the Channel, and take your mind and the tears in your eyes away with them. But now, as if the whole rumpus had not occurred, the sky was cloudless and as still as glass, and the only sounds were the tap of my club on the balls and the cries of the gulls ripping through the air. The young gulls must have hatched and the parents were driving off the crows. Probably next day there would be sea fog. We don’t live on land here, as my wife says, we live in weather. One lives from one hour to the next, as they turn into days and weeks and the piled up years we spent in Africa, Canada, Egypt and Hong Kong.

On this quiet day last April Rhoda rang up. It was the first time that we had been able to have breakfast outside. As I say, I was out on the lawn and I heard the telephone ring. I am supposed to be retired, but the week rarely passes without two or three calls from the London office, the dockyard or some Ministry about an oil rig or a dry dock or asking me to go and serve on some commission of enquiry. I am a consultant now, called in when something goes wrong – stress mostly.

I crossed the lawn. My wife, Miranda, was standing by an open window answering the call. Not in her usual calm, practical voice, but in a high thrilled rushing voice: ‘Darling, how extraordinary! How marvellous! Where are you? What are you doing? Why didn’t you write? We’ve been so worried about you. What are you doing . . .?’ and so on, as she used to do when she and I first met and she was in love. She looked younger and warmer with every word.

Rhoda is her sister, who lives in Italy. Miranda was, I supposed, shouting to be heard in the Mediterranean. She always shouts on an international call. But she was really proclaiming, in her emotional way, across time, and that is why she was looking so young. We haven’t seen Rhoda since we went to Hong Kong about ten years ago and, frankly, it’s been a relief. She has never been one to write – a Christmas card every year, of course, but nothing more. When the long call came to an end Miranda stood staring out over the fields into the sky and to the sea. Then she came back out of time when she saw me.

I said: ‘Has anything happened? Something wrong? It must have cost her a penny or two ringing from Italy.

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