The War Widow. Lorna Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ I?” Mary’s prompt was faintly urgent. Mrs Alderton took her cue, theatrically, saying, “You really should be more careful, dear. Who knows who might try to borrow it? Not everyone has read them all you know.”

      There was quite some emphasis on the ‘all’.

      My gaze touched the walker’s eyes again but there was no betraying flash of character this time. They seemed in fact, if it were possible, to now be devoid of any personality whatsoever.

      It was the goad I needed to lever me out of my seat and across the foyer into the mild November day.

      ---

      The town was busier now that its residents had emerged to undertake their morning scurry to offices and shops. The thick traffic was a bizarrely confused mixture of old carts and aged horses that should probably have been retired after the war, and lorries in the crisp painted liveries of the bigger firms who had the advantage now that the basic petrol ration was being withheld from the public. There were few cars on the road. It probably explained why the vast town centre train station was absolutely crowded with people again just as it had been last night.

      My destination was the Vale of Rheidol railway, a narrow gauge line tucked in a modest corner away from its larger black cousins. It was a lifeline for the remote villages dotted picturesquely along the steeply rising mountains and it gave me an odd moment when the train gave a jolting shudder and began the slow ascent.

      Many years of my life had been spent in paying dutiful visits to my husband’s family in this seaside town. Then a war had been declared and he had gone away, with the result that opportunities for sightseeing of any sort had ceased for the duration. So I ought to have been thrilled now that it was peacetime and a crowded seat in a tiny carriage was gifting me a fresh glimpse of that once much loved scenery. But I wasn’t. The past minutes had been occupied by an unceasing surveillance of the platform and now I was able to only stare blankly as the valley slopes closed steadily in.

      It was a fiercely controlled air of calm. I wished that I’d managed to achieve something like this yesterday during the long journey south from Lancaster. Yesterday’s hours between waking and dinner had been consumed by an exhaustion of crowded stations and carriages until the deafening rattle shook me out of logical thought. Sometime after Crewe I had convinced myself that an elderly gentleman was making notes about me and his neighbour was excessively interested in the stops along my route. All of which had, of course, later been embarrassingly – and publicly – proved false.

      Today though, I was rested and defiant in the face of yet another journey. No silliness was permitted to accompany me here, not even when my neighbour smiled at me and urged me to precede him into the jostling herd of disembarking passengers at the bare levelled ground that made up the station at Devil’s Bridge.

      This was a tiny place. It was situated at the narrow head of a steeply wooded gorge and spanned only by the bridge that lent the hamlet its name. A few buildings straggled along the winding road and the sole hotel peeped out over the treetops, seeming incapable of supporting the sheer volume of tourists that were descending from the train. In summer this place was darkly leafy but now, when the autumn had already struck the dead leaves from the mossy boughs, the grazing land above was like a crown above the wild sweep downhill into bleak wooded valleys.

      I’d expected it to be quiet here today. Instead it was as busy as summer and I could feel the excitement growing in the crowd around me long before we swept in a sort of united disorientation of hats, handbags and raincoats around a bend lined with high metal railings towards the low parapet that signalled our first glimpse of the natural spectacle that made this place famous.

      I handed my shilling to the man at the turnstile. He took my money in a greasy hand and the mechanical clanking as the turnstile’s metal arms turned was stiff and unwelcoming. But then I was through and stepping down into the sudden wilderness of dormant woodland. It was no quieter inside; it seemed as though the crowd’s chatter was magnified in here and I stood for a moment, gathering my bearings before trailing after them down the steps towards the first viewpoint.

      For a while there was no view at all. The trees grew sinuously, twisted old oaks clinging to any piece of ground they could. Even leafless, the damply rusting branches still strained vigorously to reclaim the scene. They acted like a ruthless blind; for a while I could see nothing and it seemed as though the cluster of tourists might never grow bored enough to move on and leave me to take in the view in peace. But then, finally, the last of them turned away and bustled past on their own private mission to tackle the waymarked path so I could step forwards and reach out a hand to take sole possession of the cold metal barrier. Here I was at last.

      It felt like a lifetime had passed since I’d first begun this journey to this place where I would mark my husband’s death.

      But this was no agonised pilgrimage of the sort undertaken by a bewildered war widow. The sort where a grief-stricken wife hopes to achieve some kind of comprehension of the cruelty that stole her beloved husband’s life. This was peacetime, he was my ex-husband after our divorce thirteen months ago and he had been a stranger to me for far longer than that. This was no respectful farewell to former happiness at all.

      Before me rose the bridge like a stark monument to past centuries. It held two older bridges cocooned beneath its arch. They lay one on top of the other, each bridge built at a slightly different angle to the older stonework that had gone before and each squatting over a wider gap. Somewhere far below, the fierce waters of the Mynach roared blind into the chasm; folklore claimed that the devil himself had built the first narrow crossing and today, for the first time, I could have almost believed it.

      Because about eight days ago, my ex-husband had taken himself to that selfsame spot and looked down into the raging depths. And had then decided to follow the look with his body.

      Whatever else had happened in the days since then and now, this part of my story at least was not a creation. The police had confirmed it. The river had been in spate; it had been swollen beyond all normal bounds by heavy rain in the hours before and there was no hope of anyone surviving that. No hope even of a decent funeral. His body had never been recovered. This river’s current was the sort that was strong enough to move rocks and trees, and a human body had been a mere speck of dirt in the stream. The only fragments the torrent had left us as proof of a man’s passing were a broken camera, a few traumatised passers-by and a ruined sock recovered from an eddy half a mile downstream.

      It was insane. And worse, it was insufferably sad to have to hear polite judgements about his character, as if this could have ever had anything to do with his usual state of mind. I hadn’t received so much as a note from him in the year since our divorce but still it was incomprehensible; impossible to imagine Rhys, my stubbornly individual ex-husband, ever meaning to end it like this.

      And yet he had. And somehow, now, whatever it was that had brought him to this desperate extreme had since turned its gaze upon my life and my mind. And I still didn’t have the faintest idea why.

       Chapter 2

      I wasn’t going to find my answers here. Abruptly my silent vigil was broken. Oblivious to the recent history of this place, the next group of tourists appeared noisily on the viewpoint beside me to exclaim in their turn, and my bitter enjoyment of my half-angry grief was destroyed in an instant. Casting a last glance at the bridge and its forbidding heights, I swallowed the wealth of unanswered questions and found myself leaving room for sorrow instead. It came with a bolt that rocked me. One doesn’t expect to feel grief in company and there is a certain shame inherent in feeling a flood of emotion that is at odds СКАЧАТЬ