They belonged to the aproned figure of Sue Williams. My ex-mother-in-law.
Rhys’s mother was pretty and plump in the manner of the quintessential housewife in an advert for baking powder and she stared at me from an armchair that was well-hung with doilies. It was placed in the corner of a small room made dark by heavy burgundy wallpaper and thick curtains that might have easily been blackout curtains left over from the war. I suppose she must have been in her late-sixties by now. She looked younger. “Well,” she said finally. “It’s a long time since I last set eyes on you.”
“It is,” I said and settled on the settee, wondering if the stuffy shadows replayed the old scenes as vividly for her as they did for me. It took bravery of many different sorts to come here. “It is. How are you?” Then I felt like an utter fool. How exactly should she be, given what had happened.
“Well enough,” she said, and reached for a half-drunk cup of tea. It seemed she did recall those old scenes.
I smiled one of those sympathetic smiles that are nothing to do with happiness and made some stilted offerings of regret, which were received graciously but coolly, and tried to remember what I had come here for. I was glad at least that her husband was not present. That man was like a cumbersome caricature of his son; the same forceful personality and strong features, but without the brightness of mind which marked his son. Had marked his son.
Seeing her like this abruptly brought it home to me. If there had been any lingering doubts about whether or not he had really died that day, they couldn’t survive this visit. Rhys would never have let her suffer like this. It came as a violent little shock somehow. Perhaps I really had never quite accepted it before now.
Her softly accented voice covered my stumbling halt. “So, you’re here to read the condolence messages?” She swept a collection of cards off a gloomy dresser and passed them to me without leaving time to demur. I had to carry them to the small shaded window to make them out. They were a varied bunch, some inclined towards mourning and some treading a fine line nearer disbelief. All expressed sympathy and care to the parents of a lost man and they did not remotely make for easy reading.
One in particular caught in my hand. It was written in elegant curls and it read; ‘We each want to make our mark, to stand out a little from the rest and Rhys did just that. He always will. I will miss him.’ and an indecipherable scrawl that I knew must read ‘Gregory Scott’.
“What is it?”
I turned in the light from the window to find Mrs Williams staring at me. “Oh, Sue,” I said, shaken into a guilty realisation of what this visit must mean for her. “Gregory called me the day after I heard the news. He wondered if I would help him go through the prints Rhys had kept for him from that project they did together but I said I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.”
I stopped short when I registered the hurt that had passed over his mother’s face. Gregory was one of Rhys’s oldest patrons. When he, Rhys and I had first been introduced I had still been a young painter studying classical lighting techniques under the tutelage of my long-suffering uncle at the old man’s gallery in Cirencester. That had been twelve years ago. Six months after that, Gregory had been signing his name as the witness on my marriage certificate. And a year after that, Gregory had performed the next in a long line of introductions by bringing a famous critic to the launch of Rhys’s one-man show. This critic had promptly dubbed Rhys the Most Promising Photographer to Emerge from the Depths of Wales and I might add that Rhys had mildly resented this title. He hadn’t particularly liked being considered only promising.
“Oh, Sue,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry. I’m letting you think the unforgivable.” I moved back to my seat before adding firmly, “Gregory didn’t mean that I should march over the gallery threshold as if I’d never left. He wasn’t thinking about retrieving his old sporting photographs; he was thinking that we should do our utmost to honour the work that Rhys had done with him. Whatever else happened between Rhys and me, however our marriage ended, I could never forget the sheer beauty of his talent and the important part that Gregory played in it.”
This determined eulogy did far more to smooth the waters than any wild outpourings of emotion could. Her demeanour transformed and she showed the bright cheerfulness of the truly bereaved. “I know. And you’re right; Gregory was the friend Rhys needed. I remember the rows when Rhys first told his father he was going to pursue photography rather than engineering.”
I also remembered the other rows, like the one in this house that last summer before Rhys left us all for the war and the other one in our Cirencester home when he came back again. Looking back now, it amazes me that I had let his creative impulses dictate my life for so long. If I was looking for proof my judgement was poor, this was it. Not, it must be said, that I mean to imply that I call his going off to war one of his impulses.
His decision to lend his considerable skills to the Army Film and Photographic Unit was a raw opportunity to test his talent against the grittiest subject matter of all. The war was the muse to end all muses, and even I can admit that he had never lacked the kind of resolve a person must need to face the long years of hard work and utter bravery of sustained conflict. It could have changed him like many other men, but it didn’t. When he came back he only brought with him a new muse, a revitalised urge to create and the expectation that his wife would once again give way to the weight of his point of view and compromise as she always had; which really meant redrawing every fresh line, reforming every fragile emotional boundary that previously had been the last one I’d thought would never be crossed.
The surprise I think was for him, because he came home to a wife who understood herself a little more clearly. The war for me had come as a glorious respite. The hardships and terrors of bombing were nothing. War gave me the solitude I needed to rediscover a sense of balance and to break the old patterns so that by the time Rhys came back again I was a little more capable of perceiving where I was right and a little less wedded to the idea of sacrificing everything for the sake of his art.
Or perhaps I was still shackled. He came back as demanding as ever. I won my little victory by divorcing him. But he got to stay in our beautiful home while I scuttled meekly away to the north of England and my parents like the dreary little cast off I’d always played. And yet, feeble as it might sound, it had seemed right at the time. Even before the war I must have had opinions. After all, our rows were always pretty heated affairs. But this wasn’t an argument I would have even attempted to win, for my own sake rather than his. Anything else would have felt painfully like revenge.
“He left a note, you know,” his mother suddenly announced.
Before the divorce she had liked me well enough I think – though without children, what was the point of me? – but Sue Williams was a woman who was fiercely committed to the idea that it was a woman’s duty to maintain the appearance of happiness even when it was absent. I think I’d offended her more than anyone by suddenly deciding to set my own desires above the luxury of continuing to care for her flawless, incomparable son.
Today the acrimony of my sudden departure was like a shadow that faded in and out of her manner as she wavered, quite reasonably, between despising me for being the woman who had walked away from her son, and treating me as the only other woman who had known him intimately enough to appreciate the full horror of his loss. Her lightness of tone now was so far along on the scale of control that it practically met devastation coming the other way. She told me, “He left a note but the police have it so you can’t see it. He just said sorry. No explanation or anything. Just sorry.”
Behind it all, I think her voice cracked and I nearly put my hand out to her but she raced on. Her eyes were held wide open and they glittered in the dim light as she rushed into saying, “He only visited us a few weeks before, and he seemed fine, absolutely fine. He’d just opened an exhibition in the gallery so he was tired of course but nothing that …” Her voice suddenly deepened. “Nothing that could imply he was thinking of—” Devastation really did show itself this time.