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Widows' Walk

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 03:01 CDT

The spot made Clare uneasy.

The name of it, perhaps. The Widows' Walk.

A long shaded walkway, in the grounds of Carnbeg's Hydro hotel. Two parallel files of tall pine trees: like the columns in a church. Soft loam on the ground, so that-unlike in a church - you didn't hear footsteps coming until that person was almost next to you.

Would she have felt differently if it had been called something else? Well yes, probably she would. Originally it had been the Empress's Walk, because not Victoria (as some thought) but the Empress Eugnie had walked here. That would have been better.

She was born Clare Morrison the year after the War ended, in 1919. She seemed to have lived with the effects of the War ever since. People always mentioned it in conversation: they'd talk about so-and-so's father or uncle who was killed at the front, or d'you remember that favourite brother or cousin, the one who got himself gassed. Her own father had served in Flanders, and survived; but at home later he would become morose and withdrawn, and who knew if that didn't have a lot to do with the accident in his car which claimed his life?

It was a place of shadows, the Widows' Walk. Her mother tried to put the brightest interpretation on it. 'These are like the pines of Rome,' she would say, although Clare knew her mother had never been to Rome but only dreamed. Her great-uncle Colin, one of the few men who ventured here, said that the Ancient Romans also chose piney locations for their resorts, because the fragrance of pine was famous for inducing sleep.

That only contributed to her anxiety up here on the heights, Clare felt. If it really was a cataleptic kind of place. You didn't feel completely in charge of yourself. see how slowly the women, mostly in pairs or little groups, walked up and down its length. See how blandly the ones sitting on the benches watched them, with such vague and silly smiles on their faces.

Some of the women were widows. The world in 1936 was full of widows. Confusingly the Hydro was also synonymous with 'matchmaking.' Parents brought their sons and daughters to meet the daughters and sons of people very much like themselves; they trusted in good fortune and rather more in the skills of those vigilant individuals, widows or spinsters, who sat singly in the corners of the public rooms keeping a gimlet eye on their proteges for this season.

Clare had realised the same treatment was intended for her. Why should she be exempt? She was seventeen, thought acceptably pretty, and bright enough for the sort of life she was marked out for: as the wife of a solid city professional or businessman, and the mother of two, three or four children.

In Scotland, being this far north on the gazetteer, they lived a little behind the times. But if she ever hinted to her mother what she really thought, her mother would imply that arranged marriages were a custom in any country you might name, every culture had them - so just put that funny notion right out of your head, young miss. Her mother would sigh loudly, irked again that her efforts on Clare's behalf weren't appreciated. At which point Clare would lay off, since her mother's martyred widow's smile was always more than she could cope with.

It was a game for Clare, teasing the matchmakers -having them suppose she was a compliant victim -and then, whenever she saw one approaching and getting ready to pounce, managing to dart off in another direction and slipping out of the woman's grasp.

That made it all the odder, even to Clare, that she chose to come to come up to the Widows' Walk. It seemed to sum up what the Carnbeg Hydro and the lives of its guests were all about: convention and precedent, unthinking rituals, behaving by rote and not by instinct.

She would hear herself sighing, just as her mother did. Wasn't it just simpler to go along with it all? She'd still be able to think her own thoughts, wouldn't she? But she had to wonder a bit about that. After the first ten years of marriage, how many of her own thoughts would be leftwould she even have time for them? -didn't you and your spouse come to think more and more alike? That was what the matchmakers had the gift of working out: just which pairs of 'possibles' were likely to prove compatible, so that time fused them neatly into an organism.

Clare realised from the manner in which her mother steered them away from the women and wouldn't even look in their direction that she'd already been talking to them. She also knew from how she would choose to remark on this family or that one, she had specific Designs (capital 'D').

It was primitive, superstitious, sacrificial, as the pagans roundabout aeons ago would have understood. But there were worse fates, it was true. Her mother was only doing what she believed, in her conventional way, she should be doing for everyone to judge she was a good mother.

Clare sighed again, on this July afternoon of 1936, stranded between lunch and a game of tennis with her friend Fay. Perhaps, it occurred to her, the pines are what draw me, in spite of myself, because I know I have to keep a steady nerve?

She was sitting on a bench. She turned the tennis racquet idly in her hands, and chanced to look up.

She saw her again.

Her.

Fifteen or twenty yards away. The woman who didn't belong here. She spoke to no one, and had a very unsettled look, as if she too failed to appreciate this spot. She was somehow impermanent, as the regulars weren't, she was wanting not to obtrude. She -walked with the aid of a stick; reaching out for the trunks of the trees, she seemed to be touching them to test their reality.

Clare was intrigued. She thought, it might be that she and I have something in common. But any time she'd got up and gone looking for her in the past few days, the woman always managed to elude her. Perhaps she knew the Widows' Walk better than Clare did herself?

What truly distinguished her as a stranger were her clothes. She was wearing black trousers. (A woman in her late seventies, or even older!) And a matching jacket, so the combination -was like a man's suit. With a red band of some sort holding her silver hair. Nobody else here dressed like that.

Clare had asked Mrs McAinsh, sitting close by, did you notice the woman who was walking here a few moments ago?

'Which woman was that, dear?'

The one wearing black trousers-with the red band in her silver hair.

Mrs McAinsh grinned back at her, as if she thought she might be just a little mad-whereas Clare knew quite well, it was Mrs McAinsh who was doing the crazy thing, by avoiding the issue. How could she not have seen the woman, who was so individual in how she dressed and behaved?

No one else wanted to notice this interloper, that was the trouble. The trouble with Carnbeg, and all the types who came here. The woman, even in old age, didn't fit in. There wasn't any provision for people like her: a woman who looked as if she'd lived a full life, travelled to faraway places, met interesting company, smoking and dancing and cocktailing her nights away.

I want to be like her, Clare thought. I don't want to grow into one of those other women, who become like whoever they're married to and end up grieving for no one so much as themselves. I want to have wings on my feet. I want to turn cartwheels through my life, I want to laugh more than I cry. I want-oh, anything but whatever it is I'm expected to meekly do. I'll only know once it happens that this is different, not less ME but more so. I need -I need to force destiny from its shell!

It was all so clear to Clare Morrison, seated on a bench beneath the trees. She thought she would remember this moment forever. A sepulchral shaft of sunlight falling at her feet-birdsong from the branches overhead-the earthy, piney odour in her nostrils. The full generosity of the world, and its endless mystery.

Something made her turn round -it was less than a shadow, really just a faint disturbance of the air, the whispered suggestion of a presence: a whole long lifetime distilled to a split-second.

Clare sat with her heart pounding against her rib-cage, staring over her shoulder into the dense, perfumed green shadows

The unauthorised version.

The sirens led Clare Mornson west.

Her mother wept, bitterly, and called her names as she was getting into the taxi which took her to the train which took her to the ship which carried her away.

Away from Carnbeg and Scotland and from all those familiar markers. She wondered how she'd found the courage. Youth can do anything, the man on the liner told her. (He had useful friends, he assured her, who had useful friends of their own - )

And so it was to continue for years: getting by on her youth, and lucky encounters, and knowing just when to take her chances.

She started modestly enough, persuading a family on board ship to employ her as a nursemaid. In New York another family poached her, and they took her off with them to the coast. The eldest son introduced her around, and she caught the eye of a man she didn't realise was married. His wife came after her, and Clare jumped on to the first train out of there. A woman on the streamliner sat watching her, in the dining car where Clare wouldn't have been anyway if she hadn't allowed a man across the aisle to take her there; the woman decided she had just the look for the range of cosmetics her millionaire husband manufactured. Clare thought she was being promised free Harkin samples,not the lucrative if brief career she went on to enjoy as a model for billboards. Parties up- town, until she started missing public appearances, and maybe her dismissal had something to do with what happened, or what didn't happen, when Mrs Harkin -forever on the look-out for a recruit to her sapphic Upper East Side 'sewing circle'-jammed the elevator between floors that night.

Then came the War, and it was back to Go. Clare took whatever domestic nursery work she could get. An airman friend of the family she was with came home badly injured, and she helped nurse him through the months he had left. After his funeral she was informed he'd left her a hotel near Roxbury, NY for her efforts.

She duly became a hotelier, and a very enterprising one. She hired cars for transporting guests the three-plus hours up from Manhattan, and back again, and soon hers became the smartest resort m the Catskills. A swanky hotel in Washington hired her, and she got to know all the movers and shakers in town. Her address book was one big, ostrich-leather bound State Secret.

In her twenties she learned to ride. In her thirties to ski. In her forties to scuba-dive. In her fifties to pilot a light aircraft. In her sixties to race a speedboat. Men took up with her, but she wouldn't marry any of them, and when it was time to move on -always because she decided that it was, and the deed done on the men's part with good grace -she added to her portfolio another house or apartment, or a few hundred thousand in cash or stock.

In her seventies she began to notice she was losing her friends. She lost more friends than she now made. It was getting too late to take herself apart for someone new, just so that she could put herself together again and let them see she was for-good-or-bad real and 3-D. (You could never assume that of anyone.) Her address book was a mass of score-outs, and falling apart at the hand-stitched seams.

What to do?

Get off her butt for a start.

In all-purpose trousers, with her hair (silver, alas) swept purposefully back beneath a trademark red bandana, she started on some serious travelling.

She took herself off on cruises, up mountains (to the mouth of a steaming volcano once), over glaciers, across Titicaca to the floating reed islands, through the dusty veldt. She did all of it to forget she was left so lonely. She met families, lovers, widows and widowers, children sorrowing for parents, mistressses, divorcees, stalkers, old-fashioned companions. Everyone was connected to someone else, and she puzzled how she had come to connect to no one. She had never gone in for self-pity, however, and she wasn't going to begin now.

Clare Morrison had lived her American life as a story-book. Now that past existence seemed to her more and more like a dream. Just like a dream on waking, the memories were growing fainter and returning to ether. What she remembered most strongly was what had come before the dream, preceding her New World adventures.

Namely, Scotland. Home in Kilmacolm. Every July spent m Carnbeg.

She could imagine Carnbeg back to life. The greystone town, the glass-covered arcade along one side of High Street, the network of shortcut alleyways. The big hotels, and none bigger than the Hydro, sprawled on its hillside. The tennis courts and bowling lawns, the greenhouses, the stables, the outdoor lido. Acres of gardens, the rhododendron and azalea brakes.

And, just beneath the brow of the hill, with Carnbeg laid out beneath, the Widows' Walk.

She only had to close her eyes and she was back there. (Now she had the indignity of a walking stick, even if it did come from a store in Florence and had a silver nob; it was a part of her, and she couldn't think of doing without it.) Nothing had really changed about the place, except that it was now called the Widows' Walk Heritage Feature (sic). 'Enter the Past.' That was the trouble with Carnbeg: too much past.

And just as she was saying it to herself, beneath her breath, she caught sight of a girl - did a double-take and looked again

It could have been herself, sitting there in her tennis whites. (The plung-plung of tight racquets carried from lower down the hill, an unchanged aural backdrop, like the birdsong.) Too far away for her to see properly just who the girl might be. But at least-she reached out and touched them -the pine trees, with their dragon- scales' bark, those were solid and real, weren't they?

In her mind she returned to the Walk on subsequent days. July days, because that was the month when the vistors from Glasgow used to come, followed by the Edinburgh guests in August, like an inviolable rule of nature.

The girl was there again, and seemed restless and uncertain. Something about her

At intervals, from between the trees, she kept the girl in her (failing) sights.

At last she got bolder, and walked past her, just behind the bench where the girl was sitting. She was only a few inches from her. She thought she'd gone undetected, but from the cover of the nearest tree she felt the girl suddenly turn round (that tiny whoosh of air). The girl's eyes were wide in her head, she was staring and staring at the spot where she'd been just a few seconds before.

At a voice the girl spun round again. A boy, clumsy and embarrassed but eager, was talking to her, and the girl blushed to the roots of her hair. Two women, a little way off, were watching with approval - the boy's mother perhaps, and maybe some other interested party, a matchmaker. (The movement of the tree branches, the chiaroscuro of light and shade, made it difficult to tell just who was who here. Actors playing in an afternoon divertissement.)

The girl stood up.

What was she going to do? Run away?

No.

The boy was pointing to the far end of the Widows' Walk, and to wherever he planned on taking her. The girl followed the pointing finger, and nodded. Just momentarily she gazed back at the space behind the bench, then turned to look at the boy with relief.

They started off together, at a leisurely pace but already falling into step, and watched by the two women.

The future was making itself as the young pair walked on beneath the trees, through competing light and shade. The regulars strolling past were forgotten. Forgotten too were the spirits that haunted the place, one of them leaning on a silver-topped stick which left no mark, no impress at all from its ferrule on the soft needly loam.

Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1953, and educated there and at Oxford University. Five of his novels have been published in the United States, most recently The Lantern Bearers (Barbara Gittings Award, American Library Association). Recognition for his drama includes the Samuel Beckett Prize.

Copyright Fairleigh Dickinson University Summer 2005

Source: Literary Review

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