A Touch of Scarlet High jinks and drama

What colours will newly widowed Betty take on as she attempts to rejoin middle class society alone?

Betty Barker put her key in the door, took a deep, deep breath – the kind you take when you need all your courage – and entered her home. She closed the door behind her, put her keys into the empty blue and white dish on the hall table and felt the familiar pain. It was right there, just beneath her heart, an ache that was physical and real, so that she gave a little gasp.

The blue and white dish was once home to two sets of keys, hers and Ronnie’s. Hard to know what was best; to have the tangible constant reminders of him, or to have every trace removed. Neither consoled.

What Betty really wanted was a good laugh and a good cry and sometimes both. Bereavement, so the doctor said, caused as many reactions as there were motes m in the universe, so it was not a good idea to make judgements.

Nevertheless, the path towards ease e did not look very encouraging. Lydia L George went religious when her h husband died, Mandy Plowright was w still drugged like a zombie since her h son’s suicide – and from what Betty B Be remembered, her own mother h ad never quite shed the bitterness of o early loss.

The one person who might have understood u was Ronnie, and Ronnie R was dead. There was that li ittle flash of anger again. Ronnie always a was good at wriggling out of o things and you could say this was w The Big Wriggle. She was left t o mop up as usual.

She looked at the blue and white dish d and the single set of keys; she had h to have a plan, a long-term strategy, s if she were to avoid going completely c off her trolley.

Already she had started to have a fe ew stern words with that missing husband h of hers along the lines of how could you do this tome? Next, she’d be attending séances.

Something positive must take shape in her new and solo life. Something.

As she hung her coat over the newel post, it slowly slid to the floor. A pastiche of how her own body felt. Slack, useless and ready to crumple.

In the kitchen, she put on the kettle.

Very determinedly she put on the kettle. A cup of tea. A nice cup of tea. Not a stiff drink. No more stiff drinks. The funeral was more than two months ago. The time for justifying stiff drinks was well past. Séances or alcohol. Neither presented a pretty picture.

The trouble with recent widowhood was that you didn’t know what you wanted, but you wanted something. Usually what you thought you wanted, you didn’t when you got it. Like meeting up with old friend Simon for lunch – a tentative step she thought would feel normal – then seeing red mullet on the menu and dissolving. Ronnie had loved red mullet.

“Sorry,” she had said, as she fled from the restaurant. “Not ready yet.”

Now she must try harder.

ASÉANCES or alcohol… NEITHER presented a PRETTY PICTURE

week later, as she stood fiddling with her card at the cash machine, a bright female voice said, “Well, hallo there. And how are you?”

It was Nancy Barlow, she of the many dogs and the striking physical similarity

to her corgi. Ronnie always said that he could not imagine how she moved so fast with such short legs. She was always breathless. “How are you?” was not an enquiry so much as a required etiquette.

Betty was surprised to hear her usually sharp self, the one that could not suffer fools, say amenably, “Not bad at all, Nancy. And yourself?”

“Fair to middling,” and she gave a tug on the lead of her accompanying dog.

Betty did not like dogs very much. Oddly, though, she found herself stroking its head as it slavered over her skirt.

“Nice doggie,” said Betty. Hard to tell who was the more surprised. Betty, Nancy or the Dog.

“It’s a Borzoi. From Russia.” said Nancy proudly.

They both stood silent for a moment, presumably dwelling on the engaging idea that a dog could travel all the way from the Urals. Welldone, Betty told herself, but she wasn’t sure why.

The result was an invitation to dinner at the Barlows’. She was aware that it was a brave act on Nancy’s part – widows were notoriously difficult things until they either remarried, re-partnered or got too old to count.

Whatever the test for such a bestowal, she had obviously passed stage one.

Now she must get stage two right.

Betty had seen enough of the way single woman were treated, and indeed – to be fair – how single women sometimes warranted being treated if they laughed too coquettishly at another’s husband’s jokes or held forth on any subject at all at which they excelled. They were left for the chop.

In the old days Betty was inclined to be sharply witty, with a low boredom threshold, and perhaps overly intolerant of the banal.

You could do that when you had an amusing, tolerant husband like Ronnie. She must be careful now.

I will buy a suitable garment, she told herself. In a suitable garment shop. Somewhere like Jaeger, she thought. You couldn’t go wrong with Jaeger.

Well cut, good quality, nothing outrageous. She drew the line at beige and taupe but apart from that it would be restrained. Nothing in scarlet.

She smiled as she swung through the doors of the shop. It was all play acting, of course, but it was also about solo survival in the jungle of middle class lives. In her position, the best thing was to be quiet and light on the social shoulder and behave like a very ordinary woman, working in an ordinary bank, requiring little wildness.

It was the strangest experience. Like being inside another’s skin. There she sat, in a satin Jaeger shirt (brown was very tasteful, the sales assistant said) between a woman who made jewellery and a man who sold what he called special cars. This sounded so like a sex shop offering that she almost said so.

Then she remembered. Instead she blinked, looked serious, and asked him, eyeball to eyeball, what special meant. And he, most definitely, told her.

Out of the corner of her eye Betty saw the special car-man’s wife observing them. The one thing you must not do, Betty reminded herself, was to antagonise wives into thinking you were after their (usually) very unattractive mates.

Betty turned to her and said, “Do you drive one of these remarkable cars?” To which the wife relaxed and said that she preferred her little Peugeot.

“Me too,” said Betty, ditching her fantasy of replacing Ronnie with something two-seater and sporty. “As long as it goes that’s all I care about.”

Nancy’s husband Oliver turned the subject towards the main problem – he assured them – of greenhouse gases, emissions and the wilful arrogance of the USA. In the old days, Betty might have reminded him that he had scarcely a leg – or wheel – to stand on with his big, fat BMW. Instead she nodded. Big fat BMWs were not mentioned. Betty even managed to look impressed. Things were going well.

The jewellery woman, married to a vicar further down the table, did not address her conversationally though she did once ask for the butter. Betty passed it with a winning smile, but it was apparently not winning enough. Once upon a time, Betty might have taken her on – asked about the jewellery-making process and the materials, for example – but now she accepted that she was not striking in any way, that she wore small gold studs in her ears and not dangling garnets, and instead, giving the vicar a fleeting and humble smile, and accepting his little embarrassed eye- screw of sympathy (so he clearly knew of her loss) she returned to Oliver and began a neutral conversation about golf. She did not get what Ronnie used to call all het up about the masculine mystique surrounding the local Golf Club, preferring to ask Oliver to explain the terminology. Birdies, handicaps, shouting Fore! Very safe ground.

Oliver said, very seriously, that she might find golf helpful and beneficial in her present predicament. It was the only reference all evening to her widowhood and it was a disturbing one. She would have responded quite crisply in the old days by saying that the balls were, in her opinion, far too small to help with her predicament – and let them think what they would. But now she merely nodded and agreed that he could, indeed, fill her glass again.

The Redmonds offered her a lift home. Nancy hugged her at the door and patted her on the back as if she were another of the dogs; Oliver smiled patronisingly and suggested that she think over, very carefully, the benefits of golf. She smiled her humble agreement.

On the way home the Redmonds both agreed golf might be a very good way of Sorting Herself

Out – which went rather well with Having a Predicament, she thought.

When she got home she did not know whether to shoot herself, have a stiff drink, or go straight to bed. She did both the latter, missing out the adjective straight.

On another occasion, at which was behaving herself, she met the jewellery woman again. “I’ve got a wonderful piece of raw amber that Ronnie found on the beach in Suffolk,” she told her conversationally.

The woman, suddenly interested, said she could turn it into something striking for Betty to wear – a nice pair of teardrop earrings, perhaps. But Ronnie had found it uncut, untouched, and that was the way she wanted it. It caught the sunlight on the bedroom windowsill and made her happy.

Betty smiled and nodded. Although she had no intention of doing anything with the amber, she was not assertive enough nowadays to say so.

Later, when she saw the jewellery woman coming towards her, she dived for the first person she could find, which was Oliver, and immediately – and desperately – renewed the subject of playing golf and her Predicament.

If Ronnie could see her now, she thought, but then she reminded herself that he neither could nor ever would, and she must get on with it. She had worked hard to prove to her new world that she was harmless and agreeable and they had let her in. It was a relief to

She did NOT KNOW whether to SHOOT herself, have a DRINK or go to bed

no longer see people stamping that bright look of patient understanding on their faces.

Then the unthinkable happened. Oliver Barlow invited her to his golf club to learn the art of the game and Nancy encouraged her. “Though they do go on about golf a bit,” she said cheerfully.

Betty was startled to find herself saying, “Why yes Oliver, thank you.

But I have no gear.”

“We can sort that out,” he said, almost tenderly. “And we don’t call it gear, we call it kit.”

“Sorry,” she said.

The following weekend, on a bright August morning, off they went, with Betty saying all the way there how much she was looking forward to it and thinking pinch me, pinch me, pinch me –this can not be happening. She wore dark green slacks loose on the bottom and quite proper, she felt, for a Golf Club.

Nancy was right. The place was full of talk of putts, and handicaps and little else. But she passed no comment.

Instead she swung her swing, missed the balls (too small as she had guessed), drank her G&T at the bar and accepted, with downcast eyes, Oliver’s rallying compliments regarding her action.

“Not bad for starters,” he said.

“We’ll get you there. Same time next weekend?”

Then came Ladies’ Night, dinner dancing, and Nancy had a sore throat.

She asked Betty if she would accompany Oliver instead.

A dinner dance was the kind of activity Betty used to deplore – awful food and bruised toes. But she agreed.

Well – it was something. She wore a pale dress with a little sparkle and no cleavage and ate the leathery meat and chocolate mush without a murmur.

It was lifestyle balancing, she told herself. Throw the disgusting mush in the catering manager’s face and she would never be asked anywhere again. Smile sweetly and accept all, and she would.

Oliver approached his inability to dance in the same way he dealt with her golf. “Practice, practice, practice,” he said cheerily as he whisked her around. “We’ll have to do this more often.”

Doing complicated steps to Abba struck her as taking the amenability a little too far.

“Enough is enough, Oliver,” she said firmly. He whirled her out of doors. Ah well – anything was better than Fernando and those heavy feet. She agreed that it would be nice to take a turn around the golf course, the night being balmy and the moon so bright.

So, Betty admired the sweep of perfectly cut green in the silver light, jumped at the hoot of an owl – and let him kiss her. Indeed, she kissed him back.

So,this, she thought, fantasising, ishow itstarts. If she married him, how long she would be able to sustain her new amenability?

But then the blue and white dish would contain two sets of keys again which might be a very fair bargain.

In her bedroom that night – alone – she hung up her discreet dress and smiled at the way it nestled against her old red satin. That red satin had seen a thing or two in its time. She could still see Ronnie’s face when she first wore it, and hear his Wow! And see Alexander’s shocked teenaged expression. She fell asleep smiling at the memory.

The next morning Betty met a croaking Nancy accompanied by a bright-eyed Oliver in the High Street. Oliver smiled at her conspiratorially. Nancy sneezed.

“Thanks for standing in for me,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”

Betty, carrying several bags of assorted clothing, was entering the Oxfam shop. She looked Oliver in the eye and said, “No. It was absolutely bloody awful. Horrible food, silly music and boring puffed-up people. And the balls really are too small.”

Oliver’s opened his mouth, closed it, and went rigid. Nancy croaked a laugh.

“Quite right,” she said. “Same every year. What a relief to miss it.”

This time Oliver moved his rigid face to stare at his wife. She smiled at him.

And sneezed again.

Later in the day the Oxfam shop displayed in its window a series of garments worn by amenable, sensible, quietly disposed women, among which was a brown satin shirt and a pale, slightly sparkly, not too low-cut frock.

As well as a very pretty blue and white china dish.

If she MARRIED HIM, how long could she SUSTAIN her new AMENABILITY?