The widow’s lonely lot

If a man loses his wife, women rush round with shepherd’s pie. When Susan Hamlyn was widowed, she was shunned as ‘a spare woman’

Imet Michael and Louise in the queue for the neurologist. Michael’s wife, Louise, had a dementia diagnosis similar to that given to Robin, my husband. We stayed in infrequent touch during the several years it took for the dementia to do its worst and kill first Louise and then Robin.

Coincidentally, I met Michael again at the house of a friend, around six months after Robin died.

‘How are you doing?’ I asked, tentatively – there is no right way to put such a question.

‘Oh, wonderful!’ he beamed. He looked a little fatter, ruddier, younger. ‘It’s marvellous.’ ‘Is it?’ I asked – somewhat bemused. Since Robin’s death, my life had been a lonely trudge through probate – countless copies of his death certificate going to the council, land registry, solicitors, the bank, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

In a real sense, Michael and I had each lost our partners many years earlier, owing to their dementia, and I could tell that for Michael, as for me, the actual death had come as a relief.

‘Marvellous,’ Michael repeated. ‘As soon as Louise went into hospital, the women took over.’ ‘Women?’ I was even more confused. ‘Oh yes,’ he breezed on. ‘I was out virtually every night, and on the nights I wasn’t, someone always left a meal on the doorstep. In fact,’ he confessed, ‘I got absolutely sick of shepherd’s pie!’

I realised that his friends had taken pity on him once Louise was in hospital – and even more when she died and they saw him, newly, as a responsibility.

Our mutual friend told me, ‘We have huge fun. Michael always comes with us now on our girls’ nights out. He loves it.’

I have shared this story with several widowed women friends and it is clear that my surprise is naïve in the extreme.

‘Oh, the men don’t come near me,’ said my glamorous friend Joanna. ‘It’s as if I go around in a leopard-skin sarong drawling, “Come up and see me sometime.” The last time I had a few people to dinner, no one even came into the kitchen to offer to help open the wine.’

My experience had been similar. In the long years of Robin’s decline, little help had been offered, other than by two pairs of lovely friends who ensured I had some semblance of a social life.

There was a sense – I was told – that I was a ‘coper’, who would reject offers of support. Which may well be true. But the first time I had people to dinner after Robin’s death, one of the men strode into the sitting room, looked round and then said to me, in obvious consternation, ‘Oh! I thought you’d have a man here to help.’

I gave this remark the shrug I felt it deserved and was then mortified when the cork disappeared into the neck of the wine bottle and I had to hand it over for male hands to sort out while I dished up.

I have got used to good friends asking me for dinner and saying warmly, ‘It’ll just be us.’

I am glad to be invited and wonder whether the male/female balance at dinner tables is really so important. I am accustomed to others saying, ‘Oh, no one does dinner parties any more,’ and wondering where the couples carrying flowers and a bottle are heading on

Saturday evenings. And I reflect ruefully that, perhaps, it’ll only be when a few more of my friends are widowed that my social life will pick up.

Joanna constantly gives jolly and well-attended parties and I assumed, till we talked, that her hospitality is enthusiastically reciprocated.

‘Oh no,’ she told me. ‘The occasional drinks party, perhaps. Or if someone drops out of a theatre trip. But dinner parties are a couples thing.’

Not so for Michael, it seems. If you thought the notion of ‘a spare man’ went out in the 1950s, forget it. He has a key to all his friends’ houses, it would seem – a pal to the chaps and a safe escort and gallant to the women. But a spare woman? Has such a thing ever existed?

That I should be writing this in 2020 surprises me – I feel the spectres of Nancy Mitford, Barbara Pym and Ivy Compton-burnett raising quizzical eyebrows at me in this age of gender fluidity and vaunted sexual equality.

It’s not that my friends don’t like me. It’s not that Michael has a rare charm. And I am a perfectly merry widow, who would be worried if shepherd’s pies appeared on my doorstep. And I don’t think I’m a threat in mixed company – although I am contemplating acquiring that leopard-skin sarong.