The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

and went over to her canvas. And I understood that these few moments, while she busied herself with her paints and brushes, were there for me to disrobe. I was quite petrified. But I also remember feeling … well, rather excited. Not sexually, necessarily. Just a little thrill, in doing something so utterly unlike everything else in my humdrum life.
    For the first couple of sessions I must have been terribly self-conscious, and found it hard just to sit still for half an hour at a time. But you begin to know quite instinctively when a particular pose is going to be unsustainable and Annie was perfectly accommodating. And once you’re settled you get into the habit of just drifting off into your own little world. It might take five or ten minutes, but sooner or later I’d start thinking about books I’d read or planned to read, or little ideas of my own. I used toreligiously carry a little notebook around with me, so that I could jot things down in it, and the moment Annie suggested we take a break I’d scoot over to my clothes and pick out my notebook and try and get down all the things I’d been desperately trying to keep in my head. Just little thoughts and observations, which seemed so important at the time.
    But now it’s the stillness I remember. That incredible stillness and my being comfortable in it. And as the afternoon wore on, feeling the rest of the world outside that room slowly fall away.
    Even now, the merest whiff of turpentine takes me right back there. I remember the splattered paint, two inches thick, on the bare floor below the wall where she worked. The paint on the door handles, the electric kettle – everywhere. And I think what I wouldn’t give to be back there, forty years younger, with my life spread out before me, when I could happily sit for hours at a time and all I really cared about was the next line of some half-formed poem. And what it was I had to say.

One of the surprises, re the sudden onset 
    O ne of the surprises, re the sudden onset of widowhood, is finding that one no longer has to consult one’s husband on every last decision. Whether to move house, how much soy sauce to put in the dressing, and everything in between. A couple of months ago I had a bit of a late night over at Ginny’s. We’d been drinking and talking and before we knew it, it was half past one. Ginny suggested I stay over and I was about to object on the grounds that any disruption or act of spontaneity would, as always, be met with prolonged husband-sulking, when I realised that the whole sulk thing no longer applied.
    With John gone, life is now an endless succession of options, none of which has to be presented to the household committee before being acted upon. This sudden sense of liberty, it almost goes without saying, can be quite bewildering. One feels like some creature emerging, blinking, from the deep, dark cave of compromise into the blinding sunlight of … well, what exactly? The blinding sunlight of choice , the cross-party mantra of modern politics.
    But if one welcomes all these new options, one must also come to terms with the fact that one can no longer define oneself and one’s opinion simply by placing them in opposition to whatever opinion one’s husband happensto hold. You say the crime figures are up? Well, let’s go and live in Sweden. (Q. What’s that sound? A. The sound of no one listening/caring.) Well, dammit, if I’m not going to get a reaction, what the hell’s the point in me being provocative?
    My future, it seems, is frighteningly open to interpretation. On a bad day it is a bleak and empty desert stretching towards the distant horizon. On a good day it’s the same desert, but with a couple of cacti to break things up a bit. Recently, a friend suggested I might get involved in the ‘voluntary services’, as if I were some old neddy that should be put out to pasture, as opposed to being mercifully