THE WIDOW

A funeral and visitors...

It had been a bloody awful day.

Sandra Butler sat at her dining table, thankfully alone at last, and wept.

It wasn’t the humanitarian service at the crematorium that had upset her nor the platitudes muttered by well-wishers nor the fact that Bert was dead. He’d been dead for a fortnight and she’d just about got used to the idea and started making plans of her own for the first time in years.

No, it was the wretched loneliness because only now, only today, had the whole reality of her newly acquired widowhood struck home.

And there came the knock at the door.

She wasn’t expecting a knock on the door because she wasn’t expecting visitors, and anyway they had the doorbell. Everyone was supposed to use the doorbell, even the cheeky kids from down the road when they wanted to play ring-the-bell-and-run. Bert had installed it only days before he had died. It had been that doorbell that had been the death of him, something to do with the way he’d jammed a piece of copper wire into his hand as he’d worked away, and somehow that had allowed the poison in and, well, he’d not been strong enough to withstand the attack on his system. He’d not been well and that had been a fact. He’d wanted to get a man in, but she’d insisted he could do the job himself, save a few quid, they weren’t made of money were they?

And a couple of days later he was dead.

And the door knocked again.

Sandra might have sworn, but she wasn’t the swearing sort, so wearily like the recently bereaved are weary she climbed to her feet and went to answer the door.

Two middle-aged ladies in overcoats and hats stood there.

“Can’t you see the bell?” she demanded of them before either of them could say a word. “Don’t you ever look to see how a door’s supposed to be approached? Didn’t it cross your minds that the little button there is meant to be pushed, and that it rings a bell inside the house, and that’s how I know someone’s at the door?”

It was quite a verbal onslaught, and the two middle-aged ladies dressed as though they hailed from a past age looked affronted.

“We’re here on account of the funeral,” said one of them, and then she introduced herself. “I’m Marjorie,” she said.

“And I’m Daphne,” said the other.

“And we saw the hearse and the coffin when it drove off and we said to each other there’s a lady as needs our good word, there’s a soul in torment and we’d best go and see what we can do for her...”

“You what?” demanded Sandra, shocked at the intrusive reference to Bert’s demise by two rather staid looking well-overcoated women with wispy hair poking out of hats.

“The funeral, duckie,” crooned Marjorie. “We saw the hearse pulling away, and the lovely shiny coffin, and the tiny wreaths of flowers piled on it, and we said there’s a soul in torment, there’s a soul as needs the comfort of the good book, so here we are, soldiers of our Lord come to help you through dark days. Can we come in?”

Can they come in?

“No you can’t!” said Sandra in a voice louder than any voice she’d used since Bert had died. “I’d like to bid you good afternoon, please … I don’t need the platitudes of strangers when all I really want to do is cry...”

“But he’ll be with his Maker,” sighed Marjorie, and Daphne nodded vigorously in the way that those who choose to be echoes of a leader do.

“At the feet of, in Paradise,” Marjorie continued, “and with angels all around playing sweet music on harps and flutes and sulphurous fumes seeping up from the depths, where he hasn’t gone but as a sign of where he might have gone, and choirs making the most wonderful sounds with meadows and their sparkling flowers stretched away on all sides under the bluest of heavenly skies...”

“We’ve got pamphlets,” put in the echo. “Illustrated and signed.”

“I don’t want pamphlets, signed or unsigned,” snapped Sandra. “Now if you’ll excuse me...”

“You poor soul,” broken in Daphne in a voice like woven silk made into sound, using tones devised to render the listener somnolent. “Husband, was it? Worked himself into an early grave, slaving away to keep house and home together, never even a moment to thank his Lord for all the goodness in his life? And he did have goodness didn’t he, dear? He did have you, a spouse now grieving, and a loving shoulder to lay his toil-wearied head on, and always meat on his plate and a snuggling lover in bed?”

“Amen,” sighed Marjorie. “Never was a truer word spoken, Daphne dear...”

“So take a little pamphlet all about truth and hope and love,” suggested Daphne. “Look, take this one...” And she proffered a cheaply printed tract on coarse newsprint. But it was the headline printed on it that seemed to punch Sandra in the stomach as she read “HOW TO KILL YOUR HUSBAND WITH A PRICK FROM COPPER WIRE...”

“Go away!” she screamed, “it wasn’t me, I never did it, though he was a lazy swine with too many eyes on the blond next door, and never a thought for me...”

© Peter Rogerson 30.08.16