Widow's Web
name and saw her face change. He said, sharply uncomfortable because she stood just inside the house and he stood just outside it, “I sent a wire this morning but it must have gone astray. Is—”He got no further, because the woman in the doorway said eagerly, “Oh, but we did get your wire—or rather, it came to this address. We didn’t know what to do about it, there didn’t seem to be any way to let you know . . . Our name is Westing, you see, and we’ve lived here about a year now. Ever since Mr. Fennister died.”
She couldn’t, or after a startled glance at his face wouldn’t, tell him much more than that. Torrant walked past her and into the little hall, curiously blank with shock but unable to thank her politely and go. He still thought there had been some fantastic mistake, some gruesome error that they would all laugh about later; he went on thinking that until the woman said sympathetically, “It must be such a shock, finding out like this.”
“Martin Fennister?” said Torrant, knowing in the bottom of his mind that Fennister was not a name like Smith. “A photographer, about my age?”
“And very thin, with glasses,” Mrs. Westing said; she was nodding, with an expression that he didn’t understand. “We didn’t know him personally, but we’d had our eye on this house for some time. After he—after it happened, my husband said we oughtn’t to let it make any difference, just simply forget it and rise above—”
Torrant turned a savagely pale face to her, and she stopped. In that tiny interval he absorbed details that would be a long time in the washing out: flowered wallpaper, a bowl full of green glossy leaves at the foot of a stairway, a brass ashtray shaped like a fish on the table beside it. Then Mrs. Westing was saying defensively and a little angrily, “Well, after all, he did do away with himself.”
Do away with himself. Could you, wondered Torrant in the bleak silence of his own mind, find an uglier little phrase? But he couldn’t fight with it, couldn’t give way to the explosive denial inside him, because this woman was obviously repeating what she believed. She couldn’t know how alive Martin Fennister had been behind that shy nearsighted look, how sardonically amused at the people who took him so often for an earnest and bumbling scholar, or how these same people let their guards down, usefully, before a camera with Martin behind it . . .
She couldn’t know, but all at once she said the thing that made the fantasy believable. She said, “He—Mr. Fennister— was ill, you know. He’d been to a doctor and found out it was something incurable.”
Not quite half an hour after he had entered it, Torrant walked back along Bolton Road. A flutter of snow was drinking up the dregs of the light. He had left his gloves behind him in the house where Martin had died; conscious of the cold after a while, he thrust his hands into his pockets.
Everybody had a private nightmare. For some people it was poverty, for others old age. For Martin Fennister it had been the prospect of a long and hopeless illness—confinement to a bed, a growing helplessness, tiptoeing friends telling reassuring lies. In his more sombre moods, he would look upon being struck by lightning as the happiest thing that could happen to a man.
If he had learned that death had already begun inside him, it was logical that he would have shortened the process.
Torrant went back to his hotel, realizing from the fatigue that struck him in his room that it had been a three-mile walk through the snowy dark. He went down to the bar and had the drink he had expected to share with Martin and his wife, and then another drink, purely on his own, and a sandwich. He went through these processes blankly and so mechanically that he was even able to hold up one end of a sagging conversation with the bartender.
He stayed blank until he remembered the factor that had loomed so large to him on his way to the house, and that had vanished from his mind so completely—Martin’s wife. He would get in touch with her, see if there was something he could do.
Torrant was not a keeper of documents, and it was only after he lay in bed that her name came back to him, announced in a postcard from Martin—his usual brief means of communication—eighteen months ago. Annabelle. Annabelle Blair . . .
At close to two o’clock in the morning he switched on the light, took a reprint from the collection in his suitcase and read grimly until his eyes burned. He slept then, but lightly; he kept walking up Bolton Road on his eager way to a dead man.
The local newspapers of a year ago had covered Martin Fennister’s suicide amply. There was a photograph of Martin, a shy spectacled stranger, and there were the contents of two notes: the one for his wife, which said simply, “I’m sorry,” and the meticulous statement for the Medical Examiner, describing the kind and amount of sleeping pills he had swallowed “for reasons concerning my health.” There was the story of how Martin had taken his wife into New York that day for some shopping before a dinner date with friends, advising her to go on alone in case he were delayed by a business assignment, not leaving Grand Central himself but taking the next train back to Greenwich to do what he had decided to do.
There was almost nothing about the former Annabelle Blair. She was referred to several times as the “attractive wife of six months,” but attractive in newspaper parlance could mean anything or nothing. There was certainly no clue as to her future plans.
But, toward the end of the longest account, Torrant found the name he had been thinking about vaguely ever since he