When death ends a marriage, it is both ugly and lonely. You have lost the person you loved, of course – but it seems as though everybody else, too, has gone far away. When death ended my marriage to the Guardian film critic last summer, after more than four decades of partnership, everyone else seemed to be on a different planet, their voices coming from a strange place called normal – through a glass, distantly.
Except, that is, for the voices that came from a real distance – a distance in time. I’d spent many months diving into 400 years of women’s diaries; editing a new anthology, Secret Voices, even as Derek’s health took that final, definitive turn for the worse. We’d been here so very many times before. I had been told three years earlier that it would be weeks – but this time it was clear he wasn’t going to rally.
The diaries were a vigorous flood of pleasure and pain, anger and adventure. What struck a nerve with me, however, was the sense of familiarity. My own feelings seemed just another patch of unsafe ground at a time when everything was crumbling under me. But other women before me had walked the same walk; written down their own feelings, however furious or self-pitying. However much at odds with society’s wish that a widow’s grief should be uncomplicated, retiring – almost pretty. Their emotion seemed to license my own. In editing the book it felt as though I’d been trying to free the voices of these earlier women. Now, could they free me?
Among more than a hundred diarists I used in the book, many, inevitably, suffered widowhood. Some described it in terms of a kaleidoscope of feelings – all the different shades of grey. A few wrote in tones of unadulterated black. “Now I am utterly alone and for ever,” wrote author and member of the Bloomsbury group , with a violent slash of her pen, after the death of her beloved husband Ralph in 1960. Like several other impassioned lifelong diarists, she found herself unable to write in the first weeks after bereavement; and when she did begin again, it was to describe herself as “a street accident exuding blood on the pavement”, a distress to all the kind friends around. Writing was a first attempt to loosen “the terrifying, iron clamp which I have fastened on my thoughts”.
I framed things slightly differently. Immediately after Derek’s death, I took the classic route. I was busy with stuff – arranging the funeral, notifying friends, returning hospital equipment, sorting his clothes for charity. And collecting or correcting the obituaries. After the funeral, I was even busier with the fresh hell of hunting through 40 years’ worth of papers to find what was needed for probate; ready the flat for sale; work out which of the books should go to which library. Too busy actually to find time for remembering the person who had gone … Which was the point, maybe. When anyone asked how I was, the answer would always be a safe, discouraging: “Busy!”
Admittedly, the sorting situation was a desperate one – the more so for the fact that the monumental, heaping confusion seemed to sum up Derek’s infinitely complex, highly coloured personality. No one would ever know “the special perfectness of Lytton”, wrote another Bloomsbury group member , after the death in 1932 of Lytton Strachey, the love of her life. (Of course Strachey was gay, but Carrington married the man for whom Strachey had an unrequited passion – the same Ralph Partridge who went on to marry Frances … Well, it was Bloomsbury.) But I remember seizing on those words, when I first read them many years ago, as summing up Derek for me.
Every lost love is “special” and that’s as it should be. But the bags, trunks, boxes, overflowing shelves gave me plenty of evidence for my own conviction. There were remnants from Derek’s life as a film critic, as a jockey, as an unhappy public schoolboy. Evidence of the famous criminal case in his family (his father shot his wife’s lover but was found not guilty of murder) … and of our life together, him and me. That’s what I lost sight of in the months after his death, when I was unable to look past the last years of distance and difficulty.
The financial papers alone wound up with a file labelled, in my handwriting, “Older weirdnesses”. I couldn’t describe them any other way – everything from shares in companies that went bust in the 1970s to wodges of long-gone currencies. Muddled up with them were letters from a young Derek home to his parents. (“Darling both”, he called them. I don’t think he ever used a term like that with me.) Letters with scribbled cartoons by and amid a sea of 1990s press releases and pages of cryptic notes.
And then there were the photos – Derek staring grumpily down the cleavage of some unknown starlet, Derek with directors from Altman to Ray. Derek playing cricket. A cartoon of him by labelled “Our Captain – a man to be caught in the covers with”. Derek giving two fingers to a Guardian photographer after the fashion team gave him a makeover ...
Derek happy.
The hardest moments are the ones when you wonder what to do next, as Frances Partridge noted before me. She wrote of disconnectedness – of “making strenuous loops as with a giant crochet-hook to fasten myself to the outside world”. Yes. It’s that sense of recognition that had me underlining pages, unforgivably, in my huge pile of printed diaries.
We’ve dropped the idea of a widow’s weeds these days. No sitting apart in a darkened room, draped in black for a year (and let’s remember that was only ever for widows who could afford to sit idle anyway). Sometimes, when drowning in business, I’ve wished we hadn’t. But then I’ve simultaneously resented both the people who’ve insisted on treating me differently when they met me as a widow – that hushed special voice – and those who have not.
As American author Dawn Powell wrote, a week after her husband Joe’s death from cancer: “Must guard against the curious form death takes. The bereaved must suddenly hate someone as if that person was to be punished for still being alive.” I’ve hated – with a sudden, not wholly unjustified but disproportionate degree of loathing – two banks, a solicitor, a hotel and a furniture delivery company. And, yes, colleagues and acquaintances. It’s a truism that there is no right thing to say to the bereaved. Of course the person with whom you’re angriest is yourself, but even that feeling presents itself through a glass darkly.
“I find myself schizying around hating, loving, etc, to fill in the strange numbness,” Powell wrote. Yes, exactly that – physical numbness, in the hands and feet, as I spread myself out trying to fill both sides of the huge bed at night. Mentally, I’d call it more of a strange stumbling blankness, which at times made it hard to talk, or even to walk easily.
It’s not just about the death itself, it’s the time that went before. The diaries even of Queen Victoria, that famously and dramatically inconsolable widow, show her defying Albert’s doctors to snatch a moment for herself in his last illness. Powell wrote of her relief that her husband “doesn’t have to go through another day’s false hopes and wearisome preparations for a new life”. Neither, of course, does she. Powell acknowledged a sense of relief: “I do know I could not have gone on in my desperate duties much more.”
When your husband has suffered a long decline, it’s probably that sense of relief that buoys you up in the first days after bereavement, perhaps to the point of seeming callous. I’ll never forget – or forgive – the woman who, at a friend’s book launch, raised her eyebrows on hearing Derek had died just a few days before, and said: “And you’re here?” Yes, I’m here because I want to reassure myself that my whole life has not gone down the plughole with his. Yes, I’m here because I’m angry, so angry, at just how much of that life, that energy, the last years have already stripped away.
And then there’s the sheer unreality of the whole thing. If I’d had to summarise my thoughts in the days right after Derek’s death, they’d probably have been something like: “Oh yes, he’s dead today but it doesn’t really matter, he’ll be alive again next week … ” Perhaps from all the diaries I read, the single quote I found most telling came from the socialite Cynthia Asquith in 1918, to the effect that peace would require more courage than anything that had come before: “One will at last fully recognise that for the duration of the war.”
Three months after Joe’s death, Powell wrote of “the struggle to restore my private mind”. Yes. Nearly a year has passed for me, and I’m still trying. Another month, and she felt “the first chipping off of the ice barricade I built up in his last few months when he was already gone”. Already gone … yes. I’ve seen it before with other friends or relations dying – that sense that the one due to leave is removing themselves, like a liner casting off its hawsers and setting out to sea.
And it’s not just the one dying who distances themselves. Sometimes the survivor detaches from the one soon to go. I know I did, in sheer self-protection. Now I regret it, inevitably. I remember another diarist, the pseudonymous Loran Hurnscot, writing of her husband’s long illness, her longing to leave him, her powerlessness. “There’s no strength like that of a weak man,” she wrote. Knowing the darkest moments of your own experience have been shared by other women sanctions the most unacceptable of feelings. Allows you to let the monster free.
A year after Ralph’s death, Frances Partridge was still describing herself as having served a year of her life sentence. The tone is not only sad but deeply angry. When these women did begin to write again, the note they sounded wasn’t pretty. And that’s the real secret of women’s diaries. Very often they were using the form to voice feelings viewed as transgressive, unacceptable for a woman, in their day. Despair, ambition, a different sexuality. Diarist after diarist speculates on the page about why they write, and if you were to generalise the spectrum of answers into one, it would be to explore (proclaim, record – even reform) their own identity.
, the poet’s wife and Frankenstein author, was another who ceased writing in the months immediately after her husband’s death. When she began again, it might have been entries in a different woman’s diary. Before, she had been terse, self-abnegating to the point of absurdity. After, she was volubly discursive – about Shelley’s death, yes, but also about her own struggles, as a widow, to find her way.
We hope for a different framing today, that a woman would no longer be seen in terms only of her spouse. We take it as axiomatic that what would once have been seen as the end of a road – menopause, age, retirement, bereavement – represents instead an opening door, a new opportunity. There is a sense of being a new person; albeit birthed, like a baby, with pain and difficulty, and facing the world with a degree of trepidation you’d never expect to feel in maturity. One of the minor oddities I’ve noted is, at parties, the number of people who introduce you afresh, as if you’ve literally taken on a new personality.
Then again, maybe it’s because I was a new person that I couldn’t find comfort in old friends, whether of the living or the literary variety. I couldn’t read for pleasure after Derek died – still can’t, actually. The new person that I now am cannot, by definition, have any old friends except the few who’d been along for every step of the journey.
I’d once have said that my professional life of the last 20 years, as a writer of historical biography, has been lived independent of Derek and his world. But trying to do anything myself now, as a newly single person, feels scary and unaccustomed. Like the first steps of a toddler, but without the toddler’s blithe confidence that things will work out OK. The age gap between us meant I had never lived an adult life without Derek. But no one expects adolescent insecurities from a mature woman, do they?
In The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw, the memoir wrote after her husband’s death, she quotes passages from her diaries. She had inhabited many roles, she notes: “Mummy, wife, lover, public person … My big problem now is what am I to be on my own?” Yes. The sense of redundancy, when no one is telling you they need you. Feeling lost without duties. The endless days spent caring for Derek at the end of his life seemed, at the time, a burden. But now what is the shape of each day?
Returning to work, Hancock noted, albeit with guilt, that “it has been good to be Sheila, who is quite a good actress, rather than the grieving widow of a famous man”. Yes to the good, but also to the guilt. Any kind of self-care seems a kind of disloyalty. Yet there is, she wrote, a dangerous temptation to cling to grief “for fear of losing him if I let it go”.
For six months after Derek died, the struggles of his body in those last weeks were all that I could see. Memory could not reach back past them, or push the curtain away. This despite an ongoing stream of emails about awards in his name, screens to be named after him … the ultimate bittersweet experience of accidentally catching him alive and authoritative on screen in a series of endlessly repeated Sky Arts documentaries.
Moving onwards takes an infinitely complicated cocktail of courage, self-conceit and the absence of complacency, but those too are in the diaries. Marie Bashkirtseff (Russian aristo, artist and impassioned diarist) never lived long enough to be a widow. She died unmarried, 25 years old, in 1884. But her diaries, acknowledging both her soaring ambition and the tuberculosis that killed her, became a 19th-century bestseller; one that helped many a woman to find her way. One line in particular is endlessly quoted. “I am my own heroine,” Bashkirtseff boldly declared. It’s the motto for every widow, maybe.