The Widow on Fenwick Street

Forty years on Fenwick Street, three years widowed, Iris still buys the marmalade Arthur preferred. The week she is given is ordinary in the way a week can be ordinary while a question moves quietly through it.

The Widow on Fenwick Street is the most patient of the five novellas. Iris is seventy-eight, three years into widowhood, going through one ordinary week in a northern English town. The book stays with her completely.

She makes tea at unreasonable hours. She finds Arthur’s cardigan at the back of the wardrobe. She gardens, draws blood on a thorn, sits in the dark for five hours on Thursday, helps a child who has come off his bike on Friday, takes the bus to the cemetery on Saturday with chrysanthemums Arthur would have called the wrong colour. She notices, not anxiously, the precision of her own remembering and the way some kinds of crying have become difficult.

The novella does not press the question. It allows the question to live in the gaps between observations and to be shared, gently and without resolution, with the reader who is paying attention. The series’ central uncertainty is held open longest here, and given to the voice most qualified to hold it.

Readers of Penelope Fitzgerald or Anne Tyler will recognise the compression and the warmth. Readers who want the Am I AI? question answered as honestly as it can be answered, which is to say not quite, will find the book closes the series the way it should be closed.