The first time I met my stepmother was on her wedding day to my 83-year-old father. After a whirlwind courtship, she married him less than a year after my mother’s death. There were flower girls, a designer gown and a fancy ceremony more suited to a couple half a century younger.
Most concerning of all, however, were the first words she ever spoke to me: ‘Did you hear how I had the Merry Widow played in church? Only I’ve buried two husbands already!’
Five days later my father was dead and that tally rose to three.
And this woman who was a complete stranger, who had gatecrashed our tight-knit family, waltzed away with all the money my thrifty Dad had made in his distinguished 45-year banking career – a figure nudging seven figures. Everything my poor mother had helped him earn by loyally standing by him during his foul moods, his drinking bouts, his frequent absences, his hypochondria and lies.
Journalist Glenys Roberts in her youth
It wasn’t just Dad’s money she got her grasping hands on either. There was my mother’s humble china collection, her Beatrix Potter bunnies and Alice In Wonderland figurines. The china hurt more than the money, because it was a cherished reminder of my poor dear mother’s sweet, innocent character.
My stepmother coveted it only so she could sell it on a market stall before she inherited the great prize: our family house in leafy Surrey, my father’s considerable pension and his not inconsiderable savings (he never splashed out on anything).
My dad was a victim of predatory marriage, something widely assumed to happen between nubile young women and senile old men who have fallen out with their nearest and dearest. But none of this applied to us.
Not only was my new stepmother the same age as Dad — it turned out they had been teenage sweethearts.
For ten years, ever since a gardening accident had left my mother in a wheelchair and a resident of various care homes, my brother had shopped, cooked and cleaned for my apparently bereft father. I was working in London, where my daughter was at school, but I made the effort to visit him every weekend.
My mother died in 1992 – and my father’s response seemed so cruel I can never forgive it. He refused to have anyone at the funeral except my brother and myself, and even snatched his hand away from mine as I went to comfort him.
Then Dad went home, dug up all my mother’s favourite yellow roses and put them on the bonfire. Yes, they’d had a difficult relationship, but I reasoned this must be an act of grief rather than callousness.
Despite his legendary meanness, his failure to enjoy anything if the spotlight wasn’t on him, his negativity and pigheadedness, he was still my beloved, attractive, witty and oh-so-vulnerable Dad.
Soon after my mother’s death, my father drove to North Wales for a bank dinner. He had grown up there and started off a dazzling career as tea boy in a tiny rural branch of the National Provincial. And though he became a big name in the City of London, he always wanted to go home, with that longing for the old country that afflicts the Welsh.
At the dinner he was seated next to his teenage sweetheart, who’d been married to two local bank managers and had manipulated the seating plan. As we learnt later, she had rejected him when he was penniless. Now he’d made something of himself, she was back, using her womanly wiles to turn an old widower’s head.
My father returned to Surrey with a spring in his step. Soon there were daily phone calls and more trips to Wales. It was the start of his heady rejuvenation – and who can blame an him for wanting to feel young again?
As a girl with her parents and brother on holiday in Wales
The miserly old hypochondriac whose only pleasure had been the odd game of golf and his whisky bottle seemed so happy that I wanted to meet the new woman in his life. Yet all overtures were rejected.
I told my father she was welcome to stay with me in London, and tempted her with outings to the theatre and dinners in the West End. She always said no. ‘She’s just a simple country girl,’ maintained my besotted dad.
With hindsight, I realise these were the classic tactics of a predatory woman who seeks to isolate her quarry for her own ends.
All the signs were there, but my brother and I failed to see them. Our penny-pinching Dad had rarely indulged my mother, even refusing to install central heating in their retirement house because he himself didn’t feel the cold. Neither would he buy her a new engagement ring when she lost the original in the garden. But suddenly he was flaunting his money in front of his old flame.
He lavished her with new dresses, promised her foreign trips – and he gave her that cherished china collection because she said she would have loved to have known my mother.
We were so pleased to see him happy that, although he had given us power of attorney when my mother became ill, we didn’t use it.
Perhaps we might have taken control of his finances? Unlikely though, because – while he may have been behaving like an irrational teenager – he could still discuss politics, do the crossword and drive; what grounds did we have?
Then came the day when he said to me: ‘When I kiss her I feel like I’m 19, and when we are married she says I will be so happy I won’t need to take my heart medication any more.’
Now, alarm bells were ringing.
Glenys’s parents Marjorie and Stanley Roberts with dog Robin
Marjorie and Stanley’s wedding day in 1937. He remarried after Marjorie died in 1992
This was the first we’d heard of a wedding, and my father was not a well man. He’d had an early heart attack, suffered from angina and downed a handful of pills every morning. Would this unknown woman take care of him as my brother had? The day before he was to move permanently to Wales, he came to stay the night with me. I felt sure that as a high-flying professional with an ultra-cautious streak, he had thought this all through.
I waited for some assurance that his family would still be part of his life after this hasty marriage. When none came, I steeled myself to say: ‘Dad, we scarcely know this woman – are you absolutely sure that she doesn’t have another agenda?’
There followed the predictable torrent of invective intermingled with praise for her: ‘She’s a wonderful little woman. She lives in a tiny village, she wouldn’t know the way to a solicitor’s office.’ And with that he left to marry her.
My brother, my daughter and I forced ourselves to go to the wedding. At the flashy breakfast, I was seated opposite the bride and her best friend, a retired doctor. My new stepmother was inexplicably provocative. ‘See these rings,’ she said, holding up her left hand. ‘These emeralds were given to me by my first husband – oh, how he suffered. These diamonds were given to me by my second husband – he did linger. These rubies were given to me by your father . . .’ Why would she say these things to me? Was it my imagination, or was this a portent of things to come?
‘Look after him,’ I said as they prepared to go on honeymoon to the tiny hotel in Betws-y-Coed, where they had done their courting 60 years before.
Five days later, my telephone rang at 8.30am. It was a hotel manager in North Wales.
‘Your father is dead,’ he said.
Numb with disbelief, I asked after my stepmother and finally she came on the phone.
‘Will you stand by me?’ was all she said. Stand by her? What did she mean? What had happened?
My father choosing to trust his new bride over his family remains an inexplicable treachery, writes Glenys
Then she told me the story I can never get out of my head. The ramshackle country hotel hadn’t suited her, so she’d instructed my father to drive to a five-star hotel on the coast instead, where she’d arranged a banquet with her extended family.
My poor loved-up dad, with next-to-no night vision and ailing heart, negotiated 100 miles of unlit, winding Welsh mountain roads in the pouring rain, making stops for a slug of amyl nitrite for his angina.
‘Why didn’t you go back to the hotel?’ I asked.
‘We couldn’t,’ she said, ‘my family was waiting.’
‘Why didn’t you call a doctor when you reached the coast?’
‘We couldn’t, dinner was ready.’
My father, who had not gone to bed later than 9pm for 20 years, stayed up till 1am, and a good deal of whisky was drunk.
By 6am he was dead, and the first call his widow made was to her doctor friend who signed the death certificate. There are no words to express our deep distress or our suspicions, which were even shared by the coroner. ‘I can’t spend public money,’ he told me, ‘because he was elderly with a history of heart disease, but if I were you I’d have a pathology report’.
The report duly came back. There were no signs of the heart drugs he was meant to take for life, but no arsenic either.
‘All clear,’ said the pathologist triumphantly, throwing in for good measure what a wonderful little woman the widow was, and that her grandchildren went to the same school as his children.
‘Have him buried not cremated,’ advised the coroner. ‘In case anything turns up later.’ But the widow was dead against that.
Glenys with her brother Alun and her mother on holiday
And so, a few weeks later, we were back for the funeral.
The train was late and we couldn’t get to the church because of flooding. We arrived to find the grieving widow anxiously clock-watching in case we missed the crematorium slot.
When I later invited her to join us for a drink, she slammed her limousine door in my face and refused to speak to us ever again.
Later, this wonderful little woman who did not know her way to a solicitor’s office, took us to court when I tried to protect our family by arguing that – though in law a marriage automatically revokes all previous wills, with all money going to the spouse unless a new will is written – there was a case for his family to benefit because that’s what my father clearly wanted in the will he had drawn up previously.
It was no good. We had no rights. This woman was his next of kin. It was hopeless asking her to share the estate: she had no feeling for us.
More grief was to come. She refused all suggestions of scattering Dad’s ashes on the local hill where he played as a boy, and had once confided in me was the only place he felt free.
Then my brother had the best idea he has had in his life. He asked DHL to collect them from the church and bring them back to Surrey. There, he arranged a ceremony at my mother’s grave.
‘Our father is buried with our mother,’ I wrote to the Merry Widow. And thank God I never heard from her again. She had a fatal heart attack in the supermarket two years later and all my father’s hard-earned money went to a family he barely knew.
Years on, my father choosing to trust his new bride over his family remains an inexplicable treachery. And it’s going to take more time than I have left to forgive the man I once adored.
