William Trevor - Two Lives

Becoming fuller as he listened, her cousin’s smile straightened the line of his lips, which otherwise were on a slant. He didn’t seem interested in the reasons for her presence.

‘I met Aunt Emmeline,’ she doggedly added.

‘Does marriage suit you, Mary Louise?’

She replied that she was used to it by now. The words came scuttling out: she hadn’t meant to answer the question quite like that, and realized he knew she was being evasive.

‘Well, I suppose you would be used to it. What a silly question!’

He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert’s father had died without leaving much behind.

‘D’you serve in that shop?’

‘Part of the day I serve there.’

‘I often wondered.’

Her Aunt Emmeline brought in tea. She placed a tray on a small table which she cleared of books and papers, and pulled the table closer to the fire. A dog had followed her, a Kerry Blue.

‘We don’t often have a visitor,’ her aunt said, and Mary Louise could see that she was pleased, delighted even. She eked out a living selling apples and grapes, and the vegetables she grew. The pair of them wouldn’t have survived, Mary Louise had heard her father say, were it not for the apples and the grapes.

‘D’you remember you and Tessa Enright putting worms in that girl’s desk?’ Robert said. ‘Who was that girl?’

‘Possy Luke.’

‘She screeched like she’d been bitten.’

‘Poor Possy! She was afraid of worms.’

Their schooldays were talked about, and her aunt asked after Mary Louise’s family. She’d heard about Letty going out with the vet. She knew him; she said he was likeable.

‘How’s James getting on?’ Robert asked.

‘James is fine.’

This appeared to be true. Her brother didn’t complain as much as he used to; he didn’t fly off the handle so easily. For the first time in his life he seemed to be aware that he was the farm’s inheritor, that the work he did was for himself. This transformation had come about since Mary Louise’s marriage, and had intensified since Letty had begun to go out with the vet.

‘And how are the Quarrys?’ her aunt inquired.

They, too, were fine, Mary Louise replied.

‘Well, that’s good.’

‘I mustn’t stay long.’

‘Oh, don’t be in a hurry, dear. We don’t see much of you.’

Robert laughed. ‘We don’t see her at all.’

She told them how the bicycle ride, and the long hill, had years ago been too much for Letty and herself, how it had jaded them, which was why James had been given the task of delivering the weekly gift of butter. She thought she’d better say that, in case offence had ever been taken.

‘That’s why we know James better,’ her aunt said.

‘He used to play bagatelle with me,’ Robert said. ‘He loved bagatelle.’

‘He plays cards with the Edderys now.’

They laughed. But she wondered if she should have mentioned cards in view of the stories about the gambling that had left her aunt and her cousin penurious. Again she felt warmth creeping into her cheeks, and hoped they wouldn’t notice.

‘Stay and talk to Robert for a little,’ her aunt begged. The soft plea in her tone had an edge of anxiety to it. She rose as she spoke and poured them each another cup of tea. Then she went away, the Kerry Blue ambling sleepily after her.

‘She thinks I don’t see people,’ Robert said when the door closed behind her. ‘Which of course is true.’

‘What do you do all day, Robert?’

‘I come downstairs to this room. I’m very fond of this room. I light the fire when it’s chilly. We have breakfast together in the kitchen. The rest of the day depends on all sorts of things.’

She remembered his being driven to school by his mother when everyone else either walked or cycled. She had always associated him with his mother, that weather-chapped face behind the steering-wheel. She never saw her aunt in the town these days, and she wondered where the shopping was done. She had passed a general store and a petrol pump a couple of miles back. It would be there, she guessed.

‘A quiet life,’ her cousin said.

‘Yes.’

The crooked smile expanded and straightened. He was watching her: all the time he was talking she could feel him watching her.

‘I don’t think I’d have been much good at anything noisier.’

She smiled in turn, not knowing whether to deny that, deciding not to. He said:

‘I used to want to be an auctioneer when I was at Miss Mullover’s. I fancied myself shouting the odds. Can you believe it? I really did.’

‘I can’t see you an auctioneer, Robert.’

‘Useless I’d have been.’

‘I wanted to work in Dodd’s. It seemed like paradise.’

‘You got the next best thing.’

‘I thought of Quarry’s too.’

‘And is it paradise, Mary Louise?’

‘Oh, all that was just a childish thing.’

He laughed, still watching her. His eyes were brown, but very dark, nearly black when they lost their luminosity. His glasses, tortoiseshell-rimmed, perfectly round, suited him.

‘Come and look at another childish thing,’ he said.

He pushed himself out of his armchair and led her to the table in the window where the soldiers were displayed. It was the double battle of the Aisne and Champagne, he said.

‘General Nivelle’s plan was to break through the German line between Vailly and Reims. This cluster of German armies was under the command of the Crown Prince himself.’

He pointed to where the German line had held, between Vendresse and La Ville aux Bois. Elsewhere it had been pushed firmly back. Mary Louise wondered which war was being fought, and for what purpose.

‘The Germans mustered a good counter-attack, but even so the French pressed on, breaking through the Chemin des Dames.’

Arrows with neatly printed names indicated all that. Some of the soldiers were lying down. These were the dead, he said.

She plucked up courage. ‘Which war was this?’

‘The one before last. The double battle took place in the spring of 1917.’

She followed him back to the fire. She began to say again that she must go, but already he was explaining that if the Russians hadn’t been preoccupied with their revolution it would have been a different story. She wanted to tell him that in Miss Mullover’s history lessons she’d been fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc. Shyness held her back again.

‘In the end it was the Germans who emerged victorious from the Aisne and Champagne encounter. I’m sorry: this is boring.’

‘No. No, it isn’t.’

‘I was explaining how I spend the day because you asked. I play with soldiers. And read. I read a very great deal.’

Mary Louise was not much of a one for reading herself. As well as Picturegoer , Letty bought Model Housekeeping, and there used to be the Girl’s Friend years ago, when she and Letty were younger. In the farmhouse there was a bookcase on the landing. Mary Louise had read The Garden of Allah and Greenery Street; at school they’d read Lorna Doone . She had never even looked at the titles of the books in the attics of the Quarrys’ house.

‘When it isn’t winter,’ her cousin said, ‘I do things in the vegetable beds. Sometimes I wander down to the stream. There’s a heron on that stream.’

‘I’ve never seen a heron.’

‘You could see one here, Mary Louise.’