William Trevor - Two Lives

‘You see buses for country children these days.’

‘D’you know why I wanted to continue at school so much?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘D’you mind if I tell you?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘It might embarrass you.’

‘Tessa Enright used to say everything embarrasses me. Miss Embarrassment she called me.’

‘I was fond of you, Mary Louise.’

She closed her eyes. She felt a flush, hot as a red-hot poker, creeping over her neck, into her cheeks, over her forehead, down into her shoulders even. It was so intense it made her skin feel tight. She’d never had one as bad as this, she thought.

‘I have embarrassed you,’ he said, and added hastily: ‘It all belongs to that time. It has nothing to do with now. It was awful not being able to turn my head to look at you, like having part of me cut away. I can’t tell you what it was like. And yet what good would any of it have been?’

‘When you’re that age –’

‘Oh, I know, I know.’

She felt the colour draining away from her face and neck. A drop of perspiration itched on her chin, but she didn’t lift a hand, not wishing to draw attention to it, nor to distract him.

‘I’ve always wanted to tell you,’ he said.

She nodded, not knowing how to respond in any other way. She might have said she had thought herself to be in love with him: it was the natural thing to do, yet she could not. Did she know of his glances in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom without quite realizing it? What connection had there been? Something had been there, between them, something real – even if only for a week or two, before she transferred her affections to James Stewart. Yet a week or two was surely enough: that seemed so now.

‘You’ll still come back, Mary Louise? We’re cousins, after all. And anyway, you’re married now.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘People should know when they’ve been admired. That’s what I feel.’

‘It’s nice of you to tell me, Robert.’

The conversation ended there. Soon afterwards they walked back to the house, where the binoculars were hung on a hook in the passage outside the kitchen, and then there was tea beside the fire, as there had been the Sunday before. ‘Let me read you this,’ he said, taking a book from one of the piles around him.

It was time for her to go, but instead she watched him, opening the book, smiling, turning a page or two, raising his eyebrows before murmuring something about the length of the introduction, and then beginning:

‘A gentleman in the early forties, wearing check trousers and a dusty overcoat, came out on to the low porch of the coaching-inn…’

She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.

‘The date was the twentieth of May in the year 1859…’

It was later than it had been last week by more than two hours when Mary Louise left. On the outskirts of the town she dismounted and unscrewed the valve of her bicycle’s back tyre. She’d had a puncture, she said when she arrived in the dining-room. The meal was over, and had been for some time.

The vet, Dennehy, was attentive. He and Letty saw His Kind of Woman, brought back for a second showing at the Electric, and The Harder They Fall, and Cast a Dark Shadow. Dennehy liked dancing and when he suggested the Dixie dancehall Letty did not demur, as she had in the past. It wasn’t too bad, she even agreed after they’d been there a couple of times.

Dennehy always collected her in his car. He would arrive at the farmhouse, drive into the yard and blow his horn twice, then smoke a cigarette while he waited. If Mr Dallon passed through the yard Dennehy got out and passed the time talking to him, usually about livestock prices. Sometimes Dennehy took Letty to a restaurant that had opened in a town nineteen miles away, the Rainbow Café; sometimes, when it wasn’t a night that the Dixie dancehall was open, or they’d seen the film at the Electric, they spent the evening in MacDermott’s bar. On the way home from wherever they’d been Dennehy invariably made a detour, driving to an unoccupied farm and parking in the yard. The headlights passingly illuminated tattered curtains hanging in the windows of the house, a blue halldoor in a discoloured cement façade. ‘An old fellow died there,’ Dennehy revealed. ‘You’d get a bargain with that place.’ In the yard he turned the headlights off and drew Letty into an embrace. He took liberties she had not permitted Gargan or Billie Lyndon to take. In time she laid her head back against the car seat and gave herself up to them.

*

Miss Mullover heard that Elmer Quarry had taken to drinking. She recalled the rather heavy, squarely-made child he’d been, solemn-featured, slow when he wrote down his conclusions – liking to do things properly – but swift of thought, except where algebra was concerned. In her small bungalow, regularly visited by ex-pupils of all ages, she reflected that drinking was not a Quarry weakness and that there’d been no talk of it before the marriage. Did they not get on? Did they quarrel? Was it all too much, the sisters being there too? Time was when Matilda and Rose Quarry had been the belles of Protestant whist drives for miles around, lovely-looking girls.

Once, years ago, Miss Mullover had been asked by an ex-pupil to ‘talk to’ her husband because drink was threatening to destroy the marriage. This man, who had never lost either his respect or his affection for his teacher, rode up to her bungalow on a motor-cycle. Awkward and unhappy, he sat down with his crash helmet on the floor by his feet. It wasn’t drink, he insisted, that had done the damage. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t like her.’

Tannon, the accountant at the brickette factory, drove forty miles every Thursday afternoon to visit the wife of a bank manager in another town. That had been going on for twenty-six years, and had resulted in Tannon’s never marrying. In the emergency period of the war, when petrol was unavailable to private motorists, he had arranged a lift in one of the brickette-factory lorries, his bicycle stowed away in the back so that he could make the return journey. The gossip went that when he arrived at his destination he parked his car in a side street and entered the bank house by a wicket gate in the double doors of the yard. Miss Mullover often wondered what the bank manager’s wife looked like, what age she was and if she had children. A woman with plump lips came to mind, a slack-faced woman, powdered and scented, expensively dressed. She imagined Tannon making his way into the back of the house, dodging the office windows. She imagined all the bank business going on beneath the erring couple, loans being arranged, cash given out, the bank manager on the phone to his head office. A skinny boy Tannon had been, with rabbit teeth and very short trousers above fragile, bony knees.

In the town other such unconventional relationships were talked about. It was said that ever since they’d quarrelled about their daughter’s mixed marriage, a certain elderly couple addressed one another only by way of their dog. One of the post office clerks, the mildest of men when he served you across the counter, gently tearing along the perforated edge of the stamps, was said to be violent in the home. A young wife’s weekly presence in the Dixie dancehall was not known to her husband, who worked through the night at the electricity plant. One of the town’s bread deliverers went off with a tinker girl and then returned, saying it was all a mistake. None of these people had passed through Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, but she’d known all of them, at least to see, as children.