William Trevor - Two Lives

Robert laughed. He took her hand again, and again she permitted him to do so. Anyone would do as she had, he said.

‘I wouldn’t have if there’d been our friendship, Robert.’

‘Then I’d have been insisting I was the guilty one.’

He felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm. Was this a sign, a statement she could not bring herself otherwise to make? Now and again, since the time they had been together in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, he had glimpsed her in the town when by chance they visited it on the same day, not often. Every autumn his mother drove to the Dallons’ farmhouse with grapes and apples. He might have accompanied her but he’d never wished to, fearful of the renewal of emotions. The wedding had been impossible, entirely, to avoid.

‘I’m sorry I said all that, Robert.’

‘It means everything to me that you did.’

On his side, there were facts he might have added to what she’d said: his gloom and wretchedness while his mother chattered in the car, driving back after the wedding; the pain he experienced because he’d selfishly deprived her of an occasion she would have enjoyed; the greater pain of imagining the radiant happiness of the bride. While Mary Louise drank cherry brandy in McBirney’s she had still been in his thoughts, still in her wedding-dress, as last he’d seen her. He had tortured himself while Mary Louise, in the presence of her already unconscious husband, undressed and crept woozily into her marriage bed. While she slept, virginal and alone, he had descended to the bitterest depths of melancholy.

‘What an irony it is!’ was all he observed in this respect, speaking softly in the graveyard.

‘You are the only person in the world I could have told.’

He kissed her gently, their lips just touching. Then he pushed himself to his feet and held his hands out to her. They walked back towards the house, not saying anything else. Both were possessed by a warmth that delighted them, the warmth of secrets at last shared while still remaining secrets, the intimacy of a private truth.

Crossing the sloping field beyond which the house and garden lay, Robert said:

‘Look! There he is.’

They had not, that day, brought the binoculars. But Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of. Neck extended, it dipped its long beak into the water, no doubt fishing for the trout, although the distance was too great to allow them to observe how successful these efforts were. It stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away.

‘Clever creature,’ Robert said.

In the house he read to Mary Louise from a reference book. It was a common heron they’d seen, not a Great White or a Purple: Ardea cinerea . The common heron wasn’t rare, but even so was not often seen. Anglers had been known to persecute it.

He put the book away and hunted among some others. There were many stories by his favourite Russian novelist, he said, but he possessed only three. He spread these volumes out for her, each open at the title page, as if it was important for her to see them.

‘Why did you do that, Robert?’

‘In case you do not come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘No one can be certain.’

The three volumes were left as he had opened them, on one of the tables that contained stacks of other books. If not because of what had been confided, he thought, then because of what had occurred: she would not return.

‘You’ve been so good to me, Robert. I can’t tell you what it means to have been able to talk to you.’

‘May I kiss you in this room, Mary Louise? Just once?’

‘Yes, you may.’ She spoke quickly, without the slightest hesitation.

This time he put his arms around her and pressed her lips a little closer, then held her hand for a moment after they had parted. He said again that she was beautiful.

‘But I’m not in the least,’ she began, as she had before.

‘Actually you are,’ he repeated too.

They had tea in the kitchen, and when Mary Louise had gone Robert carried a cup out to his mother, who was picking raspberries. Was it enough, he wondered, that they had talked so? Would all they had shared make up for her not returning? As he helped to pick the fruit, it seemed to Robert that his cousin’s abrupt incursion into his life had from the very beginning been part of a pattern that their conversation today completed, with the telling of the truth. It seemed as if, outside their wills, their declaration of affection had been ordained. That his own love had persisted while hers had dwindled was just a circumstance; at least they’d honoured what there had been. But could he, he wondered, live off the moments of an afternoon?

As she cycled on the empty road, Mary Louise felt at first that she was riding away from a fantasy. It wasn’t in the least like reality that Robert had taken her hand, that she had told him so much, that twice they had kissed. And yet all that had happened. What had occurred was the next thing to adultery; she was a sinful wife.

But she experienced neither regret nor the shadow of guilt. All afternoon the glow of her sinning had possessed her, and now she didn’t want it to fade. She wanted to sense for ever the imprint of his lips, the coolness of his hand in hers. She wanted to hear him say again, as clearly, that she was beautiful and that he loved her.

In the hedges the summer’s cow parsley was withered, only its brittle stalks remaining. Sloes and haws had already formed among the thorns. Somewhere, near where she rode, a bird-scare went off, and then again, becoming fainter as she cycled on. A woman, trimming the fuchsia hedge outside her cottage, waved and said it was a lovely day.

‘Oh, lovely,’ Mary Louise called back, reminded of the fuchsia in the blackly-dressed woman’s hair. ‘Lovely.’

*

That night, a few minutes before midnight, Robert dreamed that it was he who accompanied his cousin on her honeymoon to the seaside. The three men described to him were standing on a road, and on a wide, endless strand a flock of seagulls swooped down to the edge of the sea. Miss Mullover said he was not permitted to bathe, not even to paddle. ‘You are a disgraceful child!’ Miss Mullover reprimanded Berty Figgis. As soon as the birds touched the sand they were seen to be herons.

He put his arm around his cousin’s waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.

15

She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.

No one knows what will become of the place, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a place changing its purpose, maybe a house falling into ruins, is of no possible importance, a grain of sand turning over on a shore, nothing more. Even so, it is sad that her flowerbed may perhaps become choked with weeds.

She does not take the medication and does not intend to; not once does she intend to take it. ‘You’re naughty, you know,’ Miss Foye said once, but she didn’t say it about the medication even though she suspects. Miss Foye likes the paid-for inmates, she likes the cheques coming in. Generally naughty was what Miss Foye meant, a tendency that way. The nurses watch her swallowing it down, but Miss Foye knows there’s more to swallowing than meets the eye. Cute as a fox, Miss Foye is, over a thing like that.

16

James Dallon was inflating a tractor tyre in the yard when a man he didn’t know got out of a blue van and asked if this was the Dallons’ house. The man said something about having called in for the raspberries and the last of the peas at James’s aunt’s house, but James didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the man said he had a message. He didn’t smile. He didn’t seem happy. James brought him into the kitchen.