William Trevor - Two Lives

Mary Louise wondered if he knew. If you believed in heaven there was no reason to suppose that he wouldn’t. She imagined him with his half smile watching her, knowing what she was up to. When she was seven or eight her mother had taken Letty and herself to the auction there’d been when old Colonel Esdaile died, three weeks after his wife had gone. She remembered a white marble statue in the garden, a draped woman. ‘Not another like it in Ireland,’ the auctioneer had bellowed. ‘Every detail in place, down to the toenails.’ And he was right: the toenails were delicately incised, she and Letty had gone to look. Mrs Dallon had hoped to bid for a job lot that consisted of a clothes line, scrubbing brushes and a bucket, but unfortunately the auctioneer, running out of time, placed it beyond her reach by throwing it in with two other selections of household items.

The morning was mild and sunny. Primroses still bloomed on the verges. Buds dotted the hedges, catkins were heavy on the new season’s shoots. Still softly green, cow parsley and elder bided their time.

There was a car ahead of Mary Louise on the green avenue. It moved slowly, as if wary of an unfamiliar surface. She watched it draw away from her and finally turn on to the grass before it reached the house. She could just see figures moving away from it. When she was closer a cardboard sign read Park Here .

‘The sale won’t start till two, miss,’ a man in the kitchen said. He was sitting at the table with another man and a boy. There was a blue Thermos flask on the table, and three cups without saucers. The boy was eating a doughnut he’d taken from a torn-open paper bag beside the flask.

‘I just want to look around,’ Mary Louise said.

The two men seemed doubtful, the boy wasn’t interested. The man who’d spoken said that viewing would commence at ten. Ten was what was advertised, he added.

‘I’m a member of the family,’ Mary Louise explained, and the two men appeared to be relieved.

‘Go ahead for yourself in that case,’ the second man said, and Mary Louise passed through the kitchen.

Her aunt had declared she would herself find the auction too painful to attend, and in the circumstances Mary Louise guessed her mother would not drive over either. Other people she knew would arrive, but that didn’t matter, provided they didn’t bother her with their inquisitiveness. She mounted the stairs and opened the door of the first room she came to. Clearly it had been her aunt’s. The mattress was rolled up on the bed, tied with string. Each piece of furniture had a number stuck on it.

In her cousin’s room there were further numbers, black figures on a small blue rectangle. Framed in badly chipped gilt, a picture on the wall facing the bed was 91: farm workers in old-fashioned dress crowding round one of the wheels of a hay-cart, which had broken beneath the strain; near by, a dog was chasing a rat through the stubble. The mattress on this bed also was rolled up and tied. A china water jug, and the basin it stood in, were numbered 97, the wash-stand 96. There was a sun-bleached wardrobe and a dressing-table without a looking-glass, brown linoleum on the floor. The room’s single window had a view of the distant stream, and Mary Louise remembered her cousin telling her that he’d first seen the heron from his bedroom. On the mantelpiece, seeming as if he might have left them there himself, were his binoculars. A corner press, built into the two walls that formed it, was empty. So was the wardrobe. The dressing-table had a single drawer, lined with old newspaper. It, too, was empty, except for a collar-stud and a bottle of green Stephens’ ink, both of which she took.

Downstairs, in the room he had been so fond of, the scattered papers had been cleared. Books were tied into bundles. The French and German soldiers, still battling as he had left them, were numbered 39. She pulled out drawers and searched in the mahogany cupboards on either side of the door, but her cousin’s papers, his drawings and his scribbles, were not there. She had hoped to find them tied up in a bundle like the books – not an item in the auction but simply tidied away. Her Aunt Emmeline might have kept them by her, she decided; she might have packed them into the luggage she had taken to Culleen. One day, if her aunt didn’t want them any more, she’d ask if she could have them.

To pass the time, Mary Louise walked down to the stream, but today no fish were to be seen. Cars appeared on the avenue, one or two at first, then several at a time. She sat down on the grassy bank and watched them turning at the parking sign, and people getting out of them. The sound of doors banging, and of voices, drifted down to her. She began the walk back to the house.

Some time during her first few weeks in the house above the shop Elmer had thought to amuse her by instructing her in the ingenuity of the wall-safe in the accounting office. It had no key, he began by explaining, but operated by what was known as a combination. Single digits were registered, following one another in rotation to form a given number. A lever was turned, then a second lever, and the door of the safe opened. ‘Have a go,’ Elmer had invited, as if they were two children playing. The combination of numbers had remained in her memory, often recurring to her, as if unconsciously she knew that one day she would need to make use of it.

The evening before, when Elmer was in Hogan’s and her sisters-in-law already in bed, she discovered that a whole week’s takings were there, and, in a strong-box at the back of the safe, hiding the Jameson bottle and a glass, a bundle of five-pound notes with a rubber band around it. She took everything except the coins: £403 she counted afterwards. Anything she didn’t spend she intended to return.

‘Toy soldiers!’ The auctioneer’s tone was wearily impatient, dismissive almost. ‘Colourful set of soldiers! Who’ll start me with a pound?’

No one did. Mary Louise bought the soldiers for ten shillings.

When Elmer opened the wall-safe he couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d sustained one shock already that day – Rose’s announcement that his wife had gone off cycling without her breakfast inside her. When he entered the dining-room at one o’clock he was immediately told she hadn’t returned. Now, it seemed, he’d been robbed as well.

With the door of the safe hanging open, he sat down at his desk and endeavoured to think the matter out. Had he put the takings somewhere else? Had he moved the notes from the strong-box, taken them out and then omitted to return them? Sometimes, before setting out for Hogan’s, it was necessary to open the safe and slip out a few pounds to keep him going. Sometimes, during the day, he opened the safe because he was feeling tired and needed a pick-me-up. Could he possibly, in his haste, have forgotten to lock it again? Had someone managed to get into the accounting office, noticed the safe door ajar, helped himself, and banged the door after him? But there was no sign of a break-in, unless someone had climbed in through a window of the house and made his way downstairs on the chance that there’d be something lying about.

Sometimes if he felt a bit tired when he returned from Hogan’s he sat at the desk and had a doze. When he woke up ten minutes later he often felt befuddled, the way anyone would after a nap. He’d go up to bed then, but when he entered the accounting room in the morning he’d notice that a few things were out of place, as if he’d picked them up and in his drowsiness forgotten where they should be returned to. He kept the bottle and the glass in the safe because of privacy. He’d bought the glass in Renehan’s, knowing that if he took one out of the kitchen it would be missed.

He could have had a small one last night after he’d come in. When he’d had a doze he could have opened the safe and forgotten to close it again. He could even have taken the cash out to count it, which from time to time he did. He could have walked away and left the whole shooting-match spread out on the desk.