William Trevor - Two Lives

Later I taxed him with this treachery. He laughed at first, but then he turned away and his cheeks were damp with tears when again he faced me. ‘How can you make such an accusation?’ he whispered in a broken voice, and went on for so long – professing loyalty and faithfulness, uttering statements to the effect that he and the girl would lay down their lives for me, and protesting their desire to be nowhere else on earth but in my house – that I forgave him. ‘I’ve poured you a nice g and t,’ he said with a smile, coming to find me that evening in the salotto. When I met her next Rosa Crevelli curtsied.

Of course I could not be certain: maybe they sniggered, who can say? That I have a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt is either a weakness or a strength, but whichever it is I certainly don’t claim it as a virtue. In fact, for very good reasons, I claim very little for myself: there’s not much to me, and I’m the first to confess it. Nor do I claim anything mystical for that particular summer, no angels making their presence felt in my house, no voices heard. The child was an ordinary child, and I believe the others were ordinary too. Yet I don’t think anyone would deny that it was a singular summer, and constituted an experience not given to everyone.

On 5 May, in the morning, wearing a suit of narrow black-and-white stripes, handbag and shoes to match, I left my house to travel to Milan. Quinty drove me to the railway junction and gave me my ticket on the platform. I can manage to travel very well on my own, despite my limited understanding of the Italian language. I recognize the familiar phrase when the ticket collector demands to see my ticket. In Rinascente and all the other stores I shop successfully, and in the Grand Hotel Duomo, where I always stay, excellent English is spoken. I look forward to shopping for clothes and shoes, taking my time over their choosing, going away to think things over, returning twice or three times: all that I love.

No one was staying in my house that day; no tourists had been sent on by the hotels since the end of last year’s season, and we didn’t expect any until the middle of June at least. Not that it is ever necessary for me to be there when visitors do arrive, but even so I like to welcome them. In the dining-room we sit at one round table and if English is spoken we talk of this and that, of places that have been visited, of experiences while travelling. If English is difficult for my guests, they speak in whatever language their own is, and I am not offended. There are never more than five in my dining-room or at the table on the terrace when we choose to dine outside.

In the train I imagined Quinty driving from the railway junction and shopping in the town, the large, grey, open-hooded car parked in the shade of the chestnut trees by the church. He would call in for a coffee and then return to the house, where he and Signora Bardini and Rosa Crevelli would have lunch in the kitchen. I imagined them there, the three of them around the table, Quinty repeating new English words and phrases for Rosa Crevelli. I wondered if Signora Bardini, too, had also been told about the past. Determinedly I pushed all that away, and then my mind became occupied by a title that had occurred to me at the railway junction. Ceaseless Tears. So far, that was all I had. A heroine had not c ome to me: I could not even faintly glimpse a hero. Yet that title insisted itself upon my consciousness, and I knew that when a title was insistent I must persevere.

The train was a Rome express; it had come through Orvieto before I boarded it; Arezzo and Florence lay ahead. Imagine the stylish interior of a First Class rapido, the pleasant Pullman atmosphere, the frilled white antimacassars, the comfortable roominess. Diagonally across from where I sat were a young man and a girl: you could tell from their faces that they were lovers. An older couple travelled with the father of the woman: you could tell that was the relationship from their conversation. This threesome spoke in English, the lovers in German. A mother and a father travelled with their two children, a boy and a girl: I could not hear what they said, but everything about them suggested Americans. A woman who might have been in the fashion world was on her own. Italian businessmen in lightweight suits occupied the other seats.

I watched the lovers. He stroked her bare arm; you could tell how much she was in love with him, though he wasn’t exactly handsome or even prepossessing. Did the older couple find the father a tiresome addition to their relationship? If they did, their politeness allowed not a single intimation of it to show; but, oddly, that politeness worried me. The Americans were stylish, the children arguing a little as spirited children do, the parents softly conversing, sometimes laughing. The mother was a particularly appealing young woman, fair-haired and freckled, with dimples in both cheeks and a flash of humour in her eyes.

Increasingly, I liked the title that had come to me, yet could still find no meaning in it, no indication of this direction or that. I recalled Ernestine French-Wyn, who had caused Adam to weep so in Behold My Heart! But one story rarely prompts the secrets of another and to avoid the nagging of my frustration I forced myself to observe again my fellow-travellers. The heads of the lovers were now bent over a scrap of paper on which the girl – she had a look of Lilli Palmer in her earliest films – was making a calculation. The daughter and son-in-law read; the old man had taken his watch off and was meticulously re-setting it. The little American boy was being reprimanded by his mother; the little girl changed places with him and took her father’s hand. Somewhere in my mind’s vision a description of this scene appeared: darkly-typed lines on the green typing paper I always use. I had no idea why that was.

The train moved swiftly, flashing through small railway stations and landscape still verdant after the rains of spring. The ticket collector appeared. Then the restaurant-car conductor hurried by, tinkling his midday bell. The businessmen went to lunch, so did the fashion woman. Out of nowhere, words came: In the garden the geraniums were in flower. Through scented twilight the girl in the white dress walked with a step as light as a morning cobweb. That evening she hadn’t a care in the world.

It would go on. I would sit down at my little black Olympia and paragraph would obediently follow paragraph, one scene flowing into the next, conversations occurring naturally. I turned the pages of Oggi, but soon lost interest. Where would I be, I found myself thinking, if late in my life I had not discovered my modest gift? At my age there were women who still served clerks their plates of food in public-house dining-rooms. There were women who sold shoes – as I have also done – or swabbed out cabins on ferry-steamers. It had never seemed like good fortune that I’d found myself in the Café Rose, but in fairness to fate I have to say it was. I ran the place in the end – everyone’s friend, as they used to say there. I was fortunate, I must record again, because without the Café Rose I don’t believe I’d ever have put pen to paper.

I must have slept, for in a dream Ernie Chubbs approached me outside the Al Fresco Club and exclaimed, just as he had in reality, ‘Hi, sugar!’ He told me he loved me in the Al Fresco Club; he wanted to sit with me all night, he whispered. Ernie went on buying drinks, the way they liked you to in the Al Fresco, and when another man came up and bought drinks also Ernie was furious, and told him to go away. Then, as abruptly as it always is in dreams, I was shopping in Milan, trying on long suede coats in different colours – next season’s cut, the assistant said. I liked the wrap-around style and was saying so when my eyes were wrenched open by a burst of noise. There was glass in the air, and the face of the American woman was upside down. There was screaming, and pain, before the darkness came.