William Trevor - Two Lives

2

‘It’s Quinty come to see you,’ Quinty said. ‘You’re all right. You’re OK.’

He tried to smile. The lines on his cheeks had wrinkled into zigzags, but the smile itself would not properly come.

‘Is it Good Friday?’ I asked, confused, because Good Friday did not come into any of it. I heard myself talking about the Café Rose, how one particular Good Friday the Austrian ivory cutter had been high on the stuff he took, and Poor Boy Abraham had been upset on account of anyone being high on the day when Jesus suffered on the Cross.

There were hours of shadows then – they might have been years for all I knew – and through them moved the white uniforms of the nurses, one nurse in particular, with thinning black hair. ‘You’ve had a bang,’ Quinty said, ‘but thanks be to God you’re progressing well.’ He sniffed the way he sometimes does, a casual, careless sound, disguising something else.

‘What happened?’ I asked, but Quinty’s reply – if he made one at all – eluded me, and when I looked he was no longer there. I didn’t want to think; I allowed my mind to wander where it would, gliding over the past, swooping into it here and there, no effort made on my part, no exhaustion. ‘Have they paid?’ Mrs Trice asked her husband. She was always asking him that, he being a collector of insurance money. ‘You’re weak with them,’ she accused him. ‘Weak as old water.’ As a child, I lived for eight years at 21 Prince Albert Street before I realized that my presence there was the result of a monetary transaction. I’d always addressed the Trices as though they were my mother and father, not knowing about the people of the Wall of Death until Mrs Trice told me in the kitchen one Saturday morning. ‘They were paid a sum by Mr Trice,’ was how she put it. ‘They weren’t people you’d care for.’

Between sleep and consciousness the honest black face of Poor Boy Abraham edged out the Trices, his negroid features intent as he swept the veranda floor at the Café Rose, while the fans whirred and rattled. The four Englishmen played poker at the corner table. ‘Where would I be if I did not come with my woes to you?’ the Austrian ivory cutter asked and, as always, drew the conversation round to his hopeless coveting of some black man’s wife. The aviator who was a regular in the café had been a skywriter, advertising a brand of beer mainly.

I dropped into sleep and dreamed, as I had on the train. ‘Feeling better, girlie?’ Ernie Chubbs was solicitous in Idaho. ‘Fancy a chow mein sent up?’

A nurse spoke kindly in Italian. I could tell she was being kind from her expression. She rearranged my pillows and for a moment held my hand. I think I must have called out in my sleep. When I seemed calm again she went away.

When Ernie Chubbs suggested accompanying him to Idaho I did so because I wanted to see the Old West. To this day, the Old West fascinates me: Claire Trevor in her cowgirl clothes, Marlene Dietrich singing in the saloon. To this day, I close my eyes when a wheel of the stagecoach works itself loose; I’m still not quick enough to see a sheriff draw his gun. Mr Tree took me to the Gaiety Cinema on Sunday afternoons and we would watch the comedy short – Leon Errol or Laurel and Hardy, or Charlie Chase – and then the Gaumont News and the serial episode, and whatever else there was besides the main feature. Sometimes the main feature was a gangster thriller, or an ice-skating drama or a musical, and that was always a disappointment. I longed for the canyons and the ranches, for the sound of a posse’s hooves, the saddles that became pillows beneath the stars.

Idaho was a disappointment too. Ernie Chubbs, who said he knew the region well, assured me it was where the Old West still was; but needless to say that wasn’t true. A lifetime’s dream was shattered – not that I expected to find the winding trails just as they had been shown to me, but at least there might have been something reminiscent of them, at least there might have been a smell of leather. ‘You’re simple, Emily,’ the big doctor who came to the Café Rose used to say. And yes, I suppose I am: I cannot help myself. I’m simple and I’m sentimental.

‘How long is it?’ I asked. ‘How long have I lain here?’

But the Italian nurses only smiled and rearranged my pillows. I worried about how long it was; yet a moment later – or perhaps it wasn’t a moment – that didn’t matter in the least. The Idaho of Ernie Chubbs – his going out on business, the waiting in the motel room – must have made me moan, because the nurses comforted me again. When they did, the Old West filled my thoughts, driving everything else away. In the Gaiety Cinema there were no curtains to the screen. On to the bare, pale expanse came the holsters and the sweat-bands of the huge-brimmed hats, the feathered Indians falling one by one, the rough and tumble of the fist fights. I was seven, and eight, and nine, when Dietrich sang. ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ she commanded in her peremptory manner, ‘And tell them I’ll have the same.’ In my sedated tranquillity I heard that song again; and the Idaho of Ernie Chubbs seemed gone for ever. Young men I have myself given life to whispered lines of love to happy girls. The Wedding March played, bouquets were thrown by brides. The Café Rose might not have existed either.

*

‘Quinty.’

‘Rest yourself, now.’

‘There were other people. A young man and his girl who talked in German. Americans. Italians in dark suits. A woman in the fashion business. Three English people. Are they here too, Quinty?’

‘They are of course.’

‘Quinty, will you find out? Find out and tell me. Please.’

‘Don’t upset yourself with that type of thing.’

‘Are they dead, Quinty?’

‘I’ll ask.’

But he didn’t move away from my bedside. He visited me to see if there were grounds for hope, promise of a relapse. His eyes were like two black gimlets; I closed my own. Little Bonny Maye was employed in Toupe’s Better Value Store, attaching prices to the shelved goods with a price-gun. Small discs of adhesive paper, each marked with an appropriate figure, were punched on to the surface of cans and packets. At certain hours of the day she worked a till.

Little Bonny Maye was taken up by Dorothy, an older girl from the table-tennis club. Dorothy was secretary to a financier and had been privately educated. Her voice was beautiful, and so was Dorothy herself. Bonny couldn’t think why she’d been taken up, and even if Dorothy had a way of asking her to do things for her rather a lot Bonny still appreciated the friendship more than any she had known. She was only too grateful: all the time with Dorothy that was what Bonny thought. Her single anxiety was that some silliness on her part would ruin everything.

‘Did you ever read that story of mine, Quinty? Little Bonny Maye? I was surprised to hear myself asking Quinty that. It wasn’t our usual kind of conversation. He said:

‘It’s great you have your stories.’

‘I thought about them in the Café Rose.’

‘You told me that.’

‘I don’t remember telling you.’

‘You had a drink or two in, the time you told me.’

The three words of the title were blue on the amber of the book-jacket, the two girls illustrated below. I must have said so because Quinty nodded. Soon afterwards he went away. He might even have guessed I had begun to hear the girls’ voices.

‘Dear, there is an “h” in “house”, you know.’ Dorothy could bring out Bonny’s blushes, hardly making an effort. When they went on holiday together, while Bonny fetched and carried for the older girl, Dorothy drew up a list of words that Bonny should take special care with. ‘Our fork belongs on our plate, not in the air. I had a nanny who said that.’