William Trevor - Two Lives

Crimson spread on denim. A hand that was crimson also bounced back from the ceiling, dangled for an instant in the air, fingers splayed. A screeching of terror was different from the screams of pain. Even while it was happening you could hear the difference.

‘Twenty pound,’ Mrs Trice said. ‘That’s what he give. He likes a child, Mr Trice does. He got the dog for nothing.’ Rough type of people she said, to profit from a baby. ‘You bloody give it back,’ I said to him, ‘but they was gone by then. Fifty they ask, twenty he give.’ Rum and Coca-Cola, Ernie asked for in the Al Fresco, a fiver a time. ‘Easy money,’ Mrs Trice said, lifting a slice of Dundee to her lips. ‘Travelling people’s always after easy money.’

‘Lightning,’ I said myself. ‘The train was struck by lightning.’

The strength of the drugs was daily reduced; tranquillity receded little by little. At 21 Prince Albert Street I stirred milk in a saucepan, and Mrs Trice was furious because the milk burnt and milk cannot burn, apparently, while it is stirred. It was in the back-yard shed at 21 Prince Albert Street that the mangle was, and the kindling in the bath. It was in the back-yard shed that the man I took to be my father wept and said we mustn’t tell, that good girls didn’t. It was his face that was ravenous, not Ernie Chubbs’s. Ernie loved me was what I thought.

Mr Trice possessed a smooth-haired fox terrier, a black and white dog of inordinate stupidity. With the chopping of kindling, washing up, and frying the breakfast, a task when I was nine was to exercise this animal, which refused to leave the confined space of the Trices’ back-yard of its own accord. It would amble reluctantly behind me down Prince Albert Street and on the damp sand of the seashore. Seagulls would sniff it when I sat with my back against a breakwater and it stood obediently on the sand. They sometimes even poked at it with their beaks, but the dog displayed signs neither of alarm nor pleasure, seeming almost to be unaware of the seagulls’ attention. When other dogs ran snarling up to it Mr Trice’s pet stolidly sat there, unimpressed also by this display of hostility. If actually attacked, it would cringe unemotionally, tightly pressed to the ground, eyes closed, hackles undisturbed. ‘A gentle creature,’ Mr Trice would say if he had chosen to accompany me, which now and again, to my dismay, he did. We would walk by the edge of the sea and Mr Trice would attempt to entice his pet towards the grey waves. But it always stubbornly resisted the temptation of the stones that were thrown and the whistles of encouragement that emanated from Mr Trice. ‘It’s a sign of intelligence,’ he would remark in defeat. ‘There’s many a dog doesn’t spot cold water before he’s in it.’ Mr Trice and I sat down by the breakwater and he always glanced over his shoulder before he put his arm around me to cuddle me. ‘Tell your Daddy you love him,’ he would urge, and I did as I was bidden, thinking it would be unobliging not to. Mr Trice would glance about him again. He would hold my hand and kiss the side of my forehead while the dog stood beside us, not seeming to know it would be restful to sit down also. The cuddles and the kisses were all Mr Trice ever went in for on the seashore. In the back-yard shed he took me on to his knee, and in the darkness of the Gaiety Cinema he kept a hand on my leg for all the time we were there, all the way through Destry Rides Again and Stagecoach War. It wasn’t until later, when I was eleven, that Mr Trice took me into the bedroom when Mrs Trice was out at the laundry where she worked. He gave me a penny and I promised. People got the wrong end of the stick, he said.

Lying in that Italian hospital, I had no wish to dwell upon the uglier parts of my life yet could not prevent myself from doing so. In my fifty-sixth year, I had my beautiful house, and as I lay there that was where I endeavoured to see myself. But again my thoughts betrayed me. Wholly against my will, I was snagged in another kind of ugliness, keeping company with the tourists who over the years had gathered at my table. The mother and the nervous son, the homosexuals with Aids, the ménage à trois and all the others: so many tell-tale signs there were, in gesture or intonation. Long ago the mother had instilled fear in her son in order to keep him by her. The younger of the homosexuals had been unfaithful but was forgiven; both soon would die. The women who shared a lover had each settled for second best. In my dining-room or on the terrace Rosa Crevelli filled the tourists’ wineglasses and offered them fruit or dolce . Wearily I rose from my table, drained by such human tragedy.

How joyfully then, how warmly, I kept company with pert Polly Darling or Annette St Claire! From pretty lips, or lips a little moist, poured whispers and murmurs and cries of simple delight. Dark hair framed another oval face, eyes were as blue as early-summer cornflowers. Often it was half-past three or four before I replaced the cover of my black Olympia. New light streaked the sky when I smoked, on the terrace, the last of the night’s cigarettes. A lovely tiredness cried out for sleep.

They dabbed at my forehead. They bound the blood-pressure thing around my arm. They stuck in a thermometer. Their tweezers pulled out stitches.

‘No harm in secrets,’ Mr Trice said. ‘No harm, eh?’

‘No.’

After the third time he’d given me a penny I put the chair against my bedroom door, but it didn’t do any good. So on the day before my sixteenth birthday I packed a brown cardboard suitcase, and left five shillings in its place because the suitcase was Mrs Trice’s and we’d been taught not to take things at Sunday school.

‘Let’s have a look at you,’ the woman in the public house said. ‘Have you served at table before?’

I never had, so they put me in the kitchen first, washing up the dishes. ‘Gawky,’ the woman said. ‘God, you’re a gawky girl.’ My hair was frizzy, I couldn’t keep my weight down, my clothes were bought in second-hand places mostly. Yet not much time went by before other men besides Mr Trice desired me and gave me presents.

*

‘A timed device,’ Quinty said.

‘I thought it was lightning.’

‘It was a timed device.’

‘Where was it, Quinty? Near where I was?’

‘It was close all right. The rest of the train was OK.’

‘Is that why the police came?’

‘That would be it.’

Early on in my hospital sojourn the carabinieri had been clustered round my bed. Their presence had interfered with my dreams and the confusion of my thoughts. Their dark blue uniforms trimmed with red and white, revolvers in black holsters, the grizzled head of one of them: all this remained with me after they had left my bedside, slipping in and out of my crowded fantasies. If conversation took place I do not recall it.

Later, in ordinary suits, detectives came with an interpreter. There were several visits, but soon it became clear from the detectives’ demeanour they did not consider it likely that I, in particular, had been the target of the outrage, though they listened intently to their interpreter’s rendering of my replies. A hundred times, it seems like now, they asked me if I had noticed anything unusual, either as I stepped on to the train or after I occupied my seat. Repeatedly I shook my head. I could recall no one skulking, no sudden turning away of a head, no hiding of a face. Each time, the detectives were patient and polite.

‘Buongiorno, signora. Grazie.’

‘Good day, lady,’ the interpreter each time translated. ‘Thank you.’

Carrozza 219 our carriage had been. I remembered the number on the ticket. Seat 11. In my mind’s vision the faces of the people who’d been near me lingered: the American family, the lovers, the couple and their elderly relative. The fashion lady and the businessmen in lightweight suits had gone to lunch.