William Trevor - Two Lives

‘They are here,’ Quinty said, and glanced at me, and added: ‘Some of them.’

Of the three English people, only the old man was alive. Of the German couple, only the boy. In the hospital they called the little American girl Aimée: the family passport had been found. She was the sole survivor of that family, and there was difficulty in locating someone in America to take responsibility. It even seemed, so Quinty said at first, that such a person did not exist. The information that filtered through the carabinieri and the hospital staff appeared to indicate that there were grandparents somewhere, later that there was an aunt. Then we learnt that the child’s grandfather suffered a heart condition and could not be told of the loss of his son, his daughter-in-law and a grandchild; the grandmother could not be told because she would not be able to hide her grief from him. Lying there, I approved of that: it was right that these people should be left in peace; it was only humane that elderly people should be permitted to drift out of life without this final nightmare to torment them.

‘They’re having difficulty in tracking down the aunt they’re after,’ Quinty reported. ‘It seems she’s travelling herself.’

She was in Germany or England, it was said, but the next day Quinty contradicted that. It was someone else who was travelling, a friend of the family who’d been assumed to be this relation. The aunt had been located.

‘Unfortunately she can’t look after a child.’

‘Why not, Quinty?’

‘It isn’t said why not. Maybe she’s delicate. Maybe she has work that keeps her on the go all over the place.’

I thought about this after he’d gone. I wondered what kind of a woman this could be, who, for whatever reason, could be so harsh.

‘They got it all wrong again,’ Quinty said on a later occasion. ‘That woman’s the aunt of someone else. The same story with those grandparents.’

I wouldn’t have known any of this if Quinty hadn’t been interested in questioning the carabinieri on the matter. From what I could gather, the policemen did not themselves appear to know what was happening in the search – so far away – for possible relatives or family friends. The hospital authorities were worried because the child would not, or could not, speak.

Apart from the victims of Carrozza 219 no one on the train had been injured, and no one of political importance had been on the train in any case. The old man’s son-in-law had had something to do with a merchant bank apparently; the American father had been a paediatrician. Yet a bomb had been planted, deliberately to take life, ingeniously and callously placed where those who by chance had been allocated certain seats would be killed or maimed.

What would one see, I wondered, in the perpetrators’ eyes? What monstrous nature did such human beings seek to disguise? There’d been crime, often more than petty, on the S.S. Hamburg . Living human embryos had been scraped out of my body and dropped into waste-disposal buckets. Seedy confessions had surfaced in the Café Rose. An ugly guilt had skittered about in the shifty eyes of Ernie Chubbs. Yet no crime could rank with what had happened on the train I’d caught at 11.45 on the morning of 5 May 1987. In search of consolation, I wrote down the few lines I had composed in Carrozza 219, the beginning of the work which had come to me through its title. 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 . But I found it difficult to continue and did my best, instead, simply to recover.

The old man and I suffered from shock. I’d had splinters of glass taken from the left side of my face; he from his legs and body. The German boy, called Otmar, had lost an arm. The old man was a general.

‘An irony,’ he murmured in the corridor where he learned to walk again. ‘It was I who’d reached the end of things.’

He made the statement without emotion. I remembered his daughter as a pretty woman in a gentle, English kind of way, quiet and rather slight, a little faded. Aries probably.

‘We are fortunate to be alive, General.’

He turned away his head, half shaking it as he did so. I told him about the child called Aimée, about the search for relatives in America. I hoped to involve him in the pathos of the child’s predicament and perhaps to make him realize that someone else had lost even more than he had. He did his best to respond, later even to smile. With military stoicism he appeared to be resigned to what had occurred, his vocation no doubt demanding that. A sense of melancholy did not come from him, only one of weariness. I left him soldiering on, precisely obeying the nurses’ strictures, marching with the aid of a metal stick, back and forth between his bed and a curtained balcony at the corridor’s end.

‘I’m sorry, Otmar,’ I commiserated, and in a soft whisper, speaking quite good English, the German boy accepted the sympathy: that it was offered because of the loss of his sweetheart or a limb was barely relevant. In the train he had been wearing a red and yellow lumberjack shirt and rather large glasses, which were shattered in the blast. He wore other spectacles now, wire-rimmed, and jeans and a plain grey shirt. His features were sallow, the eyes behind the magnifying lenses still terrified. Unlike the General, he did not attempt to smile. There was a cornered look about Otmar, as if the horror he had woken up to was too much for him.

‘We must hope, Otmar. What there is left to us is hope.’

Every time I returned to my own room, and to the ward when I was a little better, I endeavoured to proceed with my new work, but still I found it difficult to continue. This had never happened before: with reason, I had been confident on the train as soon as the girl appeared in my mind’s vision. Yet now it seemed as though a film had halted within seconds of its commencement. The fluttering of the girl’s dress was frozen, her carefree mood arrested in a random instant. Was there some companion of whom my broken cinematograph held the secret, some figure waiting to step from the garden’s shadows? Would the carefree mood become ecstatic? Would a gardenia nestle in the long fair hair? I did not know. I knew neither what joy nor sorrow there was; my girl was nameless, without detail in her life, vague as to parentage, born beneath a choice of all the stars. The title Ceaseless Tears appeared so naturally to belong to the suffering on the train that greater bewilderment, and blankness, was engendered. I was aware of a sensation that caused me to shiver in dismay, as though all that had been given to me had been snatched away. Then one day Quinty said:

‘They could stay a while in the house, you know.’

A week ago the General had murmured that he would find the return to England difficult, and wished he did not have to face it immediately. ‘The struggle back and forth,’ he said. ‘The bed, the corridor, the holy statue in the wall, the balcony. The faces of the patients, the smell of ether. You feel that’s where you belong.’

Quinty was clearly out to profit from misfortune, but even so I saw nothing to object to in his suggestion. ‘You would find it peaceful,’ I told the old man. ‘My house is high enough to be cool. Sometimes a breeze blows over the water of Lake Trasimeno.’

He nodded, and then he thanked me. When he sought me out two days later I explained that we were used to catering for strangers, that for many years we had taken in passing tourists when the hotels of the neighbourhood were full.

‘I would insist on paying,’ he gently laid down. ‘I told the man I would insist on paying whatever rates you normally charge.’