William Trevor - Two Lives

‘If you would like to,’ I gently added.

He did not at once reply. His gnarled grey head had fallen low between his shoulders. The Daily Telegraph which Quinty had bought for him was open on his knees. My eye caught gruesome headlines. A baby had been taken from its pram outside a shop and buried in nearby woods. A dentist had taken advantage of his women patients. A bishop was in some other trouble.

‘It sometimes helps to talk a bit.’

‘Eh?’

‘Only if you’d like to.’

Again there was a silence. I imagined him in his heyday, leading his men in battle. I calculated that the Second World War would have been his time. I saw him in the desert, a young fox who was now an old one.

‘You’re on your own, General?’

‘Since my wife died.’

His eyes passed over the unpleasant headlines in the newspaper. There was something about a handful of jam thrown at the prime minister.

‘Things were to change when we returned,’ he said.

I smiled encouragingly. I did not say a word.

‘I was to live with my daughter and her husband in Hampshire.’

He was away then, and I could feel it doing him good. Only one child had been born to him, the daughter he spoke of, that faded prettiness on the train. ‘Don’t go spoiling her,’ his wife had pleaded, and he told me of a day when his daughter, at six or seven, had fallen out of a tree. He’d lifted her himself into the dining-room and covered her with a rug on the sofa. She’d been no weight at all. ‘This is Digby,’ she introduced years later while they stood, all four of them drinking gin and French, beneath that very same tree.

‘I couldn’t like him,’ he confessed, his voice gruff beneath the shame induced by death. I remembered the trio’s politeness on the train, the feeling of constraint, of something hidden. I waited patiently while he rummaged among his thoughts and when he spoke again the gruffness was still there. If the outrage hadn’t occurred he would have continued to keep his own counsel concerning the man his daughter had married: you could tell that easily.

He spoke fondly of his wife. When she died there’d been a feeling of relief because the pain was over for her. Her departure from him was part of his existence now, a fact like an appendix scar. When I looked away, and banished from my mind the spare old body that carried in it somewhere an elusive chip of shrapnel, I saw, in sunshine on a shorn lawn, a medal pinned on a young man’s tunic and a girl’s arms around a soldier’s neck. ‘Oh, yes! Oh, yes!’ she eagerly agreed when marriage was proposed, her tears of happiness staining the leather of a shoulder strap. You could search for ever for a nicer man, she privately reflected: I guessed that easily also.

‘No, I never liked him and my wife was cross with me for that. She was a better mother than I ever was a father.’

Again the silence. Had he perished in the outrage he would have rated an obituary of reasonable length in the English newspapers. His wife, no doubt, had passed on without a trace of such attention; his daughter and his son-in-law too.

‘I doubted if I could live with him. But I kept that to myself.’

‘A trial run, your holiday? Was that it?’

‘Perhaps so.’

I smiled and did not press him. Jealousy, he supposed it was. More than ever on this holiday he had noticed it – in pensiones and churches and art galleries, permeating every conversation. No children had been born to his daughter, he revealed; his wife had regretted that, he hadn’t himself.

‘Have you finished with the Telegraph , sir?’ Quinty hovered, not wishing to pick up the newspaper from the old man’s knees. Rosa Crevelli set out the contents of a tea-tray.

‘Yes, I’ve finished with it.’

‘Then I’ll take it to the kitchen, sir, if I may. There’s nothing I like better than an hour with the Telegraph in the cool of the evening. When the dinner’s all been and done with, the Telegraph goes down a treat.’

A glass of lemon tea, on a saucer, was placed on a table within the General’s reach. Rosa Crevelli picked up her tray. Quinty still hovered. Nothing could stop him now.

‘I mention it, sir, so that if you require the paper you would know where it is.’

The General acknowledged this. Quinty softly coughed. He inquired:

‘Do you follow the cricket at all, sir?’

The General shook his head. But noticing that Quinty waited expectantly for a verbal response, he courteously added that cricket had never greatly interested him.

‘Myself, I follow all sport, sir. There is no sport I do not take an interest in. Ice-hockey. Baseball. Lacrosse, both men’s and women’s. I have watched the racing of canoes.’

The General sipped his tea. There were little biscuits, ricci-arelli , on a plate. Quinty offered them. He mentioned the game of boules , and again the racing of canoes. I made a sign at him, endeavouring to communicate that his playfulness, though harmless, was out of place in an atmosphere of mourning. He took no notice of my gesture.

‘To tell you the truth, sir, I’m an armchair observer myself. I never played a ball-game. Cards was as far as I got.’

Quinty’s smile is a twisted little thing, and he was smiling now. Was he aware that the reference to cards would trigger a memory – the Englishmen, and he himself, playing poker at the corner table of the Café Rose? Impossible to tell.

‘I’m afraid he’s a law unto himself,’ I explained as lightly as I could when he had left the room. A tourist had once asked me if Quinty had a screw loose, and for all I knew the General was wondering the same thing, too polite to put it into words. By way of further explanation I might have touched upon Quinty’s unfortunate life, how he had passed himself off as the manager of a meat-extract factory in order to impress an au pair girl. I might have told how he’d been left on the roadside a few kilometres outside the town of Modena, how later he’d turned up in Ombubu. I might even have confessed that I’d once felt so sorry for Quinty I’d taken him into my arms and stroked his head.

‘It’s just his way,’ I said instead, and in a moment Quinty returned and asked me if he should pour me a g and t, keeping his voice low, as if some naughtiness were afoot. He didn’t wait for my response but poured the drink as he stood there. Half a child and half a rogue, as I have said before.

Deep within what seemed like plumage, a mass of creatures darted. Their heads were the heads of human beings, their hands and feet misshapen. There was frenzy in their movement, as though they struggled against the landscape they belonged to, that forest of pale quills and silky foliage.

For a week I watched with trepidation while the child created this world that was her own. Signora Bardini had bought her crayons when we noticed she’d begun to draw, and then, with colour, everything came startlingly alive. Mouths retched. Eyes stared distractedly. Cats, as thin as razors, scavenged among human entrails; the flesh was plucked from dogs and horses. Birds lay in their own blood; rabbits were devoured by maggots.

Sometimes the child looked up from her task, and even slightly smiled, as though the unease belonged to her pictures, not to her. Her silence continued.

In her lifetime Otmar’s mother had made lace. He told me about that, his remaining fingers forever caressing whatever surface there was. His mother had found it a restful occupation, her concentration lost in the intricacies of a pattern. He spoke a lot about his mother. He described a dimly lit house in a German suburb, where the furniture loomed heavily and there was waxen fruit on a sideboard dish. Listening to his awkward voice, I heard as well the clock ticking in the curtained dining-room, the clock itself flanked by two bronze horsemen. Schweinsbrust was served, and good wine of the Rhine. ‘ Guten Appetit! ’ Otmar’s father exclaimed. How I, at Otmar’s age, would have loved the house and the family he spoke of, apfelstrudel by a winter fireside!