William Trevor - Two Lives

‘I said I would.’

He laughed the way he does. ‘You’ll get your reward in heaven,’ he repeated for the umpteenth time in our relationship. A kind of catch-phrase this is with him: he doesn’t believe it. What he knows – though it’s never spoken between us – is that the house will be his and Rosa Crevelli’s when I die. My own reward has nothing to do with anything.

‘Roast in hell, the rest of us,’ he said before he went away.

Mr Riversmith telephoned again; we had a similar conversation. I reported on his niece’s continuing progress, what she had done that day, what she had said. When there was nothing left to say the conversation ended. There was a pause, a cough, the woman’s voice in the background, a dismissive word of farewell.

A few days later he telephoned a third time. He’d had further conversations with Dr Innocenti, he said; he suggested a date – a week hence – for his arrival in my house. There was the usual prickly atmosphere, the same empty pause before he brought himself to say goodbye. I poured myself a drink and walked out to the terrace with it. The awkward conversation echoed; I watched the fireflies twinkling in the gloom. How indeed would that woman react to the advent of a child who was totally strange to her? What was the woman like? With someone less cold, the subject of what it was going to be like for both of them might even have been brought up on the telephone. Thomas Riversmith sounded a lot older than his sister. Capricorn, I’d guessed after our first conversation. You often get an uptight Capricorn.

On the terrace I lit a cigarette. Then, quite without warning, monstrously shattering the peaceful evening, the screaming of the child began, the most awful sound I’ve ever heard.

6

Dr Innocenti came at once. He was calm, and calmly soothed our anxiety. He placed Aimée under temporary sedation, warning us that its effects would not last long. He maintained from the first that there was no need to take her into hospital again, that nothing would be gained. His strength and his tranquillity allowed me to accompany him to the bedside; afterwards he sat with me in the salotto, sipping a glass of mineral water. He wished to be within earshot when Aimée emerged from her sleep, since each time she did so she would find herself deeper in what seemed like a nightmare.

‘You comprehend, signora? Reversal of waking from bad dreams. For this child such dreams begin then.’

Together we returned to the bedside when the screaming started again, but Dr Innocenti did not administer the drug immediately. Aimée sobbed when the screams had exhausted her, and while she threw her head about on the pillow a dreadful shivering seeming to wrench her small body asunder. I begged him to put a stop to it.

‘We understand, Aimée,’ he murmured instead, in unhurried tones. ‘Here are your friends.’

The child ignored the sympathy. Her eyes stared wide, like those of a creature demented. More sedation was given at last.

‘She will sleep till morning now,’ the doctor promised, ‘and then be drowsy for a little time. I will be here before another crisis.’

From the hall he telephoned Thomas Riversmith to inform him of the development. ‘May I urge you to delay your journey, signore?’ I heard him say. ‘Three weeks maybe? Four? Not easy now to calculate.’

It was impossible not to have confidence in Dr Innocenti. All his predictions came naturally about, as if he and nature shared some knowledge. There was compassion in the cut of his features, and even in the way he moved, yet it never hindered him. Pity can be an enemy, I know that well.

His presence in my house that night was a marvel. It affected Otmar and the General: without speaking a word, as though anxious only to be co-operative, they went to their rooms and closed their doors. I alone bade the doctor good-night and watched the little red tail-light of his car creeping away into the darkness, still glowing long after the sound of the engine had died.

‘Very presentable, the doctor,’ Quinty remarked in the hall, even in these wretched circumstances attempting to be jokey or whatever it was he would have called it.

‘Yes, very.’

‘A different kettle of fish from a certain medical party who had better stay nameless, eh?’

He referred to the doctor who’d been a regular in the Café Rose, a man whose weight was said to be twenty-four stone, whose stomach hung hugely out above the band of his trousers, whose chest was like a woman’s. Great sandalled feet shuffled and thumped; like florid blubber, thick lips were loosely open; eyes, piglike, peered. ‘We could make a go of it,’ was the suggestion he once made to me, and I have no doubt that Quinty knew about this. I have no doubt that the offer was later guffawed over at the card-table.

‘I’ll say good-night so,’ Quinty went on. ‘I think it’ll be best for all of us when Uncle comes.’

‘Good-night, Quinty.’

*

I could not sleep. I could not even close my eyes. I tried not to recall the sound of those screams, that stark, high-pitched shrieking that had chilled me to my very bones. Instead I made myself think about the obese doctor whom Quinty had so conveniently dredged up. You’d never have guessed he was a medical man, more like someone who drilled holes in the street. Yet when an elderly farmer sustained a heart attack in an upstairs room at the café he appeared to know what to do, and there was talk of cures among the natives.

In my continued determination not to dwell on the more immediate past I again saw vividly, as I had on my early-morning walk, the hand of Otmar’s girlfriend reaching for the herbs in the supermarket; I saw the General and his well-loved wife. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Beeds on to you,’ Mrs Trice shouted the day she came back early from the laundry. ‘Lay another finger on her and you’ll find yourself in handcuffs.’ The man I’d once taken to be my father blustered and then pleaded, a kind of gibberish coming out of him.

All through that night my mind filled with memories and dreams, a jumble that went on and on, imaginings and reality. ‘Please,’ Madeleine begged, and Otmar moved his belongings into her flat. When she was out at work he drank a great deal of coffee, and smoked, and typed the articles he submitted to newspapers. Madeleine cooked him moussaka and chicken stew, and once they went to Belgium because he’d heard of an incident which he was convinced would make a newspaper story: how a young man had ingeniously taken the place of a Belgian couple’s son after a period of army service.

‘So’s you can’t see up her skirts,’ a boy who had something wrong with him said, but no one believed that that was why Miss Alzapiedi wore long dresses. Miss Alzapiedi didn’t even know about people looking up skirts. ‘If you close your eyes you can feel the love of Jesus,’ Miss Alzapiedi said. ‘Promise me now. Wherever you are, in all your lives, find time to feel the love of Jesus.’ Nobody liked the boy who had something wrong with him. When he grinned inanely you had to avert your gaze. The girls pulled his hair whenever he made his rude noise, if Miss Alzapiedi wasn’t looking.

‘Ah, how d’you do?’ the General greeted his would-be son-in-law beneath the tree I’d heard about. The drinks were on a white table among the deck-chairs, Martini already mixed, with ice and lemon, in a tall glass jug. ‘So very pleased,’ his wife said, and he watched the face of his daughter’s fiancé, the features crinkling in a polite acknowledgement, the lips half open. The intimacy of kissing, he thought, damp and sensual. His stomach heaved; he turned away. ‘So very pleased,’ he heard again.

The aviator who wrote messages in the sky wanted to marry me before the obese doctor did. He had retired from the skywriting business when I knew him, but often he spoke of it in the Café Rose, repeating the message he had a thousand times looped and dotted high above Africa: Drink Bailey’s Beer . A condition of the inner ear had dictated his retirement, but one day he risked his life and flew again. ‘Look, missy!’ Poor Boy Abraham cried excitedly, pulling me out of the café on to the dirt expanse where the trucks parked. ‘Look! Look!’ And there, in the sky, like shaving foam, was my name and an intended compliment. A tiny aircraft, soundless from where we stood, formed the last few letters and then smeared a zigzag flourish. ‘Oh, that is beautiful! ’ Poor Boy Abraham cried as we watched. ‘Oh, my , it’s beautiful!’ Fortunately Poor Boy Abraham could not read.