William Trevor - Two Lives

‘He forgot to lock the windows,’ Aimée repeated firmly at the railway station. The Italian woman was angry and almost stamped her foot; the man was smaller than she was, with oiled black hair brushed straight back. ‘More likely he left something turned on,’ Aimée’s brother suggested. ‘Maybe the stove.’ Aimée disagreed, but then the train came in and they had to find their way to Carrozza 219. When the train moved again Aimée gazed out at the fields of sunflowers, at the green vine shoots in orderly rows and the hot little railway stations. She stared at the pale sky, all the blue bleached out of it. Some of the fields were being sprayed with water that gushed from a jet going round and round. In the far distance there were hills with clumps of trees on them. ‘Cypresses,’ her father said as the bell of the restaurant attendant tinkled and the businessmen and the fashion woman rose. The woman would have turned off the stove herself, Aimée whispered, and her brother turned grumpily away from her. ‘Stop that silly arguing,’ their mother reprimanded.

‘No, of course I don’t mind,’ Madeleine said when Otmar asked if his friends might come to the flat when she was out. His friends were intense young men, students or unemployed, one of them a girl whom Madeleine was jealous of. When Otmar and Madeleine were in Italy two of them came up while they were sitting in the sun outside a café. They gave Otmar the name of a cheap restaurant, but afterwards he lost the piece of paper he’d written it down on. ‘Look, there’re your friends,’ Madeleine said a few days later, pointing to where they sat at a café table with two other men, but Otmar didn’t want to join them, although they could have given him the name of the restaurant again.

‘Rum and Coke,’ Ernie Chubbs ordered in the Al Fresco Club, and the Eastern girl brought it quickly, flashy with him as she always was with the customers. They didn’t put any rum in mine although Ernie paid for it. They never did in the Al Fresco, saying a girl could end up anywhere if she didn’t stay sober. ‘Now then, my pretty maid,’ Ernie Chubbs said in our corner. I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know what it looked like because it was shadowy where we sat and I’d only caught a glimpse of it on the street. ‘Often come here, darling?’ he chattily questioned me.

Best White Tits in Africa! the writing said in the sky, but in my dream it was different. Angela Fresu, aged three , it said, as it does in marble at Bologna.

When I awoke next there was a dusky light in the room. I reached out for a cigarette and lit it, and closed my eyes. ‘I shall love you,’ Jason says in For Ever More , ‘till the scent has gone from the flowers and the salt from the seas.’ But Jason and Maggie are different from the people I’d kept company with in the night. You can play around with Jason and Maggie, you can change what you wish to change, you can make them do what they’re told.

I must digress here. To compose a romance it is necessary to have a set of circumstances and within those circumstances a cast of people. As the main protagonists of a cast, you have, for instance, Jason and Maggie and Maggie’s self-centred sister, and Jason’s well-to-do Uncle Cedric. The circumstances are that Jason and Maggie want to start a riding stables, but they have very little money. Maggie’s sister wants Jason for herself, and Jason’s Uncle Cedric will allow the pair a handsome income if Jason agrees to go into the family business, manufacturing girder-rivets. You must also supply places of interest – in this instance the old mill that would make an ideal stables, the little hills over which horses can be exercised, and far away – darkly unprepossessing – the family foundry. You need dramatic incident: the discovery of the machinations of Maggie’s sister, the angry family quarrel when Jason refuses to toe his Uncle Cedric’s line. None of it’s any good if the people aren’t real to you as you compose.

In the early morning after that unsettled night it seemed to me that the only story I was being offered was the story of the summer that was slipping by. The circumstances were those that followed a tragedy, the people were those who had crowded my night, the places you can guess. Ceaseless Tears was a working title only, and that morning I abandoned it. All I had dreamed was the chaos from which order was to be drawn, one way or another. Everything in storytelling, romantic or otherwise, is hit and miss, and the fact that reality was involved didn’t appear to make much difference.

I prayed, and then I finished my cigarette and soon afterwards rose. I walked about my house in the cool of the morning, relishing its tranquillity and the almost eerie feeling that possessed me: inspiration, or whatever you care to call it, had never before struck me in so strange a manner. I poured myself some tonic water and added just a trace of the other to pep it up. It seemed like obtuseness that I hadn’t realized the girl in the white dress was Aimée.

7

Aimée was calm when she awoke, but during the days that followed there were further setbacks, though thankfully none was as alarming as the first one. Her uncle’s departure from America was again delayed to allow her further time to make a recovery. But even so Dr Innocenti was optimistic.

We ourselves – the General, Otmar and I – were naturally apprehensive and each day that ended without incident seemed like a victory of a kind. And for me there was another small source of pleasure, a bolt from the blue as agreeable as any I have experienced. As I recall it now I am reminded, by way of introduction, that overheard conversations do not always throw up welcome truths. ‘Pass on, my dear, for you’ll hear no good,’ Lady Daysmith advises in Precious September , but of course it is not always so. Pausing by the door of the salotto one evening, I overheard Otmar and the General tentatively conversing.

‘Yes, she has mentioned that,’ the old man was saying, and this was when I paused, for I sensed it was I who was referred to, and who can resist a moment’s listening in such circumstances?

‘I would take the chance,’ Otmar said, ‘to pay my debt to her.’

His wife had been quite expert, the old man said next, especially where the cultivation of fritillaries was concerned. Otmar didn’t understand the term; an explanation followed, the plant described. The name came from the Latin: fritillus meant a dice-box. ‘She was always interested in a horticultural derivation. She read Dr Linnaeus.’

Otmar professing ignorance again, there came an explanation. I heard that this Linnaeus, a Swedish person apparently – Linné as he’d been born – had sorted out a whole array of flowers and plants, giving them names or finding Latin roots for existing names, orderliness and Latin being his forte.

‘She wants a garden,’ Otmar said, not interrupting but by the sound of it repeating what he had said already, in an effort to bring the conversation down to earth.

‘Then we must make her one.’

How could they make me a garden? One was too old, the other had but a single arm left! Yet how sweet it was to hear them! As I stood there I felt a throb of warmth within my body, as though a man had said when I was still a girl: ‘I love you…’

‘He’s not the sort of person,’ the old man was observing when next I paid attention. ‘He’s not the sort to be a help or even be much interested.’

I guessed they spoke of Quinty, and certainly what was deduced was true.

‘A machine is there?’ Otmar asked then. ‘An implement to break the earth?’

‘There’s a thing in England called a Merry Tiller. A motorized plough.’