William Trevor - Two Lives

‘You’ve come for the child,’ the General said.

‘Yes, I have.’

There was a silence. Quinty poured the General some whisky, and noted the drinks in the little red notebook he keeps by the tray of bottles. The old man nodded, acknowledging what had been said. In order to ease a certain stickiness that had developed I asked a question to which I knew the answer. ‘You do not know Aimée well?’ I remarked to Mr Riversmith.

‘I met my niece for the first time in my life half an hour ago.’

‘What?’ The General frowned. ‘What?’ he said again.

‘I never knew either of my sister’s children.’ He appeared not to wish to say anything more, to leave the matter there. But then, unexpectedly, he added what I knew also: that there’d been a family quarrel.

‘So the child’s a stranger to you?’ the General persisted. ‘And you to her?’

‘That is so.’

His wife would have accompanied him, Mr Riversmith continued, apropos of another question the General asked, but unfortunately it had been impossible for her to get away. He referred to his wife as Francine, a name new to me. In answer to a question of my own he supplied the information that his wife was in the academic world also.

‘We should be calling you professor,’ I put in. ‘We weren’t entirely certain.’

He replied that he didn’t much use the title. Academic distinctions were unimportant, he said. The General asked him what his line of scholarship was, and Mr Riversmith replied – his tone unchanged – that the bark-ant was his subject. He spoke of this insect as if it were a creature as familiar to us as the horse or the dog.

The General shook his head. He did not know the bark-ant, he confessed. Mr Riversmith made a very slight, scarcely perceptible shrugging motion. The interdependency of bark-ant colonies in acacia trees, he stated, revealed behaviour that was similar to human beings’. It was an esoteric area of research where the layman was concerned, he admitted in the end, and changed the subject.

‘My niece will not forget the time she’s spent here.’

‘No, she’ll hardly do that,’ the General agreed.

Otmar came in, his hand grasping one of Aimée’s. I introduced him to Mr Riversmith, and I thought for a moment that he might click his heels, for Otmar’s manner can be formal on occasion. But he only bowed. Quinty, still hovering near the drinks’ tray, poured Aimée a Coca-Cola and Otmar a Stella Artois. He made the entries in the notebook and then sloped away.

‘Those are interesting pictures you drew,’ Aimée’s uncle said.

‘Which pictures?’

‘The ones on your walls.’

‘I didn’t draw them.’

‘I drew the pictures,’ Otmar said.

‘Otmar drew them,’ Aimée said.

For the first time Mr Riversmith was taken aback. I knew that Dr Innocenti would already have spoken to him on the telephone about the pictures. I watched him wondering if he’d misunderstood what he’d been told. He opened his mouth to speak, but Aimée interrupted.

‘When are you taking me away?’

‘We’ll see what Dr Innocenti says when he comes tomorrow.’

‘I’m better.’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Really better.’

Aimée, in a plain red dress that she and Signora Bardini had bought together, took up a position in the centre of the room. Otmar leaned against the pillar of an archway. The fear was still in his eyes, but it had calmed a little.

‘Feel like that long journey soon?’ Mr Riversmith was asking Aimée in the artificial voice some people put on for children. ‘Tiring, you know, being up in the air like that.’

‘You want to rest?’ She stumbled slightly over the words, and then repeated them. ‘You want to rest, Uncle?’

‘It’s just that we mustn’t hurry your uncle,’ I quietly interjected. ‘He needs a little breathing space before turning round to go all that way back again.’

The conversation became ordinary then, the General in his courteous way continuing to ask our visitor the conventional questions that such an occasion calls for: where it was he lived in the United States, if he had children of his own? You’d never have guessed from the way he kept the chat going with Mr Riversmith that the General’s courage had deserted him, that he could not bring himself to visit an empty house or even to expose himself to the talk of solicitors.

‘Virginsville,’ Mr Riversmith responded, giving the name of the town where he resided. ‘Pennsylvania.’

He supplied the name of the nearby university where he conducted his research with the creatures he’d mentioned. I was right in my surmise that no children had been born to Francine and himself.

‘Nor to my daughter,’ the General said.

In response to further politeness, Mr Riversmith revealed that his wife had children, now grown up, by a previous marriage. I asked if he’d been married before himself, and he said he had. Then he went silent again, and the General saved the situation by telling him about the garden that was planned. In a corner Otmar and Aimée were whispering together, playing their game with torn-up pieces of paper. The General mentioned the names of various plants – moss phlox, I remember, and magnolia campbellii . He wondered if tree peonies, another favourite of his wife’s, would thrive in Umbrian soil. Trial and error he supposed it would have to be. Enthusiastically, he added that Quinty had discovered a motorized plough could be hired locally, with a man to operate it.

‘I have little knowledge of horticultural matters,’ Mr Riversmith stated.

As he spoke, for some reason I imagined 5 May in Virginsville, Pennsylvania. I imagined Mr Riversmith entering his residence, and Francine saying: ‘One of those bomb attacks in Italy.’ Easily, still, I visualize that scene. She is drinking orange juice. On the television screen there is a wrecked train. ‘How was your day?’ she asks when he has embraced her, as mechanically as he always does when he returns from his day’s research. ‘Oh, it was adequate,’ he replies. (I’m certain he chose that word.) ‘They’re colonizing quite remarkably at the moment.’ Her day has been exhausting, Francine says. She had difficulty with the hood of the Toyota, which jammed again, the way it has been doing lately. No terrorist group claimed responsibility, the television newscaster is saying.

‘Does your wife research into ants too, Mr Riversmith?’ I asked because another lull hung heavily and because, just then, I felt curious.

Before he replied he drew his lips together – stifling a sigh, it might have been, or some kind of nervous twitch. ‘My wife shares my discipline,’ he managed eventually. ‘Yes, that is so.’

Weeks later, it would have been the local police in Virginsville who supplied the information that those television pictures concerned him more than either he or Francine had thought. That scene came clearly to me also, still does: the officers declining to sit down, sunlight glittering on their metal badges. ‘Italy?’ The staccato tightness of Thomas Riversmith’s voice seems strained to the policemen, and even to himself. ‘The little girl’s out of hospital, sir,’ one of the men informs him. ‘She’s being looked after in a local house.’ Still numbed, Mr Riversmith mumbles questions. Why had the explosion occurred? Had it in any way to do with Americans being on the train? Had those responsible been apprehended? ‘My God!’ Francine exclaims, entering the room just then. ‘My God! ’

We had dinner on the terrace. Mr Riversmith stirred himself and with an effort admired the view.

The next morning Dr Innocenti went through for Mr Riversmith his lengthy account of Aimée’s progress. From the doctor’s tone and from Mr Riversmith’s responses, it was clear that much of what had already been said on the telephone was being repeated. Patiently, Dr Innocenti confirmed and elucidated, expanding when he considered it necessary. In the end he said he saw no reason why the return journey should not be made as soon as Mr Riversmith felt ready for it. He himself had done all he could for the child. Making what for him was quite a little speech, Mr Riversmith thanked him.