William Trevor - Two Lives

‘It’s been a long day.’

As he spoke, Mr Riversmith stood up. I begged him, just for a moment longer, to remain. I poured a little wine into his glass, and a little into mine. Because of his American background, I told him how I’d found myself in Idaho. I mentioned my childhood fascination with the Old West, first encountered in the Gaiety Cinema. I even mentioned Claire Trevor and Marlene Dietrich.

‘Idaho is hardly the Wild West.’

‘I was misled. I was no more than a foolish child.’

I told him how Ernie Chubbs had been going to Idaho in search of orders for sanitary-ware and had taken me with him on expenses; I told him how he’d taken me with him to Africa and then had disappeared. In the Café Rose they said they expected I’d met Mrs Chubbs, and it was clear what they were hinting at. ‘A healthy woman,’ they used to say. ‘Chubbs’s wife was always healthy.’ All I knew myself was that every time Ernie Chubbs referred to his wife he had to cough.

I described Ernie Chubbs because it was relevant, his glasses, and tidy black hair kept down with scented oil. I explained that he didn’t travel with the sanitary-ware itself, just brochures full of photographs. In order to illustrate a point, I was obliged to refer again to the Café Rose, explaining that he took an order there but when the thing arrived eight or so months later it had a crack in it. ‘The place was unfortunate in that respect. “I Speak Your Weight”, a weighing-machine said in the general toilet, but when you put your coin in nothing happened. Chubbs sold them that too. He used to be in weighing-machines.’

‘I see.’

There was another line Chubbs had, what he called the ‘joke flush’. When you pulled the chain, a voice called out, ‘Ha! ha!’ You kept pulling it and it kept saying, ‘Ha! ha!’ What was meant to happen was you’d give up in desperation; then you’d open the door to go out and the thing would flush on its own. But what actually happened was that when people installed the joke flush the voice said, ‘Ha! ha!’ and they couldn’t make it stop, and the flush didn’t work no matter what they did. Another thing was, when the light was turned on in the toilet, music was meant to play but it hardly ever did.

‘In the end the defective goods people caught up with Ernie Chubbs.’

‘I really think I must get along to bed now.’

Women were Ernie Chubbs’s weakness: he was Aries on the cusp with Taurus, a very mixed-up region for a man of his sensual disposition. Before my time he took someone else round with him on expenses, but when she wanted to marry him he couldn’t afford to because of the alimony. It was then that Mrs Chubbs conveniently turned up her toes, and after that the other lady wouldn’t touch him with a pole. Maybe she got scared, I wouldn’t know. I was eighteen years old when I first met Ernie Chubbs, green as a pea. ‘All very different from your ants,’ I said.

The engine of a motor-car started. ‘ Buonanotte! ’ the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.

Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my titles in the glass-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.

‘You’re an author, Mrs Delahunty?’

I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Café Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I said:

‘You might like to call me Emily.’

There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he’d said he didn’t grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was reassurance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn’t. Clever men probably always need drawing out.

‘You’re Capricorn,’ I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. ‘The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.’

He turned the first few pages of Bloom of Love . There was a flicker of astonishment in the eyes that had been so expressionlessly opaque a moment before. He picked up Waltz Me to Paradise , then returned both volumes to where he’d taken them from.

‘Most interesting,’ he said.

‘Your ants are interesting too, Tom.’

Perhaps it was ridiculous to think that a professor of entomology in his middle years would ask if he might take Little Bonny Maye or Two on a Sunbeam to bed with him, but even so it was a disappointment when he didn’t. We stood without saying anything for a moment, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. I kept seeing his ants, running all over the place, a few carrying others on their backs, all of them intent upon some business or other.

‘I would listen if you told me, Tom. About your ants.’

He shook his head. His research was of academic interest only, and was complex. An explanation of it did not belong in everyday conversation.

‘What was it you didn’t grasp, Tom?’

‘What?’

I smiled encouragingly, wanting to say that if he smiled more himself everything would be easier for both of us, that it was a pity to possess such strong teeth and not ever to display them. I asked him to pick out Precious September . By Janine Ann Johns, I said, and watched him while he did so.

‘Open it, Tom.’

I asked him to look for Lady Daysmith, and to read me a single sentence concerning her. There was an initial hesitation, a shifting of the jaw, the familiar tightening of the lips. I sensed a reminder to himself of the care, and love, that had so cosseted his sister’s child in this house.

‘Lady Daysmith knelt,’ he read eventually. ‘She closed her eyes and her whisper was heard in the empty room, beseeching mercy.’

He replaced the volume on its shelf and closed the glass-paned door on it.

‘Sit down, Tom. Have a glass of grappa with me.’

He rejected this, but I begged him and in the end he did as I wished because I said it was important. I poured us each a glass of grappa. I said:

‘Lady Daysmith had her origins in a Sunday-school teacher.’ I described the humility of Miss Alzapiedi, her gangling height, the hair that should have been her crowning glory. ‘Flat as a table up front. I turned her into an attractive woman, Tom.’

‘I see.’

‘All her life she never wore stockings. Her skirts came down to her shoes.’

He began to rise, his drink untouched.

‘Drink your grappa, Tom. I’ve poured it for you.’

He sipped a little. I told him that that was how it was done: you turned Miss Alzapiedi into elegant Lady Daysmith. I told him how Miss Alzapiedi had come to my assistance when I mixed up God with Joseph. I didn’t claim that making her Lady Daysmith was a reward. It was just something that had occurred.

‘But it’s nice, Tom. And it’s nice that an old man who’s had the stuffing knocked out of him can still find his last reserves in order to create an English garden in the heat of Umbria.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

Illusion came into it, of course it did. Illusion and mystery and pretence: dismiss that trinity of wonders and what’s left, after all? A stick of an old creature in misery as he walks up and down a hospital corridor with a holy statue in it. The suffering in the heart of a Sunday-school teacher who wears her dresses long. Dismiss it and you’re face to face with a violent salesman of sanitary-ware, free-wheeling about with young girls on expenses. Dismiss the conventions of my house in Umbria and Quinty, for one, would be back where he started.