William Trevor - Two Lives

‘A dream ?’

I explained that there was evidence, all around us, of what each and every one of us is capable of. There was the purchase of a female infant so that a man could later satisfy his base desires. A man who lavished affection on a pet could lay his vicious plans while an infant still suckled a bottle. Quinty scarred a young girl’s life. In the Cafée Rose my flesh felt rotten with my loathing of it.

‘The old man longed for unhappiness in his daughter’s marriage. You rejected your young sister in favour of a predatory woman. If Otmar is guilty there is redemption in a child’s forgiveness, and for Aimée a way back to herself in offering it. If Otmar is guilty the miracle may be as marvellous as the soldier giving away his food.’ Ages ago it had struck me that there was something odd about Madeleine’s journey. ‘Flights from Rome full,’ he would have lied.

‘You’re drunk, Mrs Delahunty. All the time I’ve been in your house you’ve been drunk. You wake me up at three o’clock in the morning with your garbled rigmaroles about executions and vengeance, expecting me to return to Pennsylvania without my niece just because you’ve had a dream. It’s monstrous to suggest that my niece should continue to grow fond of a boy you claim might be the murderer of her family. It’s preposterous to invent all this just in order to make a fantasy of the facts.’

In that same manner he went on speaking. He said it was inconceivable that an innocent girl had been stalked in the manner I described. It was inconceivable that a total stranger had caused her to fall so profoundly in love that a relationship had been formed which on his side was wholly deceitful. An incendiary device could not have been packed into her luggage without her knowledge. Such a device could not pass undetected through Linata Airport. No terrorist attack could possibly have been planned with such ineptitude. And terrorists did not go in for changes of heart.

‘Please let me sleep,’ he said.

Angrily I shouted at him then, all gentleness gone, not caring if I woke the household. I could feel the warmth of a flush beginning in my neck, and creeping slowly into my face.

‘You’re a man who always sleeps,’ I snapped at him. ‘You’ll sleep your way to the grave, Mr Riversmith.’

I gulped at what remained of my drink and poured some more. His glass was still where he had placed it on the bedside table. I picked it up and forced it into his hand. A little of the liquid spilt on to his pyjama front. I didn’t care.

‘Hell is where men like you wake up, Mr Riversmith, with flames curling round their naked legs.’

He said nothing. He feared my wrath, as other men have. I calmed, and wiped the spilt drink from his pyjamas.

‘You’re extremely drunk,’ he said.

It’s always easy to maintain a person’s drunk. It’s an easy way for a man to turn his back. While I looked down at him in his bed a memory of the car-girls of 1950 came into my mind, I don’t know why. A drizzle was falling as they sheltered in doorways, their faces yellow in the headlights of the cars. I didn’t mention them because I couldn’t see that they were relevant. I prayed instead that at last he would understand. ‘Please, God,’ I said in my mind.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned in toward him, determined that he should visualize the picture I painted: the evening fireflies just beginning beyond the terrace, the General in a linen suit, Otmar among the shrubs of the garden, Aimée smiling. Survivors belonged together, no matter how eccentric it seemed. Normality had ceased for them: why should she not grow fond, and come to understand the bitterness there’d been? Why should she not?

‘Don’t come closer to me,’ he warned unpleasantly. ‘I’ve never given you this kind of encouragement.’

My Indian dressing-gown had accidentally parted. Hastily he looked away. I prayed that a blink of light would enter his expressionless eyes, but while I begged with mine his remained the same. I said:

‘Among the few possessions that remained to Otmar after the incident I found a photograph of his mother.’

A newspaper item that told of her death was pasted to the back of it. If the pillow-talk of the Austrian ivory cutter had not always been in German I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a word. But I stumbled through it, and learnt to my astonishment that Otmar’s mother had hanged herself from the electric light, exactly as in my dream.

But when I told him Mr Riversmith wasn’t in the least astonished. He stared blankly back at me, even though I repeated what I’d said twice to ensure that the order of events had clearly registered. Speaking carefully and slowly, I described the scene: how I had stood among Otmar’s last few belongings with the photograph in my right hand, how I had taken nearly ten minutes to comprehend the German, how I had entered the salotto fifteen minutes later and found Otmar and the child playing their game with torn-up pieces of paper. My dream had been a month earlier, I said.

The eyes of Thomas Riversmith didn’t alter. I did not speak again.

If someone had had a camera there would be a record of the General with his hand held out and Mr Riversmith about to shake it. There would be an image of Signora Bardini still holding the sandwiches she had made for their journey, and Rosa Crevelli saying something to Quinty, and Aimée smiling up at Otmar. There would be one of me too, in a pale loose dress and sunglasses, still standing where Mr Riversmith had turned his back on me when I endeavoured to say goodbye.

I wish a photograph had been taken because just for a moment everything was of a piece and everyone was there. Ten figures stood on the gravel in front of my house, each shadowed by other people, although the camera would not have caught that subtlety. Francine was there, and Celeste Adele, and Phyl and her husband and Aimée’s brother. The General’s daughter, his son-in-law and his wife were there, and Madeleine, and the girl whom Quinty had wronged. All sorts were there with me.

‘Mr Riversmith.’ Quinty beckoned, and Mr Riversmith walked towards the car. Aimée carried the hen that was my gift to her.

The dust thrown up by the car wheels settled, and rose again when the machines that were to make the garden came. I watched them arrive, and watched while earth was turned, in preparation for the planting in the autumn. Letters from strangers also came that morning. I thought Oberon would never ask her. What a joyful outcome that was in the end! Mrs Edith Lumm of Basingstoke wrote that she and her husband, staying with her husband’s sister in Shropshire, had visited Mara Hall, although it was not called by that name any more. Her husband and his sister had pooh-poohed the idea that it was the house which featured in my story, but she herself was certain because of details she’d noticed, the maze for a start. Trimleigh Castle it was called now, being an hotel.

That day just happened, time ordinarily passed. It didn’t require much of an effort to know that in the car Quinty chatted while Mr Riversmith considered the validity of a rule structure, and said to himself that Pilsfer had got that wrong also. On the plane the child slept, and a few notes were scrawled in the blue notebook, important thoughts put down: hierarchism was almost certainly the governing factor.

My friend wonders if Derek ever turned up again, and wonders how Rose fares in later life. My friend – Miss Jaci Rakes – believes Rose’s love for Rick may not be constant . All through the afternoon the engines clanked and rattled, moving stone and earth, roughly laying out paths and flowerbeds. No one said there was something wrong because the child had gone, not Otmar certainly, not the old man.