William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘From the top,’ Roland called out, and the drill-hall went silent. Then the voices began.

It was the old woman with the dyed red hair who was murdered. In the drill-hall her elderliness was disguised with bright crimson lipstick and the henna in her hair. Mr Hance put the poison in the yoghurt carton that was left with her milk on Wednesdays and Fridays. Iris had explained all that, but Bea understood it better when she heard the voices in the drill-hall.

Not that she understood everything. In the script it said that Mr Hance played marbles with her, which was a game no one Bea knew played or had an interest in. ‘That’s a very lonely man,’ Iris had said, but it seemed peculiar to Bea that a lonely person wouldn’t go to the pub or some billiard hall instead of playing marbles with a child in a car park. In the script she was meant to be lonely herself; ‘Little Miss Latchkey’ Mr Hance called her because there was never anyone at home to let her in. In the script it said the old woman had tidy white hair, and a walking-stick because she couldn’t manage without one.

Iris was happy from the moment they entered the drill-hall: Bea could tell. She remembered it all so well, Bea heard her telling the bag-lady and later Ann-Marie, the newsagent’s daughter. The gossip of the profession, the knitting while you waited for your cue, the puffing at a cigarette you didn’t want when something wasn’t going right: Iris was back where she belonged, among the friends she might have had.

In the late afternoon there was the funeral scene: the clergyman’s words ringing out, the mourners standing round a chalked rectangle on the floor, the old woman who was dead completing the Daily Telegraph crossword. When the burial was over the boy with the fuzzy hair was given the task of showing Bea and Mr Hance how to play marbles.

‘All right then, Bea?’ Andi asked a few times, and Bea said she was. It was probably not being tall, she thought, that gave Andi the heavy look she had heard her complaining about earlier. She was on a slimming course, she’d said, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. Bea liked her best of all the people in the drill-hall.

‘From the top one more time,’ Roland called out when Bea thought the rehearsing must surely be over, and they went through the whole script again. She hadn’t shared her mother’s pleasure in the day. She hadn’t known what to expect, any more than she’d known what to expect at the audition. When the script had come in Iris said that the only disappointment was that Bea didn’t ever get to speak. She had remarked as much to Ann-Marie while the funeral scene was going on, mouthing it so as not to interrupt. And Ann-Marie, who was pussy-faced, Bea thought, but very pretty, waited until the funeral scene was over to say that Bea’s part was all the more telling for being silent. Bea had been glad she didn’t have to say anything, but she wondered now if it might perhaps be less boring if she had to say just a little.

*

‘How’s it going, Beasie?’

Dickie’s brown jacket needed a stitch at the pocket that was nearer to her, on a level with her eyes when she looked. It needed more of a stitch than it had two Sundays ago, which was the last time she’d seen it. He was incapable of attending to his clothes, Iris said.

‘OK,’ Bea said. Three weeks had passed since the first day in the drill-hall and the drill-hall had long ago been left behind. They’d moved into the set at the studios, and there’d been days of filming on location.

‘You tell Iris what I said that time, Beasie? You say I said well done?’

She nodded, cold on the street where they were walking even though it was August. She dug her hands into the pockets of the coat Iris had said to take in case it rained. The Sunday before last she’d said she’d told Iris.

‘I told her,’ she said again.

He hadn’t seen Iris today. He hadn’t seen her the last Sunday either. He’d rung the bell and Bea had called down on the intercom and he’d waited for her, the same both times.

‘All these years,’ he said on the street, ‘ The Stage ’s been her Bible.’

‘Yes.’

And in the end it was The Stage that came up trumps. Dickie went on talking about that, and Bea imagined her mother inviting him in. One Sunday or another, she said to herself, sooner or later. ‘We must tell Dickie,’ Iris had kept saying during the three weeks that had passed — about Ann-Marie being half asleep in the early morning and letting the piles of newspapers she’d just opened fall off the counter, and how she put back the different sections any old how; about Mr Hance and the marbles; about the caged canary still singing when the old woman lay dead.

‘Doesn’t worry you, any of that stuff?’ Dickie had said in the Wild Park when she’d shown him in the script where the murder was. ‘If it worries you, you say, old girl.’

She never would. She didn’t tell Iris when she dreamed about the dog on the garbage tip, the microbes you could see moving through its entrails in the film sequence. In the viewing-room, with the red light showing outside, she had sat with the others, not knowing what it was the police were looking for on the tip, watching while the camera crept slowly over the entrails of the dog. She didn’t know why the old woman kept rapping with her stick on the window, why she kept sitting there and then rapping again. ‘She’s a peeper,’ was all Mr Hance said in the script, and in the long waits when Bea wasn’t involved the confusion made the boredom worse.

‘What’s that Hance like?’ Dickie asked.

‘All right.’ Bea didn’t say she didn’t like him. She said it was a joke that he was always called Mr Hance. Extra pages had gone into his script, yellow pages at first, the second batch pink. She hadn’t been given any herself, but she could see the colours showing at the edges when he sat beside her in the coach, on the way to the studios or the locations. He always sat beside her. Getting to know her, Iris said.

‘Iris think he’s good?’ Dickie asked.

‘Oh, yes.’

They all did. He took pains, they said; he found his way. ‘She wasn’t very nice, you know,’ he said about the old woman, talking about her in the room where Bea had to wake up on the sofa. He often didn’t look at you when he spoke and because of his whispery voice you sometimes couldn’t hear. Bea didn’t know why Mr Hance made her nervous, why he had even on the first day, why most of all he did when he sat beside her in the coach, one of his fingers tracing over and over again the outline of the little label that was sewn into the edge of his plain brown scarf. On every journey his milky eyes turned away from the coach window before the journey ended and his fingers became still. He gazed at her, saying nothing, and at first she thought he was practising the part. She’d seen them doing that, trying something out, hearing one another’s lines, but in the coach it didn’t seem like practising. The room with the sofa in it was in his house, where he took her after the old woman was dead, the sofa all sagging and old, two empty milk bottles on the window-sill, cat litter on the floor beneath it. They kept having to do the scene in which she woke up, getting it right.

‘We take in a film today?’ Dickie suggested. ‘ Meet Me in St Louis ’s come back.’ In the cinema, listening to the songs, Bea tried not to think about being bored again tomorrow or Mr Hance making her nervous in the coach. She tried not to see the moisture on his squashed forehead when he knelt down by the sofa and asked her to forgive him. She tried not to hear him saying something she couldn’t hear in the coach, or not saying anything when he gazed at her.

‘Wasn’t that grand!’ Dickie said when Judy Garland sang for the last time and The End went up on the screen. ‘I’ve got some hot-cross buns,’ he said when they were on the street, although it wasn’t Easter, the wrong time of year by ages. In his bedsitting-room they toasted the hot-cross buns because they were a bit on the stale side. They squatted on the floor, each of them with a fork, poking their buns at the bar of the electric fire.