William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

It was warm in the bedsitting-room, Dickie’s overcoat hanging from the hook on the back of the door, his bed under the sloping windows, a curtain drawn over so you wouldn’t know the sink was there. He had little sachets of jam, blackcurrant and strawberry, and he offered her a choice.

‘There’s Swiss roll,’ he said, and he laughed. What was left of one, he meant. He’d kept it for her. ‘Iris busy this evening?’ he asked when they had finished everything. ‘Going out, is she?’

Bea shook her head, but when they got to the flat Iris didn’t ask him in. Iris wasn’t sure yet, Bea said to herself, and later on, when she was in bed, she went over the signs there’d been — Iris saying they must tell Dickie about the audition and then about Ann-Marie and the newspapers, and the canary singing. But when Bea fell asleep it wasn’t Dickie being back that came into her dreams. In the room with the milk bottles on the window-sill Mr Hance was showing her the label on his scarf and she kept saying she must go now. She kept trying to get up from the sofa but she couldn’t.

*

‘It’s like you pity Mr Hance,’ Roland said, turning a chair round so that he was facing Bea in the viewing-room. He dangled a leg over one of the chair’s arms, which was his favourite way of sitting. His earrings were crucifixes, Bea noticed, which she hadn’t before. ‘The piece is about stuff like that, chick.’

Yesterday on the screen Mr Hance had walked away from the funeral and then walked on, through the streets by the river and the gasometers. In a startling way his features had suddenly filled the screen, tears glistening on his lean cheeks.

‘We’re into compassion here,’ Roland said.

Bea tried to blank out Mr Hance’s weeping face, which she could still see even though the screen was empty now. The tears ran down to the corners of his mouth, droplets becoming snagged there or slipping on, into the crevices of his chin.

‘Like some poor wounded bird,’ Roland said. ‘Some little sparrow with a smashed-up wing. And you’d be sorry for it because maybe the other sparrows would be quicker and take the crumbs. You’re with us here, Bea?’

Her mother looked sharply at her, which quite reminded her of a sparrow’s beady gaze. Bea knew Iris was being sharp because she didn’t want her to say she didn’t like feathers, that they never put crumbs out because of that. The time in Trafalgar Square the pigeons were frightening the way they rushed by you, their wings crashing into your face. ‘Never again,’ Dickie had promised. ‘You give your nuts to that little boy there.’ But she hadn’t wanted even to do that. She didn’t want to have the nuts in her hand for a minute longer.

‘Try for it, shall we?’ Roland said. ‘The pity thing?’

Bea began to nod. ‘Why’d he have to murder her?’ she asked, because she had always wondered that.

‘Because the friendship’s going to be taken from him.’ Roland swung his leg off the arm of the chair. ‘Because the old lady’s got the wrong end of the stick. OK, chick?’

Bea said it was, because there didn’t seem much point in saying anything else. She had asked Iris where the dog’s carcass on the tip came into it, if the dog had been the old woman’s or what, and Iris said they would understand that when the film was put together. They would understand where Ann-Marie arranging the newspapers came into it, and the bag-lady looking in the lamp-post bins for any food that was thrown away, and the workmen repairing a pavement, and the man in a maroon-coloured car. The trouble was, Iris said, that the scenes hadn’t been shot in the right order, which naturally made it difficult. The yoghurt the poison had been put in was banana and guava, and Bea said to herself that never in her whole life would she eat banana and guava yoghurt again. One morning on the coach Mr Hance asked her what colour her school uniform was and she felt panicky when he did although she didn’t know why, just a simple question it was. She wanted to get up, to find some place else to sit, but moving about the coach would draw attention to her and she didn’t want that. ‘It’s all just pretend,’ Mr Hance said another day. ‘Only pretend, Bea.’ It seemed strange to say that, to say what she already knew, and she wondered if she’d misheard because of Mr Hance’s quiet voice.

Once when the coach drew up and they all got out, when Bea was walking with Iris to the location, she wanted so much to say she was frightened of Mr Hance that she almost did. She began to, but Iris luckily wasn’t listening. Bea realized at once that it was lucky. Everything would have been ruined.

*

‘Let’s go for it this time, chick,’ Roland said on the last day, going for the final take. Bea could hear the soft whirring of the camera when the fuzzy-haired boy had given the take number and clapped the clapperboard. They had practised the scene before the coffee break and again after it, when Roland had repeated all he’d said about pity.

Bea couldn’t do it in the take any more than she’d been able to when they’d practised. ‘Cut!’ the fuzzy-haired boy had to keep exclaiming, and Roland came on to the set and talked to Bea again, and Iris came on because he asked her to. ‘Sorry,’ Bea kept saying.

The make-up girls came on in the end. They gave her artificial tears, and the cameraman said that was better by a long chalk. The lighting man changed the lighting, softening it considerably.

‘We’ll go for it this time,’ Roland said, and the fuzzy-haired boy held up the clapperboard and called out another number. ‘One more time,’ Roland said when Bea had lost count of the takes.

They ran fifteen minutes into the lunch break before they dispersed and made their way to the mobile canteen. Over a chicken salad with chips, Iris recalled for the bag-lady and the police inspector the part she’d had — a child herself then — in an episode of Z Cars , 1962 it was. Bea had heard this a few times before and, since she didn’t like the bean-and-sausage bake she’d helped herself to, she looked around for somewhere to get rid of it without anyone, especially Iris, noticing. Iris always said to eat well at the mobile canteen so that there wouldn’t have to be much cooking when they got back to the flat. But there was no convenient vase or fire bucket into which to tip the load on Bea’s cardboard plate. Outside, where the cars were parked, she found the dustbins.

After that she didn’t want to go back to where the mobile canteen was set up because they’d see she wasn’t eating anything and press a lot of stuff she didn’t want on her. She walked about the empty set, which she had never had to herself before. She wandered from room to room, thinking it was a pity that soon it would all be dismantled when the homeless who slept in doorways could do with it, even if only for a night.

‘Hullo,’ a voice said just before Bea heard Mr Hance’s footstep, and she knew he had come looking for her.

*

That evening Dickie came to the party. ‘You ask your father,’ Iris had said. ‘Only fair.’ Dickie had said yes at once.

‘Under time, under budget!’ Roland announced in his speech of gratitude to the cast, and everyone clapped.

They were all there on the set — the bag-lady, Ann-Marie, the police inspector, the old woman, the man in the maroon car, the workmen who’d been repairing a pavement, the policemen who’d searched the tip, Mr Hance.

They made a fuss of Mr Hance. It was his piece, they said, his show. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Dickie said to him, and Bea thought he hadn’t really, but Dickie was good at being polite. The tear by his jacket pocket hadn’t been repaired. Bea had seen Iris noticing it when Dickie came over to say hullo.