William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘So what’s next on the agenda?’ the police inspector asked Bea. ‘Another part lined up, have we?’

‘Spoilt for choice,’ Iris said, but Bea wondered about that, and Dickie said what’s this then? A certain little lady on her way was what, the police inspector said.

All the technicians and production people were at the party — the sound man, the cameraman and the assistant cameraman, the set designer, the make-up girls, the costume girls, the continuity girl. They drank wine, red or white, and there was Coca Cola or orange juice to go with the plates of cold food. Dickie asked who the big woman with the glasses on a chain was and Iris said the producer. ‘Remember that producer on Emergency Ward 10?’ Dickie said.

‘Oh, my God, don’t!’

Music began. Bea showed Dickie about the set: Mr Hance’s room with the cat litter still there, the stairs, the hall with the antlers, the living-room of the other house, where the old woman rapped the window with her walking-stick. ‘Marvellous,’ Dickie kept saying. One part of the set had been dismantled already and Iris came along to explain all that.

Andi and the boy with fuzzy hair brought round the wine and the food. Roland knocked on the floor with the old woman’s walking-stick: early as it was, he said, he had to be going. They’d been great, he complimented everyone. Pure electricity this production was, the Good Housekeeping Seal.

There was laughter, and more applause. Roland waved good-bye with the walking-stick, then handed it to Andi. After he’d gone someone turned the music up.

When no one was looking, Bea opened the sandwich she had taken. There seemed to be scrambled egg in it so she dropped it into an empty cardboard box beside where she was standing. She was alone there, obscured by the pot plants that had been gathered together on a table, ready to go back to Flowers Etc , which was what was scrawled on a piece of paper tied around one of them. She could see Dickie and Iris and Mr Hance, the sound man seeming to be telling them a story. When he came to the end of it they laughed, Iris particularly, throwing back her head in a way she had. Still pouring wine, the boy with the fuzzy hair looked to where the laughter had come from and laughed himself, then moved over to fill their glasses up.

Peeping through the fleshy green leaves, Bea watched Mr Hance earnestly talking now, Dickie’s head bent to listen. A moment ago Iris had held on to Dickie’s arm, just for a second when one of her high heels let her down. She had reached out and clutched at him and he had smiled at her and she had smiled herself. Where they were standing was quite near where Bea had been when Mr Hance had said hullo that afternoon.

Across the set the old woman was sitting on her own, a cigarette alight, her wine glass half full. With her painted features and bright dyed hair she didn’t at all look like the old woman by the window, but in spite of that she still was, and suddenly Bea wanted to go over to her and say she’d been right. She wanted her to know. She wanted just one person to know.

‘Hi, Bea,’ Andi said. ‘That your dad, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘He looks nice. Nice way he has.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not in the profession, though? Not like your mum?’ Andi reached out to feel one of the leaves, softly caressing it between forefinger and thumb. ‘He could get a walk-on, your dad. You never know.’

Andi seemed forlorn without her clipboard and mobile telephone, wearing the same blue jumper she’d worn for all six weeks of the production. She wasn’t drinking wine; she wasn’t eating anything, but that would be because of her slimming.

‘You going for it, Bea? You reckon?’ She’d gone for it herself only it hadn’t worked out. She wasn’t right for the acting side of the business, although it was what she’d wanted at first. ‘Different for you,’ Andi said.

‘Yes.’

It would be better to tell Andi. It would be easier to say it had to be a secret, that all she wanted was one person to know. It seemed mean not to tell Andi when she’d come over specially to be friendly.

‘Maybe our paths’ll cross again,’ Andi said. ‘Anyway I hope they do.’

‘Yes.’

‘You did fine.’

Bea shook her head. Through the foliage she saw Mr Hance’s hand held out, to her mother and then to Dickie. They smiled at him, and then he made his way through the other people at the party, stepping over the electrical cables that stretched from one room of the set to another. Occasionally he stopped to shake hands or to be embraced. The old woman laughed up at him, sharing some joke.

‘I must make my farewells.’ Andi kissed Bea and said again she hoped their paths would cross some time.

‘So do I.’ Bea tried to tell Andi then. But if Andi knew it might show in her face even if she didn’t want it to. It mightn’t be easy for her not to let it, and when someone asked her what the matter was it could slip out when she wasn’t thinking. ‘Cheers,’ Andi said.

The bag-lady was going also. In the corner where the cameras still were, outside the set itself, Ann-Marie was dancing with one of the policemen. Dickie was holding up Iris’s see-through plastic mackintosh, waiting for Iris to step into it. ‘See you on the ice,’ the fuzzy-haired boy called after Mr Hance, and Mr Hance waved back at him before he walked out of the brightness that was the party.

*

On the train Iris told Dickie who everyone was, which part each had played, who was who among the technicians. Dickie asked questions to keep her going.

It was the first time Bea had made the journey in from the studios by train. There had always been the coach before, to the studios and back, to whatever the location was. The train was nicer, the houses that backed on to the railway line lit up, here and there people still in their gardens even though it was dark. Sometimes the train stopped at a suburban station, the passengers who alighted seeming weary as they made their way along the platform. ‘I must say, I enjoyed that,’ Dickie said.

They got the last bus to Chalmers Street and walked, all three of them, to the flat. ‘Come in, Dickie?’ Iris invited.

She’d got in the cereal he liked and it was there on the kitchen table, ready for breakfast. Bea saw him noticing it.

‘Good night, old girl,’ he said, and Bea kissed him, and kissed Iris too, for Iris had said she was too tired to come in to say good-night.

Bea washed, and folded her clothes, and brushed her teeth. She turned the light out, wondering in what way her dreams would be different now, reminding herself that she mustn’t cry out in case, being sleepy, she ruined everything.

The Mourning

In the town, on the grey estate on the Dunmanway road, they lived in a corner house. They always had. Mrs Brogan had borne and brought up six children there. Brogan, a council labourer, still grew vegetables and a few marigolds in its small back garden. Only Liam Pat was still at home with them, at twenty-three the youngest in the family, working for O’Dwyer the builder. His mother — his father, too, though in a different way — was upset when Liam Pat said he was thinking of moving further afield. ‘Cork?’ his mother asked. But it was England Liam Pat had in mind.

Dessie Coglan said he could get him fixed. He’d go himself, Dessie Coglan said, if he didn’t have the wife and another kid expected. No way Rosita would stir, no way she’d move five yards from the estate, with her mother two doors down. ‘You’ll fall on your feet there all right,’ Dessie Coglan confidently predicted. ‘No way you won’t.’

Liam Pat didn’t have wild ambitions; but he wanted to make what he could of himself. At the Christian Brothers’ he’d been the tidiest in the class. He’d been attentive, even though he often didn’t understand. Father Mooney used to compliment him on the suit he always put on for Mass, handed down through the family, and the tie he always wore on Sundays. ‘The respect, Liam Pat,’ Father Mooney would say. ‘It’s heartening for your old priest to see the respect, to see you’d give the boots a brush.’ Shoes, in fact, were what Liam Pat wore to Sunday Mass, black and patched, handed down also. Although they didn’t keep out the wet, that didn’t deter him from wearing them in the rain, stuffing them with newspaper when he was home again. ‘Ah, sure, you’ll pick it up,’ O’Dwyer said when Liam Pat asked him if he could learn a trade. He’d pick up the whole lot — plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry, house-painting. He’d have them all at his fingertips; if he settled for one of them, he wouldn’t get half the distance. Privately, O’Dwyer’s opinion was that Liam Pat didn’t have enough upstairs to master any trade and when it came down to it what was wrong with operating the mixer? ‘Keep the big mixer turning and keep Liam Pat Brogan behind it,’ was one of O’Dwyer’s good-humoured catch-phrases on the sites where his men built houses for him. ‘Typical O’Dwyer,’ Dessie Coglan scornfully pronounced. Stay with O’Dwyer and Liam Pat would be shovelling wet cement for the balance of his days.