William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

They let him live above the club because there’s a room. At night he takes the ticket money, protected in his kiosk by Alfie and Harry at the door; in the daytime he cleans up after the night before and takes the phone messages. All the club’s facilities are his to make use of, which he appreciates. Sidney is thirty-four now, thirty-four and one week and two days. He had just turned twenty when he first helped Vera.

In Mr Schele’s house they do not ever mention that. They do not talk about a time that was distressing for Vera, and for Mr Schele too. But when Sidney’s not in the house, when he’s private and on his own, in his room above the club, he talks to himself about it. ‘Shining armour,’ he repeats because it said that in the paper; still says it if he wants to look. Knight in Shining Armour , all across the page. Sometimes, when he’s trying to get to sleep, he lies there polishing the armour, laying all the pieces out, unfolding cloths, setting out the Duraglit and the Goddard’s.

‘Sidney, you stay with us for supper tonight?’ There is enough, Vera assures him. Another cup of rice will make it enough, and she recites this Saturday’s menu: chicken cooked her way and her good salad, strudel and just a little cream. Then Casualty on the TV, five past eight.

It is a plea, occasionally made when Sidney is in the house as late as this. Vera begs for company with her invitation, Sidney finds himself reflecting; for another presence besides her elderly father. Vera would have been glad when he didn’t come in the morning because he’d have finished earlier, too long before supper, and staying to lunch is never the same.

‘I should be getting on.’

‘Oh, do stay with us.’

And Sidney does. He sits with Mr Schele in the sitting-room and there’s an appetizer, salty little pretzels Vera has bought. No drink accompanies these. Mr Schele talks about his childhood.

‘The big rosebush has blown down,’ Sidney interrupts, standing by the window now. ‘This wind has taken it.’

Mr Schele comes to look and sorrowfully shakes his head. ‘Maybe the roots are holding,’ he suggests. ‘Maybe a little can be done.’

Sidney goes through the kitchen to the garden. ‘No,’ he says when they all three sit down to eat: the roots have snapped in the fall. The news upsets Mr Schele, who remembers the rose being planted, when Vera was a child. He’ll not see another rose grown to that size in the garden, he predicts. He blames himself, but Vera says no and Sidney points out that even roses come to an end.

A strudel enriched with sultanas follows the chicken cooked Vera’s way and her good salad, and then they stand in the bathroom doorway, surveying Sidney’s work. The bathroom is as new, Mr Schele says, greatly cheered by the sight of it. It is the bathroom as it was the day the house was built. Everything except the linoleum on the floor, which has been there since 1951, Mr Schele calculates.

‘A nice new vinyl,’ Mr Schele suggests, and Vera adds that not much is necessary. Two metres and three-quarters, a metre wide: she measured it this morning. ‘You lay it down, Sidney?’ Mr Schele enquires. ‘You lay it for us?’

They know he will. If Vera chooses what she wants and brings the piece back to the house he’ll lay it. There is adhesive left over from the time he laid the surround in Mr Schele’s small bedroom. In windy weather draughts came up through the cracks between the floorboards, the bedroom being on the ground floor. There’s been no trouble since Sidney cut out the vinyl surround and stuck it down, except that Mr Schele still can’t get used to the colour, shades of marbled orange.

‘For a bathroom,’ he states his preference now, ‘we keep to pale, heh?’

To go with the Lace Cap, Vera agrees. Maybe even white, to go with the bath and washbasin and the tiles. A flush of pink has crept into Vera’s hollow cheeks, and Sidney knowing Vera well — knows it is there in anticipation of the treat that lies ahead: choosing the floor material, the right weight for bathroom use, a shade to match the paint or the porcelain.

‘You can wait another minute, Sidney?’ Vera says, and briefly goes away, returning with a piece of card she has torn from a cornflakes packet. ‘You brush the paint on that for me, Sidney?’ she requests, and Sidney does so and washes out the brush again. His Stanley knife slipped when he was cutting the orange vinyl for the bedroom; he had to have three stitches and a tetanus injection.

‘Time for the hospital programme,’ Mr Schele reminds Vera, who’s disappointed when Sidney shakes his head. Not this Saturday, he explains, because he’s on early turn at the club.

‘You’re good to come, Sidney,’ Vera says in the porch, whispering as she always does when she says that. She’s older than Sidney, forty-one; she was twenty-seven when he first helped her, the time of her distress.

‘It’s nothing,’ he says before he leaves, his unchanging valediction.

*

They took Vera in because in the end they didn’t believe her story about an intruder while she was at the cinema. They had accepted it at first, when everything hung together — the kitchen window forced open, the traces of dry mud on the draining-board and again by the door, where the shoes had been taken off. Forty-eight pounds and ninepence had been taken, and medals and a silver-plated stud-box. The hall door and the porch door were both wide open when Vera returned to the house; Mr Schele, employed in those days in a radio and television shop, was still at work. They took Vera in because there was something that didn’t seem right to them about the entry through the kitchen window, no sign on the path outside of the dried mud, no sign of it on the window-sill. There was something not quite right about only a stud-box and medals taken, not other small objects that were lying about; and no one could remember Vera at the cinema. Then, in the garden, a dog sniffed out part of a glove that had been burnt on the garden fire, and the wool matched the fibres found in the room upstairs. Odd, it seemed, that gloves had been burnt, even if they were old and done for.

All that passes through Sidney’s thoughts, as it usually does when he walks away from the house. He isn’t late for his Saturday duties at the club; he doesn’t hurry. After an afternoon inside, the air is good. The wind that blew away the rain is noisy in the empty trees, lifts off a dustbin lid and plays with plastic flowerpots in the small front gardens. He’ll walk until it rains again, then take a bus.

‘Come, Angus! Angus!’ a woman calls her dog, a Pomeranian. ‘What a wind!’ she calls out, going by, and Sidney says what wind indeed. He knows the woman from meeting her and her dog on this particular stretch. Several times a day she’s out.

Walking through the ill-lit suburban avenues and crescents, leaves scattered on the pavements or gathered into corners by the wind, Sidney remembers the photograph of Vera, her big lips a little parted, her hair — blonde then — falling almost to her shoulders, her eyes innocent and lovely. She was in custody when he saw the photograph; her solicitors, not she, were appealing for anyone who’d seen her entering or leaving the cinema to come forward.

Sidney passes into streets with closed shops and minimarkets, dentists and chiropodists advertised, the Regina take-away, the Queen’s Arms at a corner, Joe Coral’s betting shop. Then there is a quiet neighbourhood, the yellow caravan still parked in the garden, the open space that’s not quite a park, litter sodden on its single path. The film was French Connection 2 . He went to see it as soon as he saw the photograph, so that he knew the plot.

On the bus Sidney feels like sleep because last night, being Friday, was one of his late ones. But he doesn’t sleep because he hates waking up on a bus. Once he went past his stop and had to pay the extra, but that hasn’t happened since. Something wakes him, some worry about having to pay the extra again; one stop before his own he always wakes now, but even so he’d rather not sleep. He closes his eyes though, because he wants to go back in his thoughts, to run it again, to make sure it’s all still there: usually after he has been to the Scheles’ he does that. ‘The ice-cream girl was going round,’ he said, and every word was written down. ‘The lights were up.’