William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘Your friend was interested in the outhouses.’

*

‘You’re intending to live with us?’ Clione stares into the puffy features, but the slaty eyes are blank, as everything else is. His voice is no more lifeless than it usually is when he explains that he happened to be in the neighbourhood of the oast-house, a library he had to look over at Nettleton Court.

‘Not fifteen minutes away. Nothing of interest. A wasted journey, I said to myself, and that I hate.’

‘You mentioned converting the outhouses to that old man.’

‘I have a minikin’s lifestyle. I like a certain smallness, I like things tidy around me. I throw things out, I do not keep possessions by me. That’s always been my way, I’ve been quite noted for it.’

‘We’ve no intention of converting the outhouses.’

Michingthorpe does not respond. He takes his spectacles off and looks at them, holding them far away. He puts them on again and says:

‘What d’you think I got for the Madox Ford? Remember the Madox Ford?’

‘We’ve never talked about your living with us.’

It is impossible to know if this is acknowledged, if there is a slight gesture of the head. Michingthorpe Ales were brewed at Maresfield, Clione learns, but that was long ago. In the 1730s, then for a generation or two.

‘I never took much interest. Just chance that I stumbled across the family name. In Locke’s Provincial Byeways , I believe it was.’

‘We’ll move down there in May.’

Quite badly foxed, the Ford, the frontispiece gone. ‘Well, you saw yourself. Six five, would you have thought it?’

*

Later, Clione passes all that on. The faint unease she experienced when she heard that Michingthorpe had been to Sussex is greater now. For more than twenty years he has had the freedom of a household, been given the hospitality a cat which does not belong to it is given, or birds that come to a window-sill. Has he seen all this as something else? It seems to Clione that it must be so, that what appears to her children and her husband to have come out of the blue is a projection of what was there already. Michingthorpe’s clumsy presumption is the presumption of an innocent, which is what his unawareness makes him. She should say that, but finds she cannot.

She listens to family laughter and when the children are no longer there says she is to blame, that she should have anticipated that something like this would one day happen.

‘Of course you’re not to blame.’

‘It was my fault that he presumed so.’

‘I don’t see how.’

She tells because at last she has to, because what didn’t matter matters now. A misunderstanding, she calls it. She knew and she just left it there, permitting it.

‘Oh, but surely this can’t be so? Surely not?’

‘I’ve always thought of it as harmless.’

‘You couldn’t have imagined it?’

She does not let a stab of anger show. Her husband is smiling at her, standing by the windows of the sitting-room they soon will leave for ever. His smile is kind. He is not mocking or being a tease.

‘No, I haven’t imagined it.’

‘Poor bloody fool!’

‘Yes.’

She does not confess that after her recent conversation with Michingthorpe she felt sorry she’d been cold, that bewilderingly she dreamed these last few nights of his shadow thrown on snow that had fallen in the oast-house garden, his shadow on sunlit grass, an imprecise reflection in a pool on the cobbles where the outhouses were. His fleshy palms were warmed by a coffee mug while his talk went on, while she beat up a soufflé, while again he recalled the dressmaker who had made him rock buns.

‘It’s horrid,’ she says. ‘Dropping someone.’

‘I know.’

James does know; she is aware of that, drawn into his thoughts, as their closeness so often allows. Dropping someone is not in James’s nature, yet why should they pander to the awkward selfishness of an oddity? There are the memories that go back to A Whiter Shade of Pale , the settlements and compromises of the marriage they were determined to make work. Her friends have not always been her husband’s kind, nor his hers, and there were other differences that, with time, didn’t matter either. The intimacy they have come to know is like a growth of roots, spreading and entangling, making them almost one. Why should there be embarrassment now?

‘For it would be like that,’ she hears James say. ‘Day after day.’

‘He has a nothing life.’

She pleads before she knows she’s doing so, and realizes then that she has done so before. In the car when they drove away after the revelation in the oast-house she suggested that the old man might have misheard, that it was probably gratuitous information on his part about the buses passing near, not the answer to a question. You can pity a child, Clione finds herself thinking, no matter what a child is like.

‘It’s a different kind of love,’ she murmurs, hesitating over every word.

‘It’s fairly preposterous, whatever it is.’

‘For all the time we’ve known him we have looked after him. You as much as I.’

‘My dear, we can’t play fantasies with a fully grown man.’

She sees again the shadow from her dream, distorted when it crosses the cobbles from the outhouses, cast bulkily on the kitchen floor, taking sunlight from the table spread with her cooking things. Being a shadow suits him, as being a joke once did.

‘It was just a thought he had,’ she says.

*

On a cool May morning, piece by piece, the furniture is carried across the pavement to the removal vans. The men are given cups of tea, the doors of the vans are closed. Clione passes from one room to the next through the emptiness of the house where her three children were born, the house in which they grew up and then left, leaving her too. Who will listen to him now? Who’ll watch him talking to the air? Who’ll not want to know what a splendid find he has come across at another auction? Who’ll not want to know that oysters don’t agree with him?

He is there when they drive off but does not wave, as if already he does not know them, as if he never did. ‘Oh, he’ll latch on to someone else,’ the children have said, each of them putting it in that same way. ‘He won’t mind your going much.’ She cannot guess how he’ll mind, what form his minding will take, where or how the pain will be. But the pain is there, for she can feel it.

Their unpresentable friend won’t come, not even once. Because he does not drive, because there is no point in it, because the pain would be too much. She does not know why he will not come, only that he won’t. She does not know why the pity she feels is so intensely there, only that it is and that his empty love is not absurd.

Low Sunday, 1950

She put the wine in the sun, on the deep white window-sill, the bottle not yet opened. It cast a flush of red on the window-sill’s surface beside the porcelain figure of a country girl with a sheaf of corn, the only ornament there. It felt like a celebration, wine laid out to catch the last of the warmth on a Sunday evening, and Philippa wondered if her brother could possibly have forgotten what Sunday it was when he brought the bottle back from Findlater’s on Friday.

There was no sound in the house. Upstairs, Tom would be reading. At this time of day at weekends he always read for a while, as she remembered him so often as a child, comfortable in the only armchair his bedroom contained. He had been tidier in the armchair then, legs tucked beneath him, body curled around his book; now the legs that had grown longer sprawled, spilt out from the cushions, while one arm dangled, a cigarette smouldering from the fingers that also turned the pages.