William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

Philippa was petite by comparison, fair-haired, her quiet features grave in repose, a prettiness coming with animation. She took care with her clothes rather than dressed well. Her blouse today was two striped shades of green, one matching her skirt, the other her tiny emerald earrings. She was thirty-nine in the Spring of 1950, her brother three years older.

They did not regret, either of them, the fruits of the revolution that by chance had changed their lives in making them its casualties. They rejoiced in all that had come about and even took pride in their accidental closeness to the revolution as it had happened. They had been in at a nation’s birth, had later experienced its childhood years, unprosperous and ordinary and undramatic. That a terrible beauty had transformed the land they had not noticed.

In the garden Philippa picked lily tulips and bluebells, and sprigs of pink hazel. Tom’s vegetable beds were raked and marked to indicate where his seeds had not yet come up, but among the herbs the tarragon was sprouting, and apple mint, and lovage. Chives were at their best, sage thickening with soft fresh growth. Next weekend, he’d said, they should weed the long border, turn up the caked soil.

On the long wooden draining-board in the kitchen she began to arrange the flowers in two vases. Tom always bought the wine in Findlater’s, settling the single bottle into the basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle. They didn’t make much of Sunday lunch — a way of arranging the day that went back to their Aunt Adelaide’s lifetime — and only on Sundays was there ever wine at supper. In the other house — before Philippa and her brother had come to Rathfarnham — decanters of whiskey and sherry had stood on the dining-room sideboard, regularly replenished, not there for appearance’s sake. ‘What you need’s a quick one,’ her father had said on the Sunday of which today was yet another anniversary, and poor little Joe Paddy hadn’t been able to say anything in response, shivering from head to toe as if he had the flu. ‘What d’you say to a sharpener?’ had been another way of putting it — when Mr Tyson or Mr Higgins came to the house — or sometimes, ‘Will we take a ball of malt?’ When the outside walls were repainted, the work complete, the men packing up their brushes and their ladders, they had been brought in to have glasses filled at the sideboard. A credit to Sallymount Avenue, her father had said, referring to the work that had been done, and the glasses were raised to it.

‘Well, I’ve finished that,’ Tom said, knowing where to find her.

‘What happened?’

‘She married the naval fellow.’

‘They’ll manage.’

‘Of course.’

She felt herself watched. Clipping the stems to the length she wanted each, shaping the hazel, she heard the rattle of his matches and knew if she turned her head she would see cigarettes and matches in one hand, the ashtray in the other. Players he smoked, though once it had been Woodbines, what he could afford then. ‘You’ve been smoking, Tom!’ Aunt Adelaide used to cry, exasperated. ‘Tom, you are not to smoke!’

He came further in to the kitchen, tipped the ashtray into the waste bucket beneath the sink, washed it under the tap and put it aside to carry back upstairs later.

‘Where’s the old dog?’ he asked. ‘Come back, has he?’

She shook her head and then, together, they heard their dog in the garden, the single bark that indicated his return from the travels they could not control. She glanced up, through the window above the sink, and there he was, panting on the grass, a black and white terrier, his smooth coat wringing wet.

‘He’s been in the Dodder,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere.’

‘He’ll be the death of me, that dog.’

The word could be used; they neither of them flinched. It had a different resonance when applied so lightly to the boldness of their dog. Different again when encountered in lines of poetry. Even the Easter Passion — recently renewed for both of them in the Christ Church service on Good Friday evening — gave death a hallowed meaning, and softened it through the miracle of the Resurrection. But death as it had affected their lives was still raw, the moment of its awful pain still terrible if they let it have its way.

‘I’ll be an hour or so,’ Tom said.

He scolded the exhausted dog on the lawn, and the dog was sheepish, hunching himself in shame and only daring then to wag his tail. Philippa watched from the window and guessed — and was right — that, exhaustion or not, Tom would be accompanied on his walk.

‘No hurry.’ She unlatched the window to call out, to smile because she realized, quite suddenly, that she hadn’t during their conversation. This year she would go, she thought. She would go, and Tom would live his life.

*

Rathfarnham had hardly changed in all the years he’d known it; that was yet to come. This evening no one was about, the few small shops closed, the Yellow House — where he sometimes had a drink on weekdays — not open either. Low in the sky, the sun cast shadows that were hardly there.

‘We’re invited to Rathfarnham for tea,’ Tom remembered his mother so often announcing in Sallymount Avenue, her tone reflecting the pleasure she knew the news would bring. The tram and then the long walk, for which it had to be fine or else, at the last minute, they wouldn’t go. ‘Oh, Aunt Adelaide’ll know why,’ their mother would say, and it was always only a postponement. Twice, Tom remembered, that happened, but probably there had been another time, now forgotten. The great spread on the dining-room table, the mysterious house — for it was mysterious then — were what the pleasure of those announcements had been about. Aunt Adelaide made egg sandwiches and sardine sandwiches, and two kinds of cake — fruit and sponge — and there were little square buns already buttered, and scones with raisins in them. In the garden, among the laurels, there was a secret place.

Perfectly obedient now, the dog trotted without a sign of weariness, as close to Tom’s legs as he could manage. ‘Well, wasn’t that a grand day, sir?’ an old man Tom didn’t know remarked, and the dog went to sniff his trousers. ‘Oh, I’ve seen you about all right,’ the old man said, patting the black head.

What a bouleversement it had been in Aunt Adelaide’s life! In a million years she couldn’t have guessed that the two children who had occasionally come to tea, who had crept about upstairs, opening doors they knew they should not, who had whispered and pretended in the laurels, would every day and every night be there, her house their home, all mystery gone. Often on his weekend walks Tom thought about that; often on his return he and Philippa shared the remorse those thoughts engendered. How careless they had been of the imposition, how casual, how thoughtless! ‘I shall have to lie down,’ Aunt Adelaide used to say and Nelly, her maid and her companion, would angrily explain that that was because of rowdiness or some quarrel there had been. Murphy, who did the garden, who came every day — there being no shortages in Aunt Adelaide’s spinster life — told them the blackly moustached figure, silver-framed on the drawing-room window-table, stern and unsmiling, was an admirer of long ago. They’d often wondered who he was.

Tom’s sister had been wrong in assuming he could not possibly have forgotten what this Sunday was when he bought the wine. Tom had forgotten because, he supposed, he wanted to; dismounting from his bicycle outside Findlater’s on Friday evening, he had been thinking of their summer holiday and so the aberration had occurred. Within a minute he had realized, but would have felt foolish handing the bottle back, and when he reached the house he felt it would have been underhand not to have brought the wine to the kitchen, as he always did if he’d bought a bottle. There had of course been Philippa’s surprise, but it was natural between them that they did not comment.