William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

She imagined, in a small low-ceilinged sitting-room a coal fire spluttering a bit, a single blue flame among insipid spurts of orange. People didn’t live much in Anglesea Street, it wasn’t that kind of street, but that would suit her — the sound of handcarts down below, voices faintly calling out.

‘Thank you,’ she said, finishing her sherry when she saw that Tom had finished his. She rinsed the glasses. Thirty-four years, she calculated; she would be seventy-three when the same time had passed again, Tom would be seventy-six. 1984 it would be, sixteen years from the century’s end, as 1916 had been from the beginning.

He helped her carry the dishes into the dining-room and then he poured the wine. It did not seem an error now, that he had bought it. The wine would make it easier to say, the sherry and the wine together.

‘There’s talk of a new road,’ he said. ‘Out near Marley.’

‘I hadn’t heard that.’

‘Oh, some time well into the future they’re talking of.’

‘Maybe it won’t happen.’

Once on this Sunday he had predicted more war and more war had come; he had predicted Ireland’s wise neutrality and had been right. He would hate a big new road out there. He hated the motorcycles that roared up Tibradden, that crashed through fern and undergrowth and little woods, that muddied the streams. One day the crawl of lorries would take the freshness from the air.

‘Tom,’ she said again. She was wondering, she began, and paused, a natural pause it seemed. 13 Anglesea St. , it said on an envelope, and they crossed College Green from Trinity, and then she heard their footsteps on the stairs. She made them coffee because coffee was what they liked, and cut the Bewley’s cake, ready for them. Why thirteen? she wondered, and wondered then if even now there was an empty flat there, if some premonition had winkled that out for her. Long legs her nephew had, like his father; her niece was beautiful already.

‘This summer?’ Tom said. ‘Port-na-Blagh, d’you think?’ He had been patient, not saying anything. A kindness that was, and his smile was a kindness too. ‘Port-na-Blagh?’ he said again.

She nodded, making herself because he had been kind. She talked about the summer because he wanted to. Three weeks away from Dublin and Rathfarnham, the sands at Port-na-Blagh unchanged, the white farmhouse, the hens that pecked about its yard. She loved it too, as much as he did, when they locked up and went away to Donegal. Even when it rained and her summer dresses remained unpacked, when they gazed from the windows at their ruined days or crunched over pebbles that never dried. They always brought more books than they could read, denuding the shelves of the Argosy Lending Library, owing a bit on them when they returned.

‘Or somewhere else, d’you think?’ he said.

They’d gone to Glandore once, another year to Ross-league, but Port-na-Blagh they still liked best. ‘I wonder what became of those widowed brothers,’ Tom said, and she knew at once whom he meant: two Guinness clerks who’d been widowed in the same year, who hardly spoke in the boarding-house dining-room; on Achill that was. And the school inspector who spoke in Irish came for a few nights to Glandore.

‘July again?’ she said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘It’s often fine enough.’

He nodded, and she could tell he was longing for a cigarette. But it wasn’t his way to smoke during a meal; she’d never seen him doing that.

‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said.

*

He saw, again, the effort in her eyes, and sensed her saying to herself that it would not be difficult, that he would listen, that the words were simple. Once, a while ago, maybe as long ago as fifteen years, she had said it; and again, more recently, had come closer to saying it than she had tonight.

‘Low Sunday it is called, you know,’ he said.

‘Yes, I did know.’

He poured the last of the wine in the silence that had gathered. Once she had wept when he was not there; he knew because her smile was different when he returned, the marks of tears powdered over. Now, it was easier. Only Low Sunday held them in its thrall, her head pressed into the wool of his jersey, his voice not letting her look. Pity for his romantic ghosts still kept the moment at bay; she had her fantasy of the future. Fragments of intuition were their conversation, real beneath the unreal words. No one else would understand: tomorrow, she would once more know that.

They gathered the dishes and the plates from the table and took them to the kitchen. He washed up, as he always did at weekends. She put things away. The tired dog lay sleeping in his kennel. The downstairs lights were one by one extinguished.

The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as it would. Night settled, there was no sound. Tranquil 1950 was again a haven in Ireland’s dark.

Le Visiteur

Once a year, when summer was waning, Guy went to the island. And once a year, as his visit drew to a close, he took Monsieur and Madame Buissonnet out to dinner at the hotel. He had not always done so, for he had first received the Buissonnets’ invitation to visit them when he was seven. He was thirty-two now, no longer placed by his mother in the care of the ferryman for the journey from Port Vevey and by Madame Buissonnet for the journey back. For thirteen years there had been the tradition of dinner at the hotel, the drive from the farm in the onion truck, Madame Buissonnet in her grey and black, Monsieur Buissonnet teasingly not taking off his boatman’s cap until they were almost in the restaurant, then stuffing it into his pocket. Loup de mer: always the same for both of them, and as often as not for Guy also. Soupe de langoustines to start with.

‘Well, now,’ Madame Buissonnet said, as she always did when the order had been given, the Macon Fuissé tasted. ‘Well, now?’ she repeated, for dinner at the hotel was the occasion for such revelations as had not yet been divulged during Guy’s stay.

‘Gérard married,’ he said. ‘Jean-Claude has gone to Africa.’

‘Africa?’

‘Maybe for ever. I miss him.’

Monsieur Buissonnet listened less intently than his wife did, his eye roving about the restaurant, lingering occasionally on a beautiful face. Sometimes he softly sighed. ‘Your mother?’ he had enquired in a private moment on the first afternoon of Guy’s visit, as every year he did. As far as Madame Buissonnet was concerned, Guy’s mother might not have existed.

‘And you are promoted a step higher, Guy?’ she asked now.

‘It is once in three years, that.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘My dear.’ Monsieur Buissonnet placed a hand over one of his wife’s, his endearment gently reassuring her that it didn’t matter if she had forgotten promotion did not come every single year.

‘How agreeable it is here,’ she murmured, turning her palm upward for a moment and smiling a smile she reserved for such moments. Guy felt not included in this occasion of communication between the couple, even though he was responsible for their presence here. A silence fell, then Monsieur Buissonnet said:

‘It was nothing once, this place.’

‘It has made a milliard since,’ his wife reminded him. Or two, he agreed. A man who knew how to make money was Perdreau. Yet every dish you ate in his restaurant was worth its francs.

White-haired, a shock still falling over his forehead, Monsieur Buissonnet possessed the remnants of handsome features, as his wife did of beauty. Nothing would be regained by either of them; the disturbances of time and sun were there for ever. Yet the toll was softened: the whiteness of their hair, and its abundance, was an attraction in old age; that he was leaner than he had ever been brought out in Monsieur Buissonnet qualities of distinction that had not been evident before; his wife’s fragility complemented the slenderness she had never lost.