William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

He needn’t have sat next to her but he did, he explained. He wanted to; soon’s he saw the hair he wanted to, soon’s he looked along the row and saw her lips, moving as it happened, sucking a sweet maybe, or chocolate. ‘You make a practice of this, Sidney?’ the sergeant asked. Well, once or twice before, he said, a woman he liked the look of.

The bus draws in again, three people get off, two men and a girl, the men much older, as if one of them’s her father. ‘You’re certain, Sidney?’ the sergeant pressed him, and he said the ice-cream girl took her time, not that anyone was buying from her, a good five minutes it was the lights were up. And there was afterwards too, of course. No way he wasn’t certain, he said. ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘Oh, yes.’ The other man came in then, and asked the same questions all over again. ‘You tell us what clothes she was wearing, Sidney? Take your time now, son.’ It said in the paper about the clothes, and he remembered because he’d learnt it off.

The club is in darkness when he reaches it, but he turns the lights on as soon as he’s inside. He tidied this morning, the time he always tidies. Everything is ready. Alfie and Harry arrive, and he makes them Maxwell House the way they like it, and they sit there, drinking it and smoking. Tomorrow he’ll go back, Sidney says to himself, tidy up that rose that’s come down.

*

The Sunday bells of a church are sounding for an early service when Vera glances from the kitchen window and there he is, cutting up the big rosebush that the wind brought down. A warmth begins in Vera, spreading from some central part of her to her shoulders and her thighs, tingling in her arms and legs. It is the warmth of Vera’s passion, heat in her blood that such an unexpected glimpse always inspires. He came to help yesterday. Why today also? The blown-down rosebush could have waited.

‘Sidney’s come,’ her father says, having looked out too. ‘Twenty-five years, that rosebush. High as a tree and now we must begin again.’

‘Oh, I’m not sorry it’s gone. It darkened the garden. Sidney, you like some coffee?’ Vera calls from the back door and Sidney waves and says in a minute.

‘Is Sidney wearing the garden gloves?’ Mr Schele fusses. ‘You need the gloves with a rose.’

‘Sidney knows.’

Once, working in the garden, sawing up old planks of wood, he got a splinter under a thumbnail and Vera saw to it: Sidney’s hand laid flat on the kitchen worktop, a light brought specially in, a needle sterilized in a match flame, TCP and tweezers. In her night-time fantasies she has comforted Sidney, whispering to him, asking him to talk to her. Sometimes, when he has worked all through a weekend morning, she turns the immersion heater on early in case he’d like to have a bath before he goes. The time he cut his hand she staunched the blood flow with a tourniquet.

‘Ready, Sidney,’ Vera calls from the back door. ‘Coffee.’

Mr Schele senses something in the air. His thoughts reflect Vera’s: unsightly though it is, the thicket of twisted branches on the grass could easily have stayed there for a week. It is Sidney’s pretext, Mr Schele tells himself; it is a reason to come back so soon. He pours hot milk on to his bran flakes and stirs the mixture with his spoon, softening the flakes because he does not like them crispy. Is this, at last, the Sunday of the proposal? He watches Vera at the stove. She remembers her fluffy slippers and hurries away to change them. The glass disc rattles in the milk saucepan and Mr Schele rises to attend to that. He cannot last for ever; each day, at seventy-eight, is borrowed time. What life is it for a woman alone?

Moving the saucepan to one side of the gas jet, Mr Schele accepts that when he is gone Vera will have no one. Going out with chaps — and there used to be quite a few — has been a thing of the past since the trouble. Vera will be alone for the rest of her days: he understands that, although the subject is never mentioned. He understands that her luck might even change for a while, before some new chap she makes friends with has second thoughts, even though at the time she walked away without a stain. That is how things happen, Mr Schele knows, and knows that Vera has worked it out too. Sidney is different because of coming forward, and in a sense he has been coming forward ever since, as good a friend to Vera as he was at the time, a saviour really: in Mr Schele’s opinion that word is not too strong. It took time for the opinion to form, as naturally it would in a father, the circumstances as they were.

‘It’s good of Sidney. Just because that rose blew down.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Vera nods, saying that, lending the words a little emphasis. Her father knows what other people know, no more. He came in at his usual time, just after half past six. He saw the white police cars outside and was in a state before he passed through the porch. ‘You sit down now,’ she said, and told him, and the policewoman brought him tea. ‘It can’t be,’ he kept saying. Later on, she had kippers to boil in the bag, but they didn’t want them. She folded up the wheelchair and put it in the cupboard under the stairs, not wanting to look at it. Best to get it out of the house, she decided when everything quietened down, a month gone by, and they got a fair price for it.

‘You take your chances, Vera.’

She knows what he means, but Sidney’s not going to propose marriage, this morning or any other time, because marriage isn’t on the cards and never has been. The intruder would not have guessed there was anyone in that room because when he’d watched the house he’d only ever seen two people coming and going: the policemen explained all that. An intruder always sussed a place, they explained, he didn’t just come barging in. Her father out all day from eight-fifteen on, and the villain would have followed her to the cinema and seen her safely in. Cinemas, funerals, weddings: your house-thief loves all that. ‘Oh no, that’s crazy,’ her father kept muttering when they changed their minds, suddenly taking a different line. He had always thought it was crazy, their groundless probing, as he put it. He had always believed their case would fall to bits because it didn’t make sense.

‘You know what I’m saying, Vera? You take your chances.’

She nods. Changing her slippers for shoes because Sidney had come, she decided as well to change her drab Sunday skirt for her dog-tooth. She stood in front of the long wardrobe looking-glass the way she used to in the old days. She liked to be smart in the old days and she still does now. Sometimes a man looks at her in a supermarket or on the street. And Sidney does, when he thinks she isn’t noticing. She heats the milk again and is ready to make fresh coffee.

‘You like an egg, Sidney?’ she offers when Sidney comes in. ‘Poached egg? Maybe scrambled?’

‘No, honestly. Thanks, Vera.’ It’s too windy to risk burning the rosebush, he says, but he has clipped it up, ready for a calmer day.

There’s a leaf in his hair, and Vera draws his attention to it. ‘You just sit down.’

‘Only a cup of coffee, Vera.’

That morning Sidney woke when it was half past six, the light just beginning. He thought at once about Vera, although it had been a particularly rough night in the club and usually that comes into his mind first thing. Harry and Alfie had had to separate youths who began to fight, one of them with a knife. Later, after two, a girl who was a stranger in the club collapsed. But in spite of the intervention of that excitement, this morning it was Vera he woke up to, her face as it was when her hair was blonde. Fleshy you’d have called her face then, soft was what he’d thought when he first saw the photograph, in the Evening Standard someone had left behind in the club. It doesn’t matter that Vera is leaner now, it doesn’t matter that her hair is different. Vera’s the same, no way she isn’t.