William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

As he looks about him, wondering where he left the decanter, the conversational lull seems not to have been adventitious after all, but a portent. The doorbell sounds. Professor Ormston has come at last.

*

Someone once said — the precise source of a much-repeated observation long ago lost — that in her heyday Vanessa Ormston’s beauty recalled Marilyn Monroe’s. Over the years, inevitably has come the riposte that she still possesses the film star’s brain. Photographs show a smiling girl with bright fair hair, slender to the point of slightness, her features lit with the delicate beauty of a child. At forty-eight — younger by sixteen years than her husband — she seems thin rather than slender and has retained her beauty to the same degree that the flowers she presses between the leaves of books have. Ormston’s wife — as she is often designated among her husband’s colleagues — has a passion for flowers. Significance has been found in her preservation of blooms beyond their prime, the venom of envy spilt a little in college cloisters or at High Table.

Very early on the morning of the Master’s sherry do — that racy term racily approved in academe — Vanessa read the obituary of her husband, whom ten minutes ago she had left alive in the twin bed next to hers. Arrested by the grainy photograph — head and shoulders, caught at Commencements five years ago — her instinct was to hurry upstairs to make sure everything was all right, that time had not played tricks on her. Was it somehow another day? Had amnesia kindly erased the facts of tragedy? But then she heard her husband’s footfall and his early-morning cough. Mistily, she read — a revelation — that he was well loved by his students. She read that he was ‘distinguished in his small world’ and knew he would not care for that. None of them recognized that his world was small.

The electric kettle came to the boil while Vanessa read on; and then, alarmed anew, she hurried upstairs. He was propped up on his pillows after his brief absence from the bed, what showed of him almost a replica of the photographed head and shoulders on the fawn Formica surface of the kitchen table. ‘Won’t be a tick,’ she managed to get out and hurried off again to make their seven o’clock tea, the tray prepared the night before, gingersnap biscuits in the round tin with ‘The Hay Wain’ on it. The newspaper should accompany all this, his turn to scan it then.

Vanessa lost her head, as in difficult moments she tended to. She could not possibly hand the paper to him and wait for him to arrive at his recorded death. His companions on the page — no doubt correctly there — were a backing singer of a pop group, a bishop, born in Stockport, and a lieutenant colonel. Professor A. R. Ormston , it said, the space allocated to him less than that of the others, less particularly than the backing singer’s. The bishop’s photograph was small, but generous text made up for that; the lieutenant colonel married Anne Nancy Truster-Ede in 1931 and lost an arm in Cyprus. Gazing at his soldier’s brave old eyes and the bishop’s murky likeness, the raddled babyface of the singer, metal suspended from lobe and nostril, Vanessa again said to herself that she could not possibly commit this cruelty. Being crammed into what space remained was horrible.

The obituaries were on the inside of the last page. There had been a time when the paperboy jammed the paper into the letter-box, tearing that page quite badly. Please leave the newspapers on the window-sill , her husband had instructed on a square of cardboard which he suspended from the brass hall-door handle. He kept the square of cardboard by him, displaying it each time the paperboy changed.

Vanessa tore the bottom of the page and bundled away what she could not bring herself to reveal. She dropped the ball of paper into the waste-bucket beneath the sink, pushing it well down, under potato peelings and a soup tin. Then she carried the tray upstairs.

‘We need to hang out your notice again,’ she said, pouring tea and adding milk. ‘It’s a different boy.’

‘What boy’s that, dear?’

‘The one with the papers.’

What on earth else could I do? she wildly asked herself, dipping a gingersnap into her tea. She had needed time to think, but now that she had it could think of nothing. Her worried features, private behind the cover of the magazine that had been delivered also, were a blankness that filled eventually with a consideration of the consequences of her subterfuge. It did not occur to her that this was anything but an error in a single newspaper. More on her mind was that her protection could not possibly last, that when the moment of truth arrived no explanation could soften the harshness of an obituarist’s mistake. She might have tried to speak, to lead on gently to a confession, but still she could not.

‘Whatever’s a stealth fighter?’ came an enquiry from the other bed, the question answered almost as soon as it was asked. An F117 Stealth Fighter was an aeroplane, she was told, and also told that there was going to be trouble with the postal unions, and then that there was not much news today. ‘Oh, little do you know!’ her own voice cried, though only to herself. She turned the pages of her magazine, seeing nothing of them. Her desperation misled her: friends and colleagues would rally round in humane conspiracy, their instinct to protect, as hers had been. When letters arrived from those who could not know the truth she would reply, explaining. They would, in the nature of things, be addressed to her. That some undergraduate, when the new term began, might say, ‘Sir, surely you are dead?’ did not enter Vanessa’s bewildered thoughts. He was well loved by his students, after all. They, too, would surely respect his dignity.

But minutes later, when Professor Ormston’s wife stood in the bedroom with her dressing-gown and nightdress slipped off, the moment before her underclothes every morning felt cold on her skin, she knew she had again done the wrong thing, as so often she had in her marriage and in her life. And as so often also, she had compounded it by creating an unreal wonderland: they would take pleasure, all of them, in this amusement.

‘What shall today bring?’ the Professor wondered from his bed, words familiar in the bedroom at this time.

She thought to tell him then. She could have gone to him half dressed, and offered consolation with her young wife’s body. ‘I am ridiculous,’ instead her own voice echoed, soundless in the room, ridiculous because she did not have the courage to cause pain.

She boiled his egg and made his toast. She heated milk for their coffee. To come were the leisurely hours of this Saturday morning, while still he would not know. And hopelessly again she wondered why, for once, it should not be different, why at the Master’s sherry do they should not be merciful.

*

‘This matter shall be dealt with,’ is the Master’s greeting. ‘Have no doubt on that score.’

He says no more, only nods through what he takes to be Ormston’s embarrassment but is, in fact, bewilderment. It seems to the Master that Ormston intends to ride the storm, disdaining comment. And in that, of course, he must be honoured. ‘Is this what’s called insouciance?’ McMoran mutters, struck also by Ormston’s calm.

Alone in a corner a medievalist, Kellfittard, regards Ormston with a distaste that reaches into hatred. ‘The Quicke and the dead,’ Kellfittard hears coming from his left when for a moment the man declared to be no longer alive is in the company of the pinkly corduroyed professor. Kellfittard cares for neither of them, but has more reason to dislike the one he imagined until an hour ago had left his wife a widow. Kellfittard’s bachelor status has everything to do with Vanessa Ormston, who is of an age with him and wasted, so he believes, on a dry old man. Dry himself, he is one of the professors who are economical with their utterances, an inclination in him that played against his chances where Vanessa was concerned, allowing his rival to get in first. Hours ago in his cheerless college rooms he gazed in disbelief and wonder, and then in pure delight, at the likeness on the obituary page, went out to buy the three other newspapers he guessed might carry the same happy tidings, and there they were. Fantasies began at once: theatre visits with Vanessa Ormston, quiet dinners at The Osteria, a discreet weekend, and in Salzburg before the autumn term began the honeymoon that should have taken place years ago. It wasn’t until he arrived at the Master’s house that Kellfittard realized some prankster had been at work.