William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

Already he had explained to Liese’s sisters — both of whom were to be bridesmaids — that strangers were telephoned, that you won if you held a stranger in conversation longer than anyone else could. The information was passed around the bewildered Germans, who politely wondered what was coming next.

‘I am in engine boats,’ a man who had been a classmate of Liese’s in Fräulein Groenewold’s kindergarten was saying when the music was turned off. ‘Outboards, you say?’

He, and all the others — more than thirty still left at the party — were asked to be silent then. A number was dialled by Tony’s best man and the first of the strangers informed that there was a gas leak in the street, asked to check the rooms of his house for a tell-tale smell, then to return to the phone with information as to that. The next was told that an external fuse had blown, that all electrical connections should be unplugged or turned off to obviate danger. The next was advised to close and lock his windows against a roving polecat.

‘The Water Board here,’ Tony said when his turn came. ‘We’re extremely sorry to ring you so late. We have an emergency.’

Some of the German visitors were still perplexed. ‘So they are all your friends?’ a girl with a plait asked, in spite of what had been said. ‘This is a joke with friends?’

Liese explained again that the people who were telephoned were just anyone. The game was to delay, to keep a conversation going. She whispered, in case her voice should carry to Tony’s victim. ‘Was? Stimmt irgendwas nicht?’ her friend whispered back, and Liese said it was all just for fun. The last call had lasted three and three-quarter minutes, the one before only a few seconds.

‘What we would like you to do,’ Tony said, ‘is to make your way to the water tanks in your loft and turn off the inlet tap. This tap is usually red, madam, but of course the colour may have worn off. What we’re endeavouring to do is to prevent the flooding of your house.’

‘Flooding?’ the woman he spoke to repeated, her voice drowsy with sleep. ‘Eh?’

‘One of our transformer valves has failed. We have a dangerously high pressure level.’

‘I can’t go up into the loft at this hour. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘We’re having to ask everyone in the area, madam. Perhaps your husband —’

‘I ain’t got no husband. I ain’t got no one here. I’m seventy-three years of age. How d’you think I’d know about a tap?’

‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience, madam. We naturally would not ask you to do this if it were not necessary. When a transformer valve goes it is a vital matter. The main articulated valve may go next and then of course it is too late. When the articulated valve goes the flood-water could rise to sixteen feet within minutes. In which case I would advise you to keep to the upstairs rooms.’

Tony put the palm of his hand over the mouthpiece. She had beetled off to get a stepladder, he whispered, and a flashlight. He listened again and said there was the mewing of a cat.

‘It’ll be all right now?’ another German girl leaned forward to ask Liese, and the German who was in outboard engines, who perfectly understood the game, gestured with a smile that it would be. The game was amusing, he considered, but not a game to play in Schelesnau. It was sophisticated. It was the famous English sense of humour.

Tony heard the shuffle of footsteps, a door closing in the distance, and in the distance also the mewing of the cat again. Then there was silence.

Tony looked round his guests, some of them, as he was, a little drunk. He laughed, careless now of allowing the sound to pass to the other house, since its lone occupant was presumably already in her loft. He put the receiver down beside the directories on the narrow telephone table, and reached out with a bottle of Sancerre to attend to a couple of empty glasses. A friend he’d been at school with began to tell of an occasion when a man in Hoxton was sent out on to the streets to see if a stolen blue van had just been parked there. He himself had once posed as the proprietor of a ballroom-dancing school, offering six free lessons. Some of the Germans said they must be going now.

‘Shh.’ Listening again, Tony held up a hand. But there was no sound from the other end. ‘She’s still aloft,’ he said, and put the receiver down beside the directories.

‘Where’re you staying?’ the best man asked, his lips brushing the cheek of the girl with the plait as they danced, the music there again. The telephone game had run its course.

‘In Germany,’ it was explained by the man in outboard motors, ‘we might say this was Ärgernis.’

‘Oh, here too,’ an English girl who did not approve of the telephone game said. ‘If that means harassment.’

Those who remained left in a bunch then, the Germans telling about Wasservexierungsport , a practical joke involving jets of water. You put your ten pfennigs into a slot machine to bring the lights on in a grotto and found yourself drenched instead. ‘Water-vexing,’ the outboard-motors man translated.

*

‘You could stay here, you know,’ Tony said when he and Liese had collected the glasses and the ashtrays, when everything had been washed and dried, the cushions plumped up, a window opened to let in a stream of cold night air.

‘But I have yet to finish packing up my things. The morning will be busy.’

They walked about the flat that soon would be their home, going from room to room, although they knew the rooms well. Softly, the music still played, and they danced a little in the small hall, happy to be alone now. The day they’d met there had been an office party in the busy lunchtime restaurant, a lot of noise, and a woman in a spotted red dress quarrelling with her friend at the table next to theirs. How cautious Liese had been that day was afterwards remembered, and how cautious she’d been — much later — when Tony said he loved her. Remembered, too, with that same fondness was how both of them had wanted marriage, not some substitute, how they had wanted the binding of its demands and vows and rigours. London was the city of their romance and it was in London — to the discomfort and annoyance of her parents, defying all convention — that Liese had insisted the marriage should take place.

While they danced, Tony noticed that his telephone receiver was still lying beside the directories. More than half an hour ago he had forgotten about it. He reached to pick it up, bringing their dance to an end. He said:

‘She hasn’t put hers back.’

Liese took the receiver from him. She listened, too, and heard the empty sound of a connected line. ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘Hullo.’

‘She forgot. She went to bed.’

‘Would she forget, Tony?’

‘Well, something like it.’

‘She give a name? You have the number still?’

Tony shook his head. ‘She didn’t give a name.’ He had forgotten the number; he’d probably never even been aware of it, he said.

‘What did she say, Tony?’

‘Only that she was without a husband.’

‘Her husband was out? At this time?’

They had drawn away from one another. Tony turned the music off. He said:

‘She meant she was widowed. She wasn’t young. Seventy-three or something like that.’

‘This old woman goes to her loft —’

‘Well, I mean, she said she would. More likely, she didn’t believe a word I said.’

‘She went to look for a stepladder and a flashlight. You told us.’

‘I think she said she was cold in her nightdress. More likely, she just went back to bed. I don’t blame her.’

Listening again, Liese said:

‘I can hear the cat.’