William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

But when she passed the receiver over, Tony said he couldn’t hear anything. Nothing whatsoever, he said.

‘Very far away. The cat was mewing, and suddenly it stopped. Don’t put it back!’ Liese cried when Tony was about to return the receiver to its cradle. ‘She is there in her loft, Tony.’

‘Oh, honestly, I don’t think so. Why should she be? It doesn’t take long to turn a stop-cock off.’

‘What is a stop-cock?’

‘Just a way of controlling the water.’

The mewing of the cat came faintly to him, a single mew and then another. Not knowing why he did so, Tony shook his head again, silently denying this sound. Liese said:

‘She could have fallen down. It would be hard to see with her flashlight and she could have fallen down.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ For the first time in the year and a half she had known him Liese heard a testiness in Tony’s voice. There was no point in not replacing the receiver, he said. ‘Look, let’s forget it, Liese.’

Solemnly, but in distress, Liese gazed into the features of the man she was to marry in just over twelve hours’ time. He smiled a familiar, easy smile. No point, he said again, more softly. No point of any kind in going on about this.

‘Honestly, Liese.’

They had walked about, that first afternoon. He had taken her through Green Park, then down to the river. She was in London to perfect her English; that afternoon she should have been at another class. And it was a quarter past five before Tony explained, untruthfully, his absence from his desk. The next day they met again.

‘Nothing has happened, Liese.’

‘She could be dead.’

‘Oh, Liese, don’t be silly.’

At once, having said that, Tony apologized. Of course she wasn’t silly. That game was silly. He was sorry they’d played it tonight.

‘But, Tony —’

‘Of course she isn’t dead.’

‘Why do you think you can be sure?’

He shook his head, meaning to indicate that he wasn’t claiming to be sure, only that reason implied what he suggested. During the months they were getting to know one another he had learnt that Liese’s imagination was sometimes a nuisance; she had said so herself. Purposeless and dispensable, she said, a quirk of nature that caused her, too often, to doubt the surface of things. Music was purposeless, he had replied, the petal of a flower dispensable: what failed the market-place was often what should be treasured most. But Liese called her quirk of nature a pest; and experiencing an instance of it for the first time now, Tony understood.

‘Let’s not quarrel, Liese.’

But the quarrel — begun already while neither noticed — spread, insidious in the stillness that the silent telephone, once more passed from hand to hand, seemed to inspire. Neither heard the mewing of the cat again, and Tony said:

‘Look, in the morning she’ll see that receiver hanging there and she’ll remember she forgot to put it back.’

‘It is morning now. Tony, we could go to the police.’

‘The police? What on earth for?’

‘They could find out where that house is.’

‘Oh, none of this makes sense!’ And Tony, who happened just then to be holding the telephone receiver, would again have replaced it.

Liese snatched it, anger flushing through her cheeks. She asked him why he’d wanted to do that, and he shrugged and didn’t answer. He didn’t because all this was ridiculous, because he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

‘The police couldn’t find out,’ he said after a silence had gone on. The police wouldn’t have a telephone number to go on. All they could tell the police was that in a house somewhere in London there was an old woman and a cat. All over London, Tony said, there were old women and cats.

‘Tony, try to remember the number.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! How can I remember the bloody number when I didn’t even know it in the first place?’

‘Well, then it will be in the computers.’

‘What computers?’

‘In Germany all calls go into the computers.’

Liese didn’t know if this was so or not. What she knew was that they could do nothing if he had put the receiver back. Why had he wanted to?

‘Darling, we can’t,’ he was saying now. ‘We can’t just walk round to a police station at nearly three o’clock in the morning to report that an old woman has gone up to her loft. It was a harmless game, Liese.’

She tried to say nothing, but did not succeed. The words came anyway, unchosen, ignoring her will.

‘It is a horrible game. How can it not be horrible when it ends like this?’

The old woman lies there, Liese heard her own voice insist. And light comes up through the open trapdoor, and the stepladder is below. There are the dusty boards, the water pipes. The cat’s eyes are pinpricks in the gloom.

‘Has she struck her head, Tony? And bones go brittle when you’re old. I’m saying what could be true.’

‘We have no reason whatsoever to believe any of this has happened.’

‘The telephone left hanging —’

‘She did not replace the telephone because she forgot to.’

‘You asked her to come back. You said to do what you asked and to tell you if it was done.’

‘Sometimes people can tell immediately that it’s a put-up thing.’

‘Hullo! Hullo!’ Liese agitatedly shouted into the receiver. ‘Hullo … Please.’

‘Liese, we have to wait until she wakes up again.’

‘At least the cat will keep the mice away.’

Other people will see the lights left on. Other people will come to the house and find the dangling telephone. Why should an old woman in her night clothes set a stepladder under a trapdoor? The people who come will ask that. They’ll give the cat a plate of milk and then they’ll put the telephone back, and one of them will climb up the ladder.

‘I wish it had happened some other night.’

‘Liese —’

‘You wanted to put the receiver back. You wanted not to know. You wanted us for ever not to know, to make a darkness of it.’

‘No, of course I didn’t.’

‘Sometimes a person doesn’t realize. A person acts in some way and doesn’t realize.’

‘Please,’ Tony begged again and Liese felt his arms around her. Tears for a moment smudged away the room they were in, softly he stroked her hair. When she could speak she whispered through his murmured consolation, repeating that she wished all this had happened sooner, not tonight. As though some illness had struck her, she experienced a throbbing ache, somewhere in her body, she didn’t know where. That came from muddle and confusion was what she thought, or else from being torn apart, as if she possessed two selves. There was not room for quarrels between them. There had not been, there was not still. Why had it happened tonight, why now? Like a hammering in Liese’s brain, this repetition went on, began again as a persistent roundabout. Imagining was Gothic castles and her own fairytales made up when she was in Fräulein Groenewold’s kindergarten, and fantasies with favourite film stars later on. It became a silliness when reality was distorted. Of course he was right.

‘I can’t help thinking of her,’ Liese whispered none the less. ‘I cannot help it.’

Tony turned away, and slowly crossed to the window. He wanted to be outside, to walk about the streets, to have a chance to think. He had been asked to reason with Liese when she wanted her wedding to be in London. A longish letter had come from Schelesnau, pleading with him to intervene, to make her see sense. It was inconvenient for everyone; it was an added and unnecessary expense; it was exzentrisch of her.

Tonight Liese had learnt that Tony had been daring as a boy, that he had walked along a ledge from one dormitory window to another, eighteen feet above the ground. She had delighted in that — that he had not told her himself, that he was courageous and did not boast of it. Yet everything seemed different now.