William Trevor: The Hill Bachelors

THE HILL BACHELORS

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Among his books are Two Lives (1991), comprising the novellas Reading Turgenev , shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and My House in Umbria; eight volumes of stories that were brought together in The Collected Stories (1992), chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of the year; Felicia’s Journey (1994), winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Prize, and made into a major motion picture; After Rain (1996), selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the eight best books of the year; and Death in Summer (1998), a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. Many of his stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. In 1977, William Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in recognition of his services to literature. In 1996 he was the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. William Trevor lives in Devon, England.

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2001

Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by William Trevor

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2000. Published simultaneously in the United States by Penguin Books, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 2000. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House of Canada Limited.

“Three People” first appeared in London Magazine , “Of the Cloth,” “The Mourning,” “A Friend in the Trade,” “The Telephone Game,” and “The Hill Bachelors” in The New Yorker , “Good News” in The Hudson Review , “The Virgin’s Gift” in The Sunday Times (London); and “Against the Odds” in Harper’s Magazine . “Le Visituer” (under the title “The Summer Visitor”), “Death of a Professor,” and “The Telephone Game” were published in Great Britain in individual volumes by Travelman Publishing, Colophon Press, and Waterstone, respectively.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Trevor, William, 1928–

The hill bachelors

eISBN: 978-0-307-36739-6

I. Title.

PR6070.R4H54 2001 823′.914 C2001-901177-6

www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Three People

Of the Cloth

Good News

The Mourning

A Friend in the Trade

Low Sunday, 1950

Le Visiteur

The Virgin’s Gift

Death of a Professor

Against the Odds

The Telephone Game

The Hill Bachelors

Three People

On the steps of the Scheles’ house, stained glass on either side of the brown front door, Sidney shakes the rain from his plastic mackintosh, taking it off to do so. He lets himself into the small porch, pauses for a moment to wipe the rain from his face with a handkerchief, then rings the bell of the inner door. It is how they like it, his admission with a key to the porch, then this declaration of his presence. They’ll know who it is: no one else rings that inner bell.

‘Good afternoon, Sidney,’ Vera greets him when the bolts are drawn back and the key turned in the deadlock. ‘Is still raining, Sidney?’

‘Yes. Getting heavy now.’

‘We did not look out.’

The light is on in the hall, as it always is except in high summer.

Sidney waits while the bolts are shot into place again, the key in the deadlock turned. Then he hangs his colourless plastic coat on the hall-stand pegs.

‘Well, there the bathroom is,’ Vera says. ‘All ready.’

‘Your father —’

‘Oh, he’s well, Sidney. Father is resting now. You know: the afternoon.’

‘I’d hoped to come this morning.’

‘He hoped you would, Sidney. At eleven maybe.’

‘The morning was difficult today.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind, myself.’

In the bathroom the paint tins and brushes and a roller have been laid out, the bath and washbasin covered with old curtains. There is Polyfilla and white spirit, which last week Sidney said he’d need. He should have said Polyclens, he realizes now, instead of the white spirit; better for washing out the brushes.

‘You’d like some tea now, Sidney?’ Vera offers. ‘You’d like a cup before you begin?’

Vera has sharp cheek-bones and hair dyed black because it’s greying. The leanness in her face is everywhere else too; a navy-blue skirt is tight on bony hips, her plain red jumper is as skimpy as a child’s, clinging to breasts that hardly show. Her large brown eyes and sensuous lips are what you notice, the eyes expressionless, the lips perhaps a trick of nature, for in other ways Vera does not seem sensuous in the least.

‘Tea later.’ Sidney hesitates, glancing at Vera, as if fearing to offend her. ‘If that’s all right?’

And Vera smiles and says of course it’s all right. There is a Danish pastry, she says, an apricot Danish pastry, bought yesterday so she’ll heat it up.

‘Thanks, Vera.’

‘There’s Father, waking now.’

Lace Cap is the colour chosen. Sidney pours it into the roller dish and rolls it on to the ceiling, beginning at the centre, which a paint-shop man advised him once was the best way to go about it. The colour seems white but he knows it isn’t. It will dry out a shade darker. A satin finish, suitable for a bathroom.

‘The tiling,’ Mr Schele says in the doorway when Sidney has already begun on the walls. ‘Maybe the tiling.’

Clearing away his things — his toothbrush and his razor — Mr Schele noticed the tiling around the washbasin and the bath. In places the tiling is not good, he says. In places the tiles are perhaps a little loose, and a few are cracked. You hardly notice, but they are cracked when you look slowly, taking time to look. And the rubber filler around the bath is discoloured. Grubby, Mr Schele says.

‘Yes, I’ll do all that.’

‘Not the tiling before the paint, heh? Not finish the tiling first maybe?’

Sidney knows the old man is right. The tile replacement and the rubber should be done first because of the mess. That is the usual way. Not that Sidney is an expert, not that he decorates many bathrooms, but it stands to reason.

‘It’ll be all right, Mr Schele. The tiling’s not much, two or three to put in.’

While the undercoat on the woodwork is drying he’ll slip the new tiles in. He’ll cut away the rubber and squeeze in more of it, a tricky business, which he doesn’t like. He has done it only once before, behind the sink in the kitchen. While it’s settling he’ll gloss the woodwork.

‘You’re a good man, Sidney.’

He works all afternoon. When Vera brings the Danish pastry and tea, and two different kinds of biscuits, she doesn’t linger because he’s busy. Sidney isn’t paid for what he does, as he is for all his other work — the club, delivering the leaflets or handing them out on the street, depending on what’s required. He manages on what he gets; he doesn’t need much because there is no rent to pay. Just enough for food, and the gas he cooks it on. The electricity he doesn’t have to pay for; clothes come from the charity shop.