William Trevor - Selected Stories

They sat close together in the back. Before he started the engine again Cahal told them what the cost would be and they said that was all right. He drove through the town, gone quiet as it invariably did at this time. Some of the shops were still open and would remain so for a few more hours – the newsagents’ and tobacconists’, the sweet shops and small groceries, Quinlan’s supermarket, all the public houses – but there was a lull on the streets.

‘Are you on holiday?’ Cahal asked.

He couldn’t make much of their reply. Both of them spoke, correcting one another. After a lot of repetition they seemed to be telling him that they were getting married.

‘Well, that’s grand,’ he said.

He turned out on to the Loye road. Spanish was spoken in the back of the car. The radio wasn’t working or he’d have put it on for company. The car was a black Ford Cortina with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on the clock; his father had taken it in part-exchange. They’d use it until the tax disc expired and then put it aside for spares. Cahal thought of telling them that in case they’d think he hadn’t much to say for himself, but he knew it would be too difficult. The Christian Brothers had had him labelled as not having much to say for himself, and it had stuck in his memory, worrying him sometimes in case it caused people to believe he was slow. Whenever he could, Cahal tried to give the lie to that by making a comment.

‘Are you here long?’ he enquired, and the girl said they’d been two days in Dublin. He said he’d been in Dublin himself a few times. He said it was mountainy from now on, until they reached Pouldearg. The scenery was beautiful, the girl said.

He took the fork at the two dead trees, although going straight would have got them there too, longer still but potholes all over the place. It was a good car for the hills, the man said, and Cahal said it was a Ford, pleased that he’d understood. You’d get used to it, he considered; with a bit more practising you’d pick up the trick of understanding them.

‘How’d you say it in Spanish?’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘A statue?’

‘ Estatua ,’ they both said, together. ‘ Estatua ,’ they said.

‘ Estatua ,’ Cahal repeated, changing gear for the hill at Loye.

The girl clapped her hands, and he could see her smiling in the driving mirror. God, a woman like that, he thought. Give me a woman like that, he said to himself, and he imagined he was in the car alone with her, that the man wasn’t there, that he hadn’t come to Ireland with her, that he didn’t exist.

‘Do you hear about St Teresa of Ávila? Do you hear about her in Ireland? ’ Her lips opened and closed in the driving mirror, her teeth flashing, the tip of her tongue there for a moment. What she’d asked him was as clear as anyone would say it.

‘We do, of course,’ he said, confusing St Teresa of Ávila with the St Teresa who’d been famous for her humility and her attention to little things. ‘Grand,’ Cahal attributed to her also. ‘Grand altogether.’

To his disappointment, Spanish was spoken again. He was going with Minnie Fennelly, but no doubt about it this woman had the better of her. The two faces appeared side by side in his mind’s eye and there wasn’t a competition. He drove past the cottages beyond the bridge, the road twisting and turning all over the place after that. It said earlier on the radio there’d be showers but there wasn’t a trace of one, the October evening without a breeze, dusk beginning.

‘Not more than a mile,’ he said, not turning his head, but the Spanish was still going on. If they were planning to take photographs they mightn’t be lucky by the time they got there. With the trees, Pouldearg was a dark place at the best of times. He wondered if the Germans had scored yet. He’d have put money on the Germans if he’d had any to spare.

Before they reached their destination Cahal drew the car on to the verge where it was wide and looked dry. He could tell from the steering that there was trouble and found it in the front offside wheel, the tyre leaking at the valve. Five or six pounds it would have lost, he estimated.

‘It won’t take me a minute,’ he reassured his passengers, rummaging behind where they sat, among old newspapers and tools and empty paint tins, for the pump. He thought for a moment it mightn’t be there and wondered what he’d do if the spare tyre was flat, which sometimes it was if a car was a trade-in. But the pump was there and he gave the partially deflated tyre a couple of extra pounds to keep it going. He’d see how things were when they reached Pouldearg crossroads.

When they did, there wasn’t enough light for a photograph, but the two went up close to the Wayside Virgin, which was more lopsided than Cahal remembered it from the last time he’d driven by it, hardly longer than a year ago. The tyre had lost the extra pressure he’d pumped in and while they were occupied he began to change the wheel, having discovered that the spare tyre wasn’t flat. All the time he could hear them talking in Spanish, although their voices weren’t raised. When they returned to the car it was still jacked up and they had to wait for a while, standing on the road beside him, but they didn’t appear to mind.

He’d still catch most of the second half, Cahal said to himself when eventually he turned the car and began the journey back. You never knew how you were placed as regards how long you’d be, how long you’d have to wait for people while they poked about.

‘Was she all right for you?’ he asked them, turning on the headlights so that the potholes would show up.

They answered in Spanish, as if they had forgotten that it wouldn’t be any good. She’d fallen over a bit more, he said, but they didn’t understand. They brought up the man they’d met in the public house in Dublin. They kept repeating something, a gabble of English words that still appeared to be about getting married. In the end, it seemed to Cahal that this man had told them people received a marriage blessing when they came to Pouldearg as penitents.

‘Did you buy him drinks?’ he asked, but that wasn’t understood either.

They didn’t meet another car, nor even a bicycle until they were further down. He’d been lucky over the tyre: they could easily have said they wouldn’t pay if he’d had them stranded all night in the hills. They weren’t talking any more; when he looked in the mirror they were kissing, no more than shadows in the gloom, arms around one another.

It was then, just after they’d passed the dead trees, that the child ran out. She came out of the blue cottage and ran at the car. He’d heard of it before, the child on this road who ran out at cars. It had never happened to himself, he’d never even seen a child there any time he’d passed, but often it was mentioned. He felt the thud no more than a second after the headlights picked out the white dress by the wall and then the sudden movement of the child running out.

Cahal didn’t stop. In his mirror the road had gone dark again. He saw something white lying there but said to himself he had imagined it. In the back of the Cortina the embrace continued.

Sweat had broken on the palms of Cahal’s hands, on his back and his forehead. She’d thrown herself at the side of the car and his own door was what she’d made contact with. Her mother was the unmarried woman of that cottage, many the time he’d heard that said in the garage. Fitzie Gill had shown him damage to his wing and said the child must have had a stone in her hand. But usually there wasn’t any damage, and no one had ever mentioned damage to the child herself.

Bungalows announced the town, all of them lit up now. The Spanish began again, and he was asked if he could tell them what time the bus went to Galway. There was confusion because he thought they meant tonight, but then he understood it was the morning. He told them and when they paid him in Macey’s yard the man handed him a pencil and a notebook. He didn’t know what that was for, but they showed him, making gestures, and he wrote down the time of the bus. They shook hands with him before they went into the hotel.