William Trevor - Selected Stories

‘Perhaps consommé later on,’ she says. ‘And a cream cracker.’

‘You’re very good to me.’

‘Oh, now.’

Downstairs Zoë lights the gas-fire in the sitting-room and looks to see if there’s a morning film. Barefoot in the Park it is, about to begin. Quite suddenly then, without warning, she sees how the loose ends are. Everything is different, but nothing of course will ever be said. So good the little restaurant’s still there , the old flame writes. Just a line to thank you . So good it was to talk. So good to see him. So good of him to remember the Three Castles. Yet none of it is any good at all because Grace is not there to say, ‘Now tell me every single thing.’ Not there to say when there’s a nagging doubt, ‘My dear, what perfect nonsense!’ On her own in the seaside house she’ll not find an excuse again to suggest a quick lunch if he’d like to. He’ll not do so himself, since he never has. He’ll gladly feel his duty done at last.

The old flame bores him now, with her scent and her cigarettes and her cellophane butterflies. In her seaside house she knows her thank-you letter is the last, and the sea is grey and again it rains. One day, on her own, she’ll guess her friend was false. One day she’ll guess a sense of honour kept pretence alive.

Grace died. That’s all that happened, Zoë tells herself, so why should she forgive? ‘Why should I?’ she murmurs. ‘Why should I?’ Yet for a moment before she turns on Barefoot in the Park tears sting her eyelids. A trick of old age, she tells herself, and orders them away.

Faith

She was a difficult woman, had been a wilful child, a moody, recalcitrant girl given to flashes of temper; severity and suspicion came later. People didn’t always know what they were doing, Hester liked to point out, readily speaking her mind, which she did most often to her brother, Bartholomew. She was forty-two now, he three years younger. She hadn’t married, had never wanted to.

There was a history here: of Hester’s influence while the two grew up together in crowded accommodation above a breadshop in a respectable Dublin neighbourhood. Their father was a clerk in Yarruth’s timber yards, their mother took in sewing and crocheting. They were poor Protestants, modest behind trim net curtains in Maunder Street, pride taken in their religion, in being themselves. Her bounden duty, Hester called it, looking after Bartholomew.

When the time came, Bartholomew didn’t marry either. An intense, serious young man, newly ordained into the Church of Ireland, he loved Sally Carbery and was accepted when he proposed. Necessarily a lengthy one, the engagement weathered the delay, but on the eve of the wedding it fell apart, which was a disappointment Bartholomew did not recover from. Sally Carbery – spirited and humorous, a source of strength during their friendship, beautiful in her way – married a man in Jacob’s Biscuits.

Hester worked for the Gas Board, and gave that up to look after her father when he became a widower, suffering from Parkinson’s disease for the last nine years of his life. That was her way; it was her nature, people said, compensation for her brusque manner; her sacrifice was applauded. ‘We’ve always got on,’ Hester said on the evening of their father’s funeral. ‘You and I have, Bartholomew.’

He didn’t disagree, but knew that there was something missing in how his sister put this. They got on because, dutiful in turn, he saw to it that they did. Bartholomew’s delicate good looks – fair hair, blue eyes – made the most of a family likeness that was less pleasing in Hester, his lithe ranginess cumbersome in a woman. All in all, it seemed only right that there should be adjustment, that any efforts made in the question of getting on should be his, and without acknowledgement.

Bartholomew didn’t have a parish of his own. He assisted in one on the north side of the city, where Maunder Street was too: visiting the elderly, concerned with Youth Reach and Youth Action and the running of the Youth Centre, on Saturdays taking parties of children to ramble in the Dublin mountains or to swim in one of the northside’s swimming-pools. He and Hester shared the family possessions when it was clearly no longer practical to retain the rented accommodation above the breadshop; Bartholomew found a room in the parish where he worked; Hester looked about for one. She made enquiries at the Gas Board about returning to a position similar to the one she had filled in the past, but for the moment there was nothing. Then she discovered Oscarey.

It was a townland in the Wicklow mountains, remote and bleak, once distinguished by the thriving presence of Oscarey House, of which no trace now remained. But the church that late in the house’s existence had been built on the back avenue, for the convenience of the family and its followers, was still standing; and the estate’s scattering of dwellings – the houndsman’s and its yard and kennels, the gamekeeper’s, the estate agent’s pebble-dashed house – had undergone renovation and were all occupied. There was a Spar foodstore at Oscarey crossroads, an Esso petrol pump; letters could be posted a few miles away.

Bartholomew drove his sister to Oscarey when she asked him to. They went on a Monday, which was his free day, leaving early in the morning to avoid the Dublin traffic. He didn’t know the purpose of their journey, hadn’t yet been told, but Hester quite often didn’t reveal her intentions, and he knew that eventually she would. It didn’t occur to him to make the connection he might have.

‘There’s a man called Flewett,’ Hester said in the car, reading the name from her own handwriting on a scrap of paper. ‘He’ll tell us.’

‘What, though, Hester?’

She said then – a little, not much, not everything. The small church at Oscarey that had served a purpose in the past was being talked about again. A deprived Church of Ireland community, among it the descendants of indoor servants, gardeners and estate workers, was without a convenient means of worship. A consecrated building was mouldering through disuse.

They drove through Blessington, Bartholomew’s very old A-30 van – used mainly for his Saturday trips to the mountains – making a tinny sound he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t mention it but went on, hoping it was nothing much.

‘It came to me,’ Hester said.

‘Who’s Flewett, though?’

‘One of the people around.’

She didn’t say how she had heard about this man or offer further information about him.

‘We’ll see what Mr Flewett has to say,’ she said.

Conversation with Hester was often like that; Bartholomew was used to it. Details withheld or frugally proffered made the most of what was imparted, as if to imbue communication with greater interest. Strangers sometimes assumed this to be so, only to realize a little later that Hester was not in the least concerned with such pandering: it was simply a quirk - without a purpose – that caused her to complicate conversation in this manner. She didn’t know where it came from and did not ever wonder.

‘What d’you think?’ Bartholomew asked the man at the garage where he stopped for petrol, and the man said the tinny noise could be anything.

‘Would you rev the engine for me?’ he suggested, opening the bonnet when he’d finished at the petrol pump. ‘Give her the full throttle, sir,’ he instructed, and then, ‘D’you know what I’m going to tell you, sir? The old carburettor in this one’s a bit shook. Ease her down now, sir, till we’ll take a look.’

Bartholomew did so, then turned the engine off. As he understood it, the carburettor had loosened on its fixing. Adjusting a monkey wrench, the man said it would take two seconds to put right, and when it was done he wouldn’t charge for it, although Bartholomew pressed him to.