William Trevor - Death in Summer

4

Six days go by and then Thaddeus does what he feels he has to, having put it off, but now wanting to get it over. He has been given a time and a place, four o’clock in the Tea Cosy. He brings with him fifty pounds in notes.

The teashop is in the town where Mrs. Ferry was once the receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel. The Beech Trees has gone, and with it Mrs. Ferry’s onetime husband, whom she would settle for now. She lives alone, in a room above a confectioner’s. The Tea Cosy is in a busier street, five minutes away.

‘Bad Hat!’ Mrs. Ferry exclaims from where she sits when Thaddeus enters, lowering his head beneath the beam with a sign on it to warn him. Bad Hat! her Valentine message ran seventeen years ago, among others in a local paper. But good for his ever-loving Dot!

She has ordered tea, and a plate of cakes, which she was always partial to and used to say she shouldn’t be. She bulges out of a spotted yellow dress, a hat reminiscent of a turban hiding much of her henna hair, her lipstick a splash of crimson. Coloured beads lollop over double chins and reach an artificially deepened cleavage, exposed between mammoth breasts. There is no sign in this spectacle of the ill-health so regularly touched upon in Mrs. Ferry’s letters. Only her weight would seem to be a subject for a consulting room.

‘Hullo,’ Thaddeus greets his afternoon woman of long ago, recalling her underclothes on the back of a chair, the curtains pulled over. ‘Hullo, Dot.’

‘Well, dear, you haven’t changed. He’ll have put on a year or two, I said, but truth to tell you hardly have.’

He smiles, wiping away with his fingers the lipstick she has left on his cheek, which would have been his mouth if she’d had her way. She pours his tea, remarking that, after all, it wasn’t yesterday. She speaks in a hurried gabble, doing her best to be lighthearted. She offers Thaddeus the plate of cakes.

‘I have to explain,’ he interrupts when there’s a chance.

But she hurries on, as if fearful of what might be said. ‘We’ve had good times, dear. Don’t think I didn’t appreciate that. I lie alone in my little place, watching the light come at the curtains, and I think how good the times were. I haven’t been well, you know.’

‘You said. I’m sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked another living soul. I lie there remembering our times and I think there’s no one I can ask except my old Bad Hat.’

He wishes she wouldn’t call him that, but of course it is her right and once he didn’t mind. Thad dear, her letters have begun: that, also, he didn’t mind.

‘I’ve come over because of something that has happened. I didn’t send anything before-’

‘Shh now, dear.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He lowers his voice. ‘I didn’t send anything before because strictly speaking the money’s my wife’s. I didn’t feel I could.’ He pauses until her cup is raised, and hurries on while she sips her tea, spreading another red smudge on the china surface. ‘But then my wife came across one of your letters.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Careless herself now, Mrs. Ferry causes people to look their way. ‘Oh, my dear God!’

Thaddeus doesn’t give the details of how the letter came to light. ‘It upset her that you were in need. When she read about it she wanted you to have something.’

‘I don’t believe I follow this, dear.’

Thaddeus does not intend to disclose the fact of his widowhood, feeling that in the circumstances it would not be sensible to do so. He has respected Letitia’s wishes, he’ll send whatever is demanded in the future, but the consequences of divulging that he is again on his own are very much to be avoided.

‘My wife simply wanted to help you. She read your letter and was upset.’

‘I’m to blame for a commotion!’ is Mrs. Ferry’s response, declared in the same noisy manner.

‘No, no, of course you’re not.’

She shakes her head. A shock, she says; she nearly fainted. Her eyes seem smaller than they were a moment ago. Her mouth remains slightly open when she has finished speaking, the tip of her pink tongue revealed.

‘I wanted to explain, Dot. I’m very sorry you got a shock.’

‘I never meant harm, dear.’ Though stated more quietly, a degree of Mrs. Ferry’s natural perkiness has returned. ‘No one wants that. You believe me, dear, no harm was meant?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Another fact is, there was nothing any time I wrote to you that was an indiscretion. We have had our indiscretions, not that I regret them, not a single one. But nothing was written by me that could have offended a wife, for I said to myself I must not do that. I wrote when I was at my lowest. The first time I was at my lowest, the next time not so bad but still not able for things. I’m ailing through and through, to tell you the honest truth. Now that you’ve been kind enough to come over I can say that.’

She lives like this, Thaddeus finds himself reflecting. She writes men begging letters without threats, needling their guilt, sniffing out money. God knows how many overnight commercial travellers have benefited in the past at the Beech Trees. God knows how often the handwriting that slopes in all directions succeeds in eliciting assistance, with muttered oaths.

‘I have no money of my own, Dot.’

‘You never had, love.’

‘I think I tried to explain when you wrote the first time that it felt wrong to give you my wife’s money, but I don’t think I succeeded.’

‘Isn’t it strange how things pan out? I was well set up, married to a prosperous man, you hadn’t a bean. I didn’t want presents, it never mattered.’

She unlocked the door of Room Twenty when the chambermaids had gone home. He went up the back staircase and waited for her, and sometimes — if it was easy — she came with two drinks on a tray, gin and Martini. He used to smoke in those days, but she never let him in Room Twenty because the smell of cigarettes would be a give-away when the evening maid came on. She didn’t want talk in the hotel. She was particular about that.

‘I wouldn’t have written unless I was down.’

‘I know. I understand that.’

‘Do you, Thad? Do you really? Do you know what it is to be down?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And short when you’re getting on a bit? You weren’t much more than a boy when you were selling your garden produce. Oh, how I remember that!’

He filled the van with what he grew or picked from the fruit trees, and set off in the early morning. He supplied Fruit ‘n’ Flowers on the way and then the Beech Trees, and she was in and out of the kitchen. A grey A30 the van was, second-hand and hardly big enough.

‘I was always surprised, you know, you didn’t have ajob.’

‘It was a job of a kind.’

‘Oh, heavens, yes. Anyone could see you worked. I often wish we could turn the clock back, Thad. She’s younger, is she?’

‘A few years.’

‘I must have guessed it. You wouldn’t have written that.’

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

‘You only wrote back to me the once, dear.’

‘All I could have kept on saying was that the money wasn’t really mine to give away.’

‘Money, money! What a curse it is! Extraordinary, a wife not minding though. You have to say extraordinary, Thad?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Well, there you go, as they say these days.’

‘Yes.’

‘I hate them, really, these new expressions.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all right, you know. Except for being short I’m all right. I take pills. I’ve got a few things wrong inside, you know, but there you are. Worse at the moment is the heat. You relish the heat, Thad?’

‘Yes, actually I do.’

‘You’re weather-beaten. It suits you. I wonder if he’ll be weather-beaten? I said. He’s an outside man, I said, stands to reason it’ll show. D’you know what I’d like? I’d like to show you my little place.’