William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘No, I never did.’

‘You can’t not bring a wife, though. You let her in, eh?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’d dearly love to know what she’s like. A wife that’d pay good money to an erring lady is never usual, Thad.’

‘Look -’

‘I understand, dear. Silly to be curious.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’d never bother you, Thad. I’d never be a leech.’

She pours more gin and tries to fill his glass as well, but he puts his hand over the top of it. Her husband’s in Lytham St. Annes, she says, the brass buttons of his blazer still smart, although of course the blazer would be a different one these days, but she can see him in it and she often does, navy blue as ever it was, pen and propelling pencil in the inside pocket, the neat knot of his Paisley tie.

‘How well I knew him, Thad!’

‘Yes.’

‘Not for me the past’s been buried. Not long ago or any time, unfortunately.’

Tears run through the powder on her face, thin rivulets wreaking minor havoc. She promised herself she wouldn’t, she cries with shrill determination. She swore before he came that not a single tear would fall. ‘Bad Hat,’ she murmurs, trying for a smile, forcing out a laugh instead.

‘My own Bad Hat.’

‘I hope it’ll be a help.’ He nods towards the bamboo table, the notes still where he placed them.

‘I have my pride, dear.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘She’s a — what’s her name, Thad?’

‘Letitia.’

‘That’s lovely, dear. A younger wife, no more than a girl, is she? And kiddies too?’

‘I have a daughter.’

‘I’m truly glad for you. A Sagittarian, Letitia is?’

‘A what?’

‘I thought you said a Sagittarian. When’s Letitia’s birthday, dear?’

‘May.’

‘More like a Gemini, I’d say. And what’s the little daughter called, dear?’

‘Georgina.’

‘Five? Six?’

‘Georgina’ll be six months in a few weeks.’

‘Capricorn, I shouldn’t wonder. And you’re Aquarius yourself, as I remember.’

‘I must go, Dot.’

‘Remember, I’d say you were always going? A shadow flitting?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

He touches a cheek with his lips and feels it damp. A hand grasps one of his, her body presses, thighs and knees, mouth searching, and suddenly her tongue. The rim of the glass she still holds is sharp on his stomach, its contents spilling into his shirt.

‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry!’

She fusses with a handkerchief, dabbing him with it. He can’t go yet, she insists, and disappears behind the screen. She runs a tap and squirts out washing-up liquid. It doesn’t matter, Thaddeus protests, but she says it does, wiping him with a soapy cloth.

‘Whatever’ll she say? Whatever’ll she think you’ve been up to, dear?’

‘It’s all right. Please don’t worry.’

‘Be honest with me, Thad: she didn’t think harassment when she read the letter?’

‘Harassment?’

‘It’s what they call it these days. Privacy invaded when all there’s been is a few letters. You tell her no harm meant. You tell her that?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Forgive me for all this kerfuffle, dear.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You won’t forget old Dot?’

‘Of course I won’t.’

He looks back from the door before he goes. The wet cloth is on the bed beside her, she has poured herself another drink. She hugs her teddybear, trying to smile again. She raises her glass to him.

‘I loved you all over again this afternoon, Thad.’

He smiles away this protestation, shaking his head. In the past she wasn’t a drunk. She held the aces, as she used to say; she could have had anyone. Brash and shiny, irresistible on a barstool, or suddenly in the kitchen when he delivered what the chef she still keeps up with had ordered, there was an extraordinary excitement about her until she threw him over for an insurance salesman. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ she demanded, accusation in her tone, and he was taken aback.

‘Goodbye, Dot.’

She waves a hand, then turns her face away, seeming overcome. He doesn’t know why, just for a moment, he wants to tell her he has been widowed, that the wife she is jealous of died because she was concerned about chickens in a wooden box, that no arrogance or self-regard was smacked down by so absurd a death, only gentle modesty. In that same moment there is an urge that almost has its way: to connect past and present, to confess he could not love a girl because that is how he is, to throw in that he loves his child, a circumstance that still bewilders him. But nothing more is said.

Within minutes she’ll be asleep, he guesses as he descends the narrow stairway. Thrown down on her bed, the smell of gin cloying on her breath, she’ll drift through inebriated slumber and wake when her bed-sitting room is shadowy with twilight. A friend is what she needs, a friend from the present, not the past, some man to interest her in his hobbies, old coins or mill-wheels or choral singing. A man because she is a man’s woman. A man to whom she might give what she has always wasted, her generous muddle of devotion and respect.

Beside Thaddeus in the car, Rosie’s eyes are closed, her jaw propped on the edge of the passenger seat. He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers through her soft mane. She’s company in a car, she likes being with him. ‘Look!’ Letitia exclaimed the day she brought her back, and he thought to himself this flea-infested, mangy animal will be a nuisance and an expense. Better to have left the creature to find her own way out of her misery, he wanted to say, but instead said nothing.

With only a line of pylons breaking his horizon, he drives as slowly as he always does. He bought his snub-nosed Saab for a few hundred pounds when the big end went in the grey van Mrs. Ferry remembers. ‘That jalopy’ll go on for ever,’ the man who sold it to him promised; eighty-seven thousand four hundred, the odometer registers now. Before the grey van there was his father’s Aston Martin, which dated back to 1931, which of all his father’s possessions his mother was most adamant they should not sell. ‘We keep your father always. We see him in his things. We go to your father’s church.’ And every Sunday they did, walking there even when it rained. Twice a year Father Rzadiewicz drove her to Mass and afterwards played cards with her in the conservatory or the drawing-room she’d allowed to become tawdry, the old priest wearing his black mittens even in summer. The Aston Martin gave up on the road one day and had to be towed away, the repair that was necessary too expensive even to contemplate.

He was not able to love the bursar’s daughter when he was still fifteen, although above all else he wanted to. He tried to say he did on all their walks, and in the trunk loft, his blazer flung down on dusty floorboards, sunlight from a roof window warming her expectant face, her brown hair soft in his fingers. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ So very crossly that was demanded in Room Twenty, and elsewhere also. Disappointed in the end, would Letitia, too, have protested that passion wasn’t enough in return for so much more?

Held up behind a lorry loaded with steel girders, an impatient sports car flashes its headlights. The lorry driver takes no notice, neither hurrying nor drawing in, and the lights are flashed again. Thaddeus turns off the main road, into the lanes.

Approaching the gateless pillars at the entrance to his house, he glimpses for an instant a flash of something white and blue — a child, it seems like, hurrying on a little used right-of-way through the fields. Even in the distance there is a familiar look about the figure, but Thaddeus does not pause to wonder why that is.