William Trevor: Death in Summer

‘Please, Thaddeus. She’s far from well.’

‘I doubt it’s true, you know, much of what she says about not being well.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be true? Poor creature, why shouldn’t she be alone and ill?’

In the dining-room, registering the exchanges through the door that is common to both rooms, Maidment learnt that Mrs. Ferry’s plea for assistance was also a reminder that she had repeatedly written before and not once received an answer. The poor woman was wretched with stomach ulcers and related suffering, came a further rebuke through the door panels. She called herself a charity case: afterwards Maidment particularly remembers that being said.

‘But, Letty, she would call herself anything to get money.’

‘And you have given her none? In all the years she mentions?’

‘I could not give Mrs. Ferry your money, which is what it would amount to. I could not do that, and I had none to spare before.’

‘Please give her something now.’

‘If you would like me to I shall.’

‘Please.’

In the dining-room Maidment nodded to himself. His perusal of Mrs. Ferry’s previous letters had not been confessed to his wife, whose disapproval could be biting when she put it into words. Eavesdropping Zenobia accepted, as conversation unavoidably overheard; the investigation of private correspondence, and poking about in drawers, she preferred to believe did not occur. So Maidment had kept to himself what he had long ago pieced together: that the woman who wrote the begging letters was guilty of the sin of profitable nostalgia; of resurrecting one or two good moments so that, in the circumstances as they were now, the past might be honoured with a cheque. The woman’s handwriting sprawled wildly, decorated with exclamation marks and underlining, Maidment recalled, listening again to the voices in the drawing-room.

‘Don’t laugh at her, Thaddeus.’

Although the keyhole of the connecting door contained no key, Maidment did not stoop to a more intimate witnessing of the scene. He did not see Thaddeus — in pale corduroy trousers, tweed jacket and tie — standing in front of the empty fire-place, nor observe the holding back of Letitia’s tears. The deep blue of her dress reflecting the dots of sapphire in her earrings, her fair hair plaited in a coil, she stood also, pressed into the corner by the door, as though her sympathy for Mrs. Ferry consigned her there. Her dog — a retriever she had found as a puppy, drowning in a ditch — was stretched out between the two sets of french windows, half an eye on the misty garden outside.

‘I’ll do whatever you say, Letty. This is too little a thing to disagree about.’

Maidment carried that plea to the kitchen. ‘If there’s going to be quarrelling between them,’ he gloomily predicted, ‘it’ll be the end of us.’

In retrospect, a few hours later, there is a harshness in the statement that passed unnoticed at the time. Phlegmatic and an optimist, Zenobia simply retorted that if he was talking about separation or divorce he was being altogether too pessimistic. Married couples disagreed, as they had observed both in a personal way and in their experience of other households. The infant born four and a half months ago in this one will become a child with characteristics and a nature of her own, an influence for stability and for good should such an influence be needed, which Zenobia doubted. Colouring her argument, she touched upon the occasion of the birth: cherry brandy poured in the kitchen at a quarter past eleven at night, she herself clapping her hands, then clasping them to give thanks, Mrs. Iveson in the house as the prospective grandmother, the midwife brisk and self-important, the January night damply mild. After the gloom of miscarrying in the past it had been the happiest of events and most certainly boded well.

‘Added to which they do not row at all, those two.’

When first they came to the house, before Maidment made his way through past and present correspondence, and listened in on the kitchen telephone when Zenobia’s back was turned, the Maidments’ impression was that Thaddeus Davenant’s wife had done well for herself. They had not known the house gone to rack and ruin, and did not then realize the circumstances of its rescue. Now they knew everything.

‘I’m only saying,’ Maidment defended himself. ‘I’m only telling what’s said.’

‘They’re suited. We both know that.’

Favouring black in clothes worn tightly, accentuating plumpness, Zenobia has soft hazel eyes in a soft face, her cheeks streaked like two good apples, her hair flecked with the grey her forty-nine years demand. In contrast, her husband is a hawk-faced man, dark-jowled and lankly made, his servant’s wear — black also — completing the priestly look he cultivates. Second to his servant’s curiosity, Maidment’s interest is the turf.

‘Their natures complement one another,’ Zenobia’s insistence firmly went on. ‘That is important.’

Leaving the kitchen with cloths and a tin of Mansion polish, Maidment did not pause to comment on that. Strengths and weaknesses were distributed to the marriage’s advantage, Zenobia’s view was, and neither party trespassed on ground that was already claimed: alone again in her particular domain she reflected on that, and saw the future bright.

‘Please go to her,’ Maidment heard, his cloths on the dining-room table, the lid taken from the polish tin. A hole-in-corner thing, he concluded, a long-ago affair his employer could hardly be blamed for not wishing to pick over.

‘Go to her? She doesn’t actually ask-’

‘Darling, she asks for reassurance and a little money. A dying woman who is alone, Thaddeus.’

‘She doesn’t actually say she’s dying.’

Heard by Maidment but not seen, the dog, called Rosie, yawned, then pushed herself on to her feet, slipping about on the polished boards with a scrabble of paws. She settled herself again and, while the two familiar voices continued, slept.

Thaddeus was patient and conciliatory. Quarrels were pointless; they did no good; nothing was ever gained. He had been careless, he was to blame. But even so this need not become more tiresome than it was already, and visiting Mrs. Ferry would certainly be as tiresome as anything he could imagine.

‘I’ll write, Letty. It’s all she wants. It was nineteen seventy-nine when I knew her. It would be awfully difficult, meeting again.’

Dot she’d been in 1979, not Mrs. Ferry, as somehow in Thaddeus’s thoughts she had since become. Receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel — two AA stars — she had married Ferry, who was its manager, sharing his duties when they returned from honeymooning. A little later she’d been unfaithful to him in Room Twenty. Airless and poky, with windows opening on to the hotel’s well, Room Twenty had been suitable for surreptitious afternoon love, being tucked away and quiet. ‘Two of a kind, dear,’ the husky voice came back to Thaddeus, the fleshy limbs, hair dyed a shade of henna. ‘Bad hats, bad news,’ Mrs. Ferry liked to whisper in Room Twenty, an older woman who’d been around, who had renamed the cocktail bar the Pink Lady and the dining-room The Chandeliers. She folded underclothes on to the one chair the room supplied and afterwards, putting them on again, often spoke about her husband, her voice gone slack, touched with disdain. ‘Tried going without it, dear, but it doesn’t work.’ His sandy moustache was what he tried to go without; he had a gammy leg as well. A likeable enough man in Thaddeus’s memory, who would presumably have left her years ago.

‘Please, Thaddeus.’

‘If you really want me to, of course I’ll go to see her.’ He smiled although he did not feel like smiling. It wasn’t necessary to visit the woman and he did not intend to. He wondered if the nature of the relationship had crossed Letitia’s mind, if even for a passing moment it had occurred to her that the woman she wished to see assisted had been his associate in passionate intimacy, that they had deceived a decent man, carelessly gratifying desire. Even after six years of marriage he didn’t know his wife well enough. She could have suspected everything or nothing: her tone gave no clue when next she spoke, only a freshness in it marking the end of the contretemps.