William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘Best left if there isn’t work there, Pettie.’

‘Left? How could you leave it?’

‘Won’t do you no good, Pettie. That place.’

She reaches for her cigarette, knocking off the ash that has accumulated at the tip. You’re nearly at the gateless pillars when you take the path through the field, she says, the fir trees on your right at first. Every time the dog comes back to the house in the car it gives a bark, she says. First thing when it gets out, then again if the car comes back and it’s not in it. Other times it don’t bark at all.

‘You take care with a dog, Pettie.’

‘D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Albert?’

‘You get a bite off a dog, you’re in trouble. A woman got a bite off a dog that came over the wall — ’

‘I’m talking about something else.’

Albert nods. He knew she was, he says; it’s just that any dog can be vicious. He read about the woman in the paper, stitches in her neck. He rubs the surface of the table with a finger, drawing a shape that isn’t visible on it. He went in to ask at the Marmite factory, he says. He went to ask if there was anything for a girl, only they didn’t have anything at present. He made enquiries in the KP, in the dairy yard, down the Underground. He heard they were looking for machinists up Chadwell way, but when he went in they said they weren’t.

‘Yeah,’ she says.

‘You eat your doughnut, Pettie.’

She picks her mug up and goes to get more coffee. Albert watches her, her thin legs beneath the denim skirt, her high heels clonking on the tiled floor. When first they ran away, when they were in the seed place, she said what she wanted was to get work in a store. Someone had left two car seats in a glasshouse and put corrugated up where the glass had gone. Stone was still on pallets around a rusting weighing-machine at one end, paving stones, quarry stones. Spreading out rolls of plant-sacking to lie down on, and fixing up shelving they found to keep the rain out where more glass had been broken, they used to talk about the work they’d try for when they had somewhere better to live. Pettie always said a store.

‘You try the stores again?’ he asks when she comes back. ’You been round them at all?’

She doesn’t answer, stirring her coffee. He heard the red-haired man saying the T-shirt suited her, but she didn’t bother with that either. She tastes her coffee and breaks a bit off her doughnut, the fat on it no longer glistening because it’s cold. She says she gave up the stores yonks ago. Same’s she gave up the idea of getting office skills. Same’s she gave up trying to get work at the swimming-baths.

‘If there’s a vacancy at the Marmite, you’d go for it, Pettie? The woman said keep in touch.’

Yeah, great, she says, but he knows she doesn’t mean it. He tries for a distraction, drawing attention to Air India going over. Always at this time, he reminds Pettie, smiling at her, twenty to eleven. No way that’s anything but Air India.

‘Rosie the dog’s called.’

His smile remains when he shakes his head. ‘Won’t do no good, Pettie.’

‘I put flowers on the grave.’ She wipes a smear of jam from around her lips. ‘The grandmother’s beyond it.’

‘You still all right for the rent, Pettie?’

She doesn’t answer, and he explains that Mrs. Biddle won’t be put upon. In case she has forgotten, he mentions that. He has known it before, he says, this state she’s got into, having feelings for this man. It’s the same thing happening all over again.

‘It’s not the same. It’s like you’re waiting for something and then it happens. It’s like it’s meant, Letitia gone, then the advertisement.’

‘I know what you mean, Pettie.’

‘You hear her voice, you know it’s meant.’

‘It’s only you wouldn’t want to lose the room.’

She doesn’t look at him, she doesn’t care. Despair comes as a hollowness in Albert’s stomach, a cavity of dull, unfeeling pain. Within a week of losing her room she’ll be up Wharfdale.

‘The grandmother falls asleep,’ she says. ‘I seen her at it.’

The receiver is put down, and Pettie visualizes it on the table in the hall, where she noticed a telephone while she sat there waiting. Clearly she recalls the dark panelling in the hall, the half-open door of the dining-room, the sluggish tick of the clock.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, coming back when she is beginning to think that maybe he won’t, that maybe he hasn’t understood. ‘I’ve asked, but no ring has been found.’

‘I think maybe where I was sitting. On that settee. I think maybe it slipped under a cushion. A finger-ring,’ she says.

Again the receiver is placed on the table’s surface, more of a rustle than a thud, as if his hand is partly over the mouthpiece as he lays it there. There are his footsteps moving away, and then there are different, distant sounds. She puts another coin in the slot. She lights a cigarette. She couldn’t stop smoking after she went back to the Floor Coverings place with the tie she had acquired, and the book about tennis stars because he’d said he liked to watch the tennis. ‘Oh, Eric’s gone,’ they said, putting an end to what hadn’t yet begun. She stood there looking at them and they asked her if she was all right. How could she search for him? she thought, and yet she trailed from store to store.

‘No, nothing there, I’m afraid.’

His voice is as it was when first she heard it, when he gave her directions, on the telephone also. It’s soft, just a little different from what it is when she hears it in the garden or as it was at the interview. But not a whisper; every word is clear. Again he says he’s sorry.

‘I’ve pulled the cushions out,’ he says.

She wonders if settee is right. Couch she might have said, but it wasn’t called that when she was there, and she remembers now that the grandmother said sofa. Finger-ring was Miss Rapp’s word. ‘Grey soapstone,’ Miss Rapp said when someone asked. ‘Mother’s grey soapstone.’ Just say a ring and it could be a curtain ring or something for an ear.

‘No, sentimental only,’ she says when he asks if it’s valuable. She must have fiddled with it, nervous because of the interview, she says, because she wanted the position so. She must have slipped it up and down her finger. She only noticed afterwards, in the train.

‘I didn’t like to bother you before, sir. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, a time like this for you. But then I thought that’s silly.’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’

‘I was the last girl that came on the Friday. I think you remarked I was the last.’

‘If you could let me have a phone number or an address we’ll let you know if your ring is found.’

There are twenty pence left, registered on the screen. She has another coin ready in case it’s necessary, a fifty. She wonders if he’s wearing his fawn shirt and light-coloured trousers, the brown leather shoes that could do with a shine. He doesn’t wear a chain or anything, nothing on the wrist or at the neck.

‘D’you think I could come out, Mr. Davenant? Could I look on the driveway in case it slipped off there?’

He doesn’t say anything and for a moment she thinks the money has run out, that they have been cut off. But the screen says 16p. Once he had other shoes on in the garden, canvas, light-coloured like his trousers.

‘I’m afraid it’s a little like a needle in a haystack.’

She can feel his concern, as she did when first she said she’d lost something. Thaddeus suits his voice as well as his appearance. It suits an older man. When you get used to it you realize he couldn’t be called anything else.

‘Maybe it’s silver, or only silver-coloured. The gem’s a soapstone. Grey.’