William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘Well, I’m sorry to say we haven’t found it.’

‘I’d have a look along the lane I walked on. All right to do that, Mr. Davenant?’

‘Of course it is. And if you do, please come back here and see for yourself.’

For a moment Pettie cannot speak. In the silence she hears his breathing and knows everything is different because he has said that. No two people could have more in common than a baby: Georgina Belle, and the long days of his bereavement becoming shorter, time the healer. In the silence she can feel the closeness again, like there was when he held his hand out, the moment their hands touched. Like when she looked at the photograph among the flowery paperweights, when he saw her looking and didn’t have to say anything.

‘I’ll come,’ she says, and asks him when she should.

‘I never wanted her here.’

‘It’s only temporary, Mrs. Biddle. Pettie’s down on her luck, but that’s just for the moment. Pettie’ll walk in with news of a job and it’ll be like it used to be.’

‘She’ll get up on her legs and go is what she’ll do.’

Albert mentions the Dowlers. He explains that he has looked up Dowler Drains in the telephone directory, 21A Side Street. No way the Dowlers won’t take Pettie back when he puts it to them.

‘Pettie’s got into a muddle, Mrs. Biddle.’

‘The time I woke up she was standing there with a camel in her hand.’

‘Pettie was only looking at the camel, Mrs. Biddle.’

‘She could look at it on the mantelpiece, nothing stopping her. She could stand there looking at it all day, only she never come in when I’m lying awake. Creeping about the place, that girl’d get you into an early grave. She was nicking that camel. She’d nick the whole display, give her a chance.’

‘Soon’s she hears no problem with the Dowlers she’ll be OK.’

‘You have a room, you pay for it.’

‘It’s only I’m worried what’ll happen to her.’ Albert mentions Bev gone missing and Marti Spinks and Ange up Wharfdale. He mentions Joey Ells.

‘You told me about Joey Ells. We’re talking about paying the rent.’

‘If the chutes wasn’t clogged, there’d have been water in that tank. Could’ve been she was lying there drowned.’

Propped up on her pillow, the backs of her hands cool at last after the day’s heat, Mrs. Biddle quotes thirty-six pounds as the sum due to her. It isn’t much to pay for getting rid of a girl you didn’t want to have near you in the first place, but she refrains from saying so.

‘Joey Ells can’t hardly walk ever since.’

‘You told me, Albert. It lowers me to hear about Joey Ells. I’m low enough without hearing about Joey Ells all over the place.’

The hot weather brings out a testiness in Mrs. Biddle. All day long, wafting in through her open windows, the comments of the pedestrians on the pavement outside have had to do with the unabating heat. A drought is spreading throughout the country, the television News has three times informed her. Even though it’s gone eight and the evening cool has come, grown men go by in shorts.

‘She can creep about somewhere else. You tell her that from me, Albert. You tell her if she paid what’s owing ten times over she’s not coming back to that room. Par for the course, this is.’

‘I’d call in at the Dowlers’ tonight.’

‘That girl ain’t coming back here.’

He’ll call in at the Dowlers’ all the same, he says. His smile has gone; his eyes are dull. There isn’t often any kind of disagreement between them. In a flat voice he asks:

‘You got an appetite now the warmth’s gone? You fancy pilchards?’

She says she would and he goes to open a tin, leaving the door open because she likes to hear him in the kitchen. Smells waft in and she likes that too. ‘Make us a bit of toast?’ she calls out, and he says he will.

Extraordinary, that he’d be mixed up with a girl who’d sweet-talk her way into a bed-ridden woman’s house. All you have’s your house, the view from the window, folk going by. You can’t be expected to take in all and sundry. ‘Lovely animals,’ was what the girl said when she was caught with the camel.

‘All right then, Albert?’

He calls back, saying he is. She tries the television, but all that happens is snow coming down. She turns it off and watches a woman across the street sweeping the pavement in front of her door. He’s far from all right, with that girl affecting him, that Joey Ells coming up the way she always does. The last few weeks he’s not been himself by a long chalk.

The woman across the street leans on her brush, talking to a gas man. A car turns into the terrace and West Indian people get out of it, a man laughing, a girl with a sleeping baby. She can smell the toast now. When he comes in with the meal she’ll soothe him. They had to have the upset, but it’s behind them now. She’ll try to get it to him that they’ll be like they used to be.

‘Television’s gone on the blink again,’ she says when he comes back, not wanting to rush in with the other immediately. His arms are tense, carrying the tray in the careful way he has, clutching it tightly. When he pushes the door closed with his elbow she says that the upset’s over and done with, that she had to put her foot down. She advises him to put the girl behind him, same’s he should that Joey Ells. ‘You forget them bad things, Albert. There’s no one can look after me better’n you do. No one ever did.’

He places the tray on the bedclothes the way she likes him to do, not too far down, so that she doesn’t have to sit up more.

‘You having enough there, Albert? You make more toast if you want to.’

‘No, I’ve enough.’

‘You don’t want to starve yourself. You take what you want.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘I like a pilchard, Albert.’

She brings in Bolton then, reminded by the fish. Tomkins Avenue, Number Seventeen, and Harvey Clegg put the breakfast herrings down the armchair. Nineteen forty-nine it would have been.

‘A Mrs. Frist that landlady was, thin little woman, sharp’s a tooth. Couldn’t stand her, Harvey couldn’t, and the herrings was off. Stank the house out inside of a day and she knew, of course. She said she’d have the law on him.’

He wags his head; she can tell he’s interested. He’s interested in everything, he likes to hear. She takes a mouthful of tea, washing bits of pilchard from under her teeth, then settling the teeth back into place.

‘He was always up to something, that Harvey Clegg. The time he brought the Widow Twanky into Little Red Riding Hood you’d have laughed your head off. “Next for shaving, the Widow Twanky!” he shouted out when Red Riding Hood’d just said what big eyes. Not a pick of sense it made, but they roared.’

His head is cocked to one side a bit, as it is when he listens for his planes, but all there is to hear is the distant traffic in Bride Street. He finishes his pilchards, always quick with his food. He turns the television on, then goes behind it.

‘You getting a picture now?’

There’s sexual intercourse, which is on constantly these days. Either that or people at death’s door in a Casualty. Or it’s the female who reads out letters and winks at you, some kind of tic she has.

‘That OK now, Mrs. Biddle?’

She changes the channel, pressing the numbers on the remote control. Blood spatters a wall and drips over a vase of flowers. A boot is kicking the stomach out of a body on the ground.

He goes on fiddling, then comes round to look himself, and she says that’s OK now, they can turn it off. He does so and the picture disappears, taking with it another thump of the boot, and frenzied music that is beginning to give her a headache. On the street outside an old man goes by, unkempt and bleary-eyed in the gathering dusk.