William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘She took advantage, Albert.’

He piles his own dishes on to her tray and waits for hers. One morning he didn’t come in and she thought he was dead. Out on the streets in the night hours, someone like him could easily be set on because he’s the way he is, because he’s different.

‘I’ll make a jelly,’ he says. ‘Greengage. For tomorrow.’ The door closes behind him and then she hears him beginning to wash up. After that he’ll go and have his evening rest. They told him down the platforms he must have his sleeps and he always does. She listens to the clatter of the dishes, then drops off for a moment, waking to hear his footsteps in the room above her. The day she managed the stairs when he was resting, his sleeping face was like an angel’s, the empty eyes closed over, lips parted a little. Everything in the room was tidy around him, the little decorations on the walls. Sometimes all she wishes for before she goes is to have his worries taken from him, to know he’ll be all right when she isn’t there to think about him. When she can’t move at all, which won’t be long now, she wouldn’t mind it if he washed her. He could bring the basin in and lift her nightdress off. She’d lie there with something else private between them, not anyone else’s business, like the upset over the girl isn’t.

7

Mahonia shoots shrivel, the elaeagnus is arrested. The climbing hydrangea droops, the leaves of the smoke shrubs have lost their sheen. Thaddeus’s spinach goes to seed, the potatoes he digs are small. The drought is worse than the drought of 197 6; the worst, so people interested in such matters say, for two hundred years. In the fields the sheep are fed hay, cattle are parched when streams dry up.

But the apple trees in Thaddeus’s garden are laden, the pear trees and the plum orchard. Gooseberries and redcurrants ripen before their time. Cosmos has grown high, its misty foliage heavy with purple flowers, and pink and mauve and white. Butterflies flap silently through the buddleia.

Beneath the catalpa tree, with her grandchild on a tartan rug beside her deckchair, Mrs. Iveson reads. Casting shadows on the pages of her book, lacy white panicles hang among the vast leaves, their scent delicate in the heat. On a cold grey morning in late December Mr. Charles set forth as usual, his letters stamped and sealed. Miss Amble greeted him, Mrs. Mace a moment later. To both he raised his hat. The plump housemaid did it, Mrs. Iveson’s thought is, before The Mystery of the Milestone slips from her fingers.

When you had collected seven transfers from seven tins of cocoa you sent away the seven pictures they made and received in return a statuette of Snow White. With a crust of bread clamped between her teeth, skinning and chopping two onions, Zenobia remembers that. She washes carrots and parsnips beneath a running tap, then trims the fat from a tenderloin of pork. Duplicates wouldn’t do. She had Sneezy twice and Happy four times and still had to go on collecting. Her father said you’d maybe drink forty gallons of cocoa to get it right. He declared the whole thing a disgrace, on a par with chain letters and brush salesmen at the door.

‘She has settled in,’ she hears, as from a distance, her husband admit. ‘I have to say you were right.’

Removing the bread from her mouth, she is startled: that does not come easily from him. He was certain there would be fireworks, unease at the very least. In spite of a loss two days ago at Ascot, he has given in gracefully; and Zenobia knows better than to gloat.

‘It’s early days yet, of course,’ she acknowledges, since that seems only fair.

‘She has come to accept what must be accepted.’

Maidment has inspected the newcomer’s correspondence. Letters are often left not yet completed on her dressing-table, all to her friend in Sussex, whose replies later tie up loose ends. At the kitchen table, replacing one of the lugs that hold the strap of his wristwatch, he agrees that the blood tie of the child has made the difference.

‘As you said yourself,’ he graciously repeats. His beaky features are bent close to his task, the spigot in the spring of the metal lug repeatedly slipping as he attempts to prise it home with the blade of a knife. He experiences neither frustration nor impatience. Sooner or later, he knows he will succeed. Mr. Nice Guy he should have gone for, but that is water under the bridge.

‘Whoever’s that?’ Zenobia exclaims when the jangle of the hall-door bell sounds.

Achieving success before this dies away, Maidment returns his watch to his wrist and goes to answer the summons.

Kneeling on a plastic fertilizer sack, scattering the seeds of his winter parsley in a shady corner, Thaddeus wonders if in these conditions they’ll germinate. Carefully, he waters, then places a sheet of glass on the four lengths of wood he has used to construct a square around what he has sown. Weeks will pass before the first green specks arrive, for if they do so at all they’ll come slowly, the dendritic formation following at that same slow pace.

The summer has settled into a pattern of its own. Its days go ordinarily by in a season that belongs to circumstance, time dawdling, tranquillity a balm. The constitution of the household, which prospectively he feared, seems right to Thaddeus now: faith kept with unexpressed wishes, as it was with a last request.

‘There’s that girl, sir,’ Maidment interrupts his thoughts, calling out, still some yards away. ‘The girl about her lost ring, sir.’

Thaddeus nods, remembering the girl, knowing what all this is about. Maidment knows too, having been asked to keep an eye out for a ring. It could have been hoovered up, he said at the time, but he believes that is most unlikely.

Thaddeus gathers together the tools he has used, folding the plastic sack as he moves towards his house. He leaves it, with fork and trowel, at the front steps, to take to the yard later.

‘If you ask me,’ Maidment remarks dismissively in the kitchen, ‘that ring never came into the house.’

The girl is after compensation, he suggests. Some devious way of claiming compensation, which nowadays is very much the fashion. Mingy little thing, he says.

She watches him feel with his hand under the sofa, crouched and stretching, then on his knees. He shakes his head when he stands up. He pulls the cushions out. All this has been done already, he says, but it’s better to be certain. No luck? he says when she has searched, herself.

When their hands touch on the sofa he gives no sign. She wonders if the scent of the perfume she put on is reaching him, Flowers of Egypt, that she came by when the saleswoman was maundering on about New Shade lip salve. She went back to EasiEyes for the smoky frames, and paid for having them changed, but she hasn’t seen him noticing that the frames are different from the ones she wore before. If he remarked on them she had it in mind to make him smile by saying she once tried contacts but they were like having shop windows stuck in. ‘I’m old enough to be your father,’ he might have said if anything had happened, if they stood up together and found themselves close. Sorrowing gets to you, he might have said, saying also that he shouldn’t have done that, that he got carried away. No, it’s all right, she had it in mind to reassure him. She knew, she understood.

They go upstairs. He pulls the curtains away from a window, looking down at the stair-carpet, explaining that unfortunately it would have been hoovered. She runs her fingers beneath an edge of it and then beneath another edge. Grey, she says again, a single grey stone, her mother’s, and adds that her mother settled in the outback of Australia.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I rather think we’re not going to find it.’