William Trevor - Death in Summer

She stands beside him by the nursery door. The house feels empty, although she knows it isn’t. It’s quiet, as it was before, and again the way it seemed the first evening she pushed open the green door. An older sister brought her up, she says, and when he smiles, but doesn’t ask about that, she adds that her older sister went off years ago.

‘To Australia?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Look wherever you like in here.’

Her mother writes every week, she says. Every Tuesday, sometimes a Wednesday, there’s a newsy letter. She’d like to travel, she says.

He smiles and nods. He pulls an armchair to one side in order to look under it. ‘Nanny’s armchair,’ the old grandmother said that day. She helps him push it back again.

‘It’s a lovely nursery, Mr. Davenant.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘You don’t often see a picture done like that. On a floor.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you do.’

‘Were you a child in this house too?’

‘Well, yes, I was.’

‘It’s a lovely house. The garden’s lovely.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Pettie smiles, looking up at his face. There is a star, she can’t remember who it is, with flecks of grey in his hair and those same pale eyes. She can see him clearly, in evening dress and nonchalant, leading a woman in a gown to a restaurant table, the waiter bowing and scraping, an orchestra.

‘You remind me of someone, Mr. Davenant.’

‘Do I?’

She dared to say it because he’s still unaware, nothing in his voice except the softness she feels caressed by. He does not know that everything is special as they stand here now. He does not know that comfort and consolation in his grieving can come from somewhere.

‘A star,’ she says.

‘Star?’

‘Who you remind me of.’

He shakes his head. She wants to tell him she can hear the music of an orchestra, the people in that restaurant moving on to the dance-floor. She wants a conversation to begin, to tell him that this is her kind of music, to ask him if he likes the smoky frames, if the scent of Egyptian flowers is reaching him, if perfume on a girl is what he likes. Five times in all he has said he’s sorry, including on the phone. When first she was alone with him, when the grandmother was out of the room, she found herself trembling and for a moment had to grip the sofa cover. It was then she knew something was up and ever since she has been a different person, just thinking about him. She wants to say that. She wants to say that they have stood together in the firelight with glasses of sherry, that he has put his arms around her and held her to him. She wants to share it with him, but of course there can’t be that.

‘A lot of children,’ she says, ‘must have played on that picture. I can just see them.’

‘Yes.’

‘I love children.’

‘I’m sorry we weren’t able to offer you the position here.’

‘I know you’re sorry, Mr. Davenant.’

‘It is a difficult time for us. What we decided is best, I think.’

The knee that’s nearer to him touches some part of his leg when she slightly moves. ‘I would give you the world, Pettie,’ her Sunday uncle used to whisper, the first to call her by that name. His loving little princess, he whispered, the only one there would ever be for him. It was Eric who said he was old enough to be her father, and then said he was busy now.

‘I thought I’d got the job. When you was telling me the directions to get here I thought it was all right.’

‘Oh, no, no.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She laughs, pretending it doesn’t. It was silly of her to make that presumption. When she rang the doorbell that afternoon she kept thinking she was coming home at last, and that was silly too. She laughs again, telling him that, but he’s as solemn as he was before.

‘Well, I’m afraid we haven’t found your ring.’

He has been standing back to let her pass through the doorway in front of him, but now he doesn’t any more. He goes first and she follows on the landing, their moment shattered. Other doors are open that were closed when she was here before, a bedroom and then another bedroom.

‘It doesn’t matter about the ring.’

‘You’ve had a journey for nothing.’

‘No, not for nothing.’

He just walks on, not asking what that implies. She sees his ties, striped and dotted, on a closet rail. A dressing-table is between two bay windows, a trouser-press. Hairbrushes are by a looking-glass on a pedestal. Curtains and wallpaper are a match, huge flowers like roses. It is just a glimpse, then there are the staircase pictures — paintings of different people, men and women, a picture of the house long ago, farm workers drinking in a harvest field.

‘Oh, that is nice.’ She stops and he stops also. ‘Everything is lovely here.’

She wants them to stand there for a moment longer, as they stood together in the nursery, but he goes on, one hand on the banister, his footsteps hardly making a sound. He would have worn every one of those ties, he would have knotted them and straightened them in that mirror. Every day, every morning and maybe again later, his brushes touch his hair. He folds away his clothes, he lies asleep in that room.

‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ she says, and wants to tell him that she has looked into the garden from the door in the wall, that she has come back and come back again, that she knows about the summer-house and about the gardener’s bayonet wound, that she knows his wife’s name was Letitia, that she knows his wife loved music.

‘Thank you.’

They are in the hall; the dog is waiting there. It sounds strange, thanking her because she’s sorry. He keeps on moving, touching the dog’s head as he passes, crossing the hall to the front door. She wants to say she wouldn’t feel jealous of his wife, or be against her, that there is nothing like that.

‘I cried on the lane, thinking about your wife.’

He looks away, nodding as he opens the front door. The dog comes up to her, knowing her, wagging its tail.

‘I went into the graveyard.’

He frowns, just slightly, then he nods again, standing by the open door.

‘You said that day it was an accident on the road.’

‘My wife was knocked off her bicycle.’

‘I thought she might have been in a car.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know why I thought that.’

‘She had gone to fetch some pullets. She looked behind her for a moment, maybe because the box on her carrier felt unsteady. That’s what the driver saw. There’s a bend on the hill she was going down.’

‘I don’t think I know pullets.’

‘Young hens.’

She has saddened him; she has made him more sombre than he was. She didn’t mean to. She should smile, and take his fingers from the door edge and close the door again, pressing out the ugly sunlight. She should lean against it and be cheerful, telling him she has her own name for his baby: Georgina Belle.

‘Would you mind if I just looked once again in that room?’

‘Of course not.’

He doesn’t come with her, which she hoped he would. From the windows she can see the old woman in her deckchair beneath the tree, the baby on the patterned rug. In the room the photograph is still there, among the glass paperweights. Petals have fallen from a vase of flowers. In all her life she has never hated anyone as much as she hates the old woman: suddenly, Pettie knows that. She stands in the centre of the room thinking it, not looking for anything, since there is nothing to look for.

‘No luck?’ he says in the hall.

‘No.’

‘I don’t think you were in the conservatory that afternoon?’

He indicates it, to his left. Beyond a glass door, framed in white, rows of orange-coloured pots have different kinds of flowers in them, pink and yellow, shades of blue. Green foliage trails all over the slanted glass, two wicker chairs with cushions on them have a wicker table to match.