William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘That’s a beautiful place, isn’t it?’

‘You didn’t go in there, though, that day?’

‘No, I wasn’t in there.’

‘If we had a number to contact you on we could let you know if your ring turns up.’

‘I put flowers on the grave, Mr. Davenant.’

‘What?’

‘I put flowers on your wife’s grave.’

He doesn’t speak for a moment. Again he frowns a little, which is understandable. He says:

‘We came to a decision about a nanny. There isn’t a vacancy for one any more.’

‘You said.’ She waits for a moment, sorting out the words in her head, getting them right. ‘I was brought up by a grandmother, Mr. Davenant. She never managed.’

‘I thought — ’

‘That was before. My sister came before. My nan was never up to it is what I’m saying.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t entirely follow this.’

‘There were accidents, like. Any old woman’d get dozy. An old woman drops off in the sun. Anything like that.’

‘There really isn’t a vacancy — ’

‘It don’t matter about the vacancy, Mr. Davenant. I didn’t come out about the vacancy. I didn’t put the flowers on because I thought you’d change your mind. The flowers was different. The heatwave killed the others, they was a sorry sight.’

‘If we find your ring -’

‘It doesn’t matter about the ring. The ring’s the least of it.’

‘Even so, if ever we should find it we’d want you to have it back.’

He has opened the door as wide as it will go now. Although he’s tall there’s a slightness about him, a delicacy about his hands and slender wrists, the top button of his shirt undone beneath the grey knot of his tie. A fine silver chain is what she’d like to give him, without a medallion, nothing flash.

‘It’s terrible, what happened,’ she says.

‘What’s terrible?’

‘Your wife.’

He looks away. He mentions the ring again and she says again that it doesn’t matter. It could have dropped off in the garden, she says, but he doesn’t suggest they should look for it there. In a minute, in less than a minute more likely, she’ll have gone, passed out of his company, everything over.

When her tears begin to come she looks away herself, not wanting him to see. But he notices, as she should have known he would, being the kind that does.

‘Look, I’m awfully sorry.’

He might offer her his handkerchief, as she saw once, in a film it probably was. When he doesn’t she roots for a tissue, but doesn’t find one. He says he’ll keep an eye out in the garden.

‘Unless you’d like to look yourself.’

She shakes her head. She wants to say that all the time she has been in his house she has longed to tell him there is no ring and never was, to begin at the beginning, the afternoon when they were first alone. She wants to go to him in the silence that has come, to reach out and put a hand on his arm.

‘Just flowers growing wild,’ she says instead, since he has not denied that it is terrible about his wife. ‘I put them in a jam-pot.’

Inspector Ogle prowled about, not knowing where to begin. Sir Hector had been drinking heavily that night, of that there was not the slightest doubt. He had ‘emptied a bottle’ according to the landlord. There seemed little doubt that he’d been drunk when he was murdered, that he was only blearily aware of his assailant’s purpose. Ogle pondered, his long face further lengthened in concentration…

Mrs. Iveson ponders too. The plump housemaid has had a past, may even have been illegitimately born to Sir Hector Greystiff. There was a reference earlier that suggested that, she can’t remember what.

The girl who lost her ring comes down the front-door steps and slowly crosses the tarmac. Something about her movements suggests that the ring has not been found. Mrs. Iveson turns back a page of The Mystery of the Milestone and begins it again before glancing up. The girl on the tarmac looks towards her for a moment, stands still and stares, and then goes on.

Maidment keeps the hall door open for a while in an effort to expel the oppressive odour of Flowers of Egypt.

‘High and low they went,’ he comments crossly in the kitchen. ‘I could have told them.’

‘Precious to the girl, it probably is.’

‘No ring was lost in this house.’

‘You’d have noticed it, of course.’

‘The song and dance, it could have been the Crown Jewels.’

With that, the visit passes without further interest into the couple’s memory, and other matters are spoken of.

‘She was hoping to come here,’ Thaddeus says on the lawn beneath the catalpa tree, ‘even though we said no.’

Briefly that is wondered about, bewilderment silencing what might be said. Then in the garden, too, interest in the visit recedes and finally dissipates, the visitor forgotten.

8

Cow parsley is high in the hedgerows, foxgloves decorate the verges. Joe Minching said he worked the farms once, moving from place to place, all over the country. Silage-making and harvesting, lifting potatoes.

She walks slowly, going nowhere. She doesn’t know what the crops on either side of her are, barley or wheat or oats, undisturbed on a breezeless day. There are fields of peas, and new green plants sprouting in the dry earth. A tractor is working somewhere, a low hum reaching her over flat landscape that’s varied only by what is grown.

‘I feel for you,’ she whispered, close to him when she’d said about putting the flowers in the jam-pot. ‘I feel for you,’ she said again. He gave a kind of shrug, and she knew he thought she meant because he had been left a widower.

The sun is hot on her head and the back of her neck, a white glare in her eyes. Lost in the network of lanes, she is deep in the countryside now. She picks peas and eats them, sitting in the shade at the edge of a field.

He went down on his hands and knees; with a poignancy that softens her distress, she remembers that too. He stood by that nursery door and a beam of sunlight slanted across the room and lit up his pale eyes. ‘We’d supply the uniform, of course,’ he said the first time, on the phone. She could be with him now as he had wanted her to be, as she would be if there hadn’t been an old woman’s interference. Over and over again he said he was sorry.

The disappointment fills you and then empties; nothing’s left except what might have been, what should be still. ‘Oh yes, my dear’: just for her there was that murmur on a Sunday afternoon, special and only for her. ‘Oh yes, my princess,’ and no one ever heard. On the side of his cheek the birthmark was shaped like a crescent moon and once she touched it.

She slips peas from another pod, then throws them away. ‘The day will come I’ll give you anything you want.’ He had to come near, his breath warm on her cheek. ‘Everything I have, darling, when I take you away with me.’ A pencil-sharpener that was a globe of the world it was the first time, a Minnie Mouse watch later on. ‘I never mind,’ she said, looking away while she did what he wanted her to do, not wanting to see but still not minding. He didn’t take to any of the others because only she was affectionate, because she said all sorts of things to him, how she liked being with him, how she’d be awake and think about him. She didn’t mind that he was corpulent, the word Miss Rapp used when she noticed him going by in the downstairs passage once. She didn’t mind anything about him because he meant it when he called her his princess and said he was her lonely king. Because he lived alone that was, in a house he’d bring her to one day, a house that was warm and dim, with a long back garden, aubrietia in his rockery, and once he brought a sprig to show her what aubrietia was. ‘Wife and kiddies,’ Joe Minching contradicted, and she said no. ‘Pull the other one,’ Joe Minching said. ‘Oh, definitely.’ It wasn’t true, she shook her head, but when she asked again it seemed she had misunderstood. If only it could be, was what there was now; of all things in the world he would choose it, he wanted only that. His treasure, his lovely princess.