William Trevor - Death in Summer

You don’t believe it won’t be all right. You don’t believe you’ll go back to the flooring place and they’ll say you frightened Eric off. You don’t believe an old woman will get in the way with her venom. On the seaside outing the fishermen pulled in their boats, the shingle rasping on the wood, and when the last of them went by, ruddy-cheeked, in wading boots, he smiled and said that mackerel was what they caught. She walked on with him while the others played and he pointed up the cliffs to where he lived, lifting his arm and you could see his jersey needed a darn. She’d have done it for him. She’d have gone with him to his house.

Her feet are sore. She takes her shoes off. ‘I’m sorry,’ her Sunday uncle whispered when he told her that she could never see the aubrietia in his rockery, offering her instead another sprig. His wife was sharp-voiced when she phoned her up, screaming abuse. His wife said accusations like that should be reported, you couldn’t throw filth around and get away with it. But nothing was reported. And nothing was when she asked Joe Minching where the house was and cut the woman’s clothes with a razor-blade, when she poured away her powder and marked the television screen with her lipstick. She cut the sheets on her bed and on her children’s beds, and dumped stuff in the dustbins, and smashed the light-bulbs in the rooms: nothing was said, there was no complaint. She knew there wouldn’t be. Nothing happened except that he didn’t come back to the Morning Star.

It’s different now. The empty, pale blue sky, the green pea stalks, and grass and clay: all that makes it different, like looking for the ring together did. When he said, No luck? he wanted her to be in luck, he wanted everything to be all right. He wanted her to tend his baby, to give it all her love: in the nursery you could tell he wanted that. His voice is as it always is; it has not left her, his face has not blurred.

When she reached up for the fisherman’s hand it was only to be affectionate, and when the rictus began in his face she thought he was smiling back, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t go quickly on the shingle, his flopping fisherman’s boots a drag, holding him for another instant to her. When he was far away she picked a stone up, and felt her bitterness like vomit in her stomach when she tried to damage his boat. Riff-raff was what the old woman would have said, is maybe saying it again. The other woman was snooty on the landing that afternoon, you could tell by the way she looked. It was only him that wasn’t, and he never would be.

Pettie walks again, and rests again, and then the evening shadows come, and lengthen as she watches, the shapes of trees and stubble softening. Joe Minching walked coast to coast, he said, labouring at anything, killing rabbits, skinning squirrels, sleeping out. She’d have gone with him if he wanted it, giving him affection, a baby if he wanted it. But he’d finished with the country then and was after a barmaid — Dainty he said her name was and showed round pictures of her, not dainty at all, spreading all over the place.

It’s twilight now and Pettie sleeps, and wakes when it is dark. She put the blade back in the razor, not caring if they returned, if they walked into the bathroom while she was at it. She’d get sent to a Borstal, Marji Laye and Sylvie said when she phoned up the woman, but she didn’t care about that either. You reach out for a ballpoint, you slip away a counter tricket, or panties or a vest. No one calls out, no one bars your way. She could have said to the old woman that the worms are in the body now; she could have said that all the flowers in the world won’t keep the worms out of a body, but no good would come of that.

He wanted to agree about a grandmother being beyond it. Everything they both felt was in his expression and in his eyes. But the old woman has come and what is meant cannot happen until her greed for a baby is taken from the house she has invaded, until her venom ceases, until she isn’t there.

Sometimes the words Albert removes are scrawled in mammoth letters on the tiled surfaces, sometimes they are cramped, pushed into one another, as if recording a private utterance. Often such attempts at communication are in a language unknown to him, a pattern of strokes and marks that seems like decoration. Strictly speaking, only the tiles are Albert’s concern in the Underground stations: to remove as best he can all messages, statements, pronouncements, incitements to violence, abuse of the police authorities, expressions of lust. But he also, for his private satisfaction, erases with a rubber anything in pencil on a nearby poster, any crude additions to figures advertising stage shows or films.

He works on the tiles with cloths and brushes, bottles of erasing liquid, a bucket of soap and water. In the eerie quiet of the night it again outrages his orderly nature that he cannot cleanse the posters as he does the tiles, that it is not his remit to do so, that only the pencilled messages can be rubbed away while bolder obscenities must remain.

Tonight there is the further disappointment that he has failed in his visit to the Dowlers. ‘I can’t go rodding, this hour,’ Mr. Dowler crossly protested, misunderstanding and continuing to misunderstand. A smell of beer came from him, specks of foam on the moustache that joined up with his sideburns. A woman’s voice called down the stairs, inquiring what the problem was, and Mr. Dowler didn’t answer and Albert explained that it was Pettie he’d come about. ‘Pettie was the girl was looking after your kids, Mr. Dowler. Only she made a mistake.’ Mr. Dowler, still confused, shook his head; Mrs. Dowler shouted down again, drawing attention to the time. ‘Look, what’s your problem, son?’ Mr. Dowler demanded and Albert repeated what he’d said several times already. ‘Listen, son,’ Mr. Dowler said then, ‘you ask that little bitch where the wife’s shoes is.’ Pettie was wanted by the police, he said, and closed the door.

Eyes smile at Albert from the advertisements that, every night, become his world. Mouths simper, limbs are frozen as they gyrate, words ooze their promise. Black on pale yellow, a scrawl records an experience of Ecstasy. A smiling woman is defiled in two places and Albert tears part of the paper away, bundling it under a seat on the platform. AIDS the Saviour! is written, and beside it an account of how a woman was humiliated in a car park. Up Wharfdale the needles are thrown down on the street and in the gutters. There’s vomit in the doorways; the girls go by, not seeing you. The time the rent boys turned on him, Little Mister joined in because he was afraid not to.

He bombed… She couldn’t resist him… The message is edged with fire, its urgent letters spread across an explosion, the concrete of buildings a dance of destruction, debris arrested in a night sky. No more than a shadow a man was once, five past three in the morning, stayed down to leave a device after they’d locked the gates.

Albert squeezes dirty water out of his cleaning rags and stares morosely at the scum of bubbles in his bucket. The water that came out of the standpipe at the seed nursery was clean enough, rusty at first but then becoming clear. They should never have left that place. They could have found a Primus stove and done their cooking on it. You see things on skips when you go wandering, no reason why there wouldn’t be a Primus stove. He could have got in crisps and more Heinz beans and long-lasting milk and Mother’s Pride. They could have bought seeds themselves and grown lettuces and carrots in the tumbled-down glasshouse. They could have got blankets thrown out on a skip.

She’ll go up Wharfdale now. What else can happen to a girl without a bed to sleep in? It’s fourteen months since Bev went missing. It’s a week already since Pettie’s been about.