William Trevor - Death in Summer

Albert empties the water from his bucket on to the track and replaces his rags and brushes, soap and bucket, in a cupboard on Platform 2. His night’s work hardly begun, he climbs up a moving staircase that is stationary now. He’ll make up the time, he promises the man who’s tidying up around the turnstiles at the top.

The thump of music reaches him as he walks away from the Underground entrance, and when he turns a corner there’s a disco’s flashing neon, a bouncer with cropped head and stubble belligerent in a doorway. A bigger man than Mr. Dowler, he cups the remains of a cigarette in the palm of a hand, a dirty blue T-shirt stretched over his beer-sag. Three girls leave the disco as Albert passes, one pausing to ask the bouncer for a light. A decoration glistens in her nostril as she bends her head over the massive, lazily raised hand. ‘Ta,’ she says, and for a moment Albert wonders if she’s Bev, then sees she isn’t. He wonders if Bev would remember him, or pretend she doesn’t. Up Wharfdale, Ange pretended once.

Voices from the disco follow him, incomprehensible and loud, beating out the music’s rhythm. Leeroy heard voices, Bob Iron and the Metalmen, Ivy On Her Own. Famous, Leeroy said, but no one else at the Morning Star was familiar with Bob Iron and the Metalmen or Ivy On Her Own. A woman in the gas queue said if you hear voices they never go away.

There’s no one he knows up Wharfdale when he gets there, not Ange nor Bev, nor Pettie. There are new girls he has never seen before, twelve or thirteen years old. The rent boys are in Samuel Street and Left Street. He stays for a while, then begins the journey back to the streets he prefers. She could be anywhere.

He sits for a while on a low wall, leaning against the wire mesh of a fence. A plane passes over but he can’t see what it is. A street light illuminates a notice with a jagged lightning sign: interference with the iron container that the fence protects will result in death.

A man goes by, a white dog running in front of him. He doesn’t look at Albert but straight ahead, as if he’s nervous of catching a stranger’s eye. The dog runs on and he calls it, Tippy, Tippy. She broke her glasses at the Morning Star and they said she’d have to manage for a while. But it was only the side bit and he fixed it to be going on with, a matchstick and Sellotape.

‘Come on, Tippy,’ the man orders when the dog begins to lick Albert’s shoes. ‘Sorry about that,’ the man says, his head turned sideways, as if he is examining something in the distance, and Albert says it doesn’t matter.

He goes on, crossing a common, coming out by the dairy yard he knows, where electric floats are being loaded. ‘You got your lot, Sean?’ a voice calls out, and there’s an incomprehensible reply. Two Indians, one with a suitcase, cross the street to ask him where Caspar Road is, and he says the other side of the dairy yard. Cars pass, going faster than they would in the daytime. A quarter to three it is, the figures luminous on his Zenith. ‘I work the Underground nights,’ he explained when policemen in a car drew up beside him once. He called the policeman who questioned him sir. He always does that, to be on the safe side. He explained that to Pettie in case she was ever questioned herself, but he doesn’t know if she listened.

Across the street a grey, gaunt building with wide steps is lit up, its open door revealing uniformed figures in a hallway. Albert pauses, as he often does here: the women of the Salvation Army are congregating for their soup run, a few of their male colleagues standing by in case protection is necessary. The figures move or stand still in conversation, heads bent close, gestures made. They’re quiet people, Albert considers, except when a hymn is called for. More than ever, in his defeated mood tonight, he wants to be one of them, to wear their regimental colours, to be told what to do and then to do it.

Another plane goes over, lights flashing on its wing tips. The woman who was humiliated in the car park comes into his thoughts; he wonders if she lived or died. Joey Ells could have died, Miss Rapp said, even without water in the tank; it stood to reason she’d slip, the steps half gone, the slime. He wonders where Miss Rapp is now. ‘Rapp’s off,’ Joe Minching said the day she packed her bags. Mrs. Hoates went pale as putty the time Joey Ells broke her legs, but then she was herself again. Bev’s probably dead.

It wouldn’t surprise him if Miss Rapp has joined the Army, if at this very minute she’s going out on a soup run. Albert nods to himself and sees Miss Rapp, gangling and scrawny, her hair untidy, in the woman’s version of the red and blue uniform he covets. He’d like it, being able to talk to Miss Rapp again, to tell her how it wasn’t all that nice when people laughed at the big man on the streets, and that Mrs. Biddle is afraid to open her door to callers in case the social services attempt to counsel her, that Pettie’s in a plight. He hears the music and the tramp of feet and sees himself walking beside Miss Rapp, both of them in the red and blue. In the end they talk only about Pettie, sharing the worry.

She fears the dog may roam at night, but there is only silence when she listens. The air is colder than it was. The stillness is different from the stillness of the lanes and fields.

Cautiously she pushes open the door in the wall. If the dog comes she’ll call its name and pat its head, the same’s she’s done a dozen times. But only a black cat darts from her path.

A fading moonlight casts grey shadows in the greyness before dawn begins its mellowing of the house’s bulk. Windows gleam then, curtains showing in some. Contours sharpen, trees and shrubs reclaim their colours. Lawns do not come green, but an insipid yellow. Borders and heather slopes lighten. Rooks scavenge for leather-jackets.

In the summer-house there are deckchairs against a wall, croquet mallets and croquet balls, a slatted table folded with the chairs, sun-glasses on a windowsill, a tray with Gordon’s gin and other bottles on it, a coloured umbrella in a corner. Outside, on a white iron table, its round surface an openwork pattern of flattened roses, two empty glasses have each attracted a wasp, motionless now. Near the brick-sided cold-frames, potatoes have been dug, their haulm withered on the dry earth.

She pokes about the cobbled yard. There is the car she has seen the couple in; Subaru it says on it, Justy. The other car is his — the one that in a dream he drew up beside her, near the graveyard. There’s nothing of the old woman’s anywhere, neither a car nor anything else.

At half past six the post van comes. She leaves the garden then, to watch from the doorway in the wall, and sees the first curtains pulled back. At twenty past seven a newspaper is pushed through the front-door letterbox, another brought round to the back. At five past eight a milk float comes; voices speak in the yard. The dog lollops up to her to sniff damply at her legs, then pads off to the ragged grass beneath the trees.

Hungry now, Pettie remains. The woman in black clothes crosses the yard. The hall door opens and is left like that.

Anyone could slip into the house. Anyone could pass through the hall, could take possession of the silver fowls on the dining-room table and then skulk away. It is typical of him that he doesn’t think of that, typical of the person he is.

When he appears she wants to go to him, to say she knows he has guessed there wasn’t ever a ring, to tell him all the truth. But no good would come of that, and instead she watches while he carries a deckchair from the summer house. The old woman spreads her familiar, differently coloured rug on the grass and moves the chair he has erected for her. He goes to the house and returns with his baby.