William Trevor - Death in Summer

‘Was the girl…,’ she begins to ask, intending to inquire if the girl responsible for the stealing was frightened off by the lad poking round, or has been found and apprehended. In fact, with the three words hanging, she is answered without addition to them.

‘No one else was there but the baby, with food laid out on the floor, not that it was of use to her. As far as can be ascertained, the next thing was she got carried by this lad through the streets, to the quarters of the Salvation Army.’

Zenobia does not entirely follow this, wondering where the Salvation Army comes into it. She does not speak, knowing it is unnecessary, since her confusion is apparent in her face.

‘The lad shouldn’t have been in a house due for demolition, but there’s no fuss made about that. A few marbles short, by all accounts, but no one’s on about that either.’

‘He couldn’t be-?’

‘We know who took her, dear.’

Never in all his years in other people’s houses has Maidment garnered so much or so richly in so brief a time. The disappointment of missing the news of Mrs. Ferry’s death when it came is amply compensated. Pleasure flushes his edgy features, lights his eyes, causes a mild quivering of his lips when he reports what he has to. Observing these signs of his excitement, Zenobia is concerned for him; but her concern is slight, for the relief she experienced when the child was found continues so joyfully to possess her that all other emotions fall back. And what does it matter how the crime was committed, or even by whom, now that the thing is over? Private by her bedside, she has already knelt in gratitude.

‘Sugar lumps for the dog.’ She hears her husband repeat what he has stated several times already. ‘Chocolate or mixed sweets, a burglar’s ploy Loitering with intent under four pairs of eyes.’

He extracts a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket, and for an alarming moment it seems to Zenobia that he may light up in the kitchen, which he hasn’t done since their first position as a couple, the morning they came down to discover the water tanks had overflowed in the night.

‘Didn’t I say I didn’t like the look of her,’ he’s saying now, ‘the time she came back with her story?’

With the cigarettes and lighter still safely in his palm, he moves towards the passage that leads to the yard. In the doorway he selects a cigarette and returns the packet to his pocket. Left to him, he says, he wouldn’t have let her in that day.

Zenobia has little memory of the girl who is suspected, having glanced only once in her direction that afternoon, when the landing curtains needed a stitch. She looked an unremarkable girl as far as Zenobia can remember, small and peering a bit, the way a short-sighted girl might, nothing special. It all just goes to show, Zenobia’s view is, and silently she gives thanks again.

14

The ordeal, which has lasted a little longer than twenty-three hours, has left with Mrs. Iveson what she knows will always be there: Maidment white-faced in the sunshine when she asked him to look among the shrubs, the trembling of his hands when he returned; Thaddeus saying blame does no good; Zenobia confessing later that some time in that night she gave up hope.

We are left with no explanation and no sign of one, she writes the news to Sussex. Why any of it happened is the mystery we must live with, for I do not believe they will find the girl. If that boy had not gone to the place when he did Georgina would not be alive. That that was what the girl intended we must live with, too.

She does not think, she adds, that she can remain at Quincunx House. She shall, of course, until a new arrangement is made, but in the end the arrangement she suggested herself has been shown to be a failure. Thaddeus, though, does not accept my view and is adamant it were better I stayed. I press him — not that I want to go, but feel I should — and still he does not see it. So it is left. Stubbornness is a quality I have not noticed in him before.

The only flowers Thaddeus has ever sent Mrs. Ferry he sends on the day the letter that tells of this unresolved consequence is posted. Having forgotten about the funeral, he remembers the night before it is to take place and telephones first thing, relieved to find he is not too late. Cut flowers, not a wreath, he stipulates, bright colours, the brightest mixed together. When the time comes for the woman he was once attracted by to lie briefly in the crematorium chapel he thinks of her. ‘A generous spirit,’ he does not know the clergyman’s description is, but guesses that a favourite tune is played and that the chef who was at the Beech Trees is there. A few others are present too, her onetime husband arriving five minutes late, delayed by traffic on his journey down from Lytham St. Annes, his second wife waiting in the car, feeling that to be proper in the circumstances.

The week that brought Mrs. Ferry’s death and the ordeal of Georgina’s abduction comes to an end, and on the Sunday that finishes it Mrs. Iveson agrees to think further about her decision, and next morning agrees to stay. The days settle back into ordinariness then, as the summer heatwave continues. From Sussex come commiserations and exclamations of outrage in a shaky hand. Terrible things happen, it is declared; that is life today, enlightened times or not. A postscript adds that the cataract operation, twice postponed, is to take place at last, next month. And news goes back to Sussex of Georgina’s teething.

In time, the first green specks of Thaddeus’s winter parsley appear. Murder in Mock Street is taken from the drawing-room shelves, and then The Corpse on the Fourteenth Green. ‘My!’ Zenobia marvels on a weekend outing to Scarrow Hill, for the giant is taller than in her dream, and shocking in a way she failed to anticipate. Maidment wins with Cappoquin Boy. No change is reported from St. Bee’s.

Of course, we live in fear, Mrs. Iveson brings herself to confess, that again we are watched, that even now she comes by night to the garden, that again she will hurt us. I see her face, staring at me from where she stood that day, the sunlight glinting on her glasses.

But no one comes to the garden in the way Mrs. Iveson dreads, either by night or by day. Instead there are the first late-August signs of autumn there, a softness in the fading colours.

15

A man exercises greyhounds on the towpath where horses once drew the narrow boats of the canal. The muddy sediment that separates the two banks is dankly shadowed, its surface active with autumn insects. The greyhounds are obedient, running on and turning when they’re whistled back, one jet black, the other speckled.

The walk from the town has taken Albert forty-seven minutes, the time checked on his Zenith because he likes to check the passing of time. He has paused quite often to watch the greyhounds racing on the towpath opposite; now, he turns to the right, leaving them behind when he sees the spire of the church in the distance, and houses clustered nearer. A few minutes later the notice he has been told about says the petrol pump is out of order. Then there is the shop, and the public house next door to it. ‘That name’s all over the graveyard,’ she said, and there it is: Davenant on upright and horizontal stones. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ she said, but there’s no one answering to that, Johns and Williams and Percivals mostly, all sorts when it comes to the women. No stone yet marks the newest grave; she said that, too.

He leaves the graveyard, and on the lane a tractor comes slowly towards him and he stands in against the hedge to let it pass. The driver waves his thanks, an old man in a cap, his glance passing inquisitively over Albert’s clothing — the red and blue uniform he has coveted for so long, found for him when he was accepted into the ranks.