William Trevor - Death in Summer

They listen because there is a debt they can never repay, neither by the money that has been given already nor by their attention, yet their attention continues. From time to time they do not easily follow what they’re being told, bewildered by new names when they occur, the order of events a muddle. Easing ten minutes ago, the rain comes heavily again.

‘Her party dress she always wore on a Sunday. The others wouldn’t bother.’

His friend would put on Mrs. Hoates’s perfume. As soon as she saw Mrs. Hoates setting off on a Sunday afternoon to visit her relation who wasn’t well she would try out a different perfume. Nail-varnish she tried out once, and another time a pair of earrings. She’d do her hair in Mrs. Hoates’s mirror and then she’d go downstairs. There’d be the uncles’ coats hanging on the hallstand pegs, the uncle with the birthmark waiting, never impatient, reading any leaflets that were lying about the hall.

‘Uncles?’

‘ “Don’t take no presents,” I’d always say, but they’d take them and then they’d try to get away. You get the picture, sir?’ vYes, we do.’

Removing a roller-blind in the hall in order to adjust the tension, Maidment gets the picture also. A hell is the picture Mrs. Iveson gets, doors closed and silence, the hiding after they tried to get away. In her party dress, only one of them never minded. Pertly, she smiled at her Sunday uncle, scented and made-up for him.

‘So you went back to that place all this time later and found Georgina?’

‘Nothing doing in the yard, like, so I go in by the bottom window. Not a sound, Mrs. Iveson. Nothing there, is what I says at first.’

Thaddeus wishes he didn’t have to hear. He tries not to, apprehensive about what may be said next. He tries not to see the bleak, empty house to which his child was taken, to be abandoned for a reason that is unknown.

‘I come to the bathroom, not that you’d know it with the bath gone and the basin taken down. Mrs. Hoates’s bathroom that was, Hoates’s too. First thing I notice is the baby in a corner. I had the torch. With the windows boarded it’s dark enough in there. Not that there hasn’t been squatters, not that they hasn’t taken a board or two down. Only you need the torch in case.’

‘Of course.’ Uneasy too, Mrs. Iveson nods.

‘No place for a baby, and I give it in at Tipp Street. I just give in Georgina Belle. I didn’t tell a lie, sir.’

Thaddeus watches the shaking of the tidy head, slowly, emphatically, back and forth, back and forth, as rhythmic as a pendulum. It’s not a lie when you don’t say. It’s not a lie when you just give something in.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Mrs. Iveson reassures, not understanding.

Five minutes later Zenobia learns that this boy knew what he was looking for when he went to that bathroom. Well known to him and given to crime, the bespectacled girl had come to the house where he lived and had knocked on the kitchen window. She was a girl who’d vandalized a man’s possessions once, who walked out on employers whenever she felt like it. Calm as you please, she told the boy she’d stolen a baby, and told him where she’d put it.

‘She says would I hand it in. Like I done, Mrs. Iveson.’

They don’t say anything. Albert watches the baby trying to join her fingers together, holding them up in front of her face. She pulls them apart again. She’s gurgling and smiling, trying to laugh, only she can’t laugh properly, the age she is.

‘She put Georgina Belle down in the Morning Star on account of everything going wrong.’

‘What went wrong?’ They both say that, one after the other. She says it twice.

‘Pettie’s plans, like.’ Albert shakes his head. ‘Pettie didn’t know what to do.’

‘Why did she take Georgina?’ She says Pettie was a girl they didn’t know. She came to the house by chance, she says. ‘Was she hoping to get money? Did she just want a baby?’

‘Mrs. Biddle says Pettie’s a tearaway, Mrs. Iveson.’

‘You should have told all this to the police.’

‘Pettie took a shine to Mr. Davenant, like. Pettie takes a shine to the older man, sir.’

He explains that a man showed Pettie vinyls for the floor, different colour runs and weights, what was suitable for a kitchen, what was not. Eric he was called, she saw it on his suit lapel. He lived out Wimbledon way; he took his holidays for the tennis, always got good weather. A year ago it was; every day she went on about it in the Soft Rock. And there was a fisherman once, and another time a man who took her back to his room and she was frightened when he got up to things. The older man, Albert says again, in case there is confusion. vShe took Georgina because Georgina is Mr. Davenant’s child? Is that it? Did she tell you what she intended?’

‘Pettie was in a state, Mrs. Iveson.’ She wouldn’t have left the Dowlers if she hadn’t got into a state, and he tells them about going round to the Dowlers and Mrs. Dowler shouting down the stairs. ‘I never seen her in such a state as this time, Mrs. Iveson, and the next thing is she takes the baby. Pettie never done that before. Like I say, I’m in the kitchen and there’s this rapping on the panes. Four times she’s come round only I’m on the night work and then I have a sleep.’

‘You’ve told us all that.’

‘Soon’s I flashed the torch in the bathroom I saw the butterfly. Pettie’d make butterflies out of a cigarette wrapping. Then again the packet and the butts she left. Pettie’d always break a butt open. In the Soft Rock, anywhere. I flashed the torch and saw the bread and that. There could be rats, the bread’d bring rats. I was remarking that to myself when I picked up Georgina Belle.’

‘Her name’s Georgina.’ There is a whiteness in her face, in her cheeks and around her eyes. A moment ago she kept looking at him, but now the only movement’s a frown coming and going in her forehead. Her voice has changed, a crossness in it now, and the dog pokes up its head, then flops it down again. The baby has gone to sleep.

‘One p.m. it was when I seen her; three-quarters of a minute past. I looked at the Zenith in case they’d ask me.

He gave the time as three-quarters of a minute past one when they did, and they asked how he knew and he said. vHow about a tea?’ Captain Evans offered him when the police left, the first time he knew Captain Evans, not even knowing his name then. All the time the butterfly and the cigarette butts and the empty cigarette packet were in his pocket because there hadn’t been a chance to drop them into a bin.

‘Not that Pettie’d care,’ he says. ‘The way she was then, she couldn’t care less.’

‘That girl took a baby to a house where her crying couldn’t be heard. She walked away and left her.’

Everything is different in the room now. The sympathy’s gone, there are no smiles. It would be all right, he thought when they said they were grateful, and when she asked if he took sugar and put the lumps in with a tongs. A clock strikes quietly in the hall, and then she says he must go immediately to the police, that he must give them Pettie’s name.

‘It was Pettie wore the party dress, Mrs. Iveson.’

She takes no notice, nor does he. He thought they would. He thinks maybe they didn’t hear; but he doesn’t say it again. She says does he realize this could happen to someone else?

‘Other people will suffer as we have.’

‘Pettie never took babies before, Mrs. Iveson. She didn’t do no harm to Georgina Belle.’

She would have married the floors man. His hands were well kept, tapering fingers, she said, the tips light on the vinyl samples. She hung about the tennis when the time for the next championships came. She’d have given him a family, she said, if that was what he wanted. She’d have cooked and mended for him.