William Trevor: Death in Summer

‘Well, that’s that, poor little thing.’ Returning, Mrs. Iveson interrupts these flickers of memory. ‘Down in the mouth, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re really sure about all this?’

Thaddeus doesn’t ever address his mother-in-law by name, ‘Mrs. Iveson’ seeming unnecessarily formal, and there has never been an invitation to be more casual in this regard. The question he has asked her is academic; he knows she’s sure, and wonders how long it will be before he becomes used to this face across the breakfast table, beauty’s remnants in lips that were a rosebud once, in fragile bones beneath well-tended skin, eyes the feature that has not aged. Again he is unnerved, filled with apprehension, and for a single instant he feels that none of this is real, that Letitia has not come back yet on her bicycle, that all that’s happening is the nonsense of a dream.

‘Yes, I am sure.’

He doesn’t want to nod and yet he does, signifying gratitude and finality. Death is mysterious, he finds himself reflecting, in ordering so calmly what life can not. It is a graveyard’s gift that a grandmother’s rights are sturdier than they were before. Privately rejected when she made it, Letitia’s last request will be honoured now: Mrs. Ferry will be visited and money paid to her.

3

‘A mansion,’ Pettie reports. ‘He’s left with this kid in a mansion.’

Albert’s ovoid countenance remains impassive. He nods an acknowledgement in the Soft Rock Café. Pettie says:

‘Garages and that.’

As she speaks, the house she has visited becomes vivid for her, as in a photograph: red-brick façade and tall brick chimneys, slender and rounded, spikily decorated; blue paintwork setting off the windows, a blue front door, tarmacadam turn-around, grass and roses and stone steps. The dado of stairway lincrusta — in shiny green — appears, and blue blinds half drawn, softening the sunlight in the dining-room she could see into while she waited in the hall.

There was scarlet-striped wallpaper in the room where the interview took place. There were armchairs in the hall, and a glass door that led to a conservatory full of flowers.

‘You get the job, Pettie?’ Albert’s question is not accompanied by the inflection that indicates interrogation. His voice is toneless, as it invariably is when he is worried, and this morning he is worried about his friend. He smiles to cheer her up, a huge upset in the curve of his features, like an eggshell exploding. Then all expression goes and his eyes are dead again.

Bleakly, Pettie shakes her head. She fishes in a pocket of her short denim skirt for a cigarette, finds two remaining in a crushed packet of Silk Cut and lights one. ‘I thought I got it, but I didn’t.’

She was dragged all the way out there, but in the end they didn’t offer her the job. Quincunx House the place is called, and when Albert asks how they’re spelling that she tells him. She tells him which train station she got out at, and how there was a bus journey after that and how she walked up through a village street, not that you could call it a village, with only a shop and a public house and a petrol pump that wasn’t working. The other girls were on the train and the bus, three in all. Two of them went into the graveyard by the church, putting in time, and when they finished there she went in herself because she was more than an hour too soon. A grave was new, flowers on the dry earth, but she didn’t guess then whose it was. She sat on a railing going round another grave; she read the inscriptions on the stones, the sun beating down on her. Then she went out into the country, along a lane. Miles away, in Essex.

‘They didn’t take to you, Pettie?’

‘They didn’t say.’

It could be that they noticed the certificate, but if they did they didn’t comment. Years ago, when Pettie first decided to go for child-minding, she borrowed Cassie May’s certificate and had it photocopied in a Kall-Kwik with a tab over Cassie May’s name. When the tab was peeled off Cassie May didn’t know a thing, not even that the certificate had been borrowed.

‘No reason why they wouldn’t take to you, Pettie.’

‘They didn’t give no reason.’

Pettie is small, just into her twenties but seeming younger, seeming to be hardly passed out of her childhood. Her shoulders and elbows are sharp, a boniness that’s noticeable in her hands and feet. Her face is sharpish also, economically made, without waste. Beneath a narrow forehead trimmed with a sandy fringe, pale-lashed eyes are steady behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, and sometimes taken to be hostile. She could do with a fuller mouth, Pettie considers, and an ounce or two more flesh about the chin, but generally she is content enough: when she makes herself up she considers she can challenge other girls of her age and stature.

‘You upset then, Pettie?’

‘Yeah.’

She used the typewriter at the Dowlers’ to type the reference, scrawlingM. J. Dowler at the bottom, the back-hand slope of Mrs. Dowler’s signature reproduced as near’s no matter. Not that she knew how to type but she did the best she could; she had to because she knew the Dowlers wouldn’t be able to compose a reference, not being the kind of people who know what a reference is. She wasn’t asked for one when she started there, which was just as well because the one she got out of the Fennertys wasn’t much good, and the people before that refused to give her one because of the necklace business.

‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ Pettie says, lingering on the syllables. ‘The name of that Essex man.’

He gave the full name when she rang up. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he added, and didn’t say then there was no mother. Nor did he mention the grandmother who was hanging about, who did the talking at the interview.

‘I’m sorry you’re upset, Pettie.’ Obscuring the brand name of a lager, Albert’s chunky hands encircle one of the glass mugs in which tea or coffee is served in the Soft Rock Café. He smiles again, lending emphasis to this expression of sympathy, and when there’s no response he doesn’t take offence. He looks around the Soft Rock Café, at its pine tabletops charred here and there where a cigarette has slipped from the edge of an ashtray, its grey metal chairs and unlit juke-box, the two similar posters of a bull and matador, two fruit machines. The red hair of the café’s proprietor falls in greasy strands on to the newspaper he is hunched over at the counter. A middle-aged couple do not converse at a table by the door. The deaf and dumb man who spends the greater part of each morning in the café sits where he always sits, with a view of the street.

‘You going after another job then, Pettie?’

She’s finished with child-minding, Pettie says. She’s finished with kids making a bedlam — flour and raisins all over the floor the minute your back’s turned, Shredded Wheat floating in the sink, the bedclothes set on fire one time. The morning she typed the reference, Brendan Dowler ate the best part of a packet of Atora. The first day at the Fennertys’, Dean put the cat in the fridge. When she walked into the toilet the time Dowler hadn’t locked the door he said be my guest.

The house in Essex was a different kind of set-up altogether, you could tell that even before you got there; you could tell from the advertisement, you could tell from the man’s voice when she rang up. Living in, the job was, and the minder’s room had a carpet and an armchair, dried flowers in a vase, a television. Because of how the man sounded on the phone, giving her directions, saying they were looking forward to seeing her, she was so sure she’d get the job she didn’t turn up at the Dowlers’ the next morning. Passed on in the Soft Rock Cafe, this information causes Albert some dismay.