William Trevor: Death in Summer

‘Don’t do to go behind on the rent, Pettie.’

A couple of months ago it was Albert who got Pettie the room in Mrs. Biddle’s house, across the landing from his own. Mrs. Biddle wasn’t keen — asserting, in fact, that Pettie frightened her — but in the end she agreed, and Albert feels responsible for the arrangement. Sometimes Pettie is headstrong, not realizing what the consequences of her actions may be. If she doesn’t pay the rent she’ll have to move on, no way she won’t. A tearaway, Mrs. Biddle calls her.

‘You think about going back to explain to the Dowlers, Pettie? A Saturday today, they wouldn’t be at work.’

The time he persuaded her to go back to the Fennertys she said she’d been in a hospital with suspected appendicitis. He was against her saying that, but she argued that she couldn’t just tell them she was fed up. Not that any of it mattered: they didn’t even listen when she said about the hospital, glad to have anyone for the kids, no matter who.

‘Mrs. Biddle can’t be short on the rent, Pettie. I’m only thinking about that.’

‘No way she’ll be short.’

‘I’m only mentioning it, Pettie.’

Stockily made, two years older than his friend, Albert is a dapper presence in the Soft Rock Café, the three buttons of his brown jacket buttoned, as are the buttons of its matching waistcoat. These clothes have been acquired in a charity shop; his tie and the shirt into which it is tightly knotted were the property of Mrs. Biddle’s late husband. He wears a watch he sometimes draws attention to, a Zenith, given to him by a couple whose windows he used to clean.

‘You hear that name before?’ Pettie is saying. ‘Thaddeus?’

Albert shakes his head, on which darkish hair is tidily combed and parted. After a moment he says he thinks he has heard the name, but can’t remember where. It could have been Miss Rapp in the old days; it could have been a person he was talking to on the street. Fearful of falsehood, as Albert is, he wouldn’t like to say.

‘The wife was in a photograph.’

And Pettie describes this because it kept catching her eye: a photograph in a silvery frame on a round table with paperweights on it. There were coloured flowers in the glass of the paperweights, and you could tell the photograph was of Thaddeus Davenant’s dead wife because it was given pride of place. A road accident was all that was said, which was why a minder for the kid was necessary.

There’s too much speed on them motorways, Pettie.’

Pettie says speed wasn’t mentioned. They didn’t give a reason, any more than they did for not taking her on, except the grandmother saying they’d changed their minds. The same three girls were waiting for the bus back, and got on to the train. An hour and a half they had to wait in all, longer than the journey itself.

‘It’s my opinion the old woman done the damage. If he hadn’t all but given me the job over the phone I’d not have walked out on the Dowlers, would I? “I’m very sorry,” that woman said. You could tell she was lying her face off.’

Albert doesn’t comment. Pettie hasn’t got the job and that’s the end of it. There’s no percentage in harping on the house she went all that way out to, or the people she met there. In an effort to change the subject he tells of what he read in a magazine he bought for Mrs. Biddle, an account of two interesting coincidences. How a man, having thrown away his mother’s purse after he rifled it as a child, saw it forty-one years later in the window of a pawnshop he happened to be passing in another town. How two sisters, separated at birth, identified one another in middle age on a Dutch bus when they were on holiday to see the tulips. Other such cases were recorded in the magazine, and always there was significance in the coincidence, as if what happened was something meant. The worry that had nagged at the man who found his mother’s purse was lifted from him when at last he was able to return it, placing in it coins to the value of those he had taken. The sisters who met on the Dutch bus set up house together.

‘Oh, yes?’ Pettie acknowledges this. She shouldn’t have worn the yellow jacket. They’d have seen the state of the covered buttons, they’d have seen the state of the lining when she took it off. The windows that reached down to the floor were open all the time they were in the room because of the warmth, and a big brown dog came padding in and nosed up for a cuddle. The old woman was the grandmother on the wife’s side. She had make-up on but you could hardly see it. Soon’s she opened her mouth you could tell she was against you.

‘She went out of the room to send off the last girl. The only time I was alone with him.’

Her skirt had ridden up a bit because she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, not wanting to be too casual. She pulled it down when she heard the old woman’s footsteps coming back, but that wasn’t for a few minutes. She smiled at him and he talked to her, even though he was engaged with the dog, patting it. ‘He saw me looking at the photo. He nodded, like he could understand what I was thinking.’

Albert listens while the face in the photograph is described. There was fair hair coiled, a dress without a pattern on it, collar turned up. ‘Half a smile she had on. Like she was shy.’

‘I understand, Pettie.’

‘The drawing-room they called the room. He’d have been working in the garden, the clothes he was in.’

When she first walked into the room and he held his hand out for her to shake she noticed it was grimed. ‘Georgina’s father,’ he said, the same way he’d said it on the phone, only this time he didn’t give his full name as well. When she was alone with him she kept thinking Thaddeus suited him. The sound of it suited him, his eyes and his face. Thin as a blade he was.

‘I said it was sad, his wife and that. I said it, even though the woman was back in the room. “I’ll show you the nursery,” she said, but I knew it was no good. No chance, I knew. You could tell with that woman.’

Sensing the depth of his friend’s disappointment, and fearing it, Albert’s unease increases. He knows Pettie well. He knows what Mrs. Biddle means when she calls her a tearaway. Another person mightn’t use the word, but he knows what’s in their landlady’s mind.

‘He stayed where he was when the grandmother brought me up to the nursery.’

A couple were hanging about on the landing, the man in dark clothes who had opened the front door and a woman with a blue apron over clothes that were dark-coloured too. The man was up a stepladder, doing something to the top of the curtains at a window. The woman was standing with pins in her mouth.

‘Well, here’s Georgina,’ the grandmother said in the nursery, and the baby looked up from a picture painted on the floorboards, blue-eyed, not like her father. The picture was of hills and trees, flowers outside a cottage, sheep on a slope. Lanes wound through ploughed fields and fields of corn or something like it. A railway line was as straight as a die and there were houses and a church, and the Ring o’ Bells Inn. Cattle ate hay. There were pigs and chickens in a yard. Horses were looking over a fence.

Albert listens to this description, but none of it means much to him. The streets are what he knows. Once a year there was an outing from the Morning Star home, where he and Pettie were brought up and from which, eventually, they ran away. You saw fields then, all the way to a seaside place where there were slot machines on the promenade, where they all walked in a bunch along the sands and clambered over the shingle, a wind blowing nearly always. Joe Minching drove them in the minibus that was hired for the day from Fulcrum Street Transport. Joe Minching threw his sandwiches to the seagulls, saying he was used to better grub than that.