William Trevor: Collected Stories

Access to the Children

Malcolmson, a fair, tallish man in a green tweed suit that required pressing, banged the driver’s door of his ten-year-old Volvo and walked quickly away from the car, jangling the keys. He entered a block of flats that was titled – gold engraved letters on a granite slab – The Quadrant.

It was a Sunday afternoon in late October. Yellow-brown leaves patterned grass that was not for walking on. Some scurried on the steps that led to the building’s glass entrance doors. Rain was about, Malcolmson considered.

At three o’clock precisely he rang the bell of his ex-wife’s flat on the third floor. In response he heard at once the voices of his children and the sound of their running in the hall. ‘Hullo,’ he said when one of them, Deirdre, opened the door. ‘Ready?’

They went with him, two little girls, Deirdre seven and Susie five. In the lift they told him that a foreign person, the day before, had been trapped in the lift from eleven o’clock in the morning until teatime. Food and cups of tea had been poked through a grating to this person, a Japanese businessman who occupied a flat at the top of the block. ‘He didn’t get the hang of an English lift,’ said Deirdre. ‘He could have died there,’ said Susie.

In the Volvo he asked them if they’d like to go to the Zoo and they shook their heads firmly. On the last two Sundays he’d taken them to the Zoo, Susie reminded him in her specially polite, very quiet voice: you got tired of the Zoo, walking round and round, looking at all the same animals. She smiled at him to show she wasn’t being ungrateful. She suggested that in a little while, after a month or so, they could go to the Zoo again, because there might be some new animals. Deirdre said that there wouldn’t be, not after a month or so: why should there be? ‘Some old animals might have died,’ said Susie.

Malcolmson drove down the Edgware Road, with Hyde Park in mind.

‘What have you done?’ he asked.

‘Only school,’ said Susie.

‘And the news cinema,’ said Deirdre. ‘Mummy took us to a news cinema. We saw a film about how they make wire.’

‘A man kept talking to Mummy. He said she had nice hair.’

‘The usherette told him to be quiet. He bought us ice-creams, but Mummy said we couldn’t accept them.’

‘He wanted to take Mummy to a dance.’

‘We had to move to other seats.’

‘What else have you done?’

‘Only school,’ said Susie. ‘A boy was sick on Miss Bawden’s desk.’

‘After school stew.’

‘It’s raining,’ said Susie.

He turned the windscreen-wipers on. He wondered if he should simply bring the girls to his flat and spend the afternoon watching television. He tried to remember what the Sunday film was. There often was something suitable for children on Sunday afternoons, old films with Deanna Durbin or Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

‘Where’re we going?’ Susie asked.

‘Where d’you want to go?’

‘A Hundred and One Dalmatians. ’

‘Oh, please,’ said Susie.

‘But we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it five times.’

‘Please, Daddy.’

He stopped the Volvo and bought a What’s On. While he leafed through it they sat quietly, willing him to discover a cinema, anywhere in London, that was showing the film. He shook his head and started the Volvo again.

‘Nothing else?’ Deirdre asked.

‘Nothing suitable.’

At Speakers’ Corner they listened to a Jehovah’s Witness and then to a woman talking about vivisection. ‘How horrid,’ said Deirdre. ‘Is that true, Daddy?’ He made a face. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

In the drizzle they played a game among the trees, hiding and chasing one another. Once when they’d been playing this game a woman had brought a policeman up to him. She’d seen him approaching the girls, she said; the girls had been playing alone and he’d joined in. ‘He’s our daddy,’ Susie had said, but the woman had still argued, claiming that he’d given them sweets so that they’d say that. ‘Look at him,’ the woman had insultingly said. ‘He needs a shave.’ Then she’d gone away, and the policeman had apologized.

‘The boy who was sick was Nicholas Barnet,’ Susie said. ‘I think he could have died.’

A year and a half ago Malcolmson’s wife, Elizabeth, had said he must choose between her and Diana. For weeks they had talked about it; she knowing that he was in love with Diana and was having some kind of an affair with her, he caught between the two of them, attempting the impossible in his effort not to hurt anyone. She had given him a chance to get over Diana, as she put it, but she couldn’t go on for ever giving him a chance, no woman could. In the end, after the shock and the tears and the period of reasonableness, she became bitter. He didn’t blame her: they’d been in the middle of a happy marriage, nothing was wrong, nothing was lacking.

He’d met Diana on a train; he’d sat with her, talking for a long time, and after that his marriage didn’t seem the same. In her bitterness Elizabeth said he was stupidly infatuated: he was behaving like a murderer: there was neither dignity nor humanity left in him. Diana she described as a flat-chested American nymphomaniac and predator, the worst type of woman in the world. She was beautiful herself, more beautiful than Diana, more gracious, warmer, and funnier: there was a sting of truth in what she said; he couldn’t understand himself. In the very end, after they’d been morosely drinking gin and lime-juice, she’d suddenly shouted at him that he’d better pack his bags. He sat unhappily, gazing at the green bottle of Gordon’s gin on the carpet between his chair and hers. She screamed; tears poured in a torrent from her eyes. ‘For God’s sake go away!’ she cried, on her feet, turning away from him. She shook her head in a wild gesture, causing her long fair hair to move like a horse’s mane. Her hands, clenched into fists, beat at his cheeks, making bruises that Diana afterwards tended.

For months-after that he saw neither Elizabeth nor his children. He tried not to think about them. He and Diana took a flat in Barnes, near the river, and in time he became used to the absence of the children’s noise in the mornings, and to Diana’s cooking and her quick efficiency in little things, and the way she always remembered to pass on telephone messages, which was something that Elizabeth had always forgotten to do.

Then one day, a week or so before the divorce was due, Diana said she didn’t think there was anything left between them. It hadn’t worked, she said; nothing was quite right. Amazed and bewildered, he argued with her. He frowned at her, his eyes screwed up as though he couldn’t properly see her. She was very poised, in a black dress, with a necklace at her throat, her hair pulled smooth and neatly tied. She’d met a man called Abbotforth, she said, and she went on talking about that, still standing.

‘We could go to the Natural History Museum,’ Deirdre said.

‘Would you like to, Susie?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Susie.

They were sitting on a bench, watching a bird that Susie said was a yellow-hammer. Deirdre disagreed: at this time of year, she said, there were no yellow-hammers in England, she’d read it in a book. ‘It’s a little baby yellow-hammer,’ said Susie. ‘Miss Bawden said you see lots of them.’

The bird flew away. A man in a raincoat was approaching them, singing quietly. They began to giggle. ‘ Sure, maybe some day I’ll go back to Ireland,’ sang the man, ‘ if it’s only at the closing of my day. ’ He stopped, noticing that they were watching him.

‘Were you ever in Ireland?’ he asked. The girls, still giggling, shook their heads. ‘It’s a great place,’ said the man. He took a bottle of VP wine from his raincoat pocket and drank from it.