William Trevor - Collected Stories

He drank two large measures of whisky. He bought cigarettes and lit one, rolling the smoke around in his mouth to disguise the smell of the alcohol. As he returned to the taxi, he slipped on the wet pavement and almost lost his balance. He felt very drunk all of a sudden. Deirdre and Susie were telling the taxi man about the man in Hyde Park.

He was aware that he walked unsteadily when they left the taxi and moved across the forecourt of the block of flats. In the hall, before they got into the lift, he lit another cigarette, rolling the smoke about his mouth. ‘That poor Japanese man,’ said Deirdre.

He rang the bell, and when Elizabeth opened the door the girls turned to him and thanked him. He took the cigarette from his mouth and kissed them. Elizabeth was smiling: if only she’d ask him in and give him a drink he wouldn’t have to worry about the alcohol on his breath. He swore to himself that she was smiling as she’d smiled three weeks ago. ‘Can I come in?’ he asked, unable to keep the words back.

‘In?’ The smile was still there. She was looking at him quite closely. He released the smoke from his mouth. He tried to remember what it was he’d planned to say, and then it came to him.

‘I’m worried about Susie,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘She talked about death all the time.’

‘Death?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s someone here actually,’ she said, stepping back into the hall. ‘But come in, certainly.’

In the sitting-room she introduced him to Richard who was, as he’d imagined, a dark-haired man. The sitting-room was much the same as it always had been. ‘Have a drink,’ Richard offered.

‘D’you mind if we talk about Susie?’ Elizabeth asked Richard. He said he’d put them to bed if she liked. She nodded. Richard went away.

‘Well?’

He stood with the familiar green glass in his hand, gazing at her. He said:

‘I haven’t had gin and lime-juice since –’

‘Yes. Look, I shouldn’t worry about Susie. Children of that age often say odd things, you know –’

‘I don’t mind about Richard, Elizabeth, I think it’s your due. I worked it out in the taxi. It’s the end of October now –’

‘My due?’

‘Assuming your affair has been going on already for six weeks –’

‘You’re drunk.’

He closed one eye, focusing. He felt his body swaying and he said to himself that he must not fall now, that no matter what his body did his feet must remain firm on the carpet. He sipped from the green glass. She wasn’t, he noticed, smiling any more.

‘I’m actually not drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m actually sober. By the time our birthday comes round, Elizabeth, it’ll all be over. On April the 21st we could have family tea.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘The future, Elizabeth. Of you and me and our children.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘We tried to go to A Hundred and One Dalmatians, but it wasn’t on anywhere.’

‘So you drank instead. While the children –’

‘We came here in a taxi-cab. They’ve had their usual tea, they’ve watched a bit of The Last of the Mohicans and a bit of Going for a Song and all of The Golden Shot and The Shari Lewis Show and –’

‘You see them for a few hours and you have to go and get drunk –’

‘I am not drunk, Elizabeth.’

He crossed the room as steadily as he could. He looked aggressively at her. He poured gin and lime-juice. He said:

‘You have a right to your affair with Richard, I recognize that.’

‘A right?’

‘I love you, Elizabeth.’

‘You loved Diana.’

‘I have never not loved you. Diana was nothing – nothing, nothing at all.’

‘She broke our marriage up.’

‘No.’

‘We’re divorced.’

‘I love you, Elizabeth.’

‘Now listen to me –’

‘I live from Sunday to Sunday. We’re a family, Elizabeth; you and me and them. It’s ridiculous, all this. It’s ridiculous making Marmite sandwiches with brown bread and tomato sandwiches with white. It’s ridiculous buying meringues and going five times to A Hundred and One Dalmatians and going up the Post Office Tower until we’re sick of the sight of it, and watching drunks in Hyde Park and poking about at the Zoo –’

‘You have reasonable access –’

‘Reasonable access, my God!’ His voice rose. He felt sweat on his forehead. Reasonable access, he shouted, was utterly no good to him; reasonable access was meaningless and stupid; a day would come when they wouldn’t want to go with him on Sunday afternoons, when there was nowhere left in London that wasn’t an unholy bore. What about reasonable access then?

‘Please be quiet.’

He sat down in the armchair that he had always sat in. She said:

‘You might marry again. And have other children.’

‘I don’t want other children. I have children already. I want us all to live together as we used to –’

‘Please listen to me –’

‘I get a pain in my stomach in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and can’t go back to sleep. The children will grow up and I’ll grow old. I couldn’t begin a whole new thing all over again: I haven’t the courage. Not after Diana. A mistake like that alters everything.’

‘I’m going to marry Richard.’

‘Three weeks ago,’ he said, as though he hadn’t heard her, ‘you smiled at me.’

‘Smiled?’

‘Like you used to, Elizabeth. Before –’

‘You made a mistake,’ she said, softly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not saying don’t go on with your affair with this man. I’m not saying that, because I think in the circumstances it’d be a cheek. D’you understand me, Elizabeth?’

‘Yes, I do. And I think you and I can be perfectly good friends. I don’t feel sour about it any more: perhaps that’s what you saw in my smile.’

‘Have a six-month affair –’

‘I’m in love with Richard.’

‘That’ll all pass into the atmosphere. It’ll be nothing at all in a year’s time –’

‘No.’

‘I love you, Elizabeth.’

They stood facing one another, not close. His body was still swaying. The liquid in his glass moved gently, slopping to the rim and then settling back again. Her eyes were on his face: it was thinner, she was thinking. Her fingers played with the edge of a cushion on the back of the sofa.

‘On Saturdays,’ he said, ‘I buy the meringues and the brandy-snaps in Frith’s Patisserie. On Sunday morning I make the sandwiches. Then I cook sausages and potatoes for my lunch, and after that I come over here.’

‘Yes, yes –’

‘I look forward all week to Sunday.’

‘The children enjoy their outings, too.’

‘Will you think about it?’

‘About what?’

‘About all being together again.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ She turned away from him. ‘I wish you’d go now,’ she said.

‘Will you come out with me on our birthday?’

‘I’ve told you.’ Her voice was loud and angry, her cheeks were flushed. ‘Can’t you understand? I’m going to marry Richard. We’ll be married within a month, when the girls have had time to get to know him a little better. By Christmas we’ll be married.’

He shook his head in a way that annoyed her, seeming in his drunkenness to deny the truth of what she was saying. He tried to light a cigarette; matches dropped to the floor at his feet. He left them there.

It enraged her that he was sitting in an armchair in her flat with his eyelids drooping through drink and an unlighted cigarette in his hand and his matches spilt all over the floor. They were his children, but she wasn’t his wife: he’d destroyed her as a wife, he’d insulted her, he’d left her to bleed and she had called him a murderer.