William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

‘Well, this is nice,’ her mother said, flustered when she opened the hall door.

She led him into the sitting-room he remembered from the only time he had been in this house before—the prints of country scenes on the walls, the ornaments, a bookcase packed with books that Chloë said had never been read. The fire was unlit because this morning the room was sunny. A black-and-white dog—reluctant when it was shooed out of the french windows—smelled as it had before, of damp or of itself. A Sunday that had been too.

‘Oh yes, we’ve been well,’ Chloë’s mother said when she was asked. ‘He has a new thing now.’

Metal-detecting this turned out to be, poking about with a gadget on Winchelsea beach, which was the best for this purpose for miles around. ‘You’ll have a cup of coffee? Or lunch? He’ll be back for lunch.’

Prosper had always known she didn’t like him, an older man and not a type she could take to: he could hear her saying it. And now he’d caught her with a curler in her wispy grey hair, forgotten, he supposed. He watched her realizing, a nervous gesture, fingers patting one side of her head. She left him on his own and came back saying she was sorry for deserting him. She offered sherry, the bottle almost empty.

‘He said he’d get some more.’ She poured out what there was, none for herself.

‘I don’t know where she is,’ Prosper said. ‘I thought she might be here.’

‘Oh, Chloë’s not here.’

‘I wondered—’

‘No, Chloë’s not here.’

‘I wondered if she said anything about where she is.’

‘Well, no.’

He wondered what had been said, how it had been put, presumably on the telephone. He wondered if they’d been told more than he had himself, if they’d been glad, or at least relieved, both of them, not just she.

‘He’ll be back soon. He wouldn’t like to miss you.’

Prosper believed that, seeing in his mind’s eye the lanky figure prodding at the shingle of the beach with his detector. Her father had made a pet of Chloë and probably considered she could do no wrong; but even so it was he whom Prosper had come to see. It hadn’t been the truth when he’d said he thought she might be here.

‘It’s difficult,’ her mother said. ‘In the light of everything, it’s difficult.’

When she finished speaking she shook her head repeatedly. Prosper said he understood.

‘He’d want to see you. He’d want me to invite you.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘He’s never idle.’

‘I remember that.’

‘He made those ships in bottles all last winter. You see the ships, going through the hall?’

‘Yes, I noticed the ships.’

‘It’s lamb I’ve got for today. A little leg, but it’s enough.’

There was her husband’s key in the front door while she spoke, then his voice called out to her, saying he was back.

Chloë left the Kylemore Hotel that same Sunday morning and took a taxi to Maida Vale, where she laid her things out in the room she’d been lent while the girl who lived there was on holiday in Provence. It would be better than the hotel, and three weeks might just be long enough to find somewhere permanent.

She filled the drawers that had been allocated to her and hung what clothes there was room for in a hanging space behind a curtain. A stroke of luck she’d called it when the girl—an office colleague whom she didn’t otherwise know—had suggested this arrangement, quoting the rent and requesting that it should be paid in advance. Chloë had lived in a quite similar room before she’d moved into the flat at Clement Gardens.

He hadn’t pressed her to do that; at no stage had he done so, at no stage in their relationship had he ever pressed her about anything. As soon as she saw the flat she had wanted to be there, enraptured by its spacious-Chloe ness, and the grandeur—so she called it—of Clement Gardens. The gardens themselves, where you could sit out in summer, were for the use of the tenants only, the rules that kept them peaceful strictly enforced.

She went out in search of coffee and found a café with pavement tables in the sun. She told herself she wasn’t lonely, knowing that she was. Would weekends always be the worst? she wondered. The worst because they’d meant so much, even before she’d come to Clement Gardens, or perhaps particularly so then? She made a list of things to buy and asked the waitress who brought her coffee if there was somewhere open near by. ‘Yeah, sure,’ the waitress said, and told her where.

People exercising their dogs went by, children in the company of fathers claiming their Sunday access, dawdling couples. A church bell had begun to ring; the elderly, with prayer books, hurried. Resentment grumbled in the children’s features, the fathers struggled with conversation.

For a moment, feeling sleepy in the sun, for she’d been restless in the night, Chloë dozed; and waking, in memory saw the woman who had been his wife. ‘Prosper!’ this beautiful person had called out from the crowd at the Festival Hall, still possessing him, a little, with her smile. And Chloë had wondered as they returned to their seats for the second part of the concert if the man who was tonight the companion of this woman was the one she had run away to, and imagined that he was.

She made her list of what she needed. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony it had been, a CD of which had been played for weeks before she was taken to the Festival Hall. One composer at a time had been his way of bringing music into her life.

Her father was shy, and made more so by what had happened. He was bent a little from the shoulders, which with his frailness made him seem older than he was, which was sixty-seven. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said when his wife was out of the room.

‘I don’t know why it happened.’

‘Stay with us for lunch, Prosper.’

The invitation sounded almost compensatory, but Prosper knew he was imagining that, that nothing so ridiculous was intended.

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘I think she wants to be alone.’

‘Could you—’

‘No, we couldn’t do that.’

They walked together to the Lord and Lady, which Prosper on that other Sunday had been taken to for a similar purpose: to bring back jugs of lunchtime beer.

‘Have something now we’re here?’ the same offer came in the saloon bar and, remembering, her father ordered gin and tonic, and a Worthington for himself.

‘We couldn’t do something Chloë doesn’t want us to,’ he said while they waited for them.

There was a photograph of her framed on the sitting-room mantelpiece, a bare-footed child of nine or ten in a bathing dress, laughing among sandcastles that had been dotted around her in a ring. She hated that photograph, she used to say. She hated that sitting-room. They’d called her Chloë after a prim character in a film. She couldn’t get to like the name.

‘There’s no one else,’ Prosper said.

‘Chloë told us there was nothing like that.’

The glass of beer was raised and Prosper did the same with his gin and tonic.

‘There wasn’t a quarrel,’ he said.

‘You did a lot for Chloë, Prosper. We know what you’ve done for her.’ ‘Less than it might seem.’

Teaching wasn’t much, you passed on information. Anyone could have taken her to foreign films, anyone could have taken her to the National Gallery or told her who Apemantus was. She’d been the most perceptive and intelligent of all the girls he’d ever taught.

‘I’ll be honest with you, Prosper—at home here we haven’t always seen eye to eye on the friendship. Not that we’ve ever come to fireworks. No, I don’t mean that.’

‘I’m an older man.’

‘Yes, it’s come up.’