William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

‘That’s a lovely piece of delft,’ Mrs O’Daly commented in the hall, referring to a blue-and-white soup tureen that the men had placed on the shelf of the hallstand. Having finished her morning’s work, she had gone from room to room, inspecting the furniture that had come, and the glass and china in the hall. ‘Isn’t that really lovely!’ she exclaimed again about the soup tureen.

It was cracked, Connie saw, a long crack in the lid. It used to be on the sideboard of the dining-room in the bungalow. She’d never much noticed it then, but in the hall it seemed obtrusive.

Melissa was pretty, tall and slender, with long fair hair and greenish eyes. She liked jokes, and was clever although she didn’t want to be and often pretended she wasn’t.

‘Time to measure the maggot,’ she said later that same day. Her contention was that her brother had ceased to grow and would grow no more. She and Connie regularly made him stand against the door jamb of Connie’s bedroom in the hope of finding an increase in his modest stature.

But Connie shook her head when this was again suggested. She was reading London Belongs to Me and went on doing so. Nat, on his way upstairs already, for he enjoyed this ceremonial attention, looked disappointed.

‘Poor little maggot,’ Melissa said. ‘Poor little maggot, Connie. You’ve gone and upset it.’

‘You shouldn’t call your brother a maggot.’

‘Hey!’ Outraged, Melissa stared disbelievingly at Connie’s calm features. ‘Hey, come on!’

Connie turned down the corner of a page and began to walk away.

‘It’s only a blooming word,’ Melissa ran after her to protest. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

‘This isn’t your house,’ Connie said.

The day Connie’s mother came back from the hospice Miss Mortimer had pinned up pictures of flowers. Miss Mortimer painted her pictures herself; before the flowers there’d been clowns. ‘Foxglove,’ Connie had said when Miss Mortimer asked.

Going home on the river path, she’d been thinking of that, of the four new pictures on the schoolroom wall, of Miss Mortimer saying that soon there wouldn’t be a cowslip left anywhere. The schoolroom stayed on in her mind nearly always when she was going home, the writing on the blackboard, the tattered carpet, the boards showing all around it, the table they sat at, Miss Mortimer too. The rectory itself stayed in her mind, the two flights of stairs, the white hall door, three steps, the gravel.

Her father didn’t wave when she saw him coming towards her. It was drizzling and she thought that was maybe why he was coming to meet her. But often in winter it rained and he didn’t; it was her mother who used to. ‘Hullo, Connie,’ he said, and she knew then that her mother had come back from the hospice, as she had said she would.

He took her hand, not telling her because she knew. She didn’t cry. She wanted to ask in case it was different from what she guessed, but she didn’t because she didn’t want to hear if it was. ‘It’s all right,’ her father said. He went with her to the room that had become her mother’s, overlooking the garden. She touched her mother’s hand and he lifted her up so that she could kiss her cheek, as often he’d done before. Mr Crozier was standing by the windows in the drawing-room when they went downstairs again. She hadn’t known he was there. Then the O’Dalys came.

‘You stay here with me,’ Mrs O’Daly said in the kitchen. ‘I’ll hear you your reading.’ But it wasn’t reading on a Tuesday, another verse to learn instead, and six sentences to write. ‘You going to write them then?’ Mrs O’Daly asked. ‘You going to think them up?’

She didn’t want to. She learned the verse and said it to her father when he came to sit beside her, but the next day she didn’t have to go to Miss Mortimer’s. People came in the morning. She could hear their footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; she couldn’t hear voices. It was in the afternoon that her mother died.

‘That’s not like Connie,’ Robert said.

‘No, it isn’t.’

When Teresa had been told by her children what Connie had said to them she had guessed, with sudden, bitter intuition, that everything going well was over. And she had wondered where she and Robert had gone wrong. Robert was simply bewildered.

The wedding—to be conducted by Mr Crozier as a purely family occasion—was less than three weeks off. No going away afterwards, no honeymoon because the time of year on the farm wasn’t right for that.

‘What else does Connie say?’

Teresa shook her head. She didn’t know but suspected nothing else, and was right.

‘We want to be married,’ Robert said. ‘Nothing’s going to stop that now.’

Teresa hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Nothing is,’ she said.

‘Children manage to get on. Even when they’re strangers to one another.’

Teresa didn’t say that being strangers might make things easier. She didn’t say it because she didn’t know why that should be. But Melissa, who never wept, wept often now, affected as a stranger would not have been.

The books Connie pretended to read were in the dining-room bookcases, on either side of the fireplace. They’d been her mother’s books, picked up at country-house auctions, some thrown away when the shelves became full, all of them old, belonging to another time. ‘ The Man with Red Hair ,’ her mother said, ‘you’ll love that.’ And Dr Bradley Remembers , and Random Harvest . Only Jamaica Inn retained its paper jacket, yellow, without a picture. ‘And The Stars Look Down ,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll love The Stars Look Down .’

Connie took it to the roof, to the lead-covered gully she had found, wide enough to lie on between two slopes of slates. Every time she went there she wished she didn’t have to disobey her father and always took care not to spend too long there in case she was discovered. Sometimes she stood up, protected from sight by the bulk of a chimney and, far away, saw her father in the fields or Teresa among the geraniums. Sometimes Melissa and Nat were on the avenue, Nat on the carrier of Melissa’s bicycle, his small legs spread wide so that they wouldn’t catch in the spokes.

Teresa felt she had never loved Robert more; and felt that she was loved, herself, more steadfastly even than before—as if, she thought, the trouble brought such closeness. Or was there panic? she wondered in other moments; was it in panic that the depths of trust were tapped? Was it in panic that the widowed and the rejected protected what they’d been unable to protect before? She did not know the answers to her questions. It only seemed all wrong that a child’s obduracy should mock what was so fairly due.

‘Connie.’

Robert found her in the outhouse where the furniture was. She had folded aside a dust-sheet and was sitting in an armchair of which the springs had gone, which should have been thrown out years ago.

‘Connie,’ he interrupted her, for she had not heard him. Her book was Folly Bridge .

She marked her place with a finger. She smiled at him. No one considered that recently she’d turned sulky; there was no sign of that. Even when she’d told Melissa and Nat that the house was not theirs, she had apparently simply said it.

‘You’re troubled because Teresa and I are to be married, Connie.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You didn’t seem to mind before.’

The armchair had a high back with wings, its faded red velvet badly worn in places, an embroidery of flowers stitched into where an antimacassar might be.

‘It’s very good,’ Connie said, speaking about the book she held.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you read it?’