William Trevor - After Rain

‘You’d have the man back, I suppose?’ Alicia said, trying to hurt and knowing she succeeded. ‘You’d have him back in to paint again, to lift the bits and pieces from your dressing-table ?’

‘It’s not to do with Leary.’

‘What’s it to do with then?’

‘Let’s leave it.’

Hanging up a tea-towel, Catherine noticed that her fingers were trembling. They never quarrelled; even in childhood they hadn’t. In all the years Alicia had lived in the house she had never spoken in this unpleasant way, her voice rudely raised.

‘They’re walking all over you, Catherine.’

‘Yes.’

They did not speak again, not even to say goodnight. Alicia closed her bedroom door, telling herself crossly that her expectation had not been a greedy one. She had been unhappy in her foolish marriage, and after it she had been beholden in this house. Although it ran against her nature to do so, she had borne her lot without complaint; why should she not fairly have hoped that in widowhood they would again be sisters first of all?

In her bedroom Catherine undressed and for a moment caught a glimpse of her nakedness in her dressing-table looking-glass. She missed his warmth in bed, a hand holding hers before they slept, that last embrace, and sometimes in the night his voice saying he loved her. She pulled her nightdress on, then knelt to pray before she turned the light out.

Some instinct, vague and imprecise, drew her in the darkness on to the territory of Alicia’s disappointment. In the family photographs — some clearly defined, some drained of detail, affected by the sun — they were the sisters they had been: Alicia beautiful, confidently smiling; Catherine in her care. Catherine’s first memory was of a yellow flower, and sunlight, and a white cloth hat put on her head. That flower was a cowslip, Alicia told her afterwards, and told her that they’d gone with their mother to the ruins by the river that day, that it was she who found the cowslip. ‘Look, Catherine,’ she’d said. ‘A lovely flower.’ Catherine had watched in admiration when Alicia paraded in her First Communion dress, and later when boys paid her attention. Alicia was the important one, responsible, reliable, right about things, offered the deference that was an older sister’s due. She’d been a strength, Catherine said after the funeral, and Alicia was pleased, even though she shook her head.

Catherine dropped into sleep after half an hour of wakefulness. She woke up a few times in the night, on each occasion to find her thoughts full of the decision she had made and of her sister’s outraged face, the two tiny patches of red that had come into it, high up on her cheeks, the snap of disdain in her eyes. ‘A laughing-stock,’ Alicia said in a dream. ‘No more than a laughing-stock, Catherine.’

As Catherine lay there she imagined the silent breakfast there would be, and saw herself walking to Brady’s Lane, and Leary fiddling with his cigarette-making gadget, and Mrs. Leary in fluffy pink slippers, her stockingless legs mottled from being too close to the fire. Tea would be offered, but Catherine would refuse it. ‘A decenter man never stood in a pair of shoes,’ Leary could be counted upon to state.

She did not sleep again. She watched the darkness lighten, heard the first cars of the day pass on the road outside the house. By chance, a petty dishonesty had made death a potency for her sister, as it had not been when she was widowed herself. Alicia had cheated it of its due; it took from her now, as it had not then.

Catherine knew this intuition was no trick of her tired mind. While they were widows in her house Alicia’s jealousy would be the truth they shared, tonight’s few moments of its presence lingering insistently. Widows were widows first. Catherine would mourn, and feel in solitude the warmth of love. For Alicia there was the memory of her beauty.

Gilbert's Mother

On November 20th 1989, a Monday, in an area of South London not previously notable for acts of violence, Carol Dickson, a nineteen-year-old shop assistant, was bludgeoned to death between the hours of ten-fifteen and midnight. At approximately nine-fifty she had said goodnight to her friend Lindsayanne Trotter, with whom she had been watching Coronation Street, Brookside and Boon. She set out to walk the seven hundred yards to her parents’ house on the Ralelands estate, but did not arrive. Her parents, imagining that she and Lindsayanne had gone to a disco — notwithstanding that the night was Monday — went to bed at eleven o’clock, their normal practice whether their daughter had returned to the house or not. Carol Dickson’s body was discovered by a window-cleaner the following morning, lying on fallen leaves and woody straggles of cotoneaster, more than a mile and a half away, in Old Engine Way. Not wishing to become involved in what he described as ‘obviously something tacky’, the window-cleaner remounted his bicycle and rode on; an hour later schoolchildren reported a dead body in the bushes in Old Engine Way. Since the window-cleaner - Ronald Craig Thomas — was known to take this route along Old Engine Way every weekday morning, he was later interrupted in his work and questioned by the police. At midday on that same day, in broadcasting news of the tragedy, a radio announcer drew attention to this fact, stating that a man was helping the police with their enquiries. He also stated that Carol Dickson had been raped before her death, which was either a misinterpretation of information passed on to him or speculation on his part. It was not true.

Rosalie Mannion, fifty a month ago, peeled potatoes at the sink in her kitchen, listening to The Archers. Middle age suited her features; her round, pretty face had taken charge of what wrinkles had come, by chance distributing them favourably. Still a slight figure, she had in no way run to fat; the grey in her hair lent it a distinction that had not been there before. Her brown eyes had lost only a little of the luminosity that had been distinctive in Rosalie’s childhood.

‘Hullo,’ she called out, hearing her son’s footsteps on the stairs. She didn’t catch Gilbert’s reply because of the chatter of voices on the radio, but she knew he would have made one because he always did. The Archers’ music came on, and then there was talk about irradiated food.

At the time of her divorce it was decided that Rosalie should have the house. That was sixteen years ago, in 1973. There hadn’t been a quarrel about the house, nor even an argument. It was Gilbert’s home; it was only fair that Gilbert’s life should be disrupted as slightly as possible. So 21 Blenheim Avenue, SW15, was made over to her, while the man she’d been married to joined another woman in a Tudor-style property near Virginia Water. Rosalie returned to the botanical research she’d been engaged in before her marriage but after three years she found herself so affected by tiredness that she gave it up. She worked part-time now, in a shop that sold furniture fabrics.

At the back of Rosalie’s mind was the comforting feeling that 21 Blenheim Avenue would one day become Gilbert’s livelihood. She planned to convert the attics and the first floor, making them into self-contained flats. She and Gilbert would easily find room to spread themselves on the ground floor, which would of course retain the garden, and after her death that pattern would continue, and there would be an income from what Gilbert’s father had invested on his behalf. Gilbert, she knew, would never marry. At present he worked in an architect’s office — filing drawings, having photocopies made, taking the correspondence to be franked at the post office, delivering packages or collecting them, making tea and coffee, tidying. In the evenings Rosalie heard about the inspirations Gilbert had had about rearranging the contents of the drawings’ cabinets or heard that Kall Kwik were cheaper than Instant Action by twopence a sheet. ‘Oh, great,’ was all anyone at the office ever said apparently; but his mother listened to the details.