William Trevor - After Rain

A year after the wedding, as the couple sat one lunchtime in the car which Belle had drawn into the gateway to a field, he said:

‘You’d tell me if it was too much for you?’

‘Too much, Owen ?’

‘Driving all over the county. Having to get me in and out. Having to sit there listening.’

‘It’s not too much.’

‘You’re good the way you’ve patience.’

‘I don’t think I’m good at all.’

‘I knew you were in church that Sunday. I could smell the perfume you had on. Even at the organ I could smell it.’

‘I’ll never forget that Sunday’

‘I loved you when you let me show you the graves.’

‘I loved you before that.’

‘I don’t want to tire you out, with all the traipsing about after pianos. I could let it go, you know.’

He would do that for her, her thought was as he spoke. He wasn’t much for a woman, he had said another time: a blind man moving on towards the end of his days. He confessed that when first he wanted to marry her he hadn’t put it to her for more than two months, knowing better than she what she’d be letting herself in for if she said yes. ‘What’s that Belle look like these days?’ he had asked Violet a few years ago, and Violet hadn’t answered at first. Then apparently she’d said: ‘Belle still looks a girl.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to stop your work. Not ever, Owen.’

‘You’re all heart, my love. Don’t say you’re not good.’

‘It gets me out and about too, you know. More than ever in my life. Down all those avenues to houses I didn’t know were there. Towns I’ve never been to. People I never knew. It was restricted before.’

The word slipped out, but it didn’t matter. He did not reply that he understood about restriction, for that was not his style. When they were getting to know one another, after that Sunday by the church, he said he’d often thought of her in her brother’s jeweller’s shop, wrapping up what was purchased there, as she had wrapped for him the watch he bought for one of Violet’s birthdays. He’d thought of her putting up the grilles over the windows in the evenings and locking the shop door, and then going upstairs to sit with her brother’s family. When they were married she told him more: how most of the days of her life had been spent, only her chickens her own. ‘Smart in her clothes,’ Violet had added when she said the woman he’d rejected still looked a girl.

There hadn’t been any kind of honeymoon, but a few months after he had wondered if travelling about was too much for her he took Belle away to a seaside resort where he and Violet had many times spent a week. They stayed in the same boarding-house, the Sans Souci, and walked on the long, empty strand and in lanes where larks scuttered in and out of the fuchsia, and on the cliffs. They drank in Malley’s public house. They lay in autumn sunshine on the dunes.

‘You’re good to have thought of it.’ Belle smiled at him, pleased because he wanted her to be happy

‘Set us up for the winter, Belle.’

She knew it wasn’t easy for him. They had come to this place because he knew no other; he was aware before they set out of the complication that might develop in his emotions when they arrived. She had seen that in his face, a stoicism that was there for her. Privately, he bore the guilt of betrayal, stirred up by the smell of the sea and seaweed. The voices in the boarding-house were the voices Violet had heard. For Violet, too, the scent of honeysuckle had lingered into October. It was Violet who first said a week in the autumn sun would set them up for the winter: that showed in him, also, a moment after he spoke the words.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said. ‘When we’re back we’ll get you the television, Belle.’

‘Oh, but you — ’

‘You’d tell me.’

They were walking near the lighthouse on the cape when he said that. He would have offered the television to Violet, but Violet must have said she wouldn’t be bothered with the thing. It would never be turned on, she had probably argued; you only got silliness on it anyway.

‘You’re good to me,’ Belle said instead.

‘Ah no, no.’

When they were close enough to the lighthouse he called out and a man called back from a window. ‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said, and by the time he opened the door he must have guessed that the wife he’d known had died. ‘You’ll take a drop?’ he offered when they were inside, when the death and the remarriage had been mentioned. Whiskey was poured, and Belle felt that the three glasses lifted in salutation were an honouring of her, although this was not said. It rained on the way back to the boarding-house, the last evening of the holiday

‘Nice for the winter,’ he said as she drove the next day through rain that didn’t cease. ‘The television.’

When it came, it was installed in the small room that once was called the parlour, next to the kitchen. This was where mostly they sat, where the radio was. A fortnight after the arrival of the television set Belle acquired a small black sheepdog that a farmer didn’t want because it was afraid of sheep. This dog became hers and was always called hers. She fed it and looked after it. She got it used to travelling with them in the car. She gave it a new name, Maggie, which it answered to in time.

But even with the dog and the television, with additions and disposals in the house, with being so sincerely assured that she was loved, with being told she was good, nothing changed for Belle. The woman who for so long had taken her husband’s arm, who had guided him into rooms of houses where he coaxed pianos back to life, still claimed existence. Not as a tiresome ghost, some unforgiving spectre uncertainly there, but as if some part of her had been left in the man she’d loved.

Sensitive in ways that other people weren’t, Owen Dromgould continued to sense his second wife’s unease. She knew he did. It was why he had offered to give up his work, why he’d taken her to Violet’s seashore and borne there the guilt of his betrayal, why there was a television set now, and a sheepdog. He had guessed why she’d re-covered the kitchen floor. Proudly, he had raised his glass to her in the company of a man who had known Violet. Proudly, he had sat with her in the dining-room of the boarding-house and in Malley’s public house.

Belle made herself remember all that. She made herself see the bottle of John Jameson taken from a cupboard in the lighthouse, and hear the boarding-house voices. He understood, he did his best to comfort her; his affection was in everything he did. But Violet would have told him which leaves were on the turn. Violet would have reported that the tide was going out or coming in. Too late Belle realized that. Violet had been his blind man’s vision. Violet had left her no room to breathe.

One day, coming away from the house that was the most distant they visited, the first time Belle had been there, he said:

‘Did you ever see a room as sombre as that one? Is it the holy pictures that do it?’

Belle backed the car and straightened it, then edged it through a gateway that, thirty years ago, hadn’t been made wide enough.

‘Sombre?’ she said on a lane like a riverbed, steering around the potholes as best she could.

‘We used wonder could it be they didn’t want anything colourful in the way of a wallpaper in case it wasn’t respectful to the pictures.’

Belle didn’t comment on that. She eased the Vauxhall out on to the tarred road and drove in silence over a stretch of bogland. Vividly she saw the holy pictures in the room where Mrs. Grenaghan’s piano was: Virgin and Child, Sacred Heart, St Catherine with her lily, the Virgin on her own, Jesus in glory. They hung against nondescript brown; there were statues on the mantelpiece and on a corner shelf. Mrs. Grenaghan had brought tea and biscuits to that small, melancholy room, speaking in a hushed tone as if the holiness demanded that.