William Trevor - After Rain

‘Sit down.’ With her free hand Hazel pulled a chair out from the table and gently eased her mother toward it. Her brother grinned across the kitchen at her.

‘Oh, Stewart!’

She kissed him, hugging his awkward body. Pimples disfigured his big forehead, his spiky short hair tore uncomfortably at her cheek.

‘We should have seen,’ Mrs. Leeson whispered. ‘We should have known.’

‘You couldn’t. Of course you couldn’t.’

‘He had a dream or something. That’s all he was on about.’

Hazel remembered the dreams she’d had herself at Milton’s age, half-dreams because sometimes she was awake - close your eyes and you could make Mick Jagger smile at you, or hear the music of U2 or The Damage. ‘Paul Hogan had his arms round me,’ Addy giggled once. Then you began going out with someone and everything was different.

‘Yet how would he know about a saint?’ her mother whispered. ‘Where’d he get the name from?’

Hazel didn’t know. It would have come into his head, she said to herself, but didn’t repeat the observation aloud. In spite of what she said, her mother didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was easier for her mother, too, to believe her son had been away in the head, or maybe it made it worse. You wouldn’t know that, you couldn’t tell from her voice or from her face.

‘Don’t let it weigh on you,’ she begged. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself.’

Later Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were in the kitchen. Addy made tea and tumbled biscuits on to a plate. Herbert Cutcheon was solemn, Addy subdued. Like her father, Hazel sensed, both of them were worried about her mother. Being worried about her mother was the practical aspect of the grief that was shared, an avenue of escape from it, a distraction that was permitted. Oblivious to all emotion, Stewart reached out for a biscuit with pink marshmallow in it, his squat fingers and bitten nails ugly for an instant against the soft prettiness.

‘He’ll get the best funeral the Church can give him,’ Herbert Cutcheon promised.

Garfield stood a little away from them, with a black tie in place and his shoes black also, not the trainers he normally wore. Looking at him across the open grave, Hazel suddenly knew. In ignorance she had greeted him an hour ago in the farmhouse; they had stood together in the church; she had watched while he stepped forward to bear the coffin. Now, in the bleak churchyard, those images were illuminated differently. The shame had been exorcized, silence silently agreed upon.

‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,’ Herbert Cutcheon proclaimed, his voice heavy with the churchiness that was discarded as soon as his professional duties ceased, never apparent on a Sunday afternoon in the back room of the farmhouse. ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God.’

Earth was thrown on to the coffin. ’Our Father, who art in heaven,’ Herbert Cutcheon suitably declared, and Hazel watched Garfield’s lips, in unison with Addy’s and their parents’. Stewart was there too, now and again making a noise. Mrs. Leeson held a handkerchief to her face, clinging on to her husband in sudden bright sunshine. ‘And forgive us our trespasses.’ Garfield mouthed the words too.

With bitter calmness, Hazel allowed the facts to settle into place. Milton had been told not to. He had been told, even by Garfield himself, that you had fancies when you were fifteen. He had been told that talk about a Catholic saint was like the Catholics claiming one of their idolatrous statues had been seen to move. But in spite of all that was said to him Milton had disobeyed. ‘Your bodies a living sacrifice,’ Hazel’s Great-Uncle Willie used to thunder, steadfast in his certainty. Prominent among the mourners, the old man’s granite features displayed no emotion now.

‘Amen,’ Herbert Cutcheon prompted, and the mourners murmured and Mrs. Leeson sobbed. Hazel moved closer to her, as Addy did, receiving her from their father’s care. All of them knew, Hazel’s thoughts ran on: her father knew, and her mother, and Addy, and Herbert Cutcheon. It was known in every house in the neighbourhood; it was known in certain Belfast bars and clubs, where Garfield’s hard-man reputation had been threatened, and then enhanced.

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ Addy whispered as the three women turned from the grave, but Hazel did not attempt to soothe her mother’s distress because she knew she could not. Her mother would go to her own grave with the scalding agony of what had happened still alive within her; her father would be reminded of the day of the occurrence on all the July marches remaining to him. The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.

A Day

In the night Mrs. Lethwes wakes from time to time, turns and murmurs in her blue-quilted twin bed, is aware of fleeting thoughts and fragments of memory that dissipate swiftly. Within her stomach, food recently consumed is uneasily digested. Briefly, she suffers a moment of cramp.

Mrs. Lethwes dreams: a child again, she remains in the car while her brother, Charlie, visits the Indian family who run the supermarket. Kittens creep from beneath inverted flowerpots in the Bunches’ back yard, and she is there, in the yard too, looking for Charlie because he is visiting the Bunches now. ‘You mustn’t go bothering the Bunches,’ their mother upbraids him. ‘People are busy.’ There are rivers to cross, and the streets aren’t there any more; there is a seashore, and tents.

In her garden, while Mrs. Lethwes still sleeps, the scent of night-stock fades with the cool of night. Dew forms on roses and geraniums, on the petals of the cosmos and the yellow spikes of broom. Slugs creep towards lettuce plants, avoiding a line of virulent bait; a silent cat, far outside its own domain, waits for the emergence of the rockery mice.

It is July. Dawn comes early, casting a pale twilight on the brick of the house, on the Virginia creeper that covers half a wall, setting off white-painted window-frames and decorative wrought-iron. This house and garden, in a tranquil wooded neighbourhood, constitute one part of the achievement of Mrs. Lethwes’s husband, are a symbol of professional advancement conducted over twenty years, which happens also to be the length of this marriage.

Abruptly, Mrs. Lethwes is fully awake and knows her night’s sleep is over. Hunched beneath the bedclothes in the other bed, her husband does not stir when she rises and crosses the room they share to the window. Drawing aside the edge of a curtain, she glances down into the early-morning garden and almost at once drops the curtain back into place. In bed again, she lies on her side, facing her husband because, being fond of him, she likes to watch him sleeping. She feels blurred and headachy, as she always does at this time, the worst moment of her day, Mrs. Lethwes considers.

Is Elspeth awake too? She wonders that. Does Elspeth, in her city precinct, share the same pale shade of dawn? Is there, as well, the orange glow of a street lamp and now, beginning in the distance somewhere, the soft swish of a milk dray, a car door banging, a church bell chiming five? Mrs. Lethwes doesn’t know where Elspeth lives precisely, or in any way what she looks like, but imagines short black hair and elfin features, a small, thin body, fragile fingers. An hour and three-quarters later - still conducting this morning ritual - she hears bath-water running; and later still there is music. Vivaldi, Mrs. Lethwes thinks.

Her husband wakes. His eyes remember, becoming troubled, and then the trouble lifts from them when he notices, without surprise, that she’s not asleep. In another of her dreams during the night that has passed he carried her, and his voice spoke softly, soothing her. Or was it quite a dream, or only something like one? She tries to smile; she says she’s sorry, knowing now.