William Trevor - After Rain

‘Damian.’ Claire hugged him, laughing, playfully demanding to know what he was doing in that awful suit. I asked him where he’d been and he said oh, a lot of places - Vancouver, Oregon, Spain. Claire made him sit down, saying she was going to make some tea, inviting him to stay a while. He was the tonic we needed, Claire said, for she’s always afraid that we’ll slump into dullness unless we’re careful. A woman, somewhere, had given him the suit: we both guessed that.

‘I wasn’t all that well in Spain,’ Damian said. ‘Some kind of sunstroke.’

We are the same age, Damian and I, not young any more; that day, as we sat together in the garden, we were sixty and a bit, Claire five years younger. She’s tall and slim, and I can’t believe she’ll ever be anything but elegant, but of course I know I may be wrong. When we married she came to live in the country town I’ve always known, acquiring an extra identity as the doctor’s wife and the receptionist at the practice, as the mother of a daughter and a son, the organizer of a playgroup, the woman who first taught the illiterate of the town to read.

Damian, at the first opportunity, fled this neighbourhood. On his return to it the time before this one he had carried - clearly an affectation - a silver-topped cane, which was abandoned now, no doubt because it drew attention to its own necessity, and Damian inclines towards vanity. Although he sat down briskly in the chair Claire had vacated for him, the protest of a joint caused him, for a single instant, to wince. His light, fair hair is grey in places now, and I don’t suppose he cares for that either, or that his teeth have shrivelled and become discoloured, nor that the freckles on the backs of his hands form blobs where they have spread into one another, or that the skin of his forehead is as dry as old vellum. But that day there was nothing about his eyes to suggest a coming to terms with a future destined to be different from the past, no hint of a hesitation about what should or should not be undertaken: in that sense Damian remains young.

Even as a boy his features were gaunt, giving the impression then of undernourishment. He was angular, but without any of the awkwardness sometimes associated with that quality. In spite of whatever trouble he was having with a joint, he could still, I noticed that day, tidy himself away with natural ease. As always at the beginning of a visit, he was good-humoured; moodiness - sometimes a snappish response to questions, or silence - was apt to set in later.

If, in terms of having a profession, Damian is anything, he is a poet, although in all the time I’ve known him he has never shown me more than a verse or two. Years ago someone told us that he once had a coterie of admirers and was still, in certain quarters, considered to possess ‘a voice’ that should be more widely heard. A volume entitled Slow Death of a Pigeon - its contents sparse, Claire and I always assumed, for nothing about Damian suggests he is profligate with his talent appears to represent all he has so far chosen for posterity. In time we would receive a copy of Slow Death of a Pigeon, he promised on one of his visits, but none arrived.

‘Well, yes, it was that. Something like it,’ he was saying, slightly laughing, when I returned with another deck-chair after Claire had brought out the tea things. He had repeated all he’d told me about his sunstroke and the lack of anything of interest in Vancouver. Yes, he was confessing now, a relationship with a woman had featured in his more recent travels, had somehow been the reason for them. There was no confirmation that the powder-blue suit had been a gift. Damian wouldn’t have considered that of interest.

‘I thought I’d maybe die,’ he said, returning to the subject of his sunstroke, but when I asked him what he’d taken for it, what treatment there had been, he was vague.

‘Bloody visions,’ he said instead. ‘Goya stuff.’ In any case, he confidently pronounced, Spain was overrated.

Had the woman been Spanish? I wondered, and thought of dancers, white teeth and a rosebud that was red, black skirts swirling, red ribbons in black hair. I have doctor colleagues who farm a bit, who let the wind blow away the mixture of triviality and death that now and again makes our consulting rooms melancholy places. Others collect rare books, make cabinets, involve themselves in politics, allow gardening or some sport to become a way of life to skulk in. For me, Damian’s infrequent visits, and wondering about him in between, were such a diversion. Not as efficacious as afternoons on a tractor or searching out a Cuala Press edition of Yeats, but then by nature I’m lazy.

‘A chapter closed?’ Claire was saying.

‘Should never have been opened.’

Later, in the kitchen, I decanted the wine and Claire said the lamb would be enough, with extra potatoes and courgettes. We heard Joanna’s car and then her voice exclaiming in surprise and Damian greeting her.

I carried a tray of drinks to the garden. Damian’s small black suitcase, familiar to us for many years, was still on the grass beside his deck-chair. I can see it now.

The visit followed a familiar pattern. In the small suitcase there were shirts and underclothes and socks in need of laundering; and when they had been through the washing-machine most of them were seen to be in need of repair. Damian, besides, was penniless; and there was the request that if anyone telephoned him - which was, he said, unlikely since, strictly speaking, no one knew his whereabouts - his presence in our house should be denied.

When we were children, Damian and I had played together at Doul, the grey, half-derelict house where his Aunt Una had brought him up. Doul is no longer there, having been sold to a builder for the lead of its roof, and later razed to the ground. Damian’s Aunt Una had drunk herself to death in a caravan. I was actually there when her head jerked suddenly to one side on the pillow, the visible indication of her demise. She’d been, in our childhood, a vague presence in that old house and its lost garden, tall and handsome yet somehow like a ghost of someone else: it was said that she was Damian’s mother. People who remembered her advent, with an infant, in the neighbourhood, said the house had been bought for her by the man who’d made her pregnant, buying her silence also.

I learned all that later. When Damian and I were eight his Aunt Una was known to me as his aunt and there was never a reason, afterwards, to doubt that she was. He and I were sent away to different schools - the seducer from the past said to have obliged in this way, also, where Damian’s boarding fees were concerned - but our friendship none the less continued. Damian - like a scare-crow sometimes because it was never noticed by his Aunt Una that he grew out of his clothes - was easy company, hard to dislike, an antidote to the provincial respectability I grew up in. We wandered about the countryside; we hung about point-to-points; when we were older we went to Friday dance-halls if one of us had money; we dreamed of romance with Bettina Nowd, clerk in the Munster and Leinster Bank. Abruptly, our ways parted, and remained so for a long time: when Damian, at nineteen, left the neighbourhood he did not return for fourteen years, by which time his Aunt Una was dead and her house gone. It was said he hadn’t written to her, or communicated in any way during that time, which was surprising because he was always fond of her. But as I heard nothing from him either it’s perhaps less odd than it seems. For Damian, perhaps, the vacuum of people’s absence cannot be filled by any other means. During that fourteen years he and I met only once, at Killaloe at the first of his weddings.

‘You know, I’d like to see Doul again,’ he said the day after he’d appeared in his powder-blue suit. So we went there, where there was nothing to see, not even the caravan his Aunt Una died in. Beneath the brambles that grew everywhere, and the great swathes of nettles, there might have been remains of some kind, but if there were the naked eye could not discern them. When we walked on a bit there were the walls of the kitchen garden, ivy-clad in places, fallen away in others.