William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

She didn’t argue; there was no point in argument. She might have confessed instead that she had frightened Etty Rynne; she might have tried to explain that her wild talk had been an effort to make something good out of what there was, as so often she had seen the spread of angels’ wings emerging from roughly sawn wood. But all that was too difficult, so Nuala said nothing.

Her anger was still merciless when that day ended; and through the dark of the night she felt herself oppressed by it and bleakly prayed, waiting for a response that did not come. She reached out in the morning dusk to hold for a moment her husband’s hand. Had he woken she would have told him all she had kept to herself, unable now to be silent.

But it was Corry’s day that was beginning, and it was he who needed sympathy and support. Making breakfast for him and for her children, Nuala gave him both as best she could, banishing from her mood all outward traces of what she knew would always now be private. When the house was empty again but for herself, she washed up the morning’s dishes and tidied the kitchen as she liked to have it. She damped the fire down in the stove. Outside, she fed her hens.

In Corry’s workshop she remained longer than she usually did on her morning visit to the saints who had become her friends: St Laurence with his gridiron, St Gabriel the messenger, St Clare of Assisi, St Thomas the Apostle and blind St Lucy, St Catherine, St Agnes. Corry had made them live for her and she felt the first faint slipping away of her anger as they returned her gaze with undisturbed tranquillity. Touched by it, lost in its peace, she sensed their resignation too. The world, not she, had failed.

Rose Wept

‘How nice all this is!’ Rose’s mother cried, with dishes on the way to the dinner table Rose had laid. ‘What weather, Mr Bouverie, don’t you think? Please sit here next to me.’

Obediently Mr Bouverie did so, replying to the comment about the weather.

‘Can’t stand a heatwave,’ Mr Dakin cheerfully grumbled.

Rose’s father – Mrs Dakin’s better half, so she insisted – was bluff and genial. He spoke with a hoarseness, always keeping his voice down as if saving it for professional use, he being an auctioneer. Apart from her shrillness, there was a similarity about his wife: both were large and shared an ease often to be found in people of their girth and stature. This evening Mr Dakin was sweating, as he tended to in summer; he had taken his jacket off and undone the buttons of the waistcoat he always wore no matter what the temperature.

His daughter sweltered in her guilt. Rose was eighteen and wished, this evening, she could be somewhere else. She wished she didn’t have to meet Mr Bouverie’s weary eyes or watch him being polite, listening with inclined head to her mother, smiling at her father’s bonhomie. The occasion was a celebration: Rose was to go to university, Mr Bouverie had had a hand in her success. As a tutor, he had made borderline cases his business for more than thirty years, but intended to no longer, Rose being his last. My God, this is appalling, she thought. She had begged her mother not to issue this invitation but Mrs Dakin had insisted that they must. Mr Bouverie had attempted to refuse but had then been offered a choice of evenings.

‘How I adore the asparagus season!’ Rose heard her mother cry in her vivacious way, pressing a dish of the vegetable, well buttered, on their visitor.

Mr Bouverie smiled and murmured his appreciation. He was a man of sixty-odd. Strands of faded hair were hardly noticeable on the freckled pate of his head. There were freckles, also, on the backs of his hands, on old worn skin like dried-out chamois. He wore a pale suit and one of his colourful Italian bow ties.

‘And how is your world, Mr Bouverie?’ Mr Dakin civilly enquired.

‘Shrinking,’ Mr Bouverie replied. ‘That is something you notice as you age.’

Mrs Dakin bubbled into good-sort laughter. Mr Dakin poured claret.

‘You shrink yourself of course.’ Mr Bouverie obligingly pursued the subject, since it was clear that the Dakins liked to have a conversation going. He smiled at Rose. Half his teeth were still his own, grey and sucked away to crags.

‘Good tidings for the obese,’ mumbled Mr Dakin, his features screwed up as they often were when he made a joke. Directed against himself, his banter caused his wife to exclaim:

‘Oh, Bobo, you’re not obese!’

‘I used to be six foot and half an inch,’ Mr Bouverie laboured on. ‘I’m nothing like that now.’

‘But otherwise all is well?’ Mr Dakin enquired.

‘Oh, yes, indeed.’

Mrs Dakin had had her dining-room papered blue, a dark stripe and a lighter one. Curtains matched, the paintwork was white. Mrs Dakin enjoyed this side of things and often said so: leafless delphiniums patterned her drawing-room; her hall and staircase were black and gold.

‘I say, this is awfully good.’ Mr Dakin complimented his wife on what she had done with the turkey slices that accompanied the asparagus.

‘Delicious,’ Mr Bouverie affirmed.

Rose wore a slate-grey dress, with a collar that folded back. Unlike her parents, Rose was petite, her fair hair cut short, a fringe following the curve of her forehead, her eyes a forget-me-not shade of blue. Her guilt, this evening, silenced her, and her smile came fleetingly and not often. When it did, her lower lip lost its beesting look and for an instant her white, irregular teeth appeared. She felt awkward and unpretty at the dinner table, sick of herself.

‘We cultivate it late in our garden,’ her mother was saying, still talking about the asparagus, of which Rose had taken only a single shoot. ‘Our season runs almost to September.’

What kind of an ordeal was it for him? Rose wondered. They had invited his wife as well but a message had come the day before to say that Mrs Bouverie was unwell. Rose knew that wasn’t true. His wife had seized the opportunity; she’d said to him she couldn’t be bothered, but that wasn’t true either. His wife would be naked now, Rose thought.

‘Extraordinary, what you read on cars’ rear windows,’ her mother suddenly remarked, the subject of a particular season for asparagus now exhausted. ‘Baby on Board , for instance. I mean, why on earth should a total stranger be interested in that?’

‘I think you’re being told not to drive too close,’ Rose’s father suggested.

Tinkling with unmalicious social laughter, her mother pointed out that it was an enticement to drive too close in order to read what was said.

‘They haven’t thought of that, my dear.’

In all her chosen subjects Rose had been a borderline case and every Thursday afternoon, for almost a year, had gone to Mr Bouverie’s house, where they had sat together in the bow window that looked out into the garden. Mrs Bouverie brought tea as soon as Rose arrived and while they drank it Mr Bouverie didn’t attempt to teach but instead talked about the past, about his own life when he had been about to go to university himself, and later being interviewed for a position in the worsted-cloth business. He had tried the worsted trade for a while and then had turned to schoolmastering. But something about the form of discipline and the tedium of’hobbies time’ – when the boys put together model aeroplanes – caused him to give it up after a year. Ever since, he had received pupils in his house, deciding only a month or so ago that Rose should be the last of them. ‘Anno Domini,’ he’d said, but Rose knew that wasn’t the reason. During all those teatimes he had spun his life out, like a serial story.

‘But it’s odd,’ Mrs Dakin lightly persisted. ‘Don’t you agree with me, Mr Bouverie?’