William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

The old man hesitated, and Rose could see he had momentarily lost track of the conversation. She knew her mother would notice also and not be dismayed. Smoothly her mother said:

‘All those personal declarations on motor cars – whom people love, where they’ve been, who occupies the two front seats.’

‘Sharon and Liam usually,’ Mr Dakin guffawed.

Mrs Bouverie, ten years younger than her husband and seeming more, had a lover. Mrs Bouverie, slim and silky, with long legs and a wrinkled pout, too well made up, received a visitor on Thursday afternoons because her husband was occupied with the last of his pupils then, concentrating on a borderline case’s weaknesses. Mrs Bouverie’s visitor came softly, but there were half-muffled sounds, like shadows passing through the house, a pattern of whispers and footfalls, a gently closed door, and always – ten minutes or so before Rose was due to leave the house herself – the lightest of footsteps on the stairs and in the hall. It was a pattern that belonged with Mrs Bouverie’s placing the tea tray on the pale mahogany of the window table, her scent lingering after she left the room, the restlessness in her eyes. But Rose hadn’t entirely guessed the nature of the weekly rendezvous until the afternoon she went to fetch a handkerchief from her coat pocket on the hallstand, and saw a sallow-faced man with a latchkey in his hand breathlessly closing the hall door. Seeing her in turn, he smiled, a brightly secret smile. ‘Younger than her?’ Rose’s friend Caroline, sharp on detail, wanted to know, and Rose said no, not much, but beautifully turned out in a brown linen suit, a grey-haired man, and elegant. ‘Not come to mend something?’ suggested Daisy, who could not help being sceptical when someone else claimed the limelight. Her doubts were scorned at once by Angela and Liz, for why should a repairer of washing machines or television sets be in possession of a latchkey and be dressed so? Why should he come so regularly? Why should he smile a secret smile? In the Box Tree Café where the five girls gossiped and complained of this and that, where they talked about sex and other private matters, where Daisy and Caroline smoked, Mrs Bouverie’s Thursday lover became the subject of intense and specific speculation. He was married, Caroline said, which was why he had to come to her house: in illicit love affairs there was always the difficulty of finding somewhere to go. He came on Thursdays because, Rose being the last of Mr Bouverie’s pupils, there was no other time when Mr Bouverie was fully occupied as perhaps there had been in the past, when there were other pupils. ‘That kind of thing and she’s fifty ? ‘Daisy frowned through the words, but Angela said fifty was nothing. ‘I do not intend to be unfaithful,’ Liz romantically declared, but the others weren’t interested in that, any more than they wished to dwell for long on the advanced age of Mrs Bouverie. What fascinated all of them, Daisy too in the end, was that while Rose sat in a room that had been described to them – a long low-ceilinged room that had once been two, with sofas and armchairs and a circular mirror over the mantelpiece – in a room upstairs a man and a woman got into bed together. ‘I would love to see him,’ Caroline said. ‘Even a glance.’ Was it like, each of them wondered in the Box Tree Café, the lovemaking you saw on the television or in the cinema? Or was, somehow, the real thing quite different? They argued about that. ‘I would not hesitate to be unfaithful,’ Caroline said, ‘if things went stale.’ Caroline was like that, her matter-of-factness sometimes sounding hard. Angela – long black hair, brown eyes, rarely smiling because of her dental wires – was the victim kind, and accident-prone. Liz gave too much, generosity part of her romantic nature. Daisy, red-haired and bespectacled, distrusted the world. Liz was the prettiest of the five, with neat features and flaxen hair in a ponytail and a film star’s mouth, nothing particularly special except for deep-blue eyes, but still the prettiest. Rose thought of herself as ordinary, too quiet, too shy and nervous: Mrs Bouverie and her Thursday visitor were a godsend in her relationship with her friends.

‘How nice all this is!’ Mrs Dakin enthused for the second time, the subject of notices on motor cars having run its course. ‘How hugely grateful to you we are, Mr Bouverie!’

Rose watched him shaking his head, and heard him saying that the credit must wholly go to her.

‘No, truly, Mr Bouverie,’ her father insisted with a solemn intonation.

‘All her young life before her,’ her mother threw in.

Rose hadn’t told them, nor told her brother. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was talked about within this family. She would have been embarrassed and would have caused embarrassment – a very different reception from the one there’d been when she had passed the information on in the Box Tree Café with its green-topped tables. After the first time, her friends had always been expectant. ‘It could be any of our mothers,’ Liz whispered, awestruck, once. They had sat there, coffee drunk, Caroline and Daisy with their cigarettes, dwelling upon that, imagining Rose’s sallow-skinned man arriving in the surroundings that had been described to them. ‘Beautifully pressed, his linen suit,’ Rose said. ‘And a plain green shirt.’

Around the dinner table the conversation, still powered by Mrs Dakin, had changed again. ‘The Kindest Cut,’ she was saying now, drawing Mr Bouverie’s attention to the droll wit of hairdressers as exemplified in the titles chosen for their premises. ‘Nutters I saw the other day!’

This evening, for the very last time, he would be there. Mr Bouverie did not normally go out to dinner; he’d said as much when joining in the celebratory mood on his arrival. No tea tray had been carried to the window table since Rose had ceased to visit the house. The invitation for this evening must have seemed like a gift, naughtily wrapped, for slim Mrs Bouverie. ‘It’s a Mr Azam,’ her husband had said on the last but one of their Thursdays. ‘In case you are interested in his name.’

Mr Dakin poured the wine again. He said they’d had the glasses as a wedding present, only four of them left so they couldn’t use them often.

‘The Mitages,’ Mrs Dakin murmured softly, the shrillness that whistled through her voice gone from it now, inappropriate because the Mitages were no longer alive. She paused in her eating, inclining her head in memory, slanting it a little to the left, a wistful smile enlivening her reddened lips. Mr Dakin sighed; then death passed on, and Mrs Dakin picked up her fork again and the wine bottle was replaced on its little silver tray, another wedding gift, although this was not said.

‘Cuckold.’ In the Box Tree Café the ugly word, spoken first by Caroline, had formed in their minds, its sound acquiring shape and colour. Only Rose knew what Mr Bouverie looked like but he, really, scarcely came into it. It was not an old man who had once planned a future in the cloth trade and had ended as a tutor that was of interest. He was no rival for the darkened bedroom above the room that had once been two, or for the scent of Mrs Bouverie or her lover’s suit draped on a chair, or smears of lipstick left on sallow flesh. No one ever interposed a comment while Rose spread out for the delectation of her friends another Thursday harvest. Once, music softly played, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Once the telephone rang and was not answered by Mr Bouverie, although the receiver was only yards from where they sat. Sooner than if he had crossed to it the ringing ceased, answered at the bedside. Not always, but now and again, Mrs Bouverie appeared on the stairs when Rose was putting her coat on at the hallstand; or in summer, when there was no coat, she sometimes called down goodbye when she heard the voices of her husband and his pupil. ‘Vicious,’ Liz said. ‘That’s a vicious woman.’ But Rose said no, you couldn’t call Mrs Bouverie vicious; she didn’t strike you as that. ‘More significant that she’s childless,’ Daisy said. ‘Or at least it could be.’ Caroline disagreed.