William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

Still vacuuming the office floors, Cheryl remembered the unflurried timbre of his voice when he offered this explanation, a matter-of-factness that, quite suddenly, made her feel cold. She remembered turning on the single bar of the electric fire she had brought upstairs from the room she no longer occupied. She remembered lying awake, wondering if the darkness of the bedroom would draw him to her, wondering if he was a man like that, not that she had ever heard of being like that before. But nothing happened except what was happening in her mind, the realization that she had made a mistake.

As she slid her vacuum cleaner into corners and under desks, all that was there again, as often it was when, on the streets, her ex-husband once more attempted to enter her life. A man who was hurt was what he’d seemed to be during the time they had been getting to know one another. She’d told him about times in her childhood, about her marriage, and the shock of widowhood; he’d spoken of the censure he’d always felt himself subjected to, culminating in the lunchtime complaint he’d taken so hard. Small rebukes, reproof, blame in its different forms affected him – she was sure – more than ever was intended: from the first she had known that, when each new shade of his accumulated pain was revealed to her. Then, too, she had believed that the pain would ease, as it seemed to when she was with him. But even before she packed her things to go, Daph said, ‘Your guy’s doolally.’

Cheryl turned the cleaner off and wound the flex back into place. She straightened the chairs she had had to move out of the way, finishing one office at a time and closing the door of each behind her. She took her coat and scarf from the hooks in the passage and carried downstairs the black plastic bag in which she’d collected the waste-paper. She re-set the night alarm. She banged the door behind her and began to walk away.

‘They ignored Mr Simoni,’ he said in the empty dark. ‘Mr Simoni tried to shake hands with them but he needn’t have bothered.’

*

She looked at him with nothing in her eyes. There was no flicker that they were man and wife, as if she had forgotten. She had been everything to him; she could have sensed it from the way he’d been with her. When they’d gone for a walk together, the second time they had, she’d put a hand on his arm. A Sunday that had been, a cold afternoon and she’d been wearing gloves, red and blue. Just a touch of pressure from her fingers, no more than that, nothing forward, but he’d felt the understanding there was. A waiter could tell you how people were, he had explained to her another time. She hadn’t known it; she hadn’t known how you could feel insulted, the amount people left beside a plate. Not that a breakfast waiter got anything at all.

‘I don’t want to stand here listening to you,’ she said, and then she said he should see someone; she said she had asked him to leave her alone.

‘It’s just I wondered if I’d ever told you that, how Mr Simoni held out his hand.’

‘Please leave me alone,’ she said, walking on.

*

Every plea she made was a repetition, already stale before she made it, and sounding weary when she did. She had lost touch with Daph when she’d moved to another district but Daph had made her promise to go to the police if she became frightened.

‘You could tell she was the kind of woman who complained,’ he said. He’d put the coffee ready for her to pour out, but when he walked away she called after him that it was cold. You didn’t expect there’d be a waiter with soiled cuffs in this dining-room, she said when Mr Simoni came.

Cheryl tried not to see when he rooted in a pocket for his wallet. It was worst of all, the grubby paper taken from his wallet and carefully unfolded, its tattered edges and the blue letters of the address offered to her as a gift might be. Dear Sirs , I believe an electric fire I purchased … In the dark she couldn’t see but she knew the words were there, as the shopping list had been there too, before its pencilled items had all but disappeared.

‘Please leave me alone,’ she said.

Walking with her, he said the café by the launderette was always open, people waiting there for their washing to be ready. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Never less than quiet, that café.’

She could tell from his movements beside her that the paper was being folded again and then returned to the right compartment of his wallet. His wallet was small, black, its plastic coating worn away in places.

‘It’s hardly out of your way,’ he said.

They were alone on the street; they had been since she’d heard his voice behind her saying that the people who’d complained had ignored Mr Simoni’s wish to shake hands with them. He always spoke first from behind her on a street, his footsteps silent.

‘I thought I might run into you today,’ he said. ‘She’ll want to know about this morning, I thought.’

He mentioned tea and she said she didn’t want tea at this hour. And then she thought that in a café she could raise her voice, drawing attention to his harassing of her. But she didn’t want to go to a café with him. When she’d found things he’d stolen he’d said nothing, not even shaking his head. When she’d packed her belongings he’d been silent too, as if expecting nothing better, humiliation self-inflicted now.

‘Straight after I’d done at the hotel I went out there,’ he said. ‘This morning.’

He told her about the hotel people who’d had breakfast, a slack morning, being a Monday. He remembered the orders; he always could afterwards, even on a busy day, a waiter’s skill, he called it. He told her about the bus he’d taken, out through Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith and then the green of trees and grass beginning when Castelnau was left behind. Someone called out for the Red Rover and the driver shouted back that the Red Rover had gone years ago. There was a traffic hold-up at Upper Richmond Road and he got off and walked a bit. He’d been out there before, he said: Priory Lane, then left by a letter-box. A dozen times, he said, he’d checked it out.

They turned a corner and she could see the lit-up window of the launderette. She remembered the café he was talking about then, a little further along with a 7-Up sign in the window.

‘I’ve something to get washed,’ he said.

She didn’t go into the launderette with him. While he was there she could have hurried on, past the café, to where the buses ran. Any bus would have done, even one going in the wrong direction. But in the café, where an elderly man and two women on their own were the only customers, she carried from the counter a pot of tea and two glass cups and saucers, and went back for milk.

She waited then, blankly staring at the tea she’d poured, taking the first sip, tasting nothing. No thoughts disturbed her. She did not feel she was in a café, only that she was alone, anywhere it could have been; and then her thoughts began again. She had been drawn to him; that reminder echoed, hardly anything else made sense.

She watched him coming in, the door slipping closed behind him. He looked about, knowing she would be there, knowing she wouldn’t have disappeared.

*

On the table he laid out what he had taken from the pockets of his jacket before he’d put it into a washing machine: keys, his wallet, a ballpoint. He had thought she would ask about this jacket, where it was, why he wasn’t wearing it, but she didn’t. He stirred the tea she’d poured for him. It didn’t matter that she didn’t ask; his overcoat was open, she could see the jacket wasn’t there.

‘Three hours ago he’ll have found her,’ he said. ‘A quarter past seven every evening he gets back to that house.’