William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

*

Cheryl stared at a cigarette burn on the table’s surface while he told her. He had rung the bell, he said, and the woman hadn’t recognized him when she opened the door. He’d said he’d come to read the meter, not saying which one. The gas man had been, no longer than a week ago, the woman had said, and he’d apologized for not having his badge on display. He’d pulled aside his overcoat to show the electricity badge on his left lapel. The woman hadn’t closed the door when he walked into the hall. A good ten minutes it was open before his hands were free to close it.

‘I blame myself,’ he said, ‘for being stupid like that.’ He added that he didn’t blame himself for anything else; he had stood there, not blaming himself, remembering the woman saying that his cuffs were grimy, complaining that the coffee was cold. He had stood there, hearing her voice, and the telephone rang on a small table near the hallstand. When it stopped he went to wash his hands in the downstairs lavatory, where coats and the man’s hats and a cap hung on hooks. In the hall he draped a tissue over the Yale latch before he turned it; and afterwards dropped the scrunched-up tissue into a waste-bin on a lamp post.

Cheryl didn’t say anything; she never did. She watched while his overcoat was buttoned again after she’d seen he wasn’t wearing his jacket. A dribble of blood from the woman’s mouth had got on to his sleeve, he said, the kind of thing that was discernible beneath a microscope, easy to overlook.

Once he’d shown her a bruise he’d acquired on a finger while he was committing his crime, another time he’d shown her the tissue he had draped over the Yale, forgotten in his pocket all day. Once he’d said the second post had come while he was there, brown envelopes mostly, clattering through the letter-box. While the woman was on the floor there’d been the postman’s whistling and his footsteps going away.

‘I didn’t take a bus,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want that, sitting on a bus. The first food I had afterwards was liver and peas.’

The last time it had been a packet of crisps; another time, a chicken burger. Still silent, Cheryl listened while his voice continued, while he explained that ever since this morning he’d felt she was his only friend, ever since he’d washed his hands, with the man’s coats on coat-hangers and the scented soap on its own special little porcelain shelf. A cat had jumped on to the windowsill outside and begun to mew, as if it knew what had occurred. He had thought of opening the back door to let it in, so that it would be in the hall when the man returned, and its bloody footsteps all over the house.

She had never told Daph that it wasn’t fear she experienced when she was with him, that it wasn’t even disquiet. She had never said she knew there was cunning in his parade of what hadn’t happened, yet that it hardly seemed like cunning, so little did he ask of her. She had never said she knew it was her nature that had drawn her to go for walks with him and to accept his reticent embrace, that her pity was his nourishment. She had never wanted to talk to Daph about him. The Warkelys didn’t know he existed.

He lifted the glass cup to his lips. She still did not speak. It was not necessary to speak, only to remain a little longer, the silence an element in being with him. He did not follow her when she walked away.

He would finish his tea and pour another cup: on the streets again she imagined that. In the launderette he would open the door of a machine and release his sodden jacket from where it clung to the drum. He would spread out the sleeves and pull the material back into shape before he began his journey to the rooms where so briefly they had lived together. He would not, tonight, be offended by the glare of neon beneath which she now walked herself. Nor by the cars that loitered in their search for what the night had to offer. Nor by the voices of the couples pressed close to one another as they went by. Her tears, tonight, allowed him peace.

The Dancing-Master’s Music

Brigid’s province was the sculleries, which was where you began if you were a girl, the cutlery room and the boot room if you weren’t. Brigid began when she was fourteen and she was still fourteen when she heard about the dancing-master. It was Mr Crome who talked about him first, whose slow, lugubrious delivery came through the open scullery door from the kitchen. Lily Geoghegan said Mr Crome gave you a sermon whenever he opened his mouth.

‘An Italian person, we are to surmise. From the Italian city of Naples. A travelling person.’

‘Well, I never,’ Mrs O’Brien interjected, and Brigid could tell she was busy with something else.

The sculleries were low-ceilinged, with saucepans and kettles hanging on pot-hooks, and the bowls and dishes and jelly-moulds which weren’t often in use crowding the long shelf that continued from one scullery to the next, even though there was a doorway between the two. Years ago the door that belonged in it had been taken off its hinges because it was in the way, but the hinges were left behind, too stiff to move now. Flanked with wide draining-boards, four slate sinks stretched beneath windows that had bars on the outside, and when the panes weren’t misted Brigid could see the yard sheds and the pump. Once in a while one of the garden boys drenched the cobbles with buckets of water and swept them clean.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mr Crome went on. ‘Oh, yes, indeed. That city famed in fable.’

‘Is it Italian steps he’s teaching them, Mr Crome?’

‘Austria is the source of the steps, we have to surmise. I hear Vienna mentioned. Another city of renown.’

Mr Crome’s sermon began then, the history of the waltz step, and Brigid didn’t listen. From the sound of the range dampers being adjusted, the oven door opened and closed, she could tell that Mrs O’Brien wasn’t listening either.

Nobody listened much to Mr Crome when he got going, when he wasn’t cross, when he wasn’t giving out about dust between the banister supports or the fires not right or a staleness on the water of the carafes. You listened then all right, no matter who you were.

Every morning, early, Brigid walked from Glen-more, over Skenakilla Hill to Skenakilla House. She waited at the back door until John or Thomas opened it. If Mr Crome kept her on, if she gave satisfaction and was conscientious, if her disposition in the sculleries turned out to be agreeable, she would lodge in. Mr Crome had explained that, using those words and expressions. She was glad she didn’t have to live in the house immediately.

Brigid was tall for her age, surprising Mr Crome when she told him what it was. Fair-haired and freckled, she was the oldest of five, a country girl from across the hill. ‘Nothing much in the way of looks,’ Mr Crome confided in the kitchen after he’d interviewed her. Her mother he remembered well, for she had once worked in the sculleries herself, but unfortunately had married Ranahan instead of advancing in her employment, and was now – so Mr Crome passed on to Mrs O’Brien – brought low by poverty and childbirth. Ranahan was never sober.

Brigid was shy in the sculleries at first. The others glanced in when they passed, or came to look at her if they weren’t pressed. When they spoke to her she could feel a warmth coming into her face and the more she was aware of it the more it came, confusing her, sometimes making her say what she didn’t intend to say. But when a few weeks had gone by all that was easier, and by the time the dancing-master arrived in the house she didn’t find even dinnertime the ordeal it had been at first.

‘Where’s Naples, Mr Crome?’ Thomas asked in the servants’ dining-room on the day Mr Crome first talked about Italy. ‘Where’d it be placed on the map, Mr Crome?’