A Bit on the Side

by William Trevor

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A BIT ON THE SIDE

  ‘A better crafter of stories than Joyce, Chekhov or Updike’ Harpers & Queen

  ‘He simply never fails. With the subtlest shift of syntax, an expert change of hue, Trevor leads us through twelve little worlds which, taken together form the sensual, forgiving, sad and admiring universe in which he lives’ Herald

  ‘How to explain the marvel that is William Trevor? He has retained his abiding sense of wonder and a kindly, if all-seeing, curiosity in humankind, its hopes, sins and failures’ Irish Times

  ‘Trevor continues to be the great chronicler of tiny, painful nuances… to engage and draw the reader into the small human drama’ Economist

  ‘Original and allusive’ Spectator

  ‘Hypnotic and leavened with a quiet, dark humour… timeless’ Daily Express

  ‘Nourishing storytelling full of truth’ Metro

  ‘Beautiful and remarkable’ Scotsman

  ‘Characteristically assured and subtle. Spotlighting lives entangled in the past and characters who feel out of their element in today’s world, the stories – shrewd, poignant, ruefully funny – are masterpieces of firmly wrought delicacy, spot-on social observation and psychological and emotional truth’ Sunday Times

  ‘The master of the genre at the top of his game’ Financial Times

  ‘Excellent as always’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, and he spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin, and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He now lives in Devon.

  He has written many novels, including The Old Boys, winner of the Hawthomden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth and Fools of Fortune, both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden, winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted Reading Turgenev; Felicia’s Journey, which won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer; and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault, which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collection is The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize. Most of his books are published in Penguin, including his Collected Stories.

  In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.

  A Bit on the Side

  WILLIAM TREVOR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Published by Viking 2004

  Published in Penguin 2005

  5

  Copyright © William Trevor, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  These stories were originally published in the New Yorker, the New Statesman, Tatler and the Spectator

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN:978-0-14-190433-7

  Contents

  Sitting with the Dead

  Traditions

  Justina’s Priest

  An Evening Out

  Graillis’s Legacy

  Solitude

  Sacred Statues

  Rose Wept

  Big Bucks

  On the Streets

  The Dancing-Master’s Music

  A Bit on the Side

  Sitting with the Dead

  His eyes had been closed and he opened them, saying he wanted to see the stable-yard.

  Emily’s expression was empty of response. Her face, younger than his and yet not seeming so, was empty of everything except the tiredness she felt. ‘From the window?’ she said.

  No, he’d go down, he said. ‘Will you get me the coat? And have the boots by the door.’

  She turned away from the bed. He would manage on his own if she didn’t help him: she’d known him for twenty-eight years, been married to him for twenty-three. Whether or not she brought the coat up to him would make no difference, any more than it would if she protested.

  ‘It could kill you,’ she said.

  ‘The fresh air’d strengthen a man.’

  Downstairs, she placed the boots ready for him at the back door. She brought his cap and muffler to him with his overcoat. A stitch was needed where the left sleeve met the shoulder, she noticed. She hadn’t before and knew he wouldn’t wait while she repaired it now.

  ‘What’re you going to do there?’ she asked, and he said nothing much. Tidy up a bit, he said.

  *

  He died eight days later, and Dr Ann explained that tidying the stable-yard with only a coat over his pyjamas wouldn’t have hastened anything. An hour after she left, the Geraghtys came to the house, not knowing that he was dead.

  It was half past seven in the evening then. At the same time the next morning, Keane the undertaker was due. She said that to the Geraghtys, making sure they understood, not wanting them to think she was turning them away for some other reason. Although she knew that if her husband had been alive he wouldn’t have agreed to have the Geraghtys at his bedside. It was a relief that they had come too late.

  The Geraghtys were two middle-aged women, sisters, the Misses Geraghty, who sat with the dying. Emily had heard of them, but did not know them, not even to see: they’d had to give their name when she opened the door to them. It had never occurred to her that the Geraghtys would attempt to bring their good works to the sick-room she had lived with herself for the last seven months. They were Legion of Mary women, famed for their charity, tireless in their support of the Society of St Vincent de Paul and their promulgation of the writings of Father Xavier O’Shea, a local priest who, at a young age in the 1880s, had contracted malaria in the mission fields of the East.

  ‘We only heard of your trouble Tuesday,’ the thinner and smaller of the two apologized. ‘It does happen the occasional time we wouldn’t hear.’

  The other woman, more robust and older, allowed herself jewellery and make-up and took more care with her clothes. But it was her quiet, sharp-featured sister who took the lead.

  ‘We heard in MacClincy’s,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a
wasted journey.’

  ‘It’s never wasted.’ There was a pause, as if a pause was necessary here. ‘You have our sympathy,’ was added to that, the explanation of why the journey had not been in vain.

  The conversation took place entirely at the hall door. Dusk was becoming dark, but over the white-washed wall of the small front garden Emily still could see a car drawn up in the road. It was cold, the wind gone round to the east. They meant well, these women, even if they’d got everything wrong, driving out from Carra to visit a man who wouldn’t have welcomed them and then arriving too late, a man whose death had spared them an embarrassment.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Emily offered.

  She imagined they’d refuse and then begin to go, saying they couldn’t disturb her at a time like this. But the big, wide-shouldered one glanced at her sister, hesitating.

  ‘If you’re alone,’ the smaller one said, ‘you’d be welcome to our company. If it would be of help to you.’

  *

  The dead man had been without religion. Anyone could have told them that, Emily reflected, making tea. He would have said that there was more to their sitting at the bedsides of the ill than met the eye, and she wondered if that could possibly be so. Did they in their compassionate travels hope for the first signs of the belief that often came out of nowhere when death declared its intention? Did they drive away from the houses they visited, straight to a presbytery, their duty done? She had never heard that said about the Geraghtys and she didn’t want to believe it. They meant well, she said to herself again.

  When they left, she wouldn’t go back upstairs to look at the dead features. She’d leave him now to Keane in the morning. In the brief time that had elapsed a day had been settled for the funeral, Thursday of next week; in the morning she would let a few people know; she’d put a notice in the Advertiser. No children had been born: when Thursday had passed everything would be over except for the unpaid debts. She buttered slices of brack and stirred the tea in the pot. She carried in the tray.

  They hadn’t taken their coats off, but sat as still as statues, a little apart from one another.

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said, Til light the fire.’

  ‘Ah no. Ah no, don’t bother.’ They both protested, but she did anyway, and the kindling that had been in the grate all summer flared up at once. She poured their tea, asking if they took sugar, and then offering the brack. They began to call her Emily, as if they knew her well. They gave their own names: Kathleen the older sister, and Norah.

  ‘I didn’t think,’ Kathleen began to say, and Norah interrupted her.

  ‘Oh, we know all right,’ she said. ‘You’re Protestant here, but that never made a difference yet.’

  They had sat with the Methodist minister, the Reverend Wolfe, Kathleen said. They’d read to him, they’d brought in whatever he wanted. They were there when he went.

  ‘Never a difference,’ Norah repeated, and in turn they took a slice of brack. They commented on it, saying it was excellent.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ Kathleen said when the conversation lapsed. ‘The first few hours. We often stay.’

  ‘It was good of you to think of him.’

  ‘It’s cheerful with that fire, Emily,’ Kathleen said.

  They asked her about the horses because the horses were what they’d heard about, and she explained that they’d become a thing of the past. She’d sell the place now, she said.

  ‘You’d find it remote, Emily,’ Kathleen said. Her lipstick had left a trace on the rim of the teacup and Norah drew her attention to it with a gesture. Kathleen wiped it off. ‘We’re town people ourselves,’ she said.

  Emily didn’t consider the house she’d lived in for nearly thirty years remote. Five minutes in the car and you were in the middle of Carra. Mangan’s Bridge, in the other direction, was no more than a minute.

  ‘You get used to a place,’ Emily said.

  They identified for her the house where they lived themselves, on the outskirts of Carra, on the Athy road. Emily knew it, a pleasant creeper-covered house with silver railings in front of it, not big but prosperous-looking. She’d thought it was Corrigan’s, the surveyor’s.

  ‘I don’t know why I thought that.’

  ‘We bought it from Mr Corrigan,’ Norah said, ‘when we came to Carra three years ago.’ And her sister said they’d been living in Athy before that.

  ‘Carra was what we were looking for,’ Norah said.

  They were endeavouring to lift her spirits, Emily realized, by keeping things light. Carra had improved in their time, they said, and it would again. You could tell with a town; some of them wouldn’t rise out of the doldrums while a century’d go by.

  ‘You’d maybe come in to Carra now?’ Kathleen said.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  She poured more tea. She handed round the brack again. Dr Ann had given her pills to take, but she didn’t intend to take them. Exhausted as she was, she didn’t want to sleep.

  ‘He went out a week ago,’ she said. ‘He got up and went out to the yard with only a coat over his pyjamas. I thought it was that that hurried it on, but seemingly it wasn’t.’

  They didn’t say anything, just nodded, both of them. She said he had been seven months dying. He hadn’t read a newspaper all that time, she said. In the end all the food he could manage was cornflour.

  ‘We never knew your husband,’ Norah said, ‘any more than yourself. Although I think we maybe met him on the road one day.’

  A feeling of apprehension began in Emily, a familiar dread that compulsively caused one hand to clench the other, fingers tightly locking. People often met him, exercising one of the horses. A car would slow down for him but he never acknowledged it, never so much as raised the crop. For a moment she forget that he was dead.

  ‘He was often out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, this was long ago.’

  ‘He sold the last of the horses twelve months ago. He didn’t want them left.’

  ‘He raced his horses, we’re to understand?’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Point-to-points. Punchestown the odd time.’

  ‘Well, that’s great.’

  ‘There wasn’t much success.’

  ‘It’s an up and down business, of course.’

  Disappointment had filled the house when yet again a horse trailed in, when months of preparation went for nothing. There had never been much reason for optimism, but even so expectation had been high, as if anything less would have brought bad luck. When Emily married, her husband had been training a string of yearlings on the Curragh. Doing well, he’d said himself, although in fact he wasn’t.

  ‘You never had children, Emily?’ Kathleen asked.

  ‘No, we never did.’

  ‘I think we heard that said.’

  The house had been left to her by an aunt on her mother’s side. Forty-three acres, sheep kept; and the furniture had been left to her too. ‘I used come here as a child. A Miss Edgill my aunt was. Did you hear of her?’

  They shook their heads. Way before their time, Kathleen said, looking around her. A good house, she said.

  ‘She’d no one else to leave it to.’ And Emily didn’t add that neither the property nor the land would ever have become hers if her aunt had suspected she’d marry the man she had.

  ‘You’ll let it go though?’ Kathleen pursued her enquiries, doing her best to knit together a conversation. ‘The way things are now, you were saying you’d let it go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Anyone would require a bit of time.’

  ‘We see a lot of widowing,’ Norah murmured.

  ‘Nearly to the day, we were married twenty-three years.’

  ‘God took him because He wanted him, Emily.’

  The Geraghtys continued to offer sympathy, one following the other in what was said, the difference in tone and manner continuing also. And again – and more often as more solace was pressed upon her – Emily reflected how fortunate it wa
s that they had escaped the awkwardness of attempting to keep company with her husband. He would have called her back as soon as she’d left them with him. He would have asked her who they were, although he knew; he would have told her to take them away. He’d never minded what he said – the flow of coarse language when someone crossed one of the fields, every word shouted out, frighteningly sometimes. It was always that: raising his voice, the expressions he used; not once, not ever, had there been violence. Yet often she had wished that there had been, believing that violence would have been easier to bear than the power of his articulated anger. It was power she had always felt coming from him, festering and then released, his denial of his failure.

  ‘The horses. Punchestown. The world of the racecourse,’ Kathleen said. ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Emily.’

  It seemed to Emily that Norah was about to shake her head, that for the first time the sisters were on the Verge of a disagreement. It didn’t surprise her: the observation that had been made astonished her.

  ‘Unusual is what my sister means.’ Norah nodded her correction into place, her tone softening the contradiction.

  ‘There’s many a woman doesn’t get out and about,’ Kathleen said.

  Emily poured more tea and added turf to the fire. She had forgotten to draw the curtains over and she did so now. The light in the room was dim; he’d been particular about low-wattage electric bulbs. But the dimness made the room cosy and it seemed wrong that anywhere should be so while he lay only a few hours dead. She wondered what she’d do when another bulb went, either here or somewhere else, if she would replace it with a stronger one or if low-wattage light was part of her now. She wondered if her nervousness was part of her too. It didn’t seem that it had always been, but she knew she could be wrong about that.

  ‘I didn’t go out and about much,’ she said because a silence in the conversation had come. Both visitors were stirring sugar into their tea. When their teaspoons were laid down, Norah said:

  ‘There’s some wouldn’t bother with that.’