Two Lives

by William Trevor

  ‘As great a sadness?’ I hinted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It cut you up, Tom?’

  ‘Yes, it was painful.’

  I dragged from him the name of his first wife: Celeste Adele. Sometimes there is not the slightest difficulty in visualizing a person spoken of, perhaps because of the intonation or expression that accompanies the reference. This was so now: the woman who appeared in my mind was kittenish and petite, dark-haired, much prettier than Francine.

  ‘When was your first wife’s birthday, Tom?’

  ‘Adele’s?’ He had to think. Then: ‘May twenty-nine.’

  I stopped. ‘No wonder it didn’t work out, Tom.’

  ‘I don’t imagine our break-up had to do with her birthday!’

  This opinion was delivered lightly, possibly intended as a joke. If it was, it was the first time he had endeavoured to make one since his arrival in my house.

  ‘What’s Francine’s birth sign, Tom?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not aware of it.’

  ‘When’s her birthday?’

  ‘August eighteen.’

  ‘Oh, Tom!’

  He frowned, appearing to be genuinely bewildered. When I explained he said:

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t accept that individual characteristics have much to do with when a person’s born.’

  I didn’t contradict that. I didn’t argue. We walked on again. In a companionable way I slipped my arm through his. The truth was that when I’d picked up the receiver and overheard that unpleasant conversation I’d already had a drink or two, though not much by any means. Sometimes things aren’t as crystal clear as they might be when you’ve had a drink. On top of that the line to Pennsylvania had not been all that good. He’d said something about what he called a ‘little-girl voice’, and that, of course, might well have been a compliment. I couldn’t help thinking that it was nice to have your voice likened to a young girl’s. For some reason my thoughts kept harping on that, and while they did so I kept wanting to tell him about the couple in the travelling entertainment business who’d perished when their motor-cycle soared towards heaven over the top of a Wall of Death. It was ludicrous of course, but I wanted to tell him – of all people – about taking that dog for a walk by the sea, and about the person I’d assumed to be my father importuning me in a cinema and in a shed and finally in a bedroom. I even wanted to tell him about the Oleander Avenue scandal. But he was cautious himself in what he said and in time I caught caution from him.

  ‘Was it a hell with Adele, Tom?’

  ‘We were unsuited.’

  ‘She left you in the end?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Geminis often do the leaving. I only wondered. Did Adele have children later on?’

  He replied, rather curtly, that Adele was forty-three when they parted and had not had children, though in fact she had re-married. I said I was sorry it had been a hell with her.

  We paused and looked back. I pointed out a hill-town in the misty distance, and a few more landmarks, a tower that two Swedish women had begun to renovate and then had given up, a rock formation that looked like human figures. As we walked on again I said:

  ‘Why did they dislike one another, Tom? Your sister and your wife?’

  He was reluctant to supply this information. His eyes had a faraway look and I remembered the jottings in the notebook at his bedside. No doubt he was among those jottings now, no doubt castigating Pilsfer for some fresh inadequacy. I pressed him, very gently. He said:

  ‘They didn’t dislike one another. It was simply that my sister wanted me to try again with Adele.’

  ‘But it was your life, eh?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to appreciate that it was.’

  Time had passed, they hadn’t made it up: there was more to all this than the bald explanation I’d been offered. Perhaps he didn’t know: men sometimes don’t. But I sensed that his sister had recognized Francine for what she was and made it clear to her at the time of the divorce. ‘It won’t last, Tom’: he didn’t confess his sister – less outspoken and quieter in his presence – had said that, but I guessed she had. I also guessed that the wound this opinion left behind was deep.

  ‘There’s another very good Italian word, Tom. Colpa.’

  ‘What’s it mean?’

  Again I was careful not to alarm him. Colpa meant guilt, I explained. The General experienced guilt because of his daughter. Otmar experienced it because he was responsible for Madeleine’s presence in Italy. ‘And you quarrelled with your sister instead of standing up to Francine.’

  He said something I didn’t catch. We turned off the road on to a path that wound up a hill where umbrella pines grow in clumps. Here we must keep a special eye out for sleepy vipers, I warned. Better to have worn rubber boots, but Quinty’s would be too small for him, and it was only after we’d begun our walk that I realized there was something on that particular hill I wanted him to see.

  ‘This is a beautiful country, Tom. There are beautiful moments hidden away in corners. I have seen, near the Scala in Milan, a stout little opera singer practising as he strolled to a café. I have seen a wedding in the cathedral at Orvieto, when the great doors were thrown wide open and the bride and groom walked out into the sunshine. Something choked in my throat, Tom.’

  I believe he nodded. Sometimes his gestures were so slight it was hard to make them out. There was the tranquillity of my house, I went on; in time there would be the garden. Where there had been only rusted iron and tumbled-down buildings before, birds would nest. Bees would search for honey among the flowers.

  ‘It is as though, Tom, we are all inside a story that is being composed as each day passes. Does that explain it better?’

  ‘I guess I don’t entirely grasp what you’re suggesting. And about my sister –’

  ‘All right, Tom, all right.’ I pressed his arm a little closer. He was on the way to becoming agitated, and really there was no need for that. Why should not Aimée be healed, I asked him, as the scratches on my face had healed already, as Otmar’s stump would heal, and the General’s leg?

  ‘That is what we hope for.’

  ‘She is happy here, you know. Or as happy as she can be at the moment.’

  ‘My wife and I are extremely grateful to you –’

  ‘Is there not a sacrifice you would make, Tom? After years of keeping your young sister at arm’s length, through no fault of hers? Do you not owe something to her memory? As the old man does to his daughter’s and Otmar to Madeleine’s?’

  ‘I’ve come here to bring my sister’s child home.’ He spoke flatly; stolidly, I thought. For the first time he sounded a little stupid, although I knew that was ridiculous. ‘I am taking in my sister’s child,’ he said.

  Again I was aware of the jottings in the notebook, the darting swiftness of a mind reflected in that impatient scribbling. He knew about the brains of ants. He knew about the nature of their energy. His own brain contained the details of their thought processes or whatever he liked to call them. Of course he could not be stupid.

  ‘Could it be, Tom, that you had to come here to know you should go back alone?’

  ‘Mrs Delahunty –’

  ‘Look,’ I interrupted, feeling it was necessary to do so. ‘That’s the grave of an American soldier.’

  I pointed at an iron cross in the grass beside the path. I explained why there was no inscription.

  ‘It is in memory of one man, but it also stands for many. The soldiers of the official enemy gave food and cigarettes to the peasants when the peasants were near starving. One man in particular gave all he had; they didn’t even know his name. He died here in some pointless skirmish, but long afterwards they didn’t forget him. What a gesture, Tom, to give away your food because you can go without and strangers cannot! And what a gesture, in return, to put a cross up to a nameless benefactor! It can’t have been much food, or many cigarettes.’

  I stepped forward when I’d finished and tore away grass and weeds f
rom the base of the cross. Then we turned and retraced our steps. He had made no comment whatsoever on the soldier’s grave. I took his arm again.

  ‘They thought it was a miracle, Tom, that a soldier should do that. They put a cross up to a miracle.’

  My sandals were covered with dust. So were his shoes. The paint on my toenails had temporarily been deprived of its gleam. Against the softness of my breast I could feel a tightening in the muscles of his arm.

  ‘May I tell you something, Tom? Will you listen?’

  ‘I have been listening.’

  ‘Two men in love came to my house, dying a little more each day. In my house a son was terrified of his mother because fear was what she’d instilled in him since his birth, because she couldn’t bear to let him go. In my house the women of a ménage à trois were cynically used. Pity made me gasp for breath, for there was no escape for any of them. It’s different now, Tom.’

  There had been a terrible evil was how I put it to him, but in this little corner of Italy there was, again, a miracle. No one could simply walk back into the world after the horror of Carrozza 219. Three survivors out of all the world’s survivors had found a place in my house. One to another they were a source of strength. Again I referred to the garden. I quoted the lines that had come to me, only to bewilder me until the General spoke so extraordinarily of a gift.

  ‘Dare we turn our backs on a miracle, Tom?’

  I sought his fingers, the way one does when one speaks like that, but roughly he disengaged himself. Suddenly he was cross and I thought he was going to shout, as other men have in my presence. But he didn’t. He simply looked at me, not saying anything at all, not speaking again, not answering questions when I asked them. I offered him a drink when we arrived back at the house, but he said he didn’t want a drink at nine o’clock in the morning.

  12

  After that morning’s walk I knew what Francine was.

  Francine was a disruptive; she couldn’t help herself. Francine had seen him and had desired him. Francine considered Celeste Adele a nobody, with her too-sweet manner and her looks and her bird-brain. ‘I want Tom Riversmith,’ Francine said aloud, although there was no one in the room except herself. ‘God damn that silly bitch to hell!’ Francine had lost her own husband because he’d been playing around. Fourteen years of marriage, three children conceived and born, and still he came home with someone else’s smell. A girl in a panty-hose department – one o’clock in the morning, he’d confessed to that. Francine didn’t ask him how he’d come across a panty-hose employee. She only wondered if it was true or if he was getting at her by making her second best to such a person. She’d stopped caring years ago.

  That was why she was alone when she discovered she was on a wavelength with Tom Riversmith. Celeste Adele gave itsy little cocktail parties because she liked to play at being a hostess. She handed round Japanese crackers shaped like sea-shells; she made Tom cut slivers of lemon and use a shaker. He did his best among the real-estate people she invited, the lawyers and art-gallery people, all of them off-campus, not his type at all.

  ‘Now join us,’ Celeste Adele would welcome in a sugary gush as soon as you stepped into the room, where the chatter was already like a tumult. She loved noise. Later, when the party really got going, she put on Big Band music. ‘Having a good time’, she called it.

  Francine had been taken to the first such occasion by a man who’d once invited her to the movies, and once to the Four Seasons for dinner. She knew that nothing was going to come of the relationship. Over ribs at the Four Seasons he’d talked about a wife he’d left and how he regretted that now. ‘It’s always a gas at the Riversmiths’,’ he promised, adding that Celeste Adele Riversmith loved to see new faces. On the way, driving with the radio on, he extolled the virtues of his ex-wife, so tediously that Francine moved away from him as soon as they reached their destination. ‘I’m Tom Riversmith,’ her host introduced himself, finding her alone.

  Vaguely recognizing her from the campus, he was interested in her presence at a party of his wife’s. (Later Francine learnt that Celeste Adele never invited university people to her parties because she considered it did her husband good to mix what she called ‘the real world’.) Francine was working on the newly discovered Kristo papers at the time and he was fascinated: four years of Kristo’s research, thought to be lost in the swamps of Cambodia, had come to light in the safe of a New York hotel.

  ‘You’re fortunate.’ He sounded envious. For more than eleven years, since Kristo’s death, there’d been the mystery of the missing notes, with nothing to indicate where they might possibly be. Kristo, who’d trusted no one, had been notorious for jealously guarding every detail of the evidence he turned up.

  ‘Yes, I have been fortunate.’

  She liked his reticence. She couldn’t imagine him blustering like the man she’d married and had spent so long with, a campus flop if ever there was one. She couldn’t imagine him lying, or being caught with a girl in the back of a sedan. He’d be grizzled when he was older – grey and grizzled, and that would suit him.

  ‘I will always despise you for this,’ his sister said when several months had passed.

  She stood there, a woman Francine had never seen before, a woman who’d travelled three thousand miles to make that statement. Tom needed Celeste Adele, their marriage was a perfectly satisfactory one. Tom and Celeste Adele were oppo-sites, but as often as not opposites belonged together, and they did in this case.

  ‘You’ve smashed your way in,’ his sister bitterly accused. ‘You’re taking what you can get. You’re only thinking of yourself.’

  There were tears then, but they weren’t Francine’s. They ran, unchecked, on the other woman’s cheeks. Francine didn’t attempt to argue.

  ‘She’s done so much for you,’ his sister pleaded with Tom. ‘You couldn’t give her children. You used up her best years. Please, Tom, you mustn’t turn around and tell her she doesn’t matter.’

  He shook his head. He hadn’t told Adele that.

  ‘What you’re doing says it.’

  She begged him, while Francine watched and listened. He’d never been like this, his sister said, and then repeated it. He’d always had a heart before.

  ‘It’s best,’ he quietly muttered.

  Hopelessly now, she disagreed. More spurts of tears came, but then she calmed. She blew her nose and wiped at her cheeks. Francine thought that with all this guff out of her system she’d accept the inevitable, would realize she’d gone too far and say so. There was a moment for an apology, for a mumbled effort to repair unnecessary damage. But no apology came.

  ‘You foul bitch,’ his sister snapped, like ice cracking. Then she went.

  13

  The old man lolled in the ladder-backed chair, Aimée was perched on one of the peacock stools. Looking down from the top of the stairs, I couldn’t hear what he was murmuring but I was aware of her pleasure in his tenderness.

  ‘I’d love to see England.’ Just for a moment, Aimée’s voice floated to me, and again the old man murmured.

  ‘The last day.’ Otmar had quietly joined me and was looking down also. Through the mist of my tears he seemed even more sombre than he’d been of late: a face I can only describe as defeated was turned in my direction when he spoke, as though the prospect of the child’s going left him bereft. Our eyes held, and locked, and the dream I’d had about him took vivid form again. For a moment it seemed like a shaft of truth, coming to complete the story of that summer, illuminating everything. I saw the matchsticks broken, some long, some short. I watched the choice being made. ‘Otmar is the chosen one,’ the unhurried voice said, and I must have swayed, for he put his hand out to assist me.

  At dinner that evening we were quiet. Aimée’s clothes, all of which had been bought while she was in the hospital, were already packed into the bag Mr Riversmith had brought specially from America, matching the black Mandarina Duck luggage Francine had chosen for him.

  The General har
dly opened his mouth; nor did Otmar; nor I, come to that. Mr Riversmith must have found it restful. He passed a remark or two and afterwards went off for a stroll on his own. I kept reminding myself that if we’d asked him he would have held forth eloquently about the digestive tracts of his chosen creature: an understanding of the human condition didn’t come into it. For all I knew, he privately considered that people damaged in an outrage were best forgotten, delegated to a rubbish tip, as the broken metal and bloodstained glass had been.

  I listened for his return and, when I heard him passing through the hall, I considered going to wish him good-night, but I did not feel entirely up to it. In the kitchen I poured boiling water on to a tea-bag and dropped a slice of lemon into the glass. I fished the tea-bag out immediately, just as the water changed colour. I added a measure of grappa as I always do when I take tea as late as this, for on its own it keeps me awake. I carried the glass on to the terrace. The sky was clear and full of stars. I could hear the whirring of mosquitoes, but the fireflies all had gone. It was as warm as day.

  ‘Madeleine.’ Otmar’s voice echoed, repeating the girl’s name, nothing more. As I sipped my tea, I heard as well the voice of Miss Alzapiedi telling us about the devil cast out of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter. When evil was made good it was as though the evil had never existed. The greatest wonder of all, Miss Alzapiedi said.

  In the kitchen I threw away the remains of my tea. I arranged two glasses and the grappa bottle on a tray. I was wearing an Indian silk dressing-gown, in shades of orange, and slippers that matched it, with gold stitching. I spent a moment in my room, applying a little make-up to my lips and eyes, a little powder, and eau-de-Cologne. I ran a comb through my hair.

  When I knocked softly on his door there was no answering murmur. I had hoped he might be awake, thinking about things, but clearly he wasn’t. I pushed open the door and for a moment stood there, framed against the dim light of the corridor, before I moved towards his bedside table. I put the tray down and switched the light on. The notebook and the grey-jacketed volume had not yet been packed. I crossed the room again to close the door.