Other People’s Worlds
William Trevor
To Jane
1
Julia’s
All over the Gloucestershire countryside the poppies that summer were delicate on sunny banks, cow parsley and campion profuse. The japonica bloomed as it hadn’t for years in the garden of Swan House, as if already celebrating the wedding there was to be. It was not Henrietta Ferndale of that house, nor her sister Katherine, who intended to marry, although both had reached marrying age: it was their mother Julia, an army officer’s widow for almost exactly nine years. But Henrietta and Katherine, both of whom had left the small town of Stone St Martin for the greater excitements of London, were delighted about the coming event; so was Mrs Anstey, Julia’s mother, who lived with her in Swan House; and Mrs Spanners, who came to clean it once a week.
Most delighted of all was Julia herself, who on a warm Wednesday afternoon was one of four women pinkly draped in Stone St Martin’s Crowning Glory Salon. Simon, who ran the place – the best friend of Arthur, who had the flower-shop next door – spared a moment for all the ladies, while attending himself to old, deaf Mrs Anstruther, who never missed her Wednesday appointment in the Crowning Glory. There was another salon in Stone St Martin, cheaper by quite a bit, but reputed to be dirty.
‘Such weather, Mrs Ferndale!’ Diane remarked, and when Julia murmured a reply the girl went on to speak about her parents’ opinion of her boyfriend, Nevil Clapp. ‘I mean,’ she finished up eventually, ‘they’re not being fair.’
The hair that Diane snipped at was short and brown, with quite some grey in it. Faint little lines had begun to blink around Julia’s eyes, coming or going with changes of expression or mood; a few faint freckles had always been just visible on her forehead. At forty-seven her round face was not yet empty of the beauty that had once distinguished it: now and again it echoed in her smile, or in the depths of her blue-green eyes. Her mother had once said that Julia had a look of a Filippo Lippi madonna, a similar delicacy in profile, the same reddish tinge in her hair. But there was plumpness now as well: Julia’s daughters had stolen the madonna look.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in reply to Diane’s protest about the unfairness of her parents, and yet felt sympathy for them. Parental doubt was understandable, since Nevil Clapp was currently on probation after the thieving of a car battery and other items from the Red Robin filling station. He was now working in the Orchard Motel on the Cheltenham road, having sworn to a bench of magistrates that he had turned over a new leaf.
‘First thing my dad said was Nevil’s a criminal. And Mum: was I pregnant?’
Julia tried to nod. She knew a lot about Diane’s life, being by nature a listener, but this afternoon she found it hard to concentrate.
‘I’d never get pregnant, Mrs Ferndale. I didn’t know where to look when Mum said it.’
‘Parents do worry,’ Julia said, hoping she wasn’t sounding vague.
It still seemed extraordinary to her that she was to marry again, that she had fallen so completely and so passionately in love with a man who was fourteen years younger than she was. It seemed extraordinary that she no longer belonged in the shadows cast by her daughters and her mother, for since Roger Ferndale’s death she had become used to occupying the background, though not unhappily. In the yard of a barracks near Berlin he had fallen from his horse and was later discovered to be dead. There had been no history of heart trouble, but a heart attack had appeared to be the cause of death. ‘Some kind of blackout, Mrs Ferndale,’ a military doctor had informed her, bewildered himself and unwilling to be more precise. The funeral had been grimmer than it might have been because of the military honours, and the return to England had collected an extra note of finality because it was the end of army life, of all the trekking about there had been, married quarters in Germany and Malaya, in Africa and Singapore. Coming home, Julia had settled into Swan House and the doziness of Stone St Martin. It was the house her mother had moved to when years ago she had sold Anstey’s Mill, a grander residence, outside the town; it was where Henrietta and Katherine had often spent their school holidays when their parents were abroad; and it seemed the natural place for Julia in her unexpected widowhood. Reduced in circumstances, she had set about making ends meet by typing legal documents for a firm of solicitors in the town, Warboys, Smith and Toogood. She did so still, working at home on an antiquated Remington, in the kitchen or the drawing-room, whenever she had a moment. Over the years the payments she received had enabled her to employ Mrs Spanners and, until his retirement a month ago, to have old Mr Pocock on Saturday mornings to help with the heavy work in the garden. In spite of the loneliness which had replaced a contented marriage, she considered that good fortune had not deserted her.
‘You know what I mean, Mrs Ferndale?’
‘Yes, of course.’
The conversation had changed. Julia was told about the plans of Diane’s sister to become a physiotherapist, but again she found concentration difficult. ‘I thought you might be a Catholic,’ Francis Tyte had said, early in their relationship, delighting her when he confessed that he was one himself. For many generations the Ansteys had been a Catholic family; Julia had been sent to St Mildred’s Convent near Stratford-upon-Avon and had later carried the family tradition on. She was not devout, but had never been able to think of life without God, without the sacraments and the mass. Her daughters had gone to St Mildred’s also, though they had afterwards abandoned religion with an ease that had distressed her at the time. Roger Ferndale had not shared her faith, nor did her mother: it seemed like a treat, plucked out of nowhere, when Francis made his revelation.
‘I just want to try this,’ Diane murmured, fiddling at the back of Julia’s head and bringing her down to earth by causing her to feel nervous. She was well aware of Diane’s opinion that much more could be done with her hair, but had no wish to feel like mutton dressed as lamb, as her mother would have said. ‘Bouffant would suit you, you know,’ Diane had once suggested, and with greater daring had even mentioned rinses.
Unable quite to see what was happening at the back, Julia issued a slight protesting noise. She had made this appointment at the Crowning Glory because of the handful of people who were coming to Swan House that evening for drinks. Father Lavin, who had already met Francis several times, would be present, but there would be others who did not yet know him, including Father Lavin’s curate, Father Dawne. The two priests would be urged to stay to dinner, as usually they were on such occasions. In a cream-coloured house on the outskirts of the town they did their own catering, and because Julia assumed they didn’t feed themselves properly priestly meals at Swan House now and again took place. During the one tonight she had no wish to have the back of her head looking funny.
‘Just a little spring,’ Diane assured. ‘Nothing you’d notice, Mrs Ferndale, only it needs a touch of lift. Mrs Anstey keeping well, is she?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘And Mr Tyte?’
‘He’s very well too. You’re not doing anything too elaborate, are you, Diane?’
‘Heavens, no. Finished in a sec. I see Mr Tyte’s in that ad again. With the pipe.’
‘Yes, he is.’
Since it had become known that she was to remarry, the identity of her fiancé had been of interest in Stone St Martin and its neighbourhood. ‘A famous actor,’ people had said at first, and so he had remained, though the parts Francis were offered were never large. In the realm of television advertisements he had established himself as a figure with a particular English charm and a smile that stayed in the mind. He was currently on show in a series which promoted a brand of tobacco.
‘Anything new to watch out for, is there?’ Diane inquired, holding u
p a glass so that Julia could see the back of her head.
‘Oh, that’s quite nice. Thank you, Diane.’ Rehearsals were about to begin, she added: the reconstruction of a famous Victorian murder.
‘Sounds exciting, Mrs Ferndale.’
‘Yes, it probably may be.’
The pink wrap was lifted from Julia’s shoulders. ‘I hope your parents come to see your point of view,’ she said, giving Diane her tip.
Diane made a face, and Julia said goodbye. She had to shop in the town, which she intended to do in a leisurely way because of the heat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Ferndale,’ Simon called after her, looking up from the grey, scant hair of old Mrs Anstruther. Julia paused to smile at him before she left the salon.
Geographically, Stone St Martin was simple, comprising for the most part a street on a hill called Highhill Street. Lesser streets ran off to the left and right, rows of houses rather than shops, residential tributaries that further from the town’s centre blossomed into modest suburbs. The green sign of Lloyd’s Bank hung at the corner of a Cotswold stone building, the Lloyd’s architecture as familiar as the black horse that danced on the sign itself. The same yellow-grey stone was ubiquitous elsewhere: the gaunt King’s Head was built of it, so was the Anglican church at the top of Highhill Street, and the Courtesy Cleaners and the old wool bank, now the co-op. The Bay Tree Café was different, all black timber beams and white stucco, a style reflected in the building which contained the Crowning Glory, a bread shop, and Moate & Greenly, estate agents. But the sub-offices of insurance companies and building societies were of the local stone, as were grocers’ shops and newsagents’, the Post Office, Baxter’s the Butcher’s, Super Cycles, the Midland Bank, and two schools. There wasn’t a great deal more to Stone St Martin except a set of traffic-lights, and the offices of Warboys, Smith and Toogood, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.
Beyond the town, on another hill, there was Julia’s church: dating from 1451 but tidily renovated in 1923, the Church of St Martin was named after St Martin of Braga for reasons which remained obscure. It was the centre of a far-flung parish, Father Lavin and his curate being responsible for several other churches in the area, as the priests of Stone St Martin had been since the Reformation. In her childhood Julia had often visited the cream-coloured priests’ house to unburden to an elderly confessor her many worries about her own inadequacy.
It was in childhood, also, that she had begun to keep the diaries which nobody except herself had ever read. When I was seven, she had written, long after the event, I stole Melissa’s pencil-sharpener. For weeks I hadn’t been able to resist it because it was a globe of the world as well. Melissa afterwards became her best friend, occupying the bed next to hers in the Green Dormitory at St Mildred’s. But Julia had never told her about the pencil-sharpener. Sister Burkardt doesn’t like me, she’d written also. She looks at me and I can feel her thinking that but for the accident to her face her features would be quite like mine. We have the same arrangement in our faces, the same bones, eyes of the same colour, a mouth that’s quite alike. Yet Sister Burkardt is ugly and I am not. I feel she has picked me out as the pupil most to resent, though she tries never to let it show and always smiles. She takes it out on others, and on girls who aren’t pretty either. I feel so sorry for her, and pray for her.
In Julia’s diaries there remained her childhood vision of the God she still addressed: greyly bearded and venerable in a tropical garden, mistily depicted, as if viewed through gauze or cloud. Only the eyes were startling: among jungly foliage, where birds with coloured plumage flew and where fruit, not quite identified, was richly vivid, her God was a watching presence. You know He is there, she wrote, as people sense a ghost. She had wept over the betrayal and the crown of thorns, and the story of Mary Magdalene. Sister Murray considers the English an agnostic people, she wrote while still at St Mildred’s. She asked for questions after she had said so in her provocative way, but no one had arty. No one inquired if it would be stifling for Catholics such as we are to live among the naturally religious, the Spanish or the Italians for instance. SisterMurray passed on to something else, a definition of piety I think. Years afterwards Julia considered these observations silly and tore the page from her diary. I am going to be a nun, she had declared when she was ten, and had torn that out as well.
Her engagement to an army officer was in a diary also, a long résumé of her friendship with him, her searching for guidance through the entanglements of romance. She had known Roger Ferndale for as long as she could remember. They had played together as children, he was the first man to kiss her. After that she had developed an interest in military matters, in his regiment and his career, in tennis, at which he was good. She had supposed she was in love with him and apparently had been right. There was a honeymoon in Wales, and then the years abroad, the birth of Henrietta and Katherine, and finally the death that broke everything apart. The death itself – and being a mother and a widow – was recorded in lines that revealed a certain stoicism, for Julia’s tendency was to find herself haunted by plights that were not her own. Her own she could somehow cope with, but long after she had left St Mildred’s, even after her husband’s death, she was uneasily concerned whenever she thought of the unhappy nun.
Perhaps the trouble with Sister Burkardt was that the contemplation of so many girls growing up was too much for her. When I think of her I see her as a girl with a looking-glass, making the decision to take the veil so that she could hide away instead of feeling rejected. But she couldn’t lose her longing to be beautiful, reminded of it cruelly by the faces all around, my own perhaps in particular. She left the convent and later left the order. Was it Sally Fryer who came across her working in a shop that sold sacred objects?
Julia’s mother, whose opinion Julia did not lightly dismiss, considered this kind of concern misplaced; and so, privately, did Julia’s daughters. ‘You have an innocence I don’t possess,’ Mrs Anstey used to say when Julia was a girl. ‘There’s a sense of guilt which comes from that.’ But Julia preferred to accept whatever facts there were: her mother was a different kind of person, her view of people sharper, her charity differently disposed, it wasn’t something to argue about. And because relationships within the family had always been tinged with this old-fashioned politeness, the emerging of Francis Tyte as a possible bridegroom had at first been a signal for tact rather than a display of even the faintest doubt. Conversations had taken place – Julia’s mother and her daughters equally contributing – and in the end it was quite naturally accepted that an actor could be an army officer’s successor without undue courting of folly. The difference in age of course didn’t matter, Mrs Anstey had set the mood by proclaiming.
We’d been shopping in Cheltenham, Julia wrote a week after she’d first met Francis. In the lounge of the Queen’s Hotel there was a man whose face seemed just familiar, though we’d never heard of him when he told us his name and that he was an actor. Fair-haired and rather elegant, a look of Leslie Howard. One day, he promised, he’ll come and see us in Stone St Martin, for time is sometimes on his hands in Cheltenham. He doesn’t live there. In Folkestone, I think he said. Francis Tyte he’s called.
‘Boursin,’ she said in Dobie’s Stores. ‘The one with garlic if you have it, please.’ She smiled at the ageing assistant who had served her since she was a child, but who now apologetically replied that today he could offer her no Boursin with garlic in it. ‘Edam, Mr Humphreys? About six ounces, please.’
‘Oh yes, there’s Edam, ma’am.’ He cut with his cheese-wire into a new scarlet ball of it while telling her about his ailing father. Again she found the necessary concentration difficult. Three weeks had to pass before the wedding and the honeymoon in Italy; after that the plan was that Francis should continue his theatrical career, while living in Swan House. Longing for the time to go by made Julia feel like a schoolgirl again, a pleasant, reckless feeling, part of being in love. She nodded at Mr Humphreys, not hearing or caring what he said.
&nbs
p; A single pool of shade was cast by the tulip tree beneath which Julia’s mother sat in a high-backed wicker chair, her two walking-sticks crooked over each of its arms. The tulip tree was at the bottom of the narrow garden, on a lawn that ran to the edge of the river. Swans had once congregated here, picking the spot out and giving Swan House its name. It was a favourite place of Mrs Anstey’s also.
She had been reading the first pages of Martin Chuzzlewit, but no longer did so. In the distance, near to the house, the man who was soon to be her son-in-law continued to weed a flowerbed: idly she watched him. Since old Mr Pocock had had to give up his work in the garden Julia had been trying to find someone else, but on her engagement to Francis Tyte this search had seemed less urgent. ‘I think I’ll quite like gardening,’ Francis had said and ever since, whenever he came to stay for a few days at Swan House, he had been content to do whatever jobs he was allocated.
Mrs Anstey was a small woman with sharp blue eyes that in certain lights appeared to be black. Her face was tight, like a knob, her white hair hidden away now beneath a brimmed white hat. Her body, twisted out of shape with arthritis, retained a certain compactness, though its affliction meant that she could not move without the assistance of her walking-sticks. In her wicker chair she wore a green dress with small white dots on it, which she did not intend to change when people later came to drinks.
She had placed Martin Chuzzlewit on a beech-wood table beside her chair. She picked it up again, then hesitated because she noticed that Francis had stood up from his task and was approaching her, dawdling down the narrow garden. On either side of him were high stone walls with plum- and pear-trees on them, and flowerbeds lively with daisy bushes and aubretia. She observed his advance, wondering if she could tell from his walk what part he was passing the time by playing. Of average height, lean and fair-haired, he was dressed in a grey-striped shirt and matching trousers. Too distant for her yet to discern, his features registered in Mrs Anstey’s imagination: eyes dimly blue, mouth not quite thin, his smile the element that made him handsome, reminding television viewers – as it had reminded Julia – of the late Leslie Howard. He strolled past quince and broom, through arches of trailing clematis, across the rose garden. When he was close to her she saw he carried, limply in his left hand, a leaf from a hosta.
Other People's Worlds Page 1