Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  Susanna nodded, trying to be interested. There was something wrong with the script they’d read: it seemed impossible that this unhappy girl possessed the spirit of a murderess. No ordinary person took human life, it wasn’t the same as stealing things or telling lies. The script they’d read was facile.

  The man who’d written it was muttering to the director through smoke from a slim cigar. The director wasn’t listening. ‘They’re not getting the physical bit across,’ the scriptwriter complained in his clipped accents. ‘She has to be menstruating at the time of the crime.’

  But the director was more concerned about the inordinate length of the drama, and when the scriptwriter again mentioned Constance Kent’s menses he smilingly replied that just for the moment he’d prefer not to open that particular can of goods. The scriptwriter did not speak again, and soon afterwards left the drill-hall. ‘We’d get a lot more pace,’ the director remarked to his assistant, ‘if we amalgamated the housekeeper and the cook.’ His assistant agreed, and suggested that for the sake of further drama Martha Holley, the daughter of the washerwoman, should be made psychic. ‘Fantastic,’ cried the toylike director, pacing excitedly up and down in his workman’s wear.

  Other things were happening in the drill-hall. The man who played Constance’s father said that the computers went wrong because of a laser beam. The peach-faced actress was jealous: Susanna could feel the jealousy in the woman’s glance, she could feel her trying to control it, trying not to let it show. The glance passed over Susanna’s features and her long, loose black hair; it was snatched away but then returned, as if of its own accord. It moved over Susanna’s thin legs and over her blue dress. The lips of the actress wanted to curl, but were prevented from doing so. Then very suddenly the director clapped his hands together and asked that the scene in the breakfast-room should be performed. He said he wished everyone to understand this scene since it reflected so well the steaminess in the house. ‘Basically, it’s the only time Kent’s wife accuses him of messing about with the nursemaid, and what she’s thinking is that she should know because he messed about with her when his first wife was alive. Greatly given to taking knickers off, was Kent.’

  The actors and actresses who were involved took their places and when the scene had been acted the director requested that the whole reconstruction should now be discussed. There was a short silence and then the actor who was playing the part of Constance Kent’s judge protested that the pornography in the plum orchard scene had been invented. ‘I mean, you’d think the nursemaid was a hooker the fruity way Kent chats her up. I mean, it’s not the actual truth we’re presenting.’

  Another actor complained that in order to reduce the running time most of his lines had been taken away from him. He’d had a name before; now he was just a specialist in mental disorders. Bucknill he’d been called before, he added.

  ‘What sticks out a mile,’ an elderly actress said, ‘is that there’s a lot of incorrect grammar in this script, spoken by people who are meant to be educated. And there’s a place where Samuel Kent suddenly says, “No way.” I think that’s an expression Kojak invented.’

  The director did not appear to register these objections. Animatedly addressing his assistant, he continued to stab the air with gestures, enhancing the impression that he was powered by some clockwork mechanism. When he paused for a moment the peach-faced actress made a speech. She stated that in her opinion the facts were in no way represented in the script. The truth was that she herself – in the part of the nursemaid who received the attentions of Samuel Kent in the plum orchard – had caused the death of the child by attempting to stifle its cries. The child, sleeping in her bedroom, had been roused by further love-making between Samuel Kent and herself: she had snatched a pillow in order to quieten it while Kent made his way back to his wife’s bedroom. Unfortunately she’d smothered the thing.

  ‘That view,’ the peach-faced actress went on, ‘was widely held at the time. Charles Dickens believed it to be true. What happened was that Kent afterwards went to work with a knife in order to make the whole thing look like the behaviour of a crazy girl. Then he put the remains down the loo.’

  The actor with the broken teeth, approving of this theory since it enriched his part as well as the actress’s, pronounced that his stabbing of the cadaver should be shown in detail, that being what excited viewers these days.

  The halo of curls danced urgently about as the director shook his head. Words tumbled over one another as he hastened to insist that the person indubitably responsible for the crime was Constance Kent. It was she who had attempted to dispose of a bloodstained nightdress; it was she who had confessed. Swiftly indicating the blown-up photograph, he added that what they were into was an in-depth assessment of a situation that was by no means purely Victorian. He smiled lavishly, a smile of encouragement for his cast, although some of them took it to be one of amusement at the tragedy that had occurred. He didn’t wish to sound extravagant, he said, but when you asked how Constance Kent could have butchered a baby you were asking how terrorist girls could blow up the innocent in shops and restaurants and dance-halls. Constance Kent had been a figure of vengeance, today she’d perhaps be a Baader-Meinhof girl. In his opinion, though not wishing to sound crass, human nature hadn’t changed since 1860.

  Susanna, to whom this interpretation of the facts was primarily directed, endeavoured to visualize a Victorian girl in this contemporary guise. She thought of her in a stranded aeroplane, threatening death, too embittered to care for her victims. She saw her in a department store, with a time-bomb in a carrier-bag. She saw her sitting in a room, watching on television the pictures of another holocaust, proud that she had caused it. ‘Yes,’ she uncertainly agreed, stepping forward to perform the breakfast-room scene again. Those who were not taking part occupied the chairs that lined the walls, settling down with newspapers or knitting.

  ‘You are totally wrong in this,’ Samuel Kent protested, seated, pretending to eat.

  ‘I have the evidence of my eyes,’ his wife replied.

  ‘What evidence, may I ask?’

  ‘That you persistently pay attention to Elizabeth Gough.’

  ‘There is nothing amiss between myself and Elizabeth Gough.’

  ‘I warn you, if I discover otherwise I shall not hesitate to act, Samuel.’

  ‘You shall have no cause to. Good morning, Constance.’

  ‘Good morning, Father.’

  ‘Move straight to the sideboard, Susanna,’ commanded the director. ‘Help yourself to kidneys. Lift the kidneys up so’s the camera can catch them. Very, very slowly. Let the silence build. Remember what you’re thinking: you’re seeing your father in the plum orchard, going to work on the nursemaid. Now, sit down. Very, very slowly. Pick up your knife and fork. Remember, you want to kill someone with that knife. Good. Super. Let’s try it from the top again.’

  All morning and for part of the afternoon the scenes continued in the drill-hall. At lunchtime the peach-faced actress had a word with the director and after that did not again protest that it was she herself who had committed the atrocity; and she controlled her jealousy of Susanna Music as best she could. No one mentioned pornography again, or unconvincing dialogue; everyone pulled together.

  It surprised Susanna that this had happened. Waking that morning in her parents’ house in S.W. I, she had gazed about her at the lilac wallpaper of her bedroom, concerned immediately with the part she was to play. The sheets on her bed were a shade of lilac also, but it was the cold white sheets of Constance Kent she had more vividly imagined, and Constance’s tortured mind, and her saintliness. What had taken place in the drill-hall seemed nothing in comparison with that simple reality.

  ‘You’re right of course,’ a voice said, and she turned to find the actor who’d introduced himself as Francis Tyte beside her. He held open a set of swing-doors and walked beside her down the gloomy corridor and out of the drill-hall.

  At half-past four that day a lorry full of scrap
metal moved slowly through afternoon sunshine, along a street that wasn’t far from the drill-hall, and not far either from Tite Street Comprehensive school. As he drove, the driver of the lorry drank milky tea from a bottle, expertly dividing his attention.

  On her way to the Rialto Café for chips and a Tizer, Francis’s child watched the lorry-driver for a moment and then moved on, past two youths who were loitering in front of a partially demolished house. The youths were naked to the waist, their hair thick with the grime of mortar and plaster, shovels idle in their hands. Another man operated a yellow crane, moving it closer to the house and at the same time swinging through the air a huge pear-shaped weight. As Joy stopped again to watch, this struck a wall and brought the greater part of it crashing down. A fire-place turned in the air. Dust exploded, showering the youths afresh.

  All the houses were unoccupied in the street, dingy lace curtains still drooping here and there behind smashed windows. The area where demolition had already taken place was protected by a high fence of corrugated iron, now richly embellished with graffiti and posters advertising rock shows. Bilo rules OK, a statement read, sprayed in blue from a paint-gun. Its letters awkward on the wavy surface of the corrugations, a black message asserted that Jesus Christ was alive and well. Working, it added, on a less ambitious project.

  On the other side of the street were the railings of a park that was as empty as the street itself, its grass browned by the sun. Beyond it was a newsagent’s shop, beside a café. Rialto Café stated a sign that also advertised Coca-Cola.

  Joy entered and placed her briefcase on the nearest of half a dozen tables that had green and white oil-cloth on them. Only one was occupied, by a small middle-aged couple who were drinking tea. Displayed on the counter were buns and miniature packets of biscuits beneath a plastic dome.

  ‘What you want?’ a woman in an overall demanded;

  ‘Chips,’ Joy said, ‘and a Tizer.’

  ‘Got the money, have you?’

  Joy said she had. By never going on a bus, either to school or on the way home, she managed to save enough for this regular repast. It meant being an hour late at Tite Street Comprehensive every morning, but almost a year ago now Clicky Hines in 3A had done a letter for her, purporting to come from her mother and explaining that due to family problems it was impossible for her to set out for school at the proper time. Arriving home a couple of hours later than she should have didn’t matter because the flat was empty then. She liked to linger in the Rialto or the Woo Han, or the Light of India Take-Away. She liked Chik ’n’ Chips in Nile Road best of all, but it didn’t open until six, which was usually too long to wait.

  ‘Twenty-one,’ she said, placing the money on the counter. She felt a little hurt that the woman, who wasn’t the usual one in the Rialto, should have distrusted her. The usual one, Sylv, sometimes charged only fifteen for chips and Tizer, saying the chips had been left over from dinnertime. The present woman had been in the café for a week now and didn’t seem to like people. Sitting down at one of the tables, Joy resolved not to return to the place without ascertaining first that Sylv had returned also.

  The middle-aged couple had begun to argue, which pleased Joy because that was something to listen to. The woman emphasized the points she was making by striking the surface of the table with a ketchup container, a roundish plastic object like a large tomato. ‘She come back in a shocking state,’ she said. ‘Nothing that wasn’t torn.’ Joy couldn’t hear the man’s reply, and then the woman said, ‘Of course you bloody had the camera going.’

  Joy was in 3B at Tite Street Comprehensive, where the current fashion was starting fires. She belonged to a group, the fans of a pop band called The Insane; the other group in the class were supporters of Fulham Football Club. A fire had been started in a French period that morning by one of the Insane fans, and a second one during the lunch-hour by the Fulham supporters. A month ago paint-guns had been all the rage, but everyone was sick of them now.

  The woman brought the Tizer and the chips, fewer chips than usual, Joy noticed. ‘No bloody way,’ the man at the next table protested angrily. ‘No way you can call them blue.’

  Clicky Hines had a drug. All day he’d been strutting about the place on his high heels, saying what it did to you, how it made you think you were walking on the air. He said he had enough to share out among the Insane fans, fifty pence a go. Clicky Hines was older, being in 3A, and knew the drummer in the group, Bobo Sweat, as he was called. It was Clicky Hines who had begun the fashion for fires, just as he’d begun the fashion for staring, which Joy had found a drag. You had to stare at whatever teacher was in the room, not ever speaking or picking up a ballpoint or opening a book. All the Insane fans in 3A and 3B had kept it up for a term, and the Fulham supporters hadn’t been able to retaliate except to shout Front slogans in the middle of whatever the teacher was saying. Even the Abrahams brothers had shouted Front slogans.

  The woman at the next table informed her companion that she didn’t intend to let any niece of hers take part in activities that involved cameras, no matter what such sessions were called. The ketchup container made a plopping sound as it repeatedly struck the table-top. It was nothing short of ridiculous, the woman snappishly exclaimed, to refer to sessions like that as a bit of fun on a Sunday afternoon when the truth was that films were being made for red-necked businessmen to get turned on by in a Soho cellar, twenty quid a head. ‘I’m telling you straight, Ron, that girl’s not performing for cameras again.’

  It was a bit of luck hearing about dirty films. Tomorrow the whole conversation could be repeated, everything the couple said, all the stuff about a Soho cellar. Eventually it would get to Clicky Hines’s ears and he’d give his excited screech, throwing his head back the way he did. The making of sex films would fascinate Clicky.

  The man and the woman rose, spots of red in the woman’s cheeks, the man looking truculent. Without speaking again they left the Rialto Café and Joy watched them walking, still without speaking, past the window. She’d perhaps embroider it a bit, she’d perhaps describe how the girl had had to be held down, like Mavis Pope that day in the toilets. She’d describe how her clothes had been torn, how four or five men had gone at her, while all the time the camera was turning.

  Slowly, relishing them, Joy consumed her chips. She wished she didn’t go to Tite Street Comprehensive. Several times recently, when dragging her way through the streets of Fulham in the mornings, she’d had it in mind to spend the day in a park. Increasingly there didn’t seem much point in arriving in 3B classroom and sitting there, not being able to hear properly because of the noise. It broke the monotony when a fire broke out at the back of the room or when the Fulham supporters tried to get nasty, but neither was much of a consolation really, especially when you couldn’t eat any of the dinner. What she actually wanted was to leave the place and go and work in the Bovril factory, where a girl called Sharon Tiles had found a job last September.

  It was then, while thinking about the Bovril factory and with two chips actually on the way to her mouth, that she saw her father walking with a girl on the street outside. Her heartbeat quickened, the way it always did when she saw him. She felt warm all over, and for a moment she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  The heat of the day had lifted.

  By the tube station people stood outside a green public house, waiting for it to open. Other people hurried home from work, some impatiently buying an evening paper from a man at the entrance to the tube. A clock hanging above a jeweller’s gave the time as twenty-five past five. ‘Would you like to have a drink?’ Francis suggested.

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  Susanna had told him about herself as they’d walked through the streets, about her drama school and after that a travelling seaside show that became a pantomime in winter. Being of an optimistic nature, melancholy had not persuaded her to turn her back on the theatre, nor had the emptiness of dreary towns on Sundays, nor cold, unpleasant digs. She’d played small parts i
n television plays she hadn’t liked and then, astonishingly, there’d been this.

  ‘Cinzano, please,’ she said, sitting down in a corner, on a padded bench that ran along the green walls of the bar. She smiled as she spoke, knowing she was acting with her eyes and lips. She made her smile crooked, which was something she had practised in front of her bedroom looking-glass.

  ‘Tell me more about yourself, Susanna,’ he said when he returned with their drinks.

  She told him she’d been lucky. She was the youngest of three daughters, the delicate one as a child, the one they’d all looked after. They were a happy family and always had been: there were jokes at mealtimes, and her father’s easy laughter, her mother’s niceness. One of her sisters worked in the British Museum, the other was a radiologist. Susanna was the only one who still lived at home, but her sisters often came at weekends and always at Christmas and Easter, towing with them various boyfriends. Everyone still made a fuss of her because she’d once been delicate and was talented, because she was so determined about the theatre, with its excesses and its dangers. What friends she brought home were carefully examined, especially if they were men. This scrutiny wasn’t beady-eyed or harsh, but it did occasionally make Susanna think of herself as a protected species.

  ‘I’m very happy really,’ she said as she sipped her Cinzano. ‘It’s just that I sometimes think I’ve had too easy a life.’

  Francis replied that of course that couldn’t be true. He said that when he’d first noticed her in the drill-hall he’d wondered if her name was real. ‘Born Pauline Boles? I wondered.’

  ‘Boles?’