Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  With sudden sharpness Susanna recalled the details of the fantasy Francis Tyte had so effortlessly created for her on the first afternoon of the rehearsals: the odd-job man and the housekeeper of a Nottingham orphanage, an elderly lecher called Vassbacher. For a brief, strange moment she was possessed by the notion that this woman had been created by Francis Tyte also, a figment of his pretence which had somehow acquired reality. She shook the hand the woman held out to her, reassuring her again.

  ‘Frankie.’

  She was there in the lounge of the hotel, sitting down at a table, smoking. Her handbag was on the table beside her packet of filter-tipped cigarettes. She was wearing her hideous mackintosh.

  ‘Good heavens, Dorrie!’ he said.

  ‘I had to have a word, Frankie.’ She held out a pound note and asked him to get something to drink. ‘A rum and blackcurrant, love,’ she said.

  He crossed the large, square lounge to the bar in the corner, reflecting that she was drunk already. He wondered if she was at last going to mention a paternity order, not that it mattered any more what she mentioned.

  ‘Lovely,’ she said when he returned with her sticky drink. She had discovered about rum and blackcurrant only today, she told him, the mixture suggested by an Irish barman in a lovely pub called the Turbaned Turk.

  ‘Is something the matter, Dorrie?’

  ‘Well yes, dear.’ She said she was sorry. She’d become upset; she had to have a word.

  ‘Of course, Dorrie. Of course.’

  ‘I followed you on the street to the rehearsal place. I spoke to the girl, Frankie.’

  ‘What girl is that?’

  ‘Susie. Is Susie her name? I was worried, Frankie.’

  ‘You don’t mean Susanna Music?’

  She said she did, and added that it wasn’t just the girl. While watching a television cartoon Joy had consumed a drug normally given to elephants, and had gone into a coma. Joy couldn’t read or write. The bathroom walls were filthy, the whole flat was in need of decoration and the landlords wouldn’t listen. Everywhere she looked there seemed to be a mess; her last lot of table-mats hadn’t been accepted by the At-Home Industries people because of poor craftsmanship; she was worried about making ends meet.

  ‘You were worried about that before, Dorrie.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I never have anything to spare, I’m afraid.’ He remembered suggesting the table-mats in the first place and later telling her about the dealer in Crawford Street. Now and again he’d had to go to the man himself. The man took anything, no questions asked.

  ‘Let’s have another drink, Frankie.’

  He nodded, smiling a little. He spoke quietly, collecting their two glasses. ‘You’ve always had ill fortune, Dorrie.’

  ‘I’ve been lucky in some ways, dear. I was lucky that day on the bus.’

  When he stood at the bar his anger didn’t erupt as it might have. She had followed him through the streets, just like the child had. She had bothered a girl he hardly knew, with whom he’d once had a drink and to whom he’d have to apologize. The condition of her bathroom had nothing to do with him, in no way was he her keeper. Yet the anger didn’t come.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again when he returned, and added that she had been in touch with an old people’s home. He didn’t understand at first what she meant, and then realized that she’d telephoned every home in Hampton Wick until she’d found one with someone called Tyte in it. ‘Are your parents alive, Frankie?’

  Slowly he shook his head. His mother and father had been killed in a railway crash, he reminded her. His uncle had died early that morning, at a quarter to five. ‘I wasn’t with him,’ he said. ‘I came back here at one o’clock because I was exhausted. I blame myself.’

  ‘They kept saying there was nothing the matter with him, Frankie.’

  ‘Who’s that, dear?’

  ‘Whoever he is. The old man in that place. You had a flirt with the girl, Frankie.’

  He smiled, not saying anything. For a moment he imagined taking the train to Folkestone and having the courage of Constance Kent. Excitement quickened inside him, pleasantly spreading warmth.

  ‘As long as it’s over, Frankie.’

  He noticed that her eyes weren’t focusing. His parents were his own affair, she said. As long as it was over, she repeated.

  ‘Let’s go back to the flat, Dorrie.’

  He would never again see her or her child. She loved him, as the dressmaker had, and the doctor’s wife, as Julia Ferndale did. The ill fortune in her life had been cheered by this love; the memory of it would be a comfort for her in the future.

  On the street she kept saying she was sorry and he replied that he was sorry she’d misunderstood things. She stumbled and he had to hold her by the arm. It was typical of her to go ringing up institutions because she’d got everything wrong, to go getting into a panic for no reason whatsoever. But in time he would naturally forgive her, as he forgave the others.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ the child said in the flat.

  ‘Hullo, Joy.’

  The child began to talk about a Bovril factory. He nodded at her and smiled. She disliked her school, she said – which she had repeatedly said before – and then she turned the television on. In the kitchen Doris produced half a bottle of vodka from a cupboard and poured some of it into two cups. She talked in her usual way, about the past and the future, and then returned to the matters which were on her mind at the moment: the decoration of her flat, her inability to make table-mats any more. As soon as the child went to bed they sat in the sitting-room, on the sofa. When she seized his hand her own felt clammy, but even so he allowed her to embrace him.

  ‘It’s not my business, your mum and dad,’ she repeated, adding that she needed to catch the Bricklayer’s before it closed because she was running out of ciggies.

  ‘Shall I?’ he offered, but she insisted that he should remain. She came back with more vodka and stood in front of him swaying, laughing in her drunkenness.

  ‘I want to tell you, dear,’ he said, and then he described the life of Constance Kent, the viciousness of her father, her stepmother’s cruelty. He told her how Constance Kent had run away, cutting her red hair off and dressing herself as a boy, how she’d been locked in a cellar as a punishment. All her life she’d been let down; other people had destroyed her. She’d been battered to shreds, turned into a crazy creature who crucified slugs.

  ‘Poor thing,’ Doris said, taking more vodka.

  She cuddled into him on the sofa, happier than she’d been for ages. She’d been let down herself, he said: the day her father married again, and then again by the table-mats people and the landlords, by Tite Street Comprehensive not caring tuppence if a child could read, by the dressmaker who went on living beyond her time. He’d suffered ill fortune too, he said. All three of them were the same, he and she and Constance Kent.

  Joy had been roused by the banging of the flat door when Doris returned from the Bricklayer’s Arms. For ages after that she lay listening to the murmur of her father’s voice through the thin partition wall. Scraps of what he said slipped through the wall, and sometimes there was her mother’s voice as well. They appeared to be talking about the thriller he was in. It was nice that he didn’t want to go.

  She dropped off to sleep and dreamed that she was back at Tite Street Comprehensive, where Clicky Hines had persuaded her to have the face of her father tattooed on her stomach. He’d even persuaded her that he could do the job himself and had brought in a lot of colours and electrical gear. She woke up with a jerk because the drill thing he was using had got out of control and was cutting her open when it should have been putting the blue in the eyes. There was silence in the sitting-room.

  8

  Julia’s

  The occasion slightly puzzled the actor who had played the part of Samuel Kent. The bride’s daughters, as thin as table-knives, seemed to be delighted by what was happening. The bride’s mother was edgy and tried to hide it. The bri
de herself was like a woman in her sleep. A person he’d been introduced to as Mrs Spanners was horribly painted and clad, with bangles jangling on her arms. Francis Tyte might well have been on a stage.

  With an actor’s curiosity, the man who had been Samuel Kent wondered just what was going on. The fact that the bride was so in love appeared to have cast a sheen over everyone’s sensibilities. No one questioned her love and because of that no one questioned anything else, no one except her mother.

  The older priest murmured, the younger one stood with his head bowed. Summer dresses and hats lent a festive air, bright afternoon sunshine glittered through the stained-glass windows. There was a pleasant scent of candle-grease and incense, the organist played Bach. Yet as the proceedings advanced the acquired best man felt increasingly disconcerted. So clamorously in the end did his professional instinct protest that he even began to feel a little unwell, and shivered when he stepped out into the warm June sunshine.

  The weather in England suddenly turned showery, which annoyed Mrs Anstey. It meant she was unable to sit reading under the tulip tree, well out of reach of Mrs Spanners. To pursue her to this position the cleaning woman needed a reasonable excuse, whereas no excuse of any kind was necessary for hoovering her way into the drawing-room or the dining-room, or anywhere else where Mrs Anstey might have established herself with her book. It often seemed that there was nothing Mrs Spanners liked better than winkling her out and proceeding to talk.

  On the second morning of her daughter’s absence in Italy she was wakened with a tray of early-morning tea. She preferred not to be roused at a quarter to seven and had said so to Mrs Spanners, only to receive the reply that none of it was any trouble. The green and brown curtains of her bedroom were pulled back briskly, noisy on their metal rails. A blast of sunshine made her blink.

  ‘Still unsettled it said on the half-six,’ Mrs Spanners informed her. ‘And petrol going short again.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Spanners.’ Mrs Anstey began to sit up. For long periods during every night she found it difficult to sleep. She read then and usually dropped off again at about five o’clock.

  ‘All right then, dear?’ Mrs Spanners inquired. ‘Garbage men out, apparently.’

  Mrs Spanners began Mrs Anstey’s day for her at this early hour because she liked to see that all was well before she made the journey back to her council house in order to give her husband, Charle, his breakfast. While he ate it she put together his two packets of sandwiches, one for consumption at ten o’clock and the other at one. She didn’t make them the evening before because he said they got stale overnight. Many times she had explained all this to Mrs Anstey.

  ‘O.K. then, dear?’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite all right thank you, Mrs Spanners.’

  ‘Fancy the garbage out again! Never think of no one but theirselves.’

  She wore an overall with prancing shepherdesses on it, and was heavily scented with Love-in-a-Mist. Her face had already been made up, fingernails shaped and painted. Her tangerine hair was fresh from its curlers.

  ‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘Pig products is up. Immediate from midnight.’

  With that she departed. At nine o’clock, bringing breakfast into the dining-room – although Mrs Anstey would have preferred it between showers on the lawn – she would have further information to impart. There’d possibly be a tit-bit concerning Princess Margaret and information about the contents of Charle’s sandwiches, and what local gossip Charle had picked up in the Three Swallows the night before. She’d stand there with her empty tray, watching to see that the scrambled eggs she’d cooked were eaten, talking about the beer-drinkers and skittles players of the Three Swallows, none of whom Mrs Anstey had ever met or even seen. Yesterday she’d protested to Mrs Spanners that she couldn’t manage a cooked breakfast every morning, after which there’d been the sudden presence of Dr Tameguard in the house, asking her what the matter was.

  Mrs Anstey sighed. So that there would be a residue in the cup when the tray was collected, she poured out some of the strong tea without which, in Mrs Spanners’s opinion, no day could properly begin. The greater part of the tea-pot’s contents would later be emptied down the lavatory.

  She placed the tray on her bedside table, reflecting that Mrs Spanners’s transistor information was probably correct: the sun, so early in the day, was too bright to augur well. Brilliant shafts of it penetrated the room, sharpening the outline of hair-brushes and stoppered bottles on the dressing-table. Sitting up in bed, Mrs Anstey saw herself reflected in a sunny looking-glass and hastily looked away. The premonition that had tormented her no longer nagged. The wedding ceremony had rendered it irrelevant, nothing could now be done.

  She reached for Martin Chuzzlewit, which she had almost finished. As she did so she heard the telephone ringing, a distant sound, coming from the hall. She listened, wondering if Mrs Spanners had already left to get Charle’s breakfast, and assuming she had when the ringing continued. She could never herself get to a telephone in time these days.

  ?

  In the priests’ house Father Lavin drew on his clerical trousers and arranged black braces on his shoulders. He remembered reading a detective story in which the dénouement had hinged on the corpse’s twisted braces. No one, some sharp investigator had argued, would walk about like that all day. The body’s clothes had clearly been re-arranged after death.

  He washed at the hand-basin in his plain, cream-coloured room and then lathered his face for shaving. After breakfast, when he had read his letters and dealt with those which required an immediate answer, he planned to drive to Cheltenham to see a builder who had volunteered to repaint the guttering of the church for nothing. A Catholic apparently, a Mr Spurgeon. Father Lavin had never heard of him until someone had mentioned the name a couple of Sundays ago, and then a letter had arrived with the rather surprising offer. Drawing the blade of his safety razor through the lather of soap on his neat, small chin, Father Lavin wondered what sin this retribution followed. Would he guess it, he wondered, when he handed Mr Spurgeon the paint-card on which, the night before, Father Dawne had marked a colour called Gull Grey? The sins that popped up in the confessional sometimes seemed quite unsuitable for those who claimed them. Avarice and envy besmirched the nicest minds, dishonesty and the sexual urge were good at finding cover.

  ‘Are you up, Father?’ the voice of Father Dawne called out. ‘You’re wanted on the telephone.’

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ he called back, wiping the last wisps of soap from his face. And there were, of course, the sins that were not sins at all: the small daily errors, vindictiveness in anger, untidy gossip, petty actions. Sinners with no greater weakness to sustain them blew all these up in their repentance; being sorry brought God a little closer.

  ‘Yes?’ he said in the office, which was coloured cream also. Even the telephone he spoke into repeated the shade. A crucifix hung on the wall opposite the room’s single window, the cross black but the body of Christ the same pervasive creaminess. The filing-cabinets and the metal desk were grey.

  ‘Father Lavin,’ he said.

  There was a silence, then he was asked to hold the line. Voices spoke faintly. There was a crackling sound and after another silence there was Julia’s voice. She said something about Francis. She said something else as well but Father Lavin couldn’t hear that either, something about having tried to get Mrs Spanners at Swan House.

  ‘It’s a very bad line,’ he shouted.

  ‘Francis has left me.’

  Father Lavin could make neither head nor tail of this, but he did not interrupt again. He listened while Julia seemed to tell him that something had in error been reported to the Italian police, that some reference or other had appeared in an Italian newspaper. Her voice faded away again and then returned, very clearly for a moment. Since an Englishman was involved, she feared the newspaper item might be picked up by the British press. She was thinking of her mother.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. �
�But, Julia –’

  ‘I believe he has gone to Germany.’

  ‘Julia, what on earth’s all this about?’

  ‘I’m asking you to break it to my mother. And to tell the girls. I don’t want anyone just to read it in a paper.’

  ‘But why has Francis done this?’

  There was further crackling on the line, and when he heard her voice again she was saying she would be returning as soon as she could. Other voices interrupted.

  ‘I can’t hear you, Julia.’

  ‘Our marriage was bigamous. No more than a farce.’

  The line went dead, but he listened for a moment longer before slowly replacing the receiver. As he hurried back to his bedroom, a smell of frying bacon came from the tiny kitchen, where Father Dawne was already preparing their breakfast. They took the cooking in turns, week by week.

  ?

  Attired in his vest and trousers, having just put the kettle on and unbolted the back door to let the cat out for its morning’s pursuit of wildlife, Mr Spanners was about to belch away some wind. He changed his mind when he noticed, to his astonishment, that his wife had entered the kitchen with a priest. He raised a hand to his mouth and made a coughing noise instead.

  ‘My God,’ his wife said shakily, ‘there’s been a terrible thing.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Mr Tyte’s gone, Charle.’

  Mr Spanners stared hard at his wife, in confusion and bewilderment. ‘Gone?’ he said.

  ‘She telephoned the reverend. She was trying to get me at the house so’s I could keep the paper from the old lady. The reverend picked me up on the street.’

  ‘Your wife’s a little distressed, Mr Spanners.’

  On the ashen whiteness of her face the cosmetic additions had acquired a brittle look. Her fingers agitated the edge of the overall with shepherdesses on it, but her husband, endeavouring to absorb the shock to his sensibilities, appeared still unaware of her distress. ‘Gone?’ he said again. ‘Gone where?’