Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  Sincerely yours, Edith Purchase.

  Julia replied to the letter, refraining from pointing out that Doris Smith was not her responsibility. She thought again that that might be the end of everything, but a few days later a man from the Cheltenham police arrived at the house. He was interested, he said, that she was still Mrs Ferndale; he had been informed that the marriage which had taken place might have been invalid. He wondered if that might be correct. He was a tall, bushy man with sideburns and a moustache and a brown herring-bone jacket. He walked about the garden with Julia, often stooping to examine a plant or a shrub.

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want him hounded.’

  ‘It was bigamy on his part, was it, Mrs Ferndale? Tongues wag, you know. Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong.’

  ‘He said it was bigamy, but then it was impossible to believe much of what he said.’

  ‘He stole from you, Mrs Ferndale?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m aware it’s painful, but from what we know he deserted you in Italy. Again, I wonder if that’s correct.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘After a matter of days?’

  ‘One day actually. I gave him my jewellery.’

  ‘Gave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The policeman admired the garden’s hypericum, and its fuchsia and buddleia. He went in particularly for gardenias himself, he said. The spaniel sniffed at the bottom of his trousers.

  ‘We’ve no intention of pursuing this man, Mrs Ferndale. But of course he has behaved in a criminal manner and no doubt will do so again. A description must naturally be issued, and there are plenty of photographs. Not that he’ll look the same by now. Being an actor.’

  The tall policeman gave an amused little laugh, and Julia wanted to say that the vigour and time of the police would be better employed in keeping an eye on an alcoholic woman called Doris Smith who appeared to be intent on upsetting people. But she didn’t say that because the conversation would become difficult when she tried to explain that Francis had left a continuing horror behind him.

  ‘If you hear from him, Mrs Ferndale, we’d be obliged if you’d inform us at once. Cheltenham 28282.’

  Julia promised, knowing that she wouldn’t inform anyone, not even her mother or Father Lavin, when the first letter arrived. She would write a cheque and put it in an envelope. ‘Thank you for coming out,’ she said, and the policeman said he’d come again in the spring if he might, to take a cutting of her Kerria japonica.

  The spaniel ran after the police car as it drove away and then returned busily to smell the gravel where it had been parked. Julia was sorry now she’d accepted the dog, and her attitude to it had already changed. The dog mocked her, its drooping earnest eyes, the silly name which her mother insisted on addressing it as: Harry O. And it wasn’t just the dog. Nevil Clapp’s dourness had begun to irritate her. The painted face of Mrs Spanners, the wafting smell of Love-in-a-Mist, grated on her nerves. Her mother, creeping about with her sticks, inspired an impatience Julia had never in her life felt before.

  Then, just after midnight one night, the telephone rang, and she knew before she answered it who was on the other end. She wouldn’t have answered it at all except that the ringing would eventually arouse her mother and it didn’t occur to her simply to lift the receiver and place it on the table. When she picked it up there was the beeping sound that indicated the call came from a public call-box. A moment later, slurred late-night accents floated into the hall.

  ‘Is that Julia? Julia, Doris. Only I thought I’d better ring you.’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘Julia, dear, would you do me a favour? Would you put the receiver down and dial this number? 01 385 1001.’

  ‘It’s awfully late. I’m just on the way to bed.’

  ‘Have you a pencil, dear? 385 1001.’ While she spoke the beeping began to sound and then the line went dead, as though she’d put the receiver down herself. Julia dialled.

  ‘That’s sweet of you. Only I’m short of coins. Put it this way, Julia, I wanted to have a chat about the girl. I’ve been to see her, Julia, SW 1, all done out modern the house is.’

  ‘I really don’t want to talk about that girl.’

  ‘I rung her first only I didn’t get any joy, in fact she put the receiver down.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s understandable, you know.’

  ‘So I hopped on a bus and there you are. C. H. Music, it says in the directory and he opened the door himself, big chap in a suit, medical he is, gyney as a matter of fact. Then the mother appears, dressed for an outing, and down the stairs comes her ladyship. I could see she was nervous of a chat in front of the parents, even though they were smiling all the time, off for a night at the opera from what I gathered. Anyway, she starts on about ringing her and I reply that there’s no call to go plumping the receiver down.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to do the same myself. I honestly can’t have you telephoning me here at all hours of the day and night.’

  ‘All I wanted was a chat with her, Julia, same’s you and I had, same’s I tried for with the old people. All I wanted was to make a few queries, and if she thought I was going to let the cat out of the bag in front of her mum and dad she was mistaken. Anyway, as soon as she hears the front door banging behind them she turns on me like I was a peasant. So I mention what you and me discussed, how he got confused and mixed up, marrying you for a bit of money. She didn’t take a pick of notice.’

  ‘If you don’t leave that girl alone you’ll get into trouble. Mrs Tyte had to be put on drugs because of what you said to her. You’re upsetting everyone, can’t you see that?’

  ‘Sorry, dear?’

  ‘No good can come of bothering this girl.’

  ‘She’s as cold as a bullet, Julia. I told her about how he couldn’t give you sex on your honeymoon on account of what she passed on to him and she didn’t turn a hair. I told her about that last night in the flat, how it was all Constance Kent.’

  Julia wanted to replace the receiver but knew that if she did the telephone would ring again. Beads of perspiration were breaking on her forehead and her back, even though the night was cool. Affected by her agitation, the dog was making a whining noise, crouched by the drawing-room door.

  ‘When you think of poor Frankie who never hurt a fly, Julia –’

  ‘You know that isn’t true.’

  There was a pause, and then Doris said:

  ‘Dear, Frankie got to be a bit of a weirdo on account of things that happened to him, but if you’re saying he was round the twist I couldn’t agree with you, dear. The dressmaker was violent for starters. She threw a sewing-machine at him. It was criminal what the debt-collector did to him. And then some fancy little tart passes on a dose of you know what. I swear to you, Julia, I could have killed her dead in that lounge we were in.’

  Julia replaced the receiver. She stood in the dimness of the hall, waiting for the telephone to ring again, which it did. She picked up the receiver and placed it on the table, wishing she had thought of that ages ago. She went into the drawing-room and sat in the dark, in the bow of the window, listening to the beeping sound and then the distant, shrill voice.

  Clouds obscured the moon. Nothing outside could be discerned. The voice on the telephone ceased, and she could hear the telephone going dead. She imagined the scene there had been in the house in SWI, the surprise because this visitor had come, the awful rambling conversation.

  ‘I cannot pray,’ Julia said in the cream-coloured office of the priests’ house. Her eyes had an empty look. Her face was tired, her fingers restless in her lap.

  ‘Sometimes it is hard to pray.’

  ‘That woman is half crazy in her grief. I’m frightened for what she may do.’

  ‘Time will heal all this unhappiness,’ Father Lavin said softly. He wanted to reach across the metal desk that was between them, to take her hands in his and to hold them for a moment withou
t saying anything. Just for that single moment he wanted her to know he loved her and then miraculously to forget it.

  ‘I am a useless kind of person,’ she said. ‘I am a middle-aged woman in whom no one can be interested. Yet I can feel afraid.’

  ‘You’re not useless, Julia. And of course people are interested in you.’

  She shook her head. There was a silence in the office, which eventually she broke. More quietly than before she said:

  ‘I didn’t know there was this poisonous make-belief, a picnic of illusions instead of what is real. For the rest of my life I shall remember the pretence of gentleness in Francis’s eyes, and how he smiled when he gathered up those few pieces of jewellery in a hotel bedroom. He smiled again while I cashed the traveller’s cheques that took him on a journey into another pathetic dream. His own illusions are the most pitiful of all.’

  ‘Please don’t dwell on him, Julia.’

  ‘There are his father and his mother to dwell on, too. The debt-collector and the dressmaker. That woman and her child. Those people whose houses he stayed in, and I myself of course.’

  ‘Julia–’

  ‘What was God thinking of, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘God moves–’

  ‘My bearded cloudy God who saw me through my childhood and my widowing. In His tropical garden He’s just a wisp of nothing now.’

  ‘You’re upset, Julia, but you mustn’t speak like this.’

  ‘I must, for He has failed me in my middle years. Is He my own particular illusion, a fog of comfort to be lost in?’

  ‘It is a sin to speak so, Julia. And you know it isn’t true.’

  ‘I don’t know that. In Italy I remembered the missionaries of the Pentecostal Church. I lay awake two nights ago and when I had ceased to think about Francis and Doris Smith I remembered them again. Do you remember those missionaries, Father?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But they are one thing and Francis Tyte another. You’re making connections that are not there.’

  ‘They were God’s creatures and surely God’s creatures are all connected? Isn’t that the only meaning there can be?’

  ‘Of course we all belong together, Julia, but you are simplifying complications. You can’t do that, you know.’

  ‘They stood in a row. When the sun reached a certain point in the sky they were clubbed to death. A week ago a legless man in Arizona was tormented by teenagers until he died. In Birmingham a husband killed his wife with a knife because she wouldn’t cook his bacon right. Bombs explode everywhere.’

  ‘I beg you, Julia. Please stop this.’

  ‘“We’ll go to Italy on our honeymoon,” I said, because in Italy the angels of Lorenzo di Credi gossip on their way from heaven, because the lemon groves of Fiesole are there for lovers to stroll through. In Italy, Father, the body of a politician rolled out of a moving car, shot through like a colander. In Italy Signor Guzzinati pleads with tourist women because some private reality is too awful, and who can blame him? Who can blame anyone for thinking it too awful that the children of the missionaries die while their parents watch?’

  ‘No one, actually, is attributing blame. It was Francis, apparently, who spoke of that. But Francis is unbalanced, Julia.’

  ‘Those missionaries died on the hard earth of their compound, and Stone St Martin nestles among the lazy wolds of Gloucestershire. How can the destruction of Doris Smith belong in the same world as the contentment of the people who came that night to have drinks on our lawn? Do you remember, Father? Dr Tameguard and his fat wife, a man who bored my mother with talk of apples, a girl with a whippet called Baloney? What will be the end of Doris Smith, Father?’

  Not permitting him to answer, Julia continued to speak herself. Her voice had become unsteady, her fingers were agitatedly twisting.

  ‘Why does it always have to be the innocent?’ she cried out. ‘Why did that wretched woman have to be on the bus that day?’

  ‘You should have a holiday, Julia.’

  She stared at him, with what he thought was hatred in her eyes. She spoke of a nun who had taught her at school, a Sister Burkardt, whose misshapen face had caused in her nun’s heart the sin of envy. She saw her clearly, she said, still selling sacred objects in the shop where the convent’s rumours had placed her. She saw her at the end of her day’s work, in a room containing ugly furniture, an iron bed and brown linoleum, and a gas-ring in a niche beneath the window.

  ‘Sister Burkardt belongs in all this too, Father.’

  ‘No, Julia. You’re being extravagant and dramatic. You’re finding meanings where there aren’t any.’

  ‘I’m saying that strangers pass her by as well. Strangers enter her shop and buy something and then forget her, not wishing to dwell on the memory of her misshapen face. Strangers hurry by Signor Guzzinati on the streets of Pisa, and then forget him too. How many women every day does Doris Smith kneel before, fitting shoes on to their feet? Who cares that her child is unhappy?’

  ‘Of course people care, Julia. I care, and so do you.’

  ‘Francis might never have made his way to this town with its weathered stone caught in the sunlight, its river flowing away to the meadows. He might never have entered Swan House, nor the lives of two women who had no idea what it was like to be missionaries lined up for death. Has Francis spread disease all round him, Father, or is it just the truth?’

  ‘Francis was incapable of telling the truth.’

  ‘Then why does the memory of my First Communion make no sense to me now? Why do I think of Sister Burkardt and Signor Guzzinati, and of people whose faces I cannot even visualize? Why does it suddenly seem that in the midst of the sacraments and the mass, Calvary has become remote, just another distant act of violence? It wasn’t like that when I first saw Our Lord on the Cross.’

  ‘Julia –’

  ‘You cannot think of St Catherine without her wheel, or St Sebastian without the agony of the arrows. That little actress is another innocent, Father. That’s all I’m saying to you.’

  ‘Nothing is going to befall the little actress.’

  ‘“Nothing is going to befall Julia.” Did you say that to my mother?’

  ‘Your mother’s feelings were never discussed between us.’

  ‘I wish you’d ask your God to intervene.’

  ‘He’s your God too, Julia.’

  ‘I’m asking you to do something. That woman has identified herself with Constance Kent.’

  ‘I promise you I’ll pray.’

  Father Dawne came in with two cups of tea and some biscuits on a plate, declaring that he was just off to St Martin’s. ‘The cup that cheers,’ he added in his young priest’s voice.

  ‘Francis haunts me,’ Julia said, more quietly, when the curate had gone. ‘His whole terrible world haunts me and frightens me.’

  ‘Please seek God’s help, Julia.’

  She shook her head. That would be another pretence, she said, her tone cross, as if impatient with him because he hadn’t understood. A flush had spread over her pale cheeks and her neck; in places it smudged her forehead. He had never permitted himself to imagine what a life with her would be like, banishing at once the beginnings of such thoughts. Once he had dreamed that he’d been with her on a train, having dinner in the dining-car, both of them drinking brandy with their coffee.

  ‘Whenever I see that dog,’ she said, ‘I shall think of Francis, since that is what he wants.’

  ‘Someone else would have the dog, Julia.’

  ‘I accepted it in my foolish innocence, and there it shall remain. Mockery is Francis’s stock-in-trade. He guesses from a distance now, knowing what he has done to Doris Smith. Murderers don’t just happen, you know.’

  ‘You’ve blown all this up, Julia.’

  ‘No.’

  Father Lavin did not protest again, nor did he drink the tea that had been brought to him. Does she think of me, he wondered, as a grey old rat, an unattractive Irish priest uselessly suggesting holidays in her moment of need? He shou
ld be on a holiday himself, visiting his mother in Co. Cork, but he had postponed all that because Julia was the person he thought about with the greatest concern and affection.

  ‘I promise you I’ll pray,’ he heard himself repeating, his own voice piercing his thoughts.

  The telephone, as far as Mrs Anstey could determine, was never silent these days. Beginning Bleak House in the drawing-room, she let the latest bout of ringing wear itself out. It might of course have been a wrong number or some query about Julia’s grocery order. There was really little reason to suppose that someone else was pressing a pet upon the household or that a drunk was on the line again, but equally there was no point in taking chances. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, she read, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgement to be given in her favour.

  Nevil Clapp’s motor-cycle clattered over the cobbles in front of the house, and then the roar of its engine abruptly ceased. His face appeared at the window, his knuckles raised to rap on the glass. Mrs Anstey indicated that one of the other windows, though closed, was unlatched. He pushed at it and informed her that he’d heard where he could get a flange.

  ‘Flange?’

  ‘I was passing, see. I said to Mrs Ferndale I’d let her know. No way the thing’ll work the way it is.’

  ‘The lawnmower?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She wondered what a flange was, but did not wish to know. She’d begun to have quite longish chats with Nevil, mainly about other employers he’d worked for. While he was correcting some fault in the lawnmower or clipping a hedge, she’d stand by him and after a while he’d begin to talk.