That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  “‘… body …

  “‘… fingers twist, knuckles dark as wood, tongue dries like grass, deeper now into silk …

  “‘… silk of pod of shawl, knees wilt, knuckles wither, neck …’”

  Here the letter suddenly ended.

  “You see? A pagan!” said Sheindel, and kept her spiteful smile. It was thick with audacity.

  “You don’t pity him,” I said, watching the contempt that glittered in her teeth.

  “Even now you don’t see? You can’t follow?”

  “Pity him,” I said.

  “He who takes his own life does an abomination.” For a long moment I considered her. You don’t pity him? You don’t pity him at all?”

  “Let the world pity me.”

  “Goodbye,” I said to the widow.

  “You won’t come back?”

  I gave what amounted to a little bow of regret.

  “I told you you came just for Isaac! But Isaac” – I was in terror of her cough, which was unmistakably laughter – “Isaac disappoints. “A scholar. A rabbi. A remarkable Jew!” Ha! He disappoints you?”

  “He was always an astonishing man.”

  “But not what you thought,” she insisted. “An illusion.”

  “Only the pitiless are illusory. Go back to that park, Rebbetzin,” I advised her.

  “And what would you like me to do there? Dance around a tree and call Greek names to the weeds?”

  “Your husband’s soul is in that park. Consult it.” But her low derisive cough accompanied me home: whereupon I remembered her earlier words and dropped three green house plants down the toilet; after a journey of some miles through conduits they straightway entered Trilham’s Inlet, where they decayed amid the civic excrement.

  BROKEN HOMES

  William Trevor

  Born in Cork, William Trevor (b.1928) is recognized as being one of the undisputed masters of the short story of the last century. His work has won the Whitbread Prize three times, been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and he has won the 1999 David Cohen Prize as well as made an honorary knight in 2002. “There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author’s own. But in my case that is as far as it goes,” he once observed.

  “I really think you’re marvellous,” the man said.

  He was small and plump, with a plump face that had a greyness about it where he shaved; his hair was grey also, falling into a fringe on his forehead. He was untidily dressed, a turtle-necked red jersey beneath a jacket that had a ballpoint pen and a pencil sticking out of the breast pocket. When he stood up his black corduroy trousers developed concertina creases. Nowadays you saw a lot of men like this, Mrs Malby said to herself.

  “We’re trying to help them,” he said, “and of course we’re trying to help you. The policy is to foster a deeper understanding.” He smiled, displaying small evenly-arranged teeth. “Between the generations,” he added.

  “Well, of course it’s very kind,” Mrs Malby said.

  He shook his head. He sipped the instant coffee she’d made for him and nibbled the edge of a pink wafer biscuit. As if driven by a compulsion, he dipped the biscuit into the coffee. He said:

  “What age actually are you, Mrs Malby?”

  “I’m eighty-seven.”

  “You really are splendid for eighty-seven.”

  He went on talking. He said he hoped he’d be as good himself at eighty-seven. He hoped he’d even be in the land of the living. “Which I doubt,” he said with a laugh. “Knowing me.”

  Mrs Malby didn’t know what he meant by that. She was sure she’d heard him quite correctly, but she could recall nothing he’d previously stated which indicated ill-health. She thought carefully while he continued to sip at his coffee and attend to the mush of biscuit. What he had said suggested that a knowledge of him would cause you to doubt that he’d live to old age. Had he already supplied further knowledge of himself which, due to her slight deafness, she had not heard? If he hadn’t, why had he left everything hanging in the air like that? It was difficult to know how best to react, whether to smile or to display concern.

  “So what I thought,” he said, “was that we could send the kids on Tuesday. Say start the job Tuesday morning, eh, Mrs Malby?”

  “It’s extremely kind of you.”

  “They’re good kids.”

  He stood up. He remarked on her two budgerigars and the geraniums on her window-sill. Her sitting-room was as warm as toast, he said; it was freezing outside.

  “It’s just that I wondered,” she said, having made up her mind to say it, “if you could possibly have come to the wrong house?”

  “Wrong? Wrong? You’re Mrs Malby, aren’t you?” He raised his voice. “You’re Mrs Malby, love?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s just that my kitchen isn’t really in need of decoration.”

  He nodded. His head moved slowly and when it stopped his dark eyes stared at her from beneath his grey fringe. He said, quite softly, what she’d dreaded he might say: that she hadn’t understood.

  “I’m thinking of the community, Mrs Malby. I’m thinking of you here on your own above a greengrocer’s shop with your two budgies. You can benefit my kids, Mrs Malby; they can benefit you. There’s no charge of any kind whatsoever. Put it like this, Mrs Malby: it’s an experiment in community relations.” He paused. He reminded her of a picture there’d been in a history book, a long time ago, History with Miss Deacon, a picture of a Roundhead. “So you see, Mrs Malby,” he said, having said something else while he was reminding her of a Roundhead.

  “It’s just that my kitchen is really quite nice.”

  “Let’s have a little look, shall we?”

  She led the way. He glanced at the kitchen’s shell-pink walls, and at the white paintwork. It would cost her nearly a hundred pounds to have it done, he said; and then, to her horror, he began all over again, as if she hadn’t heard a thing he’d been saying. He repeated that he was a teacher, from the school called the Tite Comprehensive. He appeared to assume that she wouldn’t know the Tite Comprehensive, but she did: an ugly sprawl of glass and concrete buildings, children swinging along the pavements, shouting obscenities. The man repeated what he had said before about these children: that some of them came from broken homes. The ones he wished to send to her on Tuesday morning came from broken homes, which was no joke for them. He felt, he repeated, that we all had a special duty where such children were concerned.

  Mrs Malby again agreed that broken homes were to be deplored. It was just, she explained, that she was thinking of the cost of decorating a kitchen which didn’t need decorating. Paint and brushes were expensive, she pointed out.

  “Freshen it over for you,” the man said, raising his voice. “First thing Tuesday, Mrs Malby.”

  He went away, and she realized that he hadn’t told her his name. Thinking she might be wrong about that, she went over their encounter in her mind, going back to the moment when her doorbell had sounded. “I’m from Tite Comprehensive,” was what he’d said. No name had been mentioned, of that she was positive.

  In her elderliness Mrs Malby liked to be sure of such details. You had to work quite hard sometimes at eighty-seven, straining to hear, concentrating carefully in order to be sure of things. You had to make it clear you understood because people often imagined you didn’t. Communication was what it was called nowadays, rather than conversation.

  Mrs Malby was wearing a blue dress with a pattern of darker blue flowers on it. She was a woman who had been tall but had shrunk a little with age and had become slightly bent. Scant white hair crowned a face that was touched with elderly freckling. Large brown eyes, once her most striking feature, were quieter than they had been, tired behind spectacles now. Her husband, George, the owner of the greengrocer’s shop over which she lived, had died five years ago; her two sons, Eric and Roy, had been killed in the same month – June 1942 – in the same desert retreat.

  The greengrocer
’s shop was unpretentious, in an unpretentious street in Fulham called Agnes Street. The people who owned it now, Jewish people called King, kept an eye on Mrs Malby. They watched for her coming and going and if they missed her one day they’d ring her doorbell to see that she was all right. She had a niece in Ealing who looked in twice a year, and another niece in Islington, who was crippled with arthritis. Once a week Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert came round with Meals on Wheels. A social worker, Miss Tingle, called; and the Reverend Bush called. Men came to read the meters.

  In her elderliness, living where she’d lived since her marriage in 1920, Mrs Malby was happy. The tragedy in her life – the death of her sons – was no longer a nightmare, and the time that had passed since her husband’s death had allowed her to come to terms with being on her own. All she wished for was to continue in these same circumstances until she died, and she did not fear death. She did not believe she would be re-united with her sons and her husband, not at least in a specific sense, but she could not believe, either, that she would entirely cease to exist the moment she ceased to breathe. Having thought about death, it seemed likely to Mrs Malby that after it came she’d dream, as in sleep. Heaven and hell were surely no more than flickers of such pleasant dreaming, or flickers of a nightmare from which there was no waking release. No loving omnipotent God, in Mrs Malby’s view, doled out punishments and reward: human conscience, the last survivor, did that. The idea of a God, which had puzzled Mrs Malby for most of her life, made sense when she thought of it in terms like these, when she forgot about the mystic qualities claimed for a Church and for Jesus Christ. Yet fearful of offending the Reverend Bush, she kept such conclusions to herself when he came to see her.

  All Mrs Malby dreaded now was becoming senile and being forced to enter the Sunset Home in Richmond, of which the Reverend Bush and Miss Tingle warmly spoke. The thought of a communal existence, surrounded by other elderly people, with sing-songs and card-games, was anathema to her. All her life she had hated anything that smacked of communal jolliness, refusing even to go on coach trips. She loved the house above the greengrocer’s shop. She loved walking down the stairs and out on to the street, nodding at the Kings as she went by the shop, buying birdseed and eggs and fire-lighters, and fresh bread from Len Skipps, a man of sixty-two whom she’d remembered being born.

  The dread of having to leave Agnes Street ordered her life. With all her visitors she was careful, constantly on the look-out for signs in their eyes which might mean they were diagnosing her as senile. It was for this reason that she listened so intently to all that was said to her, that she concentrated, determined to let nothing slip by. It was for this reason that she smiled and endeavoured to appear agreeable and co-operative at all times. She was well aware that it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came.

  After the teacher from Tite Comprehensive School had left, Mrs Malby continued to worry. The visit from this grey-haired man had bewildered her from the start. There was the oddity of his not giving his name, and then the way he’d placed a cigarette in his mouth and had taken it out again, putting it back in the packet. Had he imagined cigarette smoke would offend her? He could have asked, but in fact he hadn’t even referred to the cigarette. Nor had he said where he’d heard about her: he hadn’t mentioned the Reverend Bush, for instance, or Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert, or Miss Tingle. He might have been a customer in the greengrocer’s shop, but he hadn’t given any indication that that was so. Added to which, and most of all, there was the consideration that her kitchen wasn’t in the least in need of attention. She went to look at it again, beginning to wonder if there were things about it she couldn’t see. She went over in her mind what the man had said about community relations. It was difficult to resist men like that, you had to go on repeating yourself and after a while you had to assess if you were sounding senile or not. There was also the consideration that the man was trying to do good, helping children from broken homes.

  “Hi,” a boy with long blond hair said to her on the Tuesday morning. There were two other boys with him, one with a fuzz of dark curls all round his head, the other red-haired, a greased shock that hung to his shoulders. There was a girl as well, thin and beaky-faced, chewing something. Between them they carried tins of paint, brushes, cloths, a blue plastic bucket, and a transistor radio. “We come to do your kitchen out,” the blond boy said. “You Mrs Wheeler then?”

  “No, no. I’m Mrs Malby.”

  “That’s right, Billo,” the girl said. “Malby.”

  “I thought he says Wheeler.”

  “Wheeler’s the geyser in the paint shop,” the fuzzy-haired boy said.

  “Typical Billo,” the girl said.

  She let them in, saying it was very kind of them. She led them to the kitchen, remarking on the way that strictly speaking it wasn’t in need of decoration, as they could see for themselves. She’d been thinking it over she added: she wondered if they’d just like to wash the walls down, which was a task she found difficult to do herself?

  They’d do whatever she wanted, they said, no problem. They put their paint tins on the table. The red-haired boy turned on the radio. “Welcome back to Open House,” a cheery voice said and then reminded its listeners that it was the voice of Pete Murray. It said that a record was about to be played for someone in Upminster.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Mrs Malby suggested above the noise of the transistor.

  “Great,” the blond boy said.

  They all wore blue jeans with patches on them. The girl had a T-shirt with the words I Lay Down With Jesus on it. The others wore T-shirts of different colours, the blond boy’s orange, the fuzzy one’s light blue, the red haired one’s red. Hot Jam-roll a badge on the chest of the blond boy said; Jaws and Bay City Rollers other badges said.

  Mrs Malby made them Nescafé while they listened to the music. They lit cigarettes, leaning about against the electric stove and against the edge of the table and against a wall. They didn’t say anything because they were listening. “That’s a load of crap,” the red-haired boy pronounced eventually, and the others agreed. Even so they went on listening. “Pete Murray’s crappy,” the girl said.

  Mrs Malby handed them the cups of coffee, drawing their attention to the sugar she’d put out for them on the table, and to the milk. She smiled at the girl. She said again that it was a job she couldn’t manage any more, washing walls.

  “Get that, Billo?” the fuzzy-haired boy said. “Washing walls.”

  “Who loves ya, baby?” Billo replied.

  Mrs Malby closed the kitchen door on them, hoping they wouldn’t take too long because the noise of the transistor was so loud. She listened to it for a quarter of an hour and then she decided to go out and do her shopping.

  In Len Skipps’ she said that four children from the Tite Comprehensive had arrived in her house and were at present washing her kitchen walls. She said it again to the man in the fish shop and the man was surprised. It suddenly occurred to her that of course they couldn’t have done any painting because she hadn’t discussed colours with the teacher. She thought it odd that the teacher hadn’t mentioned colours and wondered what colour the paint tins contained. It worried her a little that all that hadn’t occurred to her before.

  “Hi, Mrs Wheeler,” the boy called Billo said to her in her hall. He was standing there combing his hair, looking at himself in the mirror of the hall-stand. Music was coming from upstairs.

  There were yellowish smears on the stair-carpet, which upset Mrs Malby very much. There were similar smears on the landing carpet. “Oh, but please,” Mrs Malby cried, standing in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, please, go!” she cried.

  Yellow emulsion paint partially covered the shell-pink of one wall. Some had spilt from the tin on to the black-and-white vinyl of the floor and had been walked through. The boy with fuzzy hair was standing on a draining-board applying the same paint to the ceiling. He was the only person in the kitche
n.

  He smiled at Mrs Malby, looking down at her. “Hi, Mrs Wheeler,” he said.

  “But I said only to wash them,” she cried.

  She felt tired, saying that. The upset of finding the smears on the carpets and of seeing the hideous yellow plastered over the quiet shell-pink had already taken a toll. Her emotional outburst had caused her face and neck to become warm. She felt she’d like to lie down.

  “Eh, Mrs Wheeler?” The boy smiled at her again, continuing to slap paint on to the ceiling. A lot of it dripped back on top of him, on to the draining-board and on to cups and saucers and cutlery, and on to the floor. “D’you fancy the colour, Mrs Wheeler?” he asked her.

  All the time the transistor continued to blare, a voice inexpertly singing, a tuneless twanging. The boy referred to this sound, pointing at the transistor with his paint-brush, saying it was great. Unsteadily she crossed the kitchen and turned the transistor off. “Hey, sod it, missus,” the boy protested angrily.

  “I said to wash the walls. I didn’t even choose that colour.”

  The boy, still annoyed because she’d turned off the radio, was gesturing crossly with the brush. There was paint in the fuzz of his hair and on his T-shirt and his face. Every time he moved the brush about paint flew off it. It speckled the windows, and the small dresser, and the electric stove and the taps and the sink.

  “Where’s the sound gone?” the boy called Billo demanded, coming into the kitchen and going straight to the transistor.

  “I didn’t want the kitchen painted,” Mrs Malby said again. “I told you.”

  The singing from the transistor recommenced, louder than before. On the draining-board the fuzzy-haired boy began to sway, throwing his body and his head about.

  “Please stop him painting,” Mrs Malby shouted as shrilly as she could.

  “Here,” the boy called Billo said, bundling her out on to the landing and closing the kitchen door. “Can’t hear myself think in there.”

  “I don’t want it painted.”