Last Stories

by William Trevor

  She was the worst in the world about names, she confided, seeming to imply that Etheridge had told her his on their previous encounter, which he hadn’t. His coffee came, too hot to be drunk in a couple of gulps, allowing him to go away.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was extraordinary, Mrs Crasthorpe marvelled, that he should again be here, this attractive stranger who had continued to float about in her consciousness, and whom she’d made herself love a little. What lengths she went to, she reflected, how determinedly she guarded herself from the cruelty that was more than Tommy Kildare’s treachery or Donald deciding he was homosexual, more than the haunting years of Arthur’s dreary world, more than tediousness and boredom. How good the everyday was, the ordinary with its lesser tribulations and simple pleasures. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

  Unable to find the white lies that were always there for him, Etheridge muttered incomprehensibly. He wondered if this talkative woman was drunk, but the flow of information about herself had come in an orderly manner, suggesting that she was not.

  ‘How attractive your name is,’ she said. ‘Crasthorpe is appalling, don’t you think?’

  She had been Georgina Gilmour once, she said, the same Gilmours who had carried their name all over the English-speaking world. The Crasthorpes had never been much and were, of course, unrelated to her.

  ‘How much I enjoy conversation with strangers,’ in passing she revealed.

  She spoke about the Gilmours at some length, their place in Scotland for the shooting, the child among them in the past who’d been a musical genius, and Nanny Fortescue to whom three generations had been devoted, and old Wyse Gilmour who’d raced at Silverstone and lived to be a hundred and two.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ she said, without finality. She scribbled on the edge of her newspaper and handed him the scrap of paper she tore off: she’d written down her address.

  ‘We clearly are not birds of a feather,’ pensively she concluded. ‘But if you should ever think we might know one another better I’m nearly always at home in the afternoon.’

  He nodded vaguely. Abrupt and dogmatic, her manner might have seemed rude, but she managed to make it an unawareness, as probably it was.

  ‘Your wife,’ she said. ‘You mentioned your wife.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I thought you said your wife . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘My wife died.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Afterwards, Etheridge avoided having coffee at that particular café, but several times he caught a glimpse of Mrs Crasthorpe, once coming out of the Cock and Lion. It had surprised him when she’d said they weren’t birds of a feather: he had imagined that was what she’d thought they were. He avoided the Cock and Lion too, and frequented instead the Admiral’s Rest, which was further away and rougher. Once he heard his name called out in Vincent Street and walked more quickly on. Mrs Crasthorpe did not interest or concern him, and it was hard to believe that this pushy, over-lively woman might possess qualities more appealing than her manner. Crowded out by his continuing anger at the careless greed of death, her attentions were hardly noticed. Mrs Crasthorpe would fade away to nothing, as she had been before she asked him for directions.

  But having lunch at Le Paon one day with the two men from the office he regularly had lunch with, he thought he saw Mrs Crasthorpe on the street. The plate-glass terrace doors of the restaurant had not been folded back, as in high summer they invariably were: Le Paon in early autumn echoed only with its own murmur of voices, enlivened with occasional laughter. All three men had ordered chops; a glass of house wine had been brought to each. Their conversation while they waited was devoted to the difficulties that had arisen because a typeface was neither available nor obtainable. ‘I’ll try Thompson’s this afternoon,’ one of Etheridge’s colleagues said, and the other mentioned J. Sinclair’s in Edinburgh. Etheridge said nothing.

  Mrs Crasthorpe wasn’t wearing her pale cream dress, but instead a flowery one he had also become familiar with. She was standing still, in conversation with a figure in a long black overcoat which looked, at least from a distance, to be much too heavy for the time of year. Its wearer – his back to the restaurant’s façade and to Etheridge – gestured repeatedly, as if in persuasion. Mrs Crasthorpe did not seem happy. From time to time she attempted to move away, only to be drawn back by her companion’s insistence that their encounter should continue.

  ‘Your chops, sir,’ a waiter said, and there were roast potatoes and parsnips mashed and rich brown gravy.

  ‘Or possibly Langford’s.’ Etheridge at last contributed something to what was being discussed, feeling that he should.

  When the meal ended he noticed that while he hadn’t been looking the conversation on the street appeared to have become a fracas. Mrs Crasthorpe and the man in the black coat were now the centre of a small crowd, the man still gesturing, Mrs Crasthorpe more agitated than before. Etheridge could hear the voices of several bystanders raised in angry abuse that was clearly directed at the blackly clad figure. Two elderly women pushed to get closer to him; a bearded man was restrained from striking him; a younger woman was shouting into a mobile telephone. Then the gesticulating ceased and the man in the black coat shrugged, his arms raised in despair, his comic stance suggesting that something he considered to be a source of humour had been misunderstood. Etheridge didn’t feel the incident was worth drawing to his colleagues’ attention and by the time he reached the street himself the crowd had disappeared and Mrs Crasthorpe had too. The man in the black coat was laughing, his wrists held out to the two policemen who had taken charge of him.

  * * *

  * * *

  Unnatural little bastard, the warder’s unspoken thought was when he heard this arrest had taken place. His own mother, the thought went on, who brought him jam and did her best. His own mother, and in broad daylight.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘Only teasing,’ Derek said the next time she came. ‘I thought you’d be amused.’

  * * *

  * * *

  She wept where no one could see her. She never had where anyone could, not ever in all the days and nights, all the waking up to another incident and Arthur knowing nothing. She hadn’t wept when Tommy Kildare had had enough of her or when Donald needed something different. But she wept her private tears whenever she imagined the coat unbuttoned, the sudden twitch as it opened wide, the torch’s flash. She wept because she loved him as she did no other human being. She always had. She always would.

  * * *

  * * *

  In time Etheridge married again, a relationship that strengthened as more time passed, his contentment in it similar to the contentment he had discovered in marriage before. It seemed natural in the circumstances to move away from Weymouth Street and he did so; natural, too, to buy a house in quiet Petersham, rescuing it from years of neglect and subsequent decay. A child was born there, and then another.

  To his second wife Etheridge talked about his first, which caused neither offence nor irritation, and even the bitter chagrin of his mourning was understood. He considered himself fortunate in almost every aspect of his life as it now was, in his wife and his children, in the position he held at Forrester and Bright, in the open sward of Petersham, its city buses plying daily, its city sounds a whisper in a quieter London.

  Another winter passed, another spring, and most of summer. August became September and it was then, as the days were shortening, that the name Crasthorpe occurred again. The name was unusual and it caught Etheridge’s eye in a newspaper item concerning a woman who in the night had fallen down in the street and had lain there until she was discovered by refuse collectors when the dusk of another early morning came. She had died while being conveyed to hospital in the refuse men’s enormous vehicle, a
reek of whisky emanating from her sodden clothes. Cold print reported a scene that moved him: a shrunken body gently placed on its bed of waste, the refuse men standing awkwardly then, saying nothing. The woman was thought to be a vagrant, but Etheridge saw blonded hair bedraggled and stockinged knees, an easy smile and clothes he remembered. Chatter he’d been unable to escape from he remembered too: childhood friends recalled, and going to the races, and conversations with strangers. He’d thrown away the scrap of paper that had been pressed upon him, its sprawl of handwriting unread. In Vincent Street he had hurried on.

  But the curiosity Mrs Crasthorpe had failed to inspire in her lifetime came now. Why had she lain all night where she had fallen? Why were her clothes saturated with whisky, she who had been so conventional and respectable? What did her wordless epitaph say?

  * * *

  * * *

  Lost somewhere in the crowded tangle bound by Mare Street, Morning Lane and Urswick Road is unmarked Falter Way, the sign that once identified it claimed by vandals long ago. It is a narrow passage, not greatly used because it terminates abruptly and leads nowhere. No street lights burn at night in Falter Way, no brass plate or printed notice proclaims the practice of commerce or a profession. There are no shops in Falter Way, no bars, no breakfast cafés. No enterprising business girls hang about in doorways.

  ‘Crasthorpe.’ A uniformed policeman repeated the name and shrugged away his dismay.

  ‘Poor bloody woman,’ his colleague said, and closed his notebook.

  There was nothing untoward to report, nothing to add or alter. What had happened here was evident and apparent, without a trace of anything that needed to be looked at more carefully.

  In turn the two men telephoned, then went away.

  * * *

  * * *

  Derek wondered why his mother didn’t come and hoped it was because at last she’d realized that all of it was ridiculous. When the old boy died she’d said, ‘Come to the house,’ and he hadn’t understood that she meant to live there. She could pass him off as a houseboy, her idea was; she couldn’t see the snags. Once she would have said snags didn’t matter. Once she’d liked being teased. Funny, how she was.

  * * *

  * * *

  Etheridge found it hard to forget Mrs Crasthorpe, although he wanted to. It shamed him that he had thought so little of her, a woman not really known to him, and then only because she’d been embarrassing and even a nuisance. He had read about Falter Way in the newspaper report of her death and had wondered why she had gone there. On an impulse, when months afterwards he was near it himself, he asked about Mrs Crasthorpe and although she was remembered no one had known her name. In nearby Dring Street and the shoddy bars of Breck Hill he imagined her, a different woman, drinking heavily. She went with men, a barman said, she liked a man.

  Etheridge guessed his way through the mystery of Mrs Crasthorpe, but too much was missing and he resisted further speculation. He sensed his own pity, not knowing why it was there. He honoured a tiresome woman’s secret and saw it kept.

  The Unknown Girl

  For hardly longer than a second the people on the pavement’s edge were frozen in perfect stillness. Then a man stepped into the oncoming traffic, both arms peremptorily raised to halt it. The driver’s door of the green-and-yellow van that had so dramatically braked while lurching to one side now opened. A voice called for an ambulance. ‘St Wistan Street,’ someone else added, and the halted traffic was beckoned on.

  ‘There is no pulse,’ a woman kneeling beside the figure on the ground said, but even so a rolled-up overcoat was placed beneath the lolling head.

  In the double-decker bus that had been stopped and again was moving, strangers spoke to one another, staring out at the scene that had so quickly come about. The driver of the van was distressed and expostulating; the uninvolved had gathered on the tarmacked surface, exchanging their versions of how the occurrence might have come about. Some, who’d seen nothing, asked what had happened and were differently answered. An ambulance came, so quickly it was commented on. A stretcher was laid down, ready for its burden. A man pushed in, causing people incorrectly to remark that he would be a doctor. A police car, dawdling until now, drew in behind the ambulance. The body was covered with a blanket on the stretcher, the ambulance doors were softly closed. This life was over.

  * * *

  * * *

  Some days after the tragedy in St Wistan Street Harriet Balfour opened her front door to a stooped, frail man in clerical dress whom she did not know. He asked if she was Mrs Balfour and, when she said she was, asked if he might speak to her. Harriet took him to her drawing room. She was in a hurry, for the mornings were her busy time, but she did not say so. In the drawing room she offered coffee instead.

  A quiet beauty distinguished the middle age of Harriet Balfour, gaining something in maturity, as much as it had lost of girlhood’s prettiness. Obedient to her vanity, the grey in her hair was softened in an artificial way, her skin was daily cared for, its small ravages patiently repaired. Colours were worn because they suited her; a modest manner, and hesitation before putting forth a view, governed youth’s impetuosity now, becoming a tranquillity that was attractive in itself.

  A son, education over, her only child, still lived with her; but, widowed now, Harriet knew that one day she would be alone in a house she had grown increasingly to love, which she had come to when she was rescued from a relationship that had failed, a house where she had borne her child into a contentment that continued until, too soon, her husband had died. Her attachment to the house had much to do with her devotion to his memory, and she predicted that she would not wish to move away, nor allow whatever ailments time brought to dictate otherwise. No matter what, the past she had known here would never be less than it had been – in the rooms of the house, and in the airy garden where Comice pears loosened every autumn, and lacy hydrangeas decorated faded brick, and blowsy Victorian roses thrived. There would always be the John Piper in the hall, the Minton in the drawing room, and waking to the wisteria of a faded wallpaper she had particularly come to know.

  She might have married again, but the suggestion, when more than once it was put to her, seemed absurd: apart from love remembered, there was already enough in Harriet’s life. She listened to music, took pains with cooking, gardened, kept up with friends. In Italy the early and mid-Renaissance delighted her. In France the Impressionists did. She read the novels that time’s esteem had kept alive, and judged contemporary fiction for herself.

  ‘No, no, not coffee, thank you,’ the clergyman declined her hospitality. He apologized for disturbing her, then explained why he had come. ‘Your name and address were on a cleaner’s work-list.’ He gave the cleaner’s name.

  ‘Yes, Emily Vance came here,’ Harriet agreed when she heard it. ‘She doesn’t any more. She hasn’t for quite a while, nine or ten months.’

  ‘Emily Vance died, Mrs Balfour. Tragically, in a street accident.’

  Harriet, who had not sat down, did so now. ‘My God, how terrible!’ she said, and at once felt embarrassed because she had expressed herself in language unsuitable for a clergyman to have to hear. But he was unperturbed.

  ‘I do not seek to involve you, Mrs Balfour,’ he said. ‘It’s simply that nothing appears to be known about the girl. Little more than her name.’

  He had realized when he heard about the accident that this might be a person who had sometimes come to his church. Though never to a service, he said, which made it seem as if the reason for her coming was simply to be alone. He’d been told by the police when he made enquiries that she had lived in the flat of a foreign couple, above a stationer’s shop in Camona Street. A note of the address was found on a library card in the handbag that was afterwards picked up where it had fallen.

  ‘Camona Street’s not in my parish,’ he said, ‘but even so it was my church she came to – perhaps because it is out of t
he way and ill-attended. I went to see the foreign couple, I felt I had to. In the four years Emily Vance had been their lodger, they told me she’d had no visitors, had not once used the telephone, received no letters and, listening, I realized that this was indeed the girl who had found some kind of sanctuary in the corner of a shadowy pew in a church.’

  The clergyman introduced himself then, apologizing for not doing so before, giving a name that sounded like Malfrey. He was older than Harriet had first thought, and she felt sorry for him, a thankless task imposed upon him because there was no one else.

  ‘Sanctuary?’ She repeated his word, since she hadn’t understood its implications at the time.

  ‘Well, yes, I think so. The couple in Camona Street asked me if I would conduct her funeral. But of course there would be a family somewhere and I’ve been trying to find out what might be known from the people she cleaned for.’

  ‘Of course. I understand. But all I can tell you is that Emily wasn’t the kind to talk about herself, which you may have guessed already. She did the work well, better than most. But it did occasionally cross my mind that it was strange she should be a cleaner. I used to think she had fallen on hard times.’

  ‘Yes, there was apparently that feeling.’

  ‘She left us and that was that. One morning she simply didn’t come.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bring all this to you, Mrs Balfour.’

  The slow, clerical enunciation went on a bit. The address of a church – the Church of St John the Evangelist – was given, and then the day and the time of the funeral.

  ‘But how did it happen? An accident?’ Harriet asked when they both stood up.