Last Stories

by William Trevor

  Olivia places these facts before Mrs Vinnicombe, speaking slowly and carefully. She is anxious to arrange every detail exactly where it belongs, to ensure that Mrs Vinnicombe perfectly understands.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘Look, it’s an intrusion,’ Olivia said when he was there on the street again, less than a week after his Monday telephone call. He only wanted to explain, he said. ‘That’s all, and then it’s over.’

  So reluctantly, and saying she was reluctant, she met him again, in the bar that was not frequented by her office colleagues. ‘I can’t help loving you,’ he said even before their drinks were ordered. ‘From the very first moment I haven’t been able to help it.’

  He told her then all that Mrs Vinnicombe has repeated: about their house and their children. He had no affection for his wife. Once he had, there was none left now: for fourteen years he had been indifferent to her. Quite out of the blue, astonishing Olivia, he mentioned New Zealand, promising she would be happy with him there. He said he had connections in New Zealand.

  ‘All this is silly. I’m practically a stranger to you.’

  He shook his head and smiled. ‘I lie awake at night and every word you’ve spoken to me returns. In passing once, our fingers touched. When you fell down I could have taken you in my arms. Even then I wanted to. I can still feel your elbow in the palm of my left hand. I never loved anyone before. Never.’

  His eyes were luminous in his pasty face, a tug that might have been a threat of tears worked at the corners of his mouth. He would do anything, he said, he would take on any work to buy her things she wanted. In New Zealand, he said, they would build a life together.

  ‘I must go now,’ Olivia said, and walked away from him.

  Again, one lunchtime, he was in Zampoli’s; she didn’t go there after that. He wrote long letters that were incoherent in places. They described Olivia’s beauty, the way she smiled, the way she stood, the way she spoke. He would know everything one day, they said: as much as she could remember herself about her childhood and her dreams. She would tell him her dreams at breakfast-time; they would sit in the sun when they were old. She tore the letters up, but sometimes he was there on the street when she looked from the windows of her flat or from the window of her office. She took to leaving the office by going through the garages at the back, into the mews. On the telephone she didn’t speak when she heard his voice.

  Once, at the cinema on her own, he arrived in the seat next to hers, and when she moved away he followed her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said on the street when she had to leave. Furious, Olivia threatened to make a complaint if that ever occurred again. Unless he left her in peace she would consider asking the police for advice.

  ‘I love you, Olivia.’

  ‘What you’re doing amounts to harassment. You have no right –’

  ‘No, I have no right.’

  But Olivia knew she could not bring herself to go to the police, nor even to complain to a cinema manager. One evening he was on the Tube with her and spoke to her as if they’d met by chance. He was there again, behind her on the moving staircase, and at the ticket barrier. ‘Oh, all right,’ she wearily agreed when he invited her to have a drink, hoping in her frustration that if she went through everything she had already said he would at last be affected, would at last see the absurdity of the situation he had created.

  They sat beside one another on a red-upholstered banquette and again there was the pleading in his eyes, and suddenly Olivia felt sorry for him. Seven months had passed since he had looked after her on the street. He was a man in torment was what she thought, a man doing his best to talk about other matters, to tell her about an apple-corer he had just interested a manufacturer in. As she had not before, she wondered about his wife, about the house in Brighton he returned to, about his boys. ‘Did you always invent things?’ she heard herself asking, and for the first time a connection was made with a period of her life that still inspired resentment if she brooded on it. When she was fifteen, when she was lumbering through that gawky time, there was her sister’s friend, fiancé as he became, husband in the end. In the hall she had reached up to feel the peak of his military cap, to run a finger round the leather band that touched his hair. And for a passing moment, as she sat on that red banquette with a man who was a nuisance, Olivia felt again the pain there’d been.

  * * *

  * * *

  Music comes faintly from the bathroom: the end of the first movement of Mahler’s First Symphony. Then a tap is turned on and the music is drowned.

  ‘Your husband’s only been here once, Mrs Vinnicombe. To fit an extractor over my electric hob.’

  Olivia doesn’t reveal to Mrs Vinnicombe that her husband said he was indifferent to her, or proposed a new life in New Zealand with a stranger. Instead she asks if what Mrs Vinnicombe is saying is that she doesn’t know where her husband is.

  ‘My hope was he’d be here.’

  ‘Your hope?’

  ‘He only wanted to be with you. No bones about it: he said he couldn’t lie. A meaning in his life. He used those words.’

  Mrs Vinnicombe is talkative now. Her unease has dissipated; fingers twisting into one another a moment ago are still.

  ‘He never made me think you were a go-getting woman. I never thought of you as that. “Don’t blame her,” he said, no more than two days ago, but then he’d said it already. When he told me was the time he said it first, and often after that.’ Her voice is flat, empty of emotion. She says she’s frightened. She says again her hope had been to find her husband here.

  ‘I don’t think I understand that, Mrs Vinnicombe.’

  ‘He took nothing with him. No shaving things, pyjamas. He didn’t say goodbye.’

  How long, Olivia begins to ask, and is immediately interrupted.

  ‘Oh, just since yesterday.’

  ‘Your husband and I were not having any kind of love affair.’ She gave him no encouragement, Olivia says: not once has she done that. She doesn’t say she pitied him after he followed her from the Tube station, the night they sat together on the red-upholstered banquette, the night she asked him if he had always invented things. These details, now, seem neither here nor there: omitting to relate them is not intended to mislead. ‘Why don’t we have a bite to eat?’ he said and, still pitying, she allowed him to take her to a place he knew nearby, called the Chunky Chicken Platter. ‘All right for you?’ he solicitously enquired when they were given a table there, and it was then that she knew she was pitying herself as well. A Good Friday it had been when she reached up in the hall to touch the cap of the man her sister was to marry. A Sunday, weeks later, when she lifted it down and pressed it to her face.

  ‘Your husband wasn’t even a friend, Mrs Vinnicombe.’

  Hearing that, Olivia’s visitor looks away, her head a little bent. How can that be, she softly asks, since he has done odd jobs about the place? How can it be, since he has described a woman’s hair and her eyes, the way she stands, her voice, her slender legs, her neck, her hands?

  ‘I was sick,’ Mrs Vinnicombe adds to all this. ‘I got up one night, three o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, I vomited in the bathroom. Your stomach turns over with jealousy, hour after hour, and then you’re sick. I didn’t tell him. Well, naturally.’

  ‘You have no cause for jealousy, Mrs Vinnicombe.’ Olivia begins at the beginning, from the moment on the street to meeting Vinnicombe again, by chance, she thought; and his being, by chance also it seemed, in Zampoli’s that day; how after that he bothered her. She can think of no other way to put it, even though it sounds a harsh way of describing the attentions of a man whose wife is in distress. The chicken place he took her to was horrible.

  ‘Oh, jealousy is vile, I grant you that.’ And as if Olivia hasn’t offered a single word of explanation, Mrs Vinnicombe pursues the thread of her conviction. ‘Yet there it is, and n
othing you can do. I always knew when he’d been with you. Oh, not smears of lipstick, tell-tale perfume – nothing like that. It was worse because he wasn’t the kind of man to have a woman, not the kind you read about in the papers. He wouldn’t have made the papers in a million years. He took the boys out with their kites when they were little. He brought cakes back, treats for tea, always something when he had a bit to spare. They’ll miss that now. They’ll think of it when they think of him.’

  ‘Mrs Vinnicombe, you can see your husband isn’t here. I’ve been living here with someone else for months. I’ve no idea where your husband is.’

  ‘I came to plead with you and with him too, to talk about the boys. I came to say to him we were a family.’

  Mrs Vinnicombe’s tears, so long held back, come now. She weeps on Olivia’s sofa and her tears run through her make-up, smearing it. Her weeping drags at the contours of her face, bunching the flesh into ugly grimaces. She tries to speak and cannot. She doesn’t search in her handbag for a tissue or a handkerchief but sits there, stark and upright on the pale cushions, noisily sobbing as she might in private.

  ‘“Oh, God, let him be there” was what I asked when I rang your bell.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, Mrs Vinnicombe.’

  But Olivia does. Her protest is conventional, all she can think of to say. She doesn’t want to share her visitor’s thoughts. None of it concerns her.

  ‘You took my husband.’

  Abruptly, Mrs Vinnicombe rises.

  ‘You took my husband and now you can’t give him back to me.’ She crosses the room to the hall, not answering questions that are put to her. ‘I keep on seeing him,’ she says, ‘and his footsteps on the sand. On soft, wet sand and then they ooze away to nothing.’

  She does not speak again. Some minutes later Olivia sees her from a window, crossing the empty Sunday street, walking slowly, as if the encounter has drained her energy. She passes from view, slipping round the corner.

  ‘I hear you’re learning German.’ Her sister’s friend smiled. ‘I like your dress,’ he said, and her sister said that dress had been one of hers. He went on talking when her sister wasn’t there. He knew of course: making conversation was a kindness offered.

  Mahler is still playing in the bathroom, just audible above the sound of water running out. The day her sister married, Olivia looked down at her bedside lamp and whispered to herself that all she had to do was to press the bulb out and place her thumb, dampened with spit, in the socket. That day she saw her coffin carried, lowered while he stood at the graveside, the collar of his overcoat turned up. She heard her own voice murmuring from a romantic shroud, ‘My darling, I have loved you so.’

  Olivia gazes from the window at pigeons waddling beneath a tree. Raindrops spatter the pavement, then rain falls heavily and the pigeons crossly flutter off, in search of shelter. His wife is on the train by now, huddled in her corner, pretending to watch the houses going by, the same rain falling. Somewhere else, maybe, it falls for him. The balance of the mind disturbed: the woman on her train wonders if that worn expression will soon be used. He, wherever he is, already knows better.

  He’ll be there when she returns – or tomorrow or the next day – and in their house in Brighton they’ll tack together a marriage and the family life his foolishness spoilt. He’ll hear her repeating many times that she saw his footsteps disappearing on soft, wet sand. He’ll not confess that he, too, imagined his last thoughts reaching out towards his hopeless love, that he imagined the seaweed in his clothes, and sand beneath his eyelids and in his mouth. He’ll not confess he knew, in the end, that the drama of death does not come into it – that some pain’s too dull to be worthy of a romantic shroud. Courage could have brushed glamour over what little there was, but courage is ridiculous when the other person doesn’t want to know.

  Giotto’s Angels

  On a stretch of pavement between Truman’s Corner and Buswell’s Hotel a man asked a child if she knew where St Ardo’s was. The child passed the query on to another child, causing both of them to giggle.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ the man said, smiling at the children who at once ran away, having been warned about men who smiled. An African woman who was passing was asked the same question and said there was a St Joseph’s out Springfield way. The man said it didn’t matter.

  He was a man of forty-one with finely chiselled features, red-brown hair and Wedgwood-blue eyes that had once been alert but were not now. They hadn’t been since a bright May morning in 2001 when he had found himself on a seat in one of the city parks feeling as if he had just woken up. Bewildered, he had wanted only to remain where he’d found himself, but later in the day a park keeper became concerned about him and summoned an ambulance. In the hospital he was taken to it was discovered that he could read and write. An amnesic abnormality was diagnosed, and when repeatedly the man was asked his name he was silent at first then answered in a garbled manner that was not understood. When he was searched his pockets were empty. No wallet was found, no scraps of paper, no name-tapes on his clothes, no information of any kind about himself. He was thought to be a house-painter, but the only evidence for this was traces of paint beneath his fingernails; no paint was found on his shirt-cuffs nor anywhere on his clothes or shoes. He remained in the hospital’s care for several days until one early morning he dressed himself and, unnoticed, went away.

  He was a picture-restorer by profession, and often seemed unusual, even strange, to other people, for his erratic memory caused him to rely on conjecture and deduction. When privately he considered his life – as much of it as he knew – it seemed to be a thing of unrelated shreds and blurs, something not unlike the damaged canvases that were brought to him for attention. His name was Constantine Naylor. He had forgotten that it was and wondered sometimes why that name came into his head. He liked it and tried to keep it there, but could not.

  That day he searched the city for St Ardo’s, not knowing what he was looking for nor why the two words were in his head. Outside the College of Surgeons he sought help from a bearded man and the man told him to clear off. He looked at a name written up, white letters on blue, Harcourt St. The familiarity of the two colours, the oblong shape of the metal sign, reassured him. Nailed into the brick that sign would be, he said to himself, and it was the same thing when he went on: Hatch St, Upr Charlemont St, Northbrook, Ranelagh Rd. ‘Nowhere here what you’re looking for,’ a man sponging water on a shop window told him.

  ‘Never was,’ a postman said.

  There was a key in one of his pockets but he didn’t know why it was there or what it was to. He came to a church and he stood outside it for a few minutes, reading the information on the black board by the gate. A memory came to him in the way it sometimes did, emerging from nowhere but very clear, and he knew the voice when he heard it in his mind. ‘I’m asking you, boy, give us the counties of Ulster. Say the counties off for us, Broderick, get up on your feet now.’ And Broderick did, his awful old muffler half in rags and Mr Jameson said take that thing off. Mr Jameson was a drinker, he came out of O’Daly’s footless and if he’d see you he’d go back in. ‘Well, bedad, Broderick, you’ll have me crucified,’ he said when Broderick was silent, not knowing the counties. ‘Donegal, Derry, Antrim, Down,’ Mr Jameson prompted, but the prompt was no help to poor Broderick. Then the memory slithered away and there was nothing.

  Appian Way was written up, Morehampton Rd. Dogs were being walked, five of them together on strings. ‘Don’t be long out,’ Kitty said. ‘Don’t let the terrier off the lead till you’d come to the field.’ They bought the terrier from Dwyer in Shannon’s, who bred them. He could remember that well and he tried to hold on to it, Dwyer’s long, long face and the terrier picked out for the looks of it, but he couldn’t hold it. Slippery like some old snake it was.

  All day he went about, was hungry, had peas and mash with a sausage and was brought a
glass of cordial, pale pink, without a taste. He examined the photographs outside the Corinthian Cinema, crossed over into Hawkins Street and stood in a doorway. He waited for the dark and went slowly when he walked on. There was nothing in his mind except what he was looking for, the name carved on a pillar, and gates. In the evening usually there’d be nothing.

  The lamps along the street were lit. Colours flashed in the sky, advertisements for drink or food, BOVRIL. He gave a coin to a musician with a melodeon. He took out what was left in his trouser pockets to count it. Silver in one pocket, coppers in the other was how he carried his money. He’d be all right with what he had, he said to himself, but to be sure he took the money out again and looked at the silver in the palm of his hand.

  He went on then, asking no one in case it would give offence when people were in a hurry. In a public house he took a glass of beer to an empty corner and sat there for a long while. The bar was full of drinkers when he went in and he watched it emptying. A woman in the doorway spoke to him when he was on the street again. ‘Short time?’ she said.

  Her lipstick glistened in the street light. Her black hair was thick and curled, the red coat she wore open. Her blouse had the tired look of a garment worn too long, its top buttons undone or missing. She smelt of perfume and cigarettes.

  ‘I see you often,’ she said.

  He shook his head. Maybe someone else, he said. He’d got out of his way, trying all day to find St Ardo’s, he said. He didn’t know these parts at all.

  The woman eyed him blankly, not saying anything. Her face was heavy, her eyes calculating, but otherwise uninterested. He asked her if she knew St Ardo’s at all and she didn’t answer. She said would they go over to Liffey Lane.

  He felt for the key in his pocket, wanting to take it out and look at it because sometimes if you did a memory would come out of the fogginess of nothing. But he didn’t in case the woman would think he was peculiar, looking at a key.