Last Stories

by William Trevor

  She slept again, the headache still there when she woke at ten past seven. The money was in the Roses tin on top of the wardrobe where you couldn’t see it. She’d been careless, opening her bag like that in Davin’s. With drink in, she could have let some of the notes fall out, for the new lad or Keale to pick up later on with no one looking.

  She stood on a chair and took down the Roses tin. Slowly, carefully, again she counted the money. All of it was there and she closed her eyes in relief, the beginning of a panic slipping away. Sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling better than she had, she shuffled the notes into a tidy stack, flattening turned-down corners, and pressing out creases as best she could. Returning them to the Roses tin, she noticed that one had fallen out and was lying on the bed. She picked it up and slipped it under her pillow, being short after the morning in Davin’s.

  She lay down with her eyes closed, her thoughts muddling on. That man was different from other men, she’d said to herself, and had felt when she was with him that she was different too. A misunderstanding had brought them together, her saviour, as she was his: that thought had come, and she remembered it. The drink talking was what it sounded like now.

  Too long it was, the walk back to the warehouse, too long for a girl with a bad leg. She knew it wasn’t and wondered why she lied to herself and why her courage, so briefly there, had deserted her. A distant longing nagged, too far away, elusive now. Her hand crept beneath the pillow; the note was good to touch. She watched the twilight shadows gathering, another night beginning.

  * * *

  * * *

  He waited, not knowing why he did or what he waited for. Only the sounds he made himself disturbed the stillness of the night as he cleaned his brushes and put things ready for the morning. The paint had dried and when he turned the lights out, all but one, he looked again and saw perfection in his angels. There was no rustle in the quiet when he lay down, no fingers traced a way upon his flesh. He slept and waited still, but he knew in dreams that only angels were his solace.

  An Idyll in Winter

  Mary Bella didn’t remember when she woke up and then she did: he hadn’t come. The train was late and Woods had telephoned from the station. It was nearly ten by then and she must have fallen asleep waiting on the sofa. She didn’t remember going up to bed.

  It was very early now, she could tell by the light. The air coming in at the half-open window was cold and she pulled the bedclothes up. If he had come he would be in the room she had helped to get ready for him, the primroses she’d picked in the vase on the dressing-table. She wondered if he had.

  When she slept again she dreamt he hadn’t, that it was wrong about the train being late, that Woods came back alone and said a stranger hadn’t got off that train. But when she went down to the breakfast room and listened at the door there was a voice she didn’t know. ‘Now why can I guess who this is!’ he said when she went in, and held out his hand for her to shake. They had all summer, he said in the schoolroom afterwards. They had a lot to do.

  It was she who called the nursery the schoolroom when she first had lessons there. Woods found a slate that might do for a blackboard, but it wasn’t necessary since everything could be written in her different exercise books. Mary Bella was twelve that summer, thirteen when September came.

  He wore blue jerseys, and blue shirts which her mother called Aertex, and tweed ties and whipcord trousers. Her mother said he reminded her of Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind, her father that he was confident this chap would get her into Evelynscourt, which was the purpose of his being there. ‘Enough for one morning,’ he said every day when it was twelve o’clock, and they went about the farm then to see how things were getting on. Later in the afternoon they would ride to Worley Edge and sometimes on to Still Fell, or walk to Grattan’s Tomb. ‘Very Heathcliffian,’ he said when there were riders racing one another on the moors, and she didn’t understand what he meant. He read to her on their walks, or she to him, depending on what book it was. It made her sad that the summer had to end. He said it never would, because remembering wouldn’t let it.

  * * *

  * * *

  Anthony was twenty-two then and, not knowing what to do with himself after an undistinguished university career, he considered that a few months adding what he could to the education of a child in a country house would be better than doing nothing. The letter he received in reply to his answer to the advertisement was in an educated hand, and honestly laid out the disadvantages he would encounter if he took the post. We are close to moorland, and remote. You may find the sense of solitude oppressive. But the location turned out to be less intimidating than this suggested, the house – called Old Grange – grander than he had imagined, the farm prosperous.

  Anthony delighted in the place as soon as he became familiar with it, and in Mary Bella too. Small for her age, sharp-witted and volatile, she smiled a lot and laughed a lot, the beginning of beauty already in her features, her manner touched with a child’s unspoilt charm. In the schoolroom she disliked the dreariness of geography, and geometry’s uninteresting straight lines and the silly shape of trapeziums. History caught her imagination, she learnt poetry easily, had a way with spelling and with words. And that summer, which was warm, with hardly any rain, she developed a fondness for Anthony that he could not dismiss or pretend he didn’t notice and which, when September came, caused him more unease than he admitted to himself.

  He left Old Grange the day after Mary Bella’s thirteenth birthday, leaving behind far more than their excursions on the moors, their conversations, or the birds Mary Bella identified for him, far more than the hay-making he had helped with, or a family’s friendliness. He left what he thought would be impossible to forget – the sadness Mary Bella had spoken of, and something like desperation in her eyes when the last day came and they said goodbye to one another. But Anthony did forget. He made himself, considering it better that he should.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mary Bella passed, quite comfortably, the entrance examination for Evelynscourt, where her mother had been happy in her time but where Mary Bella wasn’t. Too often and too easily she remembered the summer of the schoolroom, and nothing at Evelynscourt was like that. She didn’t talk about the summer to anyone, not wanting to; and in the holidays she concealed her feelings every time she returned from riding to the places they had ridden to or when she sat alone in the schoolroom, the books of some holiday task or other spread out on the ink-stained table unheeded. She was reconciled to never seeing Anthony again, but his voice was there, as if it always would be, telling her about Jeanne d’Arc, and Elizabeth Tudor, whom he had called the Lonely Queen, and Charlemagne and Marie Antoinette. It drew her into the world of the Marshalsea, brought her to Dorlcote Mill and Wildfell Hall, made Haworth Parsonage as real as it had been.

  * * *

  * * *

  Anthony became a cartographer, astonishing himself that he had not sooner been attracted by a profession that at once interested and absorbed him and in which, he discovered, he was both skilled and gifted. A few years after his months at Old Grange he had met at a party a slim, fair-haired girl called Nicola who, when they knew one another better, accompanied him on his commissions abroad. She took photographs for him in the uncharted region of the Abruzzi and in the new, mapless towns of Africa, in rebuilt Germany and where motorways now changed for ever the old roads of England. In time, they married. Two children – both girls – were born, a house acquired in the leafy London suburb of Barnes and, flourishing in contented motherhood and Anthony’s devotion, Nicola’s prettiness acquired a quiet confidence that had not been there before. Anthony went alone on his commissions and liked returning more than going away. Each time he came back, his children seemed a little different and another aspect of his small family was more than it had been before. His absences kept love alive, and interest in his children’s pursuits did not wane as otherwise it might
have. On Saturdays, if the week had been free of disobedience, there was a visit to Richmond Park, tea afterwards in the Maids of Honour. On Sundays Nicola’s mother took the girls away for their day with her, returning them undamaged by excessive affection, for she was careful about that. How fortunate they all four were! Anthony often said, or Nicola did. Neither wondered how married life might have been if they had married other people, how different their children would be. It was enough to know that being married to one another was what they wanted, that neither wanted more. ‘Tell them about Old Grange,’ Nicola often urged, and Anthony would recall for the girls what he remembered of it. They always listened, as Nicola did too. Because it sounded so lovely, she said, and the girls agreed.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the morning of her sixtieth birthday, Mary Bella’s mother died, suddenly, without an illness’ warning. Mary Bella was twenty-four then, had been at Old Grange since she’d left Evelynscourt, and was content to be there. She took her mother’s place quite naturally, but in spite of the comfort and convenience of her presence her father was unable to come to terms with the tragedy that had so unexpectedly occurred. He did not ever recover his good humour or his affection for the house and the farm. In the darkness of his mood he took to drink a little and to riding recklessly over the moors as if in search of the happiness that had been taken from him. One day he did not come back and was later found after his horse returned alone. The fall was a bad one, but perhaps achieved for him what he wanted. He did not regain consciousness.

  Mary Bella might have sold Old Grange, passed on to its new owner the horses and her small band of farm workers, the Charollais herd and several thousand sheep. Instead she remained, and often during the lonely months that followed her father’s death she sat in the schoolroom as she had as a child, her sole companion a spaniel who, with age, had become blind. She knew she was living in the past, that the past would always be there, around her, that she was part of it herself.

  * * *

  * * *

  It wasn’t sentiment that in time brought Anthony back to the Yorkshire moors. By chance, his profession did, and when he found himself one morning not far from Worley Edge it was an impulse, stirred by curiosity, that caused him to park his car less than a mile from Old Grange. He walked then, skirting the walled garden and the farm buildings when he came to them. There was a silence about the place, a tranquillity quite at odds with the clatter of the yard, the hurrying and the bustle that had lived on in his recollections. Not knowing why he passed the house by, he followed a right-of-way he remembered.

  The morning, in early April, was fine. Except for sheep, the moors were empty. No horses raced there, no solitary figure – a movement in the distance – climbed to Grattan’s Tomb: going on, Anthony realized he had been expecting to see that. He remembered the places where they had rested on their walks, where he had read from Wuthering Heights or listened to another page of The Chimes, or where he had insisted that only French should be spoken.

  He turned before he reached Still Fell. Carelessly selective, his memory had misled him. Only once had there been horses racing on the moors; it was unlikely that they would have been there today at this time, and long ago the child he had taught would surely have left so remote a house. He turned and walked back the way he had come, hesitated for a moment, and then passed between the avenue’s two grey pillars.

  The big, wide front door was as it always had been, sunburnt pale, in need again of paint. He went to the side entrance, a door without a knocker or a bell, bolted only at night. When he pushed it open the same picture – trapeze performers above a circus ring – still decorated one wall of the long, cold corridor that led to the kitchen and the sculleries. There was a murmur of voices, the rattle occasionally of a knife or fork put down. ‘Hello,’ Anthony called out, and his voice silenced everything.

  In the kitchen the faces around the table were not at first familiar. Six or seven men, a slight, dark-haired woman in a blue dress, looked back at him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said again, and the woman stood up and he knew at once that she was Mary Bella.

  ‘Good heavens!’ she greeted him, and two of the older men stood up too, and he knew then who they were. They nodded at him and he shook hands with them.

  ‘You’ve come to lunch!’ Mary Bella was amused in a way he had not forgotten, her sudden laughter seeming to brim over as it enlivened her features. Once long, sometimes plaited, her hair was tidily drawn back.

  ‘How are you, sir?’ One of the men who’d stood up pulled out a chair for him.

  ‘It’s shank of lamb,’ Mary Bella said, spooning some on to a plate.

  The men finished their food. There was more talk from the older two, reminiscing about the past they associated with him. Then they shook hands again and all the men went off together.

  ‘Gosh,’ Mary Bella said, gazing at Anthony in a way he remembered also.

  * * *

  * * *

  Driving back to London, Anthony didn’t wonder why he’d stayed so long. ‘Walk with me a little,’ Mary Bella had begged, and it felt natural that he should, that they should walk where they had before, that she should take him to the schoolroom, that he should stay for hours when he hadn’t intended to.

  He had heard about her mother’s death, her father’s so soon afterwards. It was the fate of an only child, Mary Bella had said, to inherit what couldn’t be refused. She wasn’t complaining. There was nothing of that in her voice, and she’d smiled when she said it, as if it were a comedy that she should own everything because there was no one else. Her smile had come often, as it used to. Her laughter too.

  ‘I wondered,’ she had said, ‘if ever you would come back.’

  She had made tea for them and the flowery china was the same, the cake the one her mother had most often made. He said he had become a cartographer.

  A man who hadn’t been in the kitchen earlier came in, and Anthony had recognized the lean, baffled features of the man waiting on the ill-lit station platform the night the train was so very late.

  ‘I saw the car,’ Woods remarked in bewildered tones that hadn’t changed. ‘I said to myself whose was it?’

  Tired of the motorway he was on, Anthony drove off it. Near Melton Mowbray he stopped in a village and had a drink in the bar of a hotel. After another he didn’t want to drive on and spent the night there. He dreamt of the schoolroom as it still was, its windows wedged to keep them from rattling, specks of soot on the unlit kindling in the grate. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Mary Bella recited for him, Little breezes dusk and shiver. Once he had been woken in the night by her father, who needed help delivering a calf, and afterwards they had sat drinking whisky until dawn. Unopened letters were always scattered on the table in the hall. Inaccurate clocks were everywhere.

  In the morning Anthony knew he shouldn’t have gone back.

  * * *

  * * *

  A letter came, his handwriting on the envelope. She propped it up on the dresser, to be read when she was alone. ‘I never thought of you as patient,’ she had confessed the day he came back, ‘but of course you must have been.’

  She remembered his saying once that patience was worthwhile, and while she waited until the evening, his letter still where she had left it, she thought that that was probably true. How very strange, seeing you again, she read at last. I passed the house by, thinking that time should perhaps be left where it had settled. But I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t changed my mind.

  She had been kind, the letter said. Your family’s hospitality is all it ever was. She wondered where he lived. He hadn’t told her, and the letter had only London as an address. He’d married someone. She could tell, although he hadn’t said that either. She wondered if there were children.

  The letter was precious and she folded it again into the folds he’d made and put it away. It didn’t ma
tter that she couldn’t reply. He had come back.

  * * *

  * * *

  Anthony hadn’t made it happen. It had happened because it was part of something else, of what had been impossible and now was not. He told himself that, but it made no difference. He tried to push it all away, but he found he couldn’t. Too much was there already, too much had coloured too many moments since they had walked again on the moors, since in the kitchen afterwards she had made tea, since in their schoolroom he had wanted her.

  The moors were vast, he reminded himself. He could go back and walk alone there, seeing from afar the house, the farm, and now and again a lonely rider. There could be that.

  But when Anthony returned he went at once to the house, and after that he always did.

  * * *

  * * *

  Nicola lived with her bewilderment, aware that it wasn’t much to have to live with. Yet each morning when she woke she felt uneasy, and didn’t want to think. And in the daytime on her own – cleaning, cooking, in a shop – she searched for the calm that had always been hers to call upon, but could not find it. She tried to believe that what she dreaded was only in what she wondered, but could not. Disquiet did not recede, and still the dread was there.

  * * *

  * * *

  A long flat stone marked Grattan’s Tomb. Half fallen, crooked on what was once a hillock and now hardly higher than the surrounding turf, it bore no inscription. Myth claimed this grave, made of its unknown dead an ill-met presence, fearsome on the moors, lone and mad, a chieftain of his ancient times.