Last Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘How the past holds on,’ Anthony remarked, and Mary Bella knew he was not referring to what an unlettered stone had inspired, but to the past that was theirs. Often their thoughts touched before words expressed them. Someone else, not he, had lived his other life: that fantasy, in silence, was shared.

  The August sky was pale, without a cloud, the day as lovely as any Mary Bella had known. The grass around the grave was grazed to a springy shortness, a single clump of cranesbill grown up again from what the sheep had left behind. ‘How good this summer is too,’ Mary Bella said. ‘How good that you have come again today.’

  Idyll, he had written for her once and she had loved the word, and more than ever loved it now. A happiness, he had written too. Since he’d come back they had not said, and did not say it now, that they would be together in the house. They knew they would be. Because the house, the moors, were where together they belonged.

  * * *

  * * *

  In the dead time of a Sunday afternoon Anthony told the wife he had once loved that their marriage, unchanged for her, had become for him a mistake. He told her gently, in the garden, choosing this time to do so, since their children were with their grandmother and would not be back for more than another hour. The deckchairs they were sitting in were close together because the garden’s paved area was restricted.

  ‘It is a shock,’ he said. ‘I know it is.’ He held a hand out and she took it, seeming not quite to realize what she was doing.

  Autumn had come, its sunshine a compensation after a disappointing summer. The leaves of shrubs were not yet withering, were only lank, less green. Quite soon the dusk of evening would be there in the afternoon, Nicola had earlier that day remarked.

  Her book was open on her knees and she searched for the bookmark she had dropped, then slipped it into place. She had said nothing in response to Anthony’s revelation and she didn’t now. He watched her walking among their small flowerbeds, picking here and there a weed, gazing down at Michaelmas daisies that yesterday hadn’t been in bloom. When she returned to the deckchairs she said that she had known. Her hope that she was wrong was a pretence: she’d known she should not hope.

  ‘Don’t say more now,’ she begged. ‘Please. Not yet.’

  She wound around a finger a blade of couch grass she’d picked. He’d left it too long, Anthony thought. All of it was worse because he’d left it so long.

  The couch grass cut her when she was careless with it and she threw it away. She put her finger to her lips and he offered to get something for it. She shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She tried to read. ‘Don’t go,’ he had thought she would plead, but she hadn’t. She didn’t plead in any way at all, nor allow her tears to come. ‘I’m sorry, Nicola,’ he said again.

  She shook her head, not looking up from the page that hadn’t been turned, and still wasn’t in the silence she had asked for. A car door banged and then their children were there, calling out as they ran into the garden, Amelia nine, Susie five.

  * * *

  * * *

  Autumn brought with it the bitter wind that, every autumn, blew across the moors. Sheep huddled close, rivulets and bogland froze. Snow came.

  But the idyll that had begun in sunshine was still there, its unhurried days, though briefer now, as much a pleasure. Anthony no longer drove away from Old Grange to begin a journey that familiarity had made uninteresting. His books were packed into half-empty bookcases, his coloured inks and pens arranged to his liking on the schoolroom table. A map of the old town of Kishinev – his first commission – was framed and on a wall, his clothes hung beside Mary Bella’s in the wardrobe that had been hers and now was theirs.

  Her life had changed less than his. The wages of the men still had to be paid every week, their midday meal cooked, her mother’s shortcuts with roasts and stews remembered. She kept the farm accounts as she had before. She was responsible and in charge, continuing to make her own contribution to how things should be, what differences were necessary in a different time. A dishwasher for the lunchtime dishes, because there were so many, made for a less busy day, as other contemporary devices did. The Aga was electric now, and it was warm in the house as it never was before. The dog who had been Mary Bella’s companion during her time of solitude was suspicious of another presence, but it didn’t matter. Nothing did, and the days that so smoothly became weeks, then months, were unlike any that Anthony or Mary Bella had experienced before; and both believed that nothing could disturb the contentment of being together.

  But as November ended, Mary Bella one morning at breakfast handed across the table a letter addressed in blue, clear handwriting. She knew at once, although she hadn’t seen the writing before, that it was his wife’s. She watched Anthony reading a single, tidily filled page. He read it twice before he gave it to her. ‘Nothing can be done about this,’ his only comment was.

  The older of his two children was starving herself. No reason for her doing so was given, but Mary Bella could guess and knew that Anthony could too.

  They did not talk about the letter that morning, or all day. Anthony took it away and Mary Bella imagined he burnt it when he was lighting the drawing-room fire. She never saw it again.

  Its contents could not so easily be eluded. They both knew that, and when the post came the following morning the blue handwriting was there again.

  ‘They have taken her into hospital,’ Anthony said when he read it. ‘For observation, so they say.’

  Mary Bella took the letter from him. It said more than he had quoted, but not much. She gathered up the breakfast dishes. He poured more coffee. He said, ‘There’s nothing to be observed. Nothing mysterious to be discovered. Nothing that isn’t known.’

  A child had found the pain of her father’s absence too much to bear. Silent at first, she cried all day for several days and then began to starve herself. They ask that you should be told at once, the clear round writing recorded.

  The day he left his family, Susie had helped him to carry his books to the car, following him every few minutes with another pile from the hall. Amelia didn’t speak. She didn’t come out of her room. But that would pass, he had told himself.

  * * *

  * * *

  At the hospital they declared that there was nothing particularly unusual about this variation of a child’s reaction to extreme distress. They were optimistic and reassuring, and Anthony’s presence brought about a recovery that was maintained, as other recoveries had not been. Eventually, it was he who drove Amelia home again, and he stayed for longer than he’d meant to, sleeping on a downstairs sofa and often in the night going to gaze at the somnolent features of his affectionate daughter. They looked as tired as an old woman’s, but whenever he touched her forehead with his lips she opened her eyes and sometimes even smiled. Amelia had been born with difficulty but had never before been difficult herself. He remained for more than a week, during which she made amends for the trouble she had caused. She said she wanted to be a cartographer and Anthony was pleased. He understood and was forgiving. He wasn’t angry when he was with her.

  But three days after he drove into the yard at Old Grange he learnt that she’d again begun to starve herself.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mary Bella tried not to dwell on what was happening. It wasn’t her place to make suggestions and anyway she could think of none. She felt uncomfortable and lost, belonging in what had come about and yet outside it. Anthony had spoken hardly at all about the family he had deserted, his tone when he did so now impersonal, as if he considered that in the circumstances it should be. Of the wife he was still married to, Mary Bella knew little more than her name and that she wrote letters in blue ink, with a fountain pen, not a ballpoint. There were no photographs of her at Old Grange, none that Mary Bella had seen of the two children who had been born. A house had a few times bee
n mentioned, no more than where it was.

  Yet out of so little, images came, and voices spoke. As in the schoolroom once Jeanne d’Arc had ridden into battle, as precious stones had glittered on the great high collar of Elizabeth Tudor, so shadows now were more than shadows. The knife that so cruelly and so often fell, the heads that rolled into a mire of blood, the treachery of plots, through their own drama became reality.

  The room that has been his is no one’s. Its shelves are empty, its drawers are light, his chair is in a corner. The household is bereft, but the pictures on its walls, the patterns on its carpets, are as they always were, and things on tables are. They take away the child again.

  * * *

  * * *

  Wind whined and whistled, gusts spluttered. On the moors conversation was lost, began again, was lost again. For warmth Mary Bella wore clothes that were rough and of the farm, the coarseness of the tweed, and shabby corduroy, making more of the delicacy in features that Anthony still often saw as a child’s. Knowing Mary Bella twice – her mind, her nature, her laughter, her sadness too – he had twice considered her unique, the second time as lovers do about each other.

  But in all this Anthony’s instinct was as it always had been: not ever to allow in himself the kind of tribulation that haunted Mary Bella. His way was to suppress, to conceal, to be protected. The cartographer’s world he had been drawn to was rational and understandable, beyond imagination’s interference. He delighted in its accuracy and precision, and made of it what it wanted him to make, discarding what had no purpose.

  ‘We are here, we are together,’ he said while the raw cold nagged. ‘We live with consequences. We have to, and we can.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Mary Bella wondered if they could. Perfection began when he came back, when he called out and she was there as she had always been, all other love rejected. And yet that memory brought disquiet now that felt like fear.

  The snow that earlier had flecked the landscape fell heavily. In the distance, Worley Edge was obscured and they went no further.

  ‘How well you taught me to imagine,’ Mary Bella murmured, the softness of her tone not quite conveying the irony of her observation. But what she said was taken by the wind and she did not repeat it. That something demanded more of her was a silent echo on the long walk back, an intimation that would not declare itself yet still was there.

  The yard was quiet when they reached it, the men already gone home. The empty house was warm, the blind dog waiting.

  * * *

  * * *

  The snow fell for days, was blown into drifts, accumulated on the roofs of sheds, on windowsills and frozen panes, changed the shape of water-butts and mounting blocks. It was confining, too.

  On the schoolroom table Anthony had spread out an unfinished map of street alterations in Dijon, four paperweights holding it in place, his inks and pens in orderly rows beside it. The table had been put to other uses since he and Mary Bella had shared it in the past – seed potatoes had sprouted on it, apples kept from touching one another, brass and silver polished, china and porcelain repaired. This morning it was shared again, Mary Bella going through the farm accounts at the other end of it.

  She would make curtains for the curtainless windows, she had a moment ago decided. And the daisy wallpaper, stained and badly faded by the sun, could be renewed. The white paint of the skirting board and the picture rail could be too, and the paintwork of the door and the window-frames. Their room they called it, and always would.

  ‘All right?’ she heard Anthony ask. Then he looked up and smiled at her before he returned to what he’d been doing.

  Often she dreamt of the household she could not prevent herself from imagining. And often she lay awake, telling herself that he was right, that people lived with what happened to them, that people had to. Marriages fell apart, he said; it was not unusual. His child was a sensible child, he said; she would be again. One day they would be glad they had held on.

  But at night, while Anthony slept, confusion crept into the empty dark, became a tiredness, and Mary Bella heard her own slight whisper speaking of a child who had been damaged, a damaged woman too. She remembered pity from long ago, when in an accident one of the workmen had lost an arm. She had pitied her mother in pain, and a girl at Evelynscourt who was despised, and the blind spaniel who followed her about the house. Challenging the love that kept her silent, her pity now seemed presumptuous when it came in the night, not belonging in an expected way as it had before. Yet still she pitied.

  ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she said, and smiled a little too. In a dream, occurring often, his child was dead and he stood by the grave, alone, flowers spread on the clay. And she watched, hidden by trees, not wanting to be parted from him.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘You are unhappy,’ Anthony said one evening in the kitchen when they had finished supper.

  Carrying plates and dishes to the sink Mary Bella shook her head but did not answer. Not turning round, she scoured a saucepan she had left on the draining board to steep.

  Anthony waited, then dried the dishes he was handed one by one warm from the steaming water. At peace, the old dog slept in his corner.

  ‘Amelia is herself again,’ Anthony said. ‘You do know that?’

  ‘Yes, I do know.’

  ‘What is it, Mary Bella?’

  ‘A silliness.’

  She had told herself this moment would come, yet had believed it might not, that the invasion of her thoughts, no matter how persistent, would slip away, each day, each night, becoming less troubled than the one before.

  ‘It’s over now,’ Anthony said. ‘The awfulness of that time.’

  It wasn’t over. Since memory would not allow it to be over, it never would be. The damaged do not politely go away, instead release their demons. That must be so, she could not think that it was different.

  Soothing and patient, his voice went on. His smile was tender. She loved his pale blue eyes, his hands, his lips, the way he stood, and moved, his quiet laughter. But still his words were nothing. He did not understand.

  She tried to say that what had been a wisp of doubt flourished now as premonition, but thought became confusion, did not connect, would not communicate. They could not change themselves, only simulate what was not so.

  With that simplicity a loneliness began for Mary Bella that was more than loneliness had ever been before. Belittling the solitude she had so often known, it was mysterious too, coming as it did while she still had the companionship she valued more than any other. ‘It’s foolishness, all this,’ Anthony said.

  There was no anger in his tone, no edge of irritation. But both would come when patience had worn itself out. There’d be indifference then, disdain, contempt. Why did she know? Why did he not? He’d been the teacher once.

  * * *

  * * *

  The night was slow. Its slowness was their hope, the dawdling hands of the clock on the windowsill their chance to settle what had been disturbed. Time was their genius, Anthony had said: emptily passing, it had held their love before it made of it a high romance.

  ‘We’re happy, surely?’ He pressed his presumption just a little. ‘Shouldn’t we be sensible, too?’

  But the disturbance that had come did not give up its ground.

  * * *

  * * *

  The men called out to one another in the yard, early-morning energy in their voices. The herd was driven from the fields for milking. Buckets rattled. Softly a transistor played. In the kitchen, through ragged tiredness, conversation stumbled on.

  ‘How slightly we know ourselves until something happens.’ Mary Bella broke a silence that had lasted. ‘How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can’t. What nags, what doesn’t.’

  Anthony stroked her hair and held her, wanting to for eve
r. ‘Your courage is extraordinary,’ he said.

  * * *

  * * *

  One of the men came in with the morning milk and eggs. Anthony took the milk can from him and filled two blue-and-white kitchen jugs, pouring what remained into a saucepan for their coffee. ‘A better day?’ he asked and the man said it was brighter than recent days had been. Mary Bella cut bread for toast.

  * * *

  * * *

  When spring was about to come and then did not, one morning Anthony wasn’t there. Waking early, Mary Bella heard the car.

  The men knew more. They’d seen his belongings carried from the house. He’d said goodbye, had shaken their hands. They waved when he drove off, then watched the car becoming nothing on the distant moors.

  His clothes, his inks, his pens, unfinished Dijon, his books: all these were gone. Only the old town of Kishinev remained, as he intended it should, a part of him still there.

  * * *

  * * *

  She knows his journey, where he will stop, where once he spent a night but has not since and will not now.

  She slices gammon, two slices for each plate; the men in turn come for their food. The sun has reached the kitchen, as at this time in spring and summer it always does. Sometimes in the schoolroom he drew the curtains. It will be dusk when he arrives.

  She takes her own plate to the table and is deferred to there. In kindness, because kindness is his way, he’ll call upon prevarication and deceit, his lies of mercy all he can offer the wife he now returns to. He’ll make of love a wild infatuation that did not last and now is over.

  The talk at the table is as it always is, about the morning’s work, some of it finished, some not yet, about the weather, the forecast for tomorrow. Mary Bella plays a part, for she is used to that. He will be tired, but even so he’ll manage, for that too is his way. His grateful wife will not reject him, the broken pieces of what is shattered will be gathered.