Old men played dominoes in a corner, the waiters stood about. A woman and child came hurrying in. The girl who worked the coffee machine pointed at a door.
‘During all your life as I have known it,’ Cecilia’s father said, ‘you have made up for what went wrong in mine.’
* * *
* * *
On the quays they watched the slow approach of the ferry. There was a stirring in the crowd waiting to embark, luggage gathered up, haversacks swung into place. A ragged line was formed when two ticket collectors arrived. The newcomers who came off the ferry trundled their suitcases to where the grey minibus from the hotel was parked.
‘We should call in at the Tourist Information,’ Cecilia’s father said, but when they did they found they didn’t have to because the times of the early-morning boats to the mainland – on one of which they hoped to be tomorrow – were listed in the window.
They bought a baguette and thinly sliced ham in the village, and peaches and a newspaper. They had another cup of coffee in the café.
‘I’m sorry,’ her father said. ‘For hating the truth so much, for so long.’
* * *
* * *
On the walk back to the hotel Cecilia didn’t say what she might have said, nor ask what she might have asked. She didn’t want to know.
They rested in the shade, beneath dry dusty trees. People on bicycles cycled by and smiled at them and waved. Faintly in the distance they could hear the rattle of the minibus returning to the harbour.
‘Shall we go on?’ her father suggested, his hands held out to her.
* * *
* * *
She drew the curtains in her room, darkening the lit-up brightness of the afternoon. She thought she might weep when she lay down, and spread a towel over her pillow in case she did. Fragments made a whole: the photographs that were lies, the marriage that fell apart. No child was born; they’d hoped one would be. As best they could they had made up for that, but what had been was over. Suitcases instead were in the hall, coats and dresses trailing from hangers piled together. A taxi drove away. He watched it go, alone but for a child who, by chance belonging nowhere, now belonged to him.
Maids came to turn the bed down. Cecilia said to leave it and thanked them for the chocolate they had put out for her on her bedside table. She called out, apologizing when her father knocked softly on the door. She had a headache; she would not come down tonight. He didn’t fuss. He never did. His footsteps went away.
* * *
* * *
The night didn’t hurry when it came. She did not want it to. Tomorrow he would finish what he had begun: she had that now. ‘I have to tell you this as well,’ gently he would say, and ask to be forgiven when he did. She didn’t blame him for what he had withheld. She understood; he had explained. But still he would complete what wasn’t yet complete because he felt he should.
* * *
* * *
They were early at Toulon for their train to Paris and took it in turns to walk about the streets so that their luggage wouldn’t be left unattended. Morosely, Cecilia gazed into the shop windows, hardly seeing their contents. Again the women hovered, as in reality they had. Their voices did, their clothes, the clergyman they talked about, their house, their cat. Her father’s silence would not hold; he did not want it to. He would tell her on the train.
Or even now, Cecilia thought when they waited together on the platform. In a strange place, among hurrying people, there’d be a moment that seemed right and he would choose his words. He would say again her presence in his house made up for his unhappiness there, and tell her what she had to know.
But when her father spoke it was to praise the train they waited for. An express that haughtily ignored Marseille and Montpellier, Lyon and Dijon too, stopping only twice. ‘The best trains in the world,’ he said. ‘And we can have a croque for lunch.’
They had it standing at the counter of the bar and their talk was about the island and how they would always want to return to the little bays, the clear deep water, their daily explorations, the café they had liked. Cecilia’s panic receded a little and then a little more; her father’s politeness was measured and firm, as if he’d been aware of her brooding and understood it. He drew the conversation out and kept it going. She could read it in his face that he had changed his mind.
Afterwards in an almost empty carriage their seats faced one another, were on their own, and quiet. Her father read Bleak House, a book he liked to go back to, and she didn’t feel neglected by his absorption in it as on other journeys she sometimes had when he read. His occasional smile of pleasure, his delicate fingers turning the pages, his summer clothes uncreased in spite of travel, reflected the ease with himself that had been slow in becoming what it was. He had borne his bitterness well. Somewhere, today and every day, the wife he had not ceased to love enjoyed the contentment he had been unable to give her. With cruel fortitude he might have allowed himself to dwell on her life without him, but he preferred an emptiness, and made of it something better than the truth.
Cecilia knew it; and emulating his skill in living with distress, allowed his silence to continue because there was nothing else to reveal. The women nurtured in the lonely lives they shared a fantasy that dressed things up a bit. They sought out girls without a mother, befriending them in order themselves to be befriended. There was excitement in the shadowlands of what might have been, in the bluster of daring and pretending, and drama that made a talking point.
This flimsy exercise in assumption and surmise crept, unsummoned, into Cecilia’s thoughts and did not go away. Shakily challenging the apparent, the almost certain, its suppositions were vague, inchoate. Yet they were there, and Cecilia reached out for their whisper of consoling doubt.
About the Author
William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928 and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of fourteen novels and thirteen collections of short stories, and he has won many prizes. His short stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, and his Collected Stories was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as a Best Book of the Year. His novels include Love and Summer, nominated for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Story of Lucy Gault, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Fiction Award, and also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Death in Summer, a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year.
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