The Boarding-House

by William Trevor

  ‘The midday mail,’ said Studdy; and he eased off some of his clothes, humming a tune.

  2

  Concealed from the public eye, snug within his coffin, Mr Bird looked as he had looked in life. Despite his size and the flowing bulk of his flesh, he had borne always, since a child, the grey pallor of death; and he had a way of seeming as still as a statue. There was a new transparency about his skin, but it was as yet a slight thing, and the evidence of real decay was not apparent. Mr Bird had often thought about his funeral and visualized the scene. It was a pity he could not relish it now, for he more than anyone would have enjoyed this mourning that convention demanded. More even than Nurse Clock, who was enjoying it well enough but resented the drizzle that damped her face. More by far than the others of The Boarding-House who stood by the graveside and made no pretence, who did not enjoy the thing at all.

  They had come, all of them, for they felt attendance to be a duty. ‘I am going to a funeral,’ said Venables, the controller of office traffic, and his superiors – or a few of them, for there were many – had looked askance and sour and asked some questions about the deceased: who the deceased had been in life, and what the relationship had been with Venables. ‘He took me in; he was like a father. I knew no father as a child.’ So Venables took two hours off and promised to make them up. He had never before done such a thing, for he had never wished to nor had had occasion to. He felt himself a pioneer within himself as he stood by the graveside, but he did not care for all these trimmings that went with death and he reflected with pleasure that the ceremony could not last for ever.

  The drizzle freshened the short grass of the graveyard and toned down the lime of new headstones. It was a suitable day for a funeral, though Major Eele had said that morning that he hoped for sun. ‘I will stand about in sunshine till kingdom come,’ he said. ‘People have caught their deaths in chill churchyards.’ The words had irritated others, who felt, in different ways, that the words were unseemly, implying, as they did, a lack of respect for death the universal thing.

  Gallelty and Mrs Slape stood close together, behind the residents, humble in their stance, accepting the point that they were paid while others paid their way. ‘I recognize the good in you,’ Mr Bird had said that day to Gallelty, and she had said: ‘I was taken short, I could not go on. I came to this house because it was at a corner.’ ‘Do not be sorry,’ Mr Bird had replied, although she had not claimed that she was sorry and did not feel it. ‘Do not be sorry that you came in an emergency to this house at a corner. Sooner or later we knew that this would happen, and happen it has. Where are you off to with that haversack?’ And she had explained.

  ‘What now?’ said Gallelty to Mrs Slape, thinking of the death.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Who shall pay us? What shall happen? I felt I had come home.’

  Mrs Slape did not reply. She wore maroon, a fitted coat, and a hat that matched the colour. She was thinking of the kitchen and how pleasant it would be to be there at this moment, making the place cosy, ascertaining that there was something on hand to drink in the evening. ‘God helps those,’ was Mrs Slape’s motto, carved out of a hard life.

  ‘What shall happen?’ repeated Gallelty, and Mrs Slape bade her be quiet.

  They had agreed long since amidst their kitchen chores that neither of them had had the easiest of times. They talked of themselves as they worked by day and later as they sat in rest. They were, they said, well met; as good at listening as they were at giving forth. But now was not the time, thought Mrs Slape as she silenced Gallelty; now was not the time because words could not flow in a manner that was unrestrained. Now was a time that was given up to the committing of Mr Bird and one could not make it otherwise. One could not escape the significance of the hole that gaped in the ground, nor of Mr Bird encased in wood and deep within it.

  ‘That servant girl is muttering,’ said Major Eele. ‘She mutters at an open grave, or else chews gum. Nothing is sacred.’

  He looked across the distance at Mrs Slape in maroon and Gallelty murmuring in emotion. Gallelty ferret face was all aquiver; he could see the twitch in her eye and her lips rising and falling.

  ‘God is present,’ called out Major Eele, cutting through the clergyman’s words, staring hard at Gallelty. The others shuffled their feet, embarrassed by the Major saying so odd a thing and saying it so loudly.

  Only The Boarding-House people, with the clergyman, stood by the graveside. The clergyman, who had never known Mr Bird, nor even heard much of him until it was too late, wondered between moments of prayer what manner of man this one had been. Lodged in his mind was the information that the man had died at sixty-seven, that he had been of heavy build and with a foot deformity. Were these the family? wondered the clergyman, glancing round the semicircle they made and doubting that theory almost as soon as it was formed. ‘God is present,’ called out the man who might have been a brother, and the others, an African friend and maybe a daughter, sisters and servants, had rippled in a communal way, as a crowd ripples in church. And then, while all that was going on, the clergyman’s glance fell on the face of Rose Cave and recognition trickled in his brain. He recalled her name; she often came and sat far back, and slipped away. Once he had shaken hands with her and learnt that she lived in a boarding-house some way away. He thought that odd, to live in a lodging-house nowadays, when so many people preferred bed-sitting-rooms, with cooking facilities that made them independent. All at once in the clergyman’s mind the pieces linked: there was more information that he had known but forgotten until now: that the heavily-built man was himself the keeper of some boarding-house and had been, too, a singular man, a godly man, so the clergyman had heard, though not apparently a member of the Church of England, the church that now was called upon to hold this final service. So the man had been the landlord of the lady who was wont to slip away; and of all these others, thought the clergyman, inspired; and further thought that here was something just a little odd.

  ‘Vouchsafe, we beseech Thee,’ said the clergyman, ‘to bless and hallow this grave, that it may be a peaceful resting place for the body of Thy servant …’

  The wet soil clattered upon the wood of Mr Bird’s container. The clergyman closed his prayer-book and held it flat on his chest.

  There were two wreaths, offered by the members of The Boarding-House. Studdy had made the collection and had bought two rather than one, because two seemed the greater gesture; which was important since Studdy had wished to keep back some of the money. He had walked some way to find them, seeking – and discovering in the end – wreaths that had seen better days and were thus reduced in price. Studdy was thinking that he had made seven shillings in the purchasing of the wreaths, and thinking too that he had saved the sum of eight pounds eight, rent owed at the time of death. Money was important to him: he found it hard to come by. Watching the earth fall fast upon the casket, Studdy thought sadly that often before he had owed more in the way of rent, twenty guineas once and sixteen another time. He closed his eyes to drive away the thought, and opened them and saw the others strangely: as though the length of Mr Scribbin and the plumpness of Venables and the ferret face of Gallelty were new to him and were important and must be registered. He sought among the faces for an enemy and found one soon enough: Nurse Clock and he did not hit it off. He wondered if she knew about the eight pounds eight. It was not impossible, he imagined, that Mr Bird had released that information on his death-bed. She had looked at him oddly when he had displayed the wreaths, when he said that he had added an extra sixpence of his own. She had pitched up her head, snorting like a horse, blowing through her nostrils. You could not trust, thought Studdy, a woman who looked like that and who spoke so sharply. Whenever he saw her in her big blue skirt he wanted to stick a pin in her. He fingered the point of his lapel and felt the pin there, the pin he carried for that purpose: to stick, one day, into one or other of Nurse Clock’s knees.

  Sixty-seven years ago, to the very week, William Bird
had been born. ‘I fancy Wagner as a name,’ his mother said in labour. ‘I read it in a book.’ Her husband, who was there at the time, agreed at once, thinking that this was not the time to argue. They were an inefficient couple and had left it late before calling in the midwife. ‘What shall we do,’ said the husband, ‘if the woman does not come? Or does not come in time? Could I deliver the child myself?’ He bit his nails and murmured further. ‘You couldn’t deliver a letter,’ screeched the confined lady, laughing madly between bouts of pain. She was a person of forty-five, who claimed in after years that she had not known until the day before that she was about to bear a child. ‘“You have got fat,” he said to me, and then he said he liked me fat; he said he thought it right for a woman to be plump or at least a little plump. “It is all gas,” I said; “I am blown out with gas from indigestion, I must see a doctor. Heavens above, what a thing to happen!” “Your time has come,” the doctor said. Well, I didn’t believe the man. “We never,” I said; but he said yes, no doubt at all. “Here’s a surprise,” I said. “You’ve sired a child.” “A child,” he said, “at your age? Heavens above, what a thing to happen!”‘

  Late in life the child that was born to that feckless couple entered the business world, taking up a small position in a suburban branch of a travel agency. ‘Nicer than a shop,’ the mother said. ‘Travel is the rage today.’ For twenty-five years William Wagner Bird remained there, in the same branch of the travel agency. He sought love as the years went on, but concluded early that he might never be offered it; and at the age of forty-two, already a resident of The Boarding-House, he found that he had been left the place in the will of the dead landlady. He seized the house and left the travel business. He blossomed like a bride on her wedding day, and he moved into middle age a different man.

  After his death his silent laughter continued in the rooms and passages of The Boarding-House; for the laughter was part of the place and part of its people. He in his time had sought these people out, selecting them and rejecting others. He sought them, he said, that they in each other might catch some telling reflection of themselves, and that he might see that happen and make what he wished of it. ‘I rose from my desk, most downtrodden of men. I smote adversity to make myself a God to others.’ There were people who had passed through The Boarding-House who came to consider that Mr Bird was not entirely sane. ‘Are you happy now, all of you, going and coming back? Are there complaints? The food and the rooms? A simple supper on Sundays: servants have souls. Servants have souls, they must have time off. Are there complaints about that, the simple supper we have on a Sunday? Anyone has only to say. I listen to all complaints. I sit at work in my little room if anyone wants me. Except for Sunday, my private day. Do you all see that, do you catch the significance? The Sabbath is a day of rest, food is simple, something cold.’ He would stand at the door of some room in which they were gathered, his trousers warmly over his stomach; he would finish his speech and stand for a time in silence, while his laughter, not indicated on his face, oozed about the room, in and out among them.

  He had known the suburb all his life, and for much of his life he had known The Boarding-House. In the hall there was an elephant’s foot, a container for sticks and umbrellas. In the drawer of the hallstand were two old tennis balls, dating back to 1912. Once, at the back of the house there had been a tennis court, but now it was a wilderness, rich in dandelions. Mr Bird used to look from the window of his room and smile to himself at the dandelions on the tennis lawn, thinking of his deformed foot.

  ‘The British scene has lost a formidable figure,’ said Major Eele, heading the procession away from the grave. Mr Bird it was who had brought the Major to his first strip-tease performance, who had recognized that that was what the Major required; he had introduced him to the Ti-Ti Club, signing him in for later visits.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ cried Venables, imagining that Major Eele spoke in jest, taking the opportunity to release his nervous laughter.

  Major Eele stopped at once in his tracks, so abruptly that all who followed behind him were obliged to stop also, even the clergyman, who had taken the opportunity to pick up his acquaintanceship with Rose Cave. Nurse Clock found her passage prevented by the suddenly stationary rump of Mr Scribbin; the clergyman in confusion dropped his prayer-book. Mr Obd was perplexed ; he saw Major Eele turn to face them with a gesture; he saw that the man was angry and wondered if he might expect some verbal assault. Studdy, independent as always, had stayed for a moment longer by the grave and thus was unaffected. He only heard the Major shout and saw his right arm raised, as though addressing troops, as though inciting them to action.

  Major Eele shouted some military monosyllable to arrest the attention of all present. Then he said in his tinny voice:

  ‘Venables here has gone mad.’

  A visitor to the graveyard, renewing wall-flowers in a jampot above a relative’s remains, glanced up from her task and saw across the headstones and the crosses this little knot of assorted people, one very tall and one black, being harangued apparently by a small man. The lady hastened with the flowers, for she found it at once intriguing that such a scene should be enacted in a graveyard. She walked to the group with simulated casualness and heard the small man say:

  ‘Venables sees this as an occasion when he should laugh and holler. Clearly, we should all have come intoxicated. Should we have come intoxicated, Venables? Remember, if you can, we are on hallowed ground. A man has passed to his rest. Sixty-odd years of living have slipped into eternity, and we in our weakness are saddened by our temporary loss. Yet here in the midst of all, the funeral words yet heavy on the air, another man sees fit to laugh and holler. Why not a tap-dance, Venables? Shall we all clap hands while Venables here breaks into further merriment, tap-dancing on the gravestones?’

  Venables, his face as flushed as rhubarb, bent down his head and placed a hand across his eyes to hide his shame. The rest were silent, and the woman who had come to replace the wall flowers in the jam-pot heard the clergyman say that a misunderstanding had surely taken place.

  ‘Misunderstanding?’ demanded Major Eele. ‘Tell us about that, sir. What misunderstanding has taken place? Step forward, we are all agog.’

  The clergyman explained that he imagined Major Eele was mistaken, that Venables, he thought, had no wish to tap-dance in the graveyard.

  ‘Has he not?’ cried Major Eele. ‘You do not know me, yet you elect to address me and ridiculously take sides with this freakish fellow. Let me assure you of this: I have today seen the glint in this man’s eye; he spits upon the Church of England. I would wager money that left alone in this place he would tap-dance over the tombstones; aye, and gnaw bones–’

  ‘No!’ cried Nurse Clock, striding out. ‘No, Major Eele, you have said enough. Major Eele is in drink,’ she said to the clergyman, and the clergyman blinked, finding it difficult to respond with words.

  Nurse Clock walked away, off on her own, her nurse’s heels clicking on the hard path. She felt the eyes of all the others upon her, she who had ended the ugly scene, she who was today a special person, since she had nursed Mr Bird to his death.

  The woman who had paused to watch all this saw the nurse move smartly off. She saw the clergyman hesitate and then move too; and saw the others follow, walking together because they walked towards a common goal. Last of all came the one remaining man, the one who had stayed at the grave. He came slowly, wagging his head and fingering the features of his face.

  In such circumstances William Bird, called Wagner after a character in a book, born in 1897 to feckless parents, took his final leave. He was buried thus, to the words of the established Church, in the presence of his chosen people, on August 16th of that hot summer.

  3

  When Mr Scribbin had said that the death of Mr Bird was not an unexpected thing for him he was not telling the truth. Death came as a shock to The Boarding-House, and as a personal shock, an ominous thing, to each one of its residents. Now that the funeral was over a
nd the rough edge of that shock had lessened a little, there was an opportunity to survey the general situation. ‘Well, that’s the end of The Boarding-House,’ said Rose Cave, saying it aloud, although in fact she was alone in her room. She looked about her, noting the porcelain ornaments that she collected and the framed prints of Stratford-on-Avon, and the theatre programmes. She had made the bedspread herself, not caring much for the one supplied. She had gone to D. H. Evans in a sale and had run up the flowered fabric on Mrs Slape’s old sewing machine. ‘What pretty chintz; I do love blue.’ Mrs Slape had watched her working at the kitchen table; while Rose Cave talked, telling about a one-time interest in Scottish dancing, and thinking how pleasant it was in the kitchen, thinking that she’d have more of the flowered material and make a pair of curtains as well. Afterwards she bought a half-pound box of Milk Tray chocolates and gave it to Mrs Slape, who said in her frank way that she never ate chocolates and had little use for this present offering. Upset, Rose Cave took back the little carton. ‘Two bottles of light,’ said Mrs Slape. ‘D’you follow me, dear? Two bottles of light ale you could have got for that.’ Rose Cave gave the chocolates to Mr Bird, who was well known for his sweet tooth. She had no idea how to go about the purchasing of light ale and so put off the making of the curtains.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Rose Cave now. The windows were large and of slightly odd proportions: curtains made for them might not easily be adapted for windows elsewhere. She had come to The Boarding-House in 1954, when she was forty-two. ‘I could not be alone,’ she said to Mr Bird. ‘All alone in a bed-sitting-room arrangement with hardly space to swing a cat. I do like people about me.’ In fact, she had tried just such an arrangement. For two years she had returned in the evening and made herself eggs and toast and instant coffee, assuring herself that she needed no more, what with the Italian food, spaghetti and a meat sauce, that she took for lunch. Once a month she went to a theatre, to a seat in the gallery, and sometimes to the cinema.