The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘I never yet cared for a North of Ireland person, Catholic or Protestant. Let them fight it out and not bother us.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say that, Norah.’

  ‘It’s more of your truth for you.’

  He didn’t reply. There was the gleam of his face for a moment as he drew on his cigarette. In all their married life they had never had a quarrel that was in any way serious, yet she felt herself now in the presence of a seriousness that was too much for her. She had told him that whenever a new bombing took place she prayed it might be the work of the Angry Brigade, or any group that wasn’t Irish. She’d told him that in shops she’d begun to feel embarrassed because of her Waterford accent. He’d said she must have courage, and she realized now that he had drawn on courage himself when he’d made the remark to Mr Joyce. He would have prayed and considered before making it. He would have seen it in the end as his Catholic duty.

  ‘He thinks you don’t condemn people being killed.’ She spoke quietly even though she felt a wildness inside her. She felt she should be out on the streets, shouting in her Waterford accent, violently stating that the bombers were more despicable with every breath they drew, that hatred and death were all they deserved. She saw herself on Fulham Broadway, haranguing the passers-by, her greying hair blown in the wind, her voice more passionate than it had ever been before. But none of it was the kind of thing she could do because she was not that kind of woman. She hadn’t the courage, any more than she had the courage to urge her anger to explode in their living-room. For all the years of her marriage there had never been the need of such courage before: she was aware of that, but found no consolation in it.

  ‘I think he’s maybe seen it by now,’ he said. ‘How one thing leads to another.’

  She felt insulted by the words. She willed herself the strength to shout, to pour out a torrent of fury at him, hut the strength did not come. Standing up, she stumbled in the gloom and felt a piece of holly under the sole of her shoe. She turned the light on.

  ‘I’ll pray that Mr Joyce will come,’ he said.

  She looked at him, pale and thin, with his priestly face. For the first time since he had asked her to marry him in the Tara Ballroom she did not love him. He was cleverer than she was, yet he seemed half blind. He was good, yet he seemed hard in his goodness, as though he’d be better without it. Up to the very last moment on Christmas Day there would be the pretence that their landlord might arrive, that God would answer a prayer because His truth had been honoured. She considered it hypocrisy, unable to help herself in that opinion.

  He talked but she did not listen. He spoke of keeping faith with their own, of being a Catholic. Crime begot crime, he said, God wanted it to be known that one evil led to another. She continued to look at him while he spoke, pretending to listen but wondering instead if in twelve months’ time, when another Christmas came, he would still be cycling from house to house to read gas meters. Or would people have objected, requesting a meter-reader who was not Irish? An objection to a man with an Irish accent was down-to-earth and ordinary. It didn’t belong in the same grand category as crime begetting crime or God wanting something to be known, or in the category of truth and conscience. In the present circumstances the objection would be understandable and fair. It seemed even right that it should be made, for it was a man with an Irish accent in whom the worst had been brought out by the troubles that had come, who was guilty of a cruelty no one would have believed him capable of. Their harmless elderly landlord might die in the course of that same year, a friendship he had valued lost, his last Christmas lonely. Grand though it might seem in one way, all of it was petty.

  Once, as a girl, she might have cried, but her contented marriage had caused her to lose that habit. She cleared up the tea things, reflecting that the bombers would be pleased if they could note the victory they’d scored in a living-room in Fulham. And on Christmas Day, when a family sat down to a conventional meal, the victory would be greater. There would be crackers and chatter and excitement, the Queen and the Pope would deliver speeches. Dermot would discuss these Christmas messages with Patrick and Brendan, as he’d discussed them in the past with Mr Joyce. He would be as kind as ever. He would console Bridget and Cathal and Tom by saying that Mr Joyce hadn’t been up to the journey. And whenever she looked at him she would remember the Christmases of the past. She would feel ashamed of him, and of herself.

  Broken Homes

  ‘I really think you’re marvellous,’ the man said.

  He was small and plump, with a plump face that had a greyness about it where he shaved; his hair was grey also, falling into a fringe on his forehead. He was untidily dressed, a turtlenecked red jersey beneath a jacket that had a ballpoint pen and a pencil sticking out of the breast pocket. When he stood up his black corduroy trousers developed concertina creases. Nowadays you saw a lot of men like this, Mrs Malby said to herself.

  ‘We’re trying to help them,’ he said, ‘and of course we’re trying to help you. The policy is to foster a deeper understanding.’ He smiled, displaying small, evenly arranged teeth. ‘Between the generations,’ he added.

  ‘Well, of course it’s very kind,’ Mrs Malby said.

  He shook his head. He sipped the instant coffee she’d made for him and nibbled the edge of a pink wafer biscuit. As if driven by a compulsion, he dipped the biscuit into the coffee. He said:

  ‘What age actually are you, Mrs Malby?’

  ‘I’m eighty-seven.’

  ‘You really are splendid for eighty-seven.’

  He went on talking. He said he hoped he’d be as good himself at eighty-seven. He hoped he’d even be in the land of the living. ‘Which I doubt,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Knowing me.’

  Mrs Malby didn’t know what he meant by that. She was sure she’d heard him quite correctly, but she could recall nothing he’d previously stated which indicated ill-health. She thought carefully while he continued to sip at his coffee and attend to the mush of biscuit. What he had said suggested that a knowledge of him would cause you to doubt that he’d live to old age. Had he already supplied further knowledge of himself which, due to her slight deafness, she had not heard? If he hadn’t, why had he left everything hanging in the air like that? It was difficult to know how best to react, whether to smile or to display concern.

  ‘So what I thought,’ he said, ‘was that we could send the kids on Tuesday. Say start the job Tuesday morning, eh, Mrs Malby?’

  ‘It’s extremely kind of you.’

  ‘They’re good kids.’

  He stood up. He remarked on her two budgerigars and the geraniums on her window-sill. Her sitting-room was as warm as toast, he said; it was freezing outside.

  ‘It’s just that I wondered,’ she said, having made up her mind to say it, ‘if you could possibly have come to the wrong house?’

  ‘Wrong? Wrong? You’re Mrs Malby, aren’t you?’ He raised his voice. ‘You’re Mrs Malby, love?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s just that my kitchen isn’t really in need of decoration.’

  He nodded. His head moved slowly and when it stopped his dark eyes stared at her from beneath his grey fringe. He said, quite softly, what she’d dreaded he might say: that she hadn’t understood.

  ‘I’m thinking of the community, Mrs Malby. I’m thinking of you here on your own above a greengrocer’s shop with your two budgies. You can benefit my kids, Mrs Malby; they can benefit you. There’s no charge of any kind whatsoever. Put it like this, Mrs Malby: it’s an experiment in community relations.’ He paused. He reminded her of a picture there’d been in a history book, a long time ago, History with Miss Deacon, a picture of a Roundhead. ‘So you see, Mrs Malby,’ he said, having said something else while he was reminding her of a Roundhead.

  ‘It’s just that my kitchen is really quite nice.’

  ‘Let’s have a little look, shall we?’

  She led the way. He glanced at the kitchen’s shell-pink walls, and at the white paintwork. It would cost her nearly a hun
dred pounds to have it done, he said; and then, to her horror, he began all over again, as if she hadn’t heard a thing he’d been saying. He repeated that he was a teacher, from the school called the Tite Comprehensive. He appeared to assume that she wouldn’t know the Tite Comprehensive, but she did: an ugly sprawl of glass-and-concrete buildings, children swinging along the pavements, shouting obscenities. The man repeated what he had said before about these children: that some of them came from broken homes. The ones he wished to send to her on Tuesday morning came from broken homes, which was no joke for them. He felt, he repeated, that we all had a special duty where such children were concerned.

  Mrs Malby again agreed that broken homes were to be deplored. It was just, she explained, that she was thinking of the cost of decorating a kitchen which didn’t need decorating. Paint and brushes were expensive, she pointed out.

  ‘Freshen it over for you,’ the man said, raising his voice. ‘First thing Tuesday, Mrs Malby.’

  He went away, and she realized that he hadn’t told her his name. Thinking she might be wrong about that, she went over their encounter in her mind, going back to the moment when her doorbell had sounded. I’m from Tite Comprehensive,’ was what he’d said. No name had been mentioned, of that she was positive.

  In her elderliness Mrs Malby liked to be sure of such details. You had to work quite hard sometimes at eighty-seven, straining to hear, concentrating carefully in order to be sure of things. You had to make it clear you understood because people often imagined you didn’t. Communication was what it was called nowadays, rather than conversation.

  Mrs Malby was wearing a blue dress with a pattern of darker blue flowers on it. She was a woman who had been tall but had shrunk a little with age and had become slightly bent. Scant white hair crowned a face that was touched with elderly freckling. Large brown eyes, once her most striking feature, were quieter than they had been, tired behind spectacles now. Her husband, Ernest, the owner of the greengrocer’s shop over which she lived, had died five years ago; her two sons, Derek and Roy, had been killed in the same month – June 1942 – in the same desert retreat.

  The greengrocer’s shop was unpretentious, in an unpretentious street in Fulham called Catherine Street. The people who owned it now, Jewish people called King, kept an eye on Mrs Malby. They watched for her coming and going and if they missed her one day they’d ring her doorbell to see that she was all right. She had a niece in Ealing who looked in twice a year, and another niece in Islington, who was crippled with arthritis. Once a week Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert came round with Meals on Wheels. A social worker, Miss Tingle, called; and the Reverend Bush called. Men came to read the meters.

  In her elderliness, living where she’d lived since her marriage in 1920, Mrs Malby was happy. The tragedy in her life – the death of her sons – was no longer a nightmare, and the time that had passed since her husband’s death had allowed her to come to terms with being on her own. All she wished for was to continue in these same circumstances until she died, and she did not fear death. She did not believe she would be reunited with her sons and her husband, not at least in a specific sense, but she could not believe, either, that she would entirely cease to exist the moment she ceased to breathe. Having thought about death, it seemed likely to Mrs Malby that after it came she’d dream, as in sleep. Heaven and hell were surely no more than flickers of such pleasant dreaming, or flickers of a nightmare from which there was no waking release. No loving omnipotent God, in Mrs Malby’s view, doled out punishments and reward: human conscience, the last survivor, did that. The idea of a God, which had puzzled Mrs Malby for most of her life, made sense when she thought of it in terms like these, when she forgot about the mystic qualities claimed for a Church and for Jesus Christ. Yet fearful of offending the Reverend Bush, she kept such conclusions to herself when he came to see her.

  All Mrs Malby dreaded now was becoming senile and being forced to enter the Sunset Home in Richmond, of which the Reverend Bush and Miss Tingle warmly spoke. The thought of a communal existence, surrounded by other elderly people, with sing-songs and card-games, was anathema to her. All her life she had hated anything that smacked of communal jolliness, refusing even to go on coach trips. She loved the house above the green-grocer’s shop. She loved walking down the stairs and out on to the street, nodding at the Kings as she went by the shop, buying birdseed and eggs and fire-lighters, and fresh bread from Bob Skipps, a man of sixty-two whom she’d remembered being born.

  The dread of having to leave Catherine Street ordered her life. With all her visitors she was careful, constantly on the lookout for signs in their eyes which might mean they were diagnosing her as senile. It was for this reason that she listened so intently to all that was said to her, that she concentrated, determined to let nothing slip by. It was for this reason that she smiled and endeavoured to appear agreeable and cooperative at all times. She was well aware that it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came.

  After the teacher from Tite Comprehensive School had left, Mrs Malby continued to worry. The visit from this grey-haired man had bewildered her from the start. There was the oddity of his not giving his name, and then the way he’d placed a cigarette in his mouth and had taken it out again, putting it back in the packet. Had he imagined cigarette smoke would offend her? He could have asked, but in fact he hadn’t even referred to the cigarette. Nor had he said where he’d heard about her: he hadn’t mentioned the Reverend Bush, for instance, or Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert, or Miss Tingle. He might have been a customer in the greengrocer’s shop, but he hadn’t given any indication that that was so. Added to which, and most of all, there was the consideration that her kitchen wasn’t in the least in need of attention. She went to look at it again, beginning to wonder if there were things about it she couldn’t see. She went over in her mind what the man had said about community relations. It was difficult to resist men like that, you had to go on repeating yourself and after a while you had to assess if you were sounding senile or not. There was also the consideration that the man was trying to do good, helping children from broken homes.

  ‘Hi,’ a boy with long blond hair said to her on the Tuesday morning. There were two other boys with him, one with a fuzz of dark curls all round his head, the other red-haired, a greased shock that hung to his shoulders. There was a girl as well, thin and beaky-faced, chewing something. Between them they carried tins of paint, brushes, cloths, a blue plastic bucket and a transistor radio. ‘We come to do your kitchen out,’ the blond boy said. ‘You Mrs Wheeler then?’

  ‘No, no. I’m Mrs Malby.’

  ‘That’s right, Billo,’ the girl said. ‘Malby.’

  ‘I thought he says Wheeler.’

  ‘Wheeler’s the geyser in the paint shop,’ the fuzzy-haired boy said.

  ‘Typical Billo,’ the girl said.

  She let them in, saying it was very kind of them. She led them to the kitchen, remarking on the way that strictly speaking it wasn’t in need of decoration, as they could see for themselves. She’d been thinking it over, she added: she wondered if they’d just like to wash the walls down, which was a task she found difficult to do herself?

  They’d do whatever she wanted, they said, no problem. They put their paint tins on the table. The red-haired boy turned on the radio. ‘Welcome back to Open House’, a cheery voice said and then reminded its listeners that it was the voice of Pete Murray. It said that a record was about to be played for someone in Upminster.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Mrs Malby suggested above the noise of the transistor.

  ‘Great,’ the blond boy said.

  They all wore blue jeans with patches on them. The girl had a T-shirt with the words I Lay Down With Jesus on it. The others wore T-shirts of different colours, the blond boy’s orange, the fuzzy one’s light blue, the red-haired one’s red. Hot Jam-roll a badge on the chest of the blond boy said; Jaws and Bay City Rollers other badges said.


  Mrs Malby made them Nescafé while they listened to the music. They lit cigarettes, leaning about against the electric stove and against the edge of the table and against a wall. They didn’t say anything because they were listening. ‘That’s a load of crap,’ the red-haired boy pronounced eventually, and the others agreed. Even so they went on listening. ‘Pete Murray’s crappy,’ the girl said.

  Mrs Malby handed them the cups of coffee, drawing their attention to the sugar she’d put out for them on the table, and to the milk. She smiled at the girl. She said again that it was a job she couldn’t manage any more, washing walls.

  ‘Get that, Billo?’ the fuzzy-haired boy said. ‘Washing walls.’

  ‘Who loves ya, baby?’ Billo replied.

  Mrs Malby closed the kitchen door on them, hoping they wouldn’t take too long because the noise of the transistor was so loud. She listened to it for a quarter of an hour and then she decided to go out and do her shopping.

  In Bob Skipps’ she said that four children from the Tite Comprehensive had arrived in her house and were at present washing her kitchen walls. She said it again to the man in the fish shop and the man was surprised. It suddenly occurred to her that of course they couldn’t have done any painting because she hadn’t discussed colours with the teacher. She thought it odd that the teacher hadn’t mentioned colours and wondered what colour the paint tins contained. It worried her a little that all that hadn’t occurred to her before.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Wheeler,’ the boy called Billo said to her in her hall. He was standing there combing his hair, looking at himself in the mirror of the hall-stand. Music was coming from upstairs.

  There were yellowish smears on the stair-carpet, which upset Mrs Malby very much. There were similar smears on the landing carpet. ‘Oh, but please,’ Mrs Malby cried, standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Oh, please, no!’ she cried.

  Yellow emulsion paint partially covered the shell-pink of one wall. Some had spilt from the tin on to the black-and-white vinyl of the floor and had been walked through. The boy with fuzzy hair was standing on a draining board applying the same paint to the ceiling. He was the only person in the kitchen.