The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘Anyone could come and live here,’ Belle Frye said.

  ‘Nobody’d want to.’

  We walked from room to room. The dining-room still had a sideboard in it. There was blue wallpaper on the walls: none of that had been torn off, but there were great dark blots of damp on it. There were bundled-up newspapers all over the floor, and empty cardboard boxes that would have been useless for anything because they’d gone soft due to the damp. Upstairs there was a pool of water on a landing and in one of the bedrooms half the ceiling had fallen down. Everywhere there was a musty smell.

  ‘It’s haunted,’ Belle Frye said.

  ‘Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘She died here, didn’t she?’

  ‘That doesn’t make it haunted.’

  ‘I can feel her ghost.’

  I knew she couldn’t. I thought she was silly to say it, pretending about ghosts just to set a bit of excitement going. She said it again and I didn’t answer.

  We crawled out again, through the broken window. We wandered about in the rain, looking in the outhouses and the stables. The old motor-car that used to be in one of them had been taken away. The iron roller that Dick had rolled the tennis court with was still there, beside the tennis court itself.

  ‘Let’s try in here,’ Belle Frye said, opening the door of the summer-house.

  All the times I’d come into the garden on my own I’d never gone into the summer-house. I’d never even looked through a window of Challacombe Manor itself, or poked about the outhouses. I’d have been a bit frightened, for even though I thought it was silly of Belle Frye to talk about ghosts it wouldn’t have surprised me to see a figure moving in the empty house or to hear something in one of the stables, a tramp maybe or a prisoner escaped from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp five miles away. The Italians were black-haired men mostly, whom we often met being marched along a road to work in the fields. They always waved and were given to laughing and singing. But even so I wouldn’t have cared to meet one on his own.

  In the centre of the summer-house was the table that had been covered with a white cloth, with sandwiches and cakes and the tea-urn on it, for the tennis party. The tennis marker was in a corner, placed there by Dick, I suppose, after he’d marked the court. The net was beside it, and underneath it, almost hidden by it, were two rugs, one of them brown and white, a kind of Scottish tartan pattern, the other grey. Both of these rugs belonged in our farmhouse. Could they have been lying in the summer-house since the tennis party? I wondered. I couldn’t remember when I’d seen them last.

  Facing one another across the table were two chairs which I remembered being there on the day of the party. They were dining-room chairs with red plush seats, brought from the house with a dozen or so others and arrayed on one side of the tennis court so that people could watch the games in comfort. These two must have been left behind when the others had been returned. I was thinking about that when I remembered my father hurriedly putting them into the summer-house at the end of the day. ‘It’ll maybe rain,’ he’d said.

  ‘Hey, look,’ Belle Frye said. She was pointing at an ashtray on the table, with cigarette-butts and burnt-out matches in it. ‘There’s people using this place,’ she said, giggling. ‘Maybe an escaped prisoner,’ she suggested, giggling again.

  ‘Maybe.’ I said it quickly, not wanting to pursue the subject. I knew the summer-house wasn’t being used by an escaped prisoner. Our rugs hadn’t been there since the day of the tennis party. They were part of something else, together with the cigarette-butts and the burnt-out matches. And then, quite abruptly, it occurred to me that the summer-house was where Betty and Colin Gregg came when Colin Gregg was on leave: they came to kiss, to cuddle one another like they’d been cuddling in the rhododendrons after the tennis party. Betty had brought the rugs specially, so that they could be warm and comfortable.

  ‘I bet you it’s an Eye-tie,’ Belle Frye said. ‘I bet you there’s one living here.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘I’m getting out of it.’

  We ran away. We ran through the overgrown garden on that wet afternoon and along the lane that led to the Fryes’ farm. I should have turned in the opposite direction after we’d left the garden, but I didn’t: I went with her because I didn’t want her silliness to spoil everything. I thought it was romantic, Betty and Colin Gregg going to the summer-house. I remembered a film called First Love, which Betty had gone on about. It had Deanna Durbin in it.

  ‘I’m going to tell,’ Belle Frye said, stopping for breath before we came to the Fryes’ farmyard. Her eyes jangled with excitement. There were drops of moisture in her smooth black hair.

  ‘Let’s have it a secret, Belle.’

  ‘He could murder you, a blooming Eye-tie.’

  ‘It’s where my sister and Colin Gregg go.’ I had to say it because I knew she’d never be able to keep a secret that involved an Italian prisoner of war. I knew that even if no prisoner had escaped people would go to the summer-house to see for themselves. I knew for a fact, I said, that it was where Betty and Colin Gregg went, and if she mentioned it to anyone I’d tell about going into Challacombe Manor through a broken window. She’d said as we’d clambered through it that her father would murder her if he knew. He’d specifically told her that she mustn’t go anywhere near the empty house because the floor-boards were rotten and the ceilings falling down.

  ‘But why would you tell?’ she cried, furious with me. ‘What d’you want to tell for?’

  ‘It’s private about the summer-house. It’s a private thing of Betty’s.’

  She began to giggle. We could watch, she whispered. We could watch through the window to see what they got up to. She went on giggling and whispering and I listened to her, not liking her. In the last year or so she’d become like that, repeating the stories she heard from the boys at school, all to do with undressing and peeping: There were rhymes and riddles and jokes that she repeated also, none of them funny. She’d have loved peeping through the summer-house window.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘But we could. We could wait till he was home on leave. We needn’t make a sound.’ Her voice had become shrill. She was cross with me again, not giggling any more. Her eyes glared at me. She said I was stupid, and then she turned and ran off. I knew she’d never peep through the summer-house window on her own because it wasn’t something you could giggle over when you were alone. And I knew she wouldn’t try and persuade anyone to go with her because she believed me when I said I’d tell about breaking into Challacombe Manor. Her father was a severe man; she was, fortunately, terrified of him.

  I thought about the summer-house that evening when I was meant to be learning a verse of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and writing a composition, ‘The Worst Nightmare I Ever Had’. I imagined Betty and Colin Gregg walking hand in hand through the overgrown garden and then slipping into the summer-house when it became dusky. A summer’s evening it was, with pink in the sky, and the garden was scented with the blossoms of its shrubs. I imagined them sitting on the two dining-chairs at the table, Colin telling her about the war while he smoked his cigarettes, and Betty crying because he would be gone in twelve hours’ time and Colin comforting her, and both of them lying down on the rugs so that they could be close enough to put their arms around each other.

  In the kitchen while I tried to record the details of a nightmare all I could think about was the much pleasanter subject of my sister’s romance. She was in the kitchen also. She’d changed from her farm-working clothes into a navy-blue skirt and a matching jersey. I thought she was more beautiful than usual. She and my mother were sitting on either side of the range, both of them knitting, my mother reading a book by A.J. Cronin at the same time, my sister occasionally becoming lost in a reverie. I knew what she was thinking about. She was wondering if Colin Gregg was still alive.

  Months went by and neither he nor Dick came back. There were letters, but there were also periods when no letters arrived and you cou
ld feel the worry, for one of them or the other. The war was going to be longer than everyone had thought. People looked gloomy sometimes, and when I caught their gloom I imagined bodies lying unburied and men in aeroplanes, with goggles on, the aeroplanes on fire and the men in goggles burning to death. Ages ago France had been beaten, and I remembered that in a casual moment in a Scripture class the Reverend Throataway had said that that could never happen, that the French would never give in. We would never give in either, Winston Churchill said, but I imagined the Germans marching on the lanes and the roads and through the fields, not like the cheerful Italians. The Germans were cruel in their helmets and their grey steeliness. They never smiled. They knew you hated them.

  Belle Frye would have thought I was mad if I’d told her any of that, just like she’d have thought I was mad if I’d mentioned about praying and keeping my father vivid in my mind. She was the first friend I’d ever had, but the declining of our friendship seemed almost natural now. We still sat next to one another in class, but we didn’t always walk home together. Doing that had always meant that one of us had to go the long way round and avoiding this extra journey now became an excuse. Not having had Dick and Betty to walk home with for so long, I’d enjoyed Belle Frye’s company, but now I found myself pretending to be in a hurry or just slipping away when she wasn’t looking. She didn’t seem to mind, and we still spent days together, at the weekends or in the holidays. We’d have tea in each other’s kitchens, formally invited by our mothers, who didn’t realize that we weren’t such friends. And that was still quite nice.

  Sometimes in the evenings my mother used to go to see a woman called Mrs Latham because Mrs Latham was all alone in the Burrow Farm, three miles away. On these occasions I always hoped Betty would talk to me about Colin Gregg, that she’d even mention the summer-house. But she never did. She’d sit there knitting, or else writing a letter to him. She’d hear me say any homework I had to learn by heart, a theorem or poetry or spelling. She’d make me go to bed, just like my mother did, and then she’d turn on the wireless and listen to Monday Night at Eight or Waterlogged Spa or Itma. She’d become very quiet, less impatient with me than she’d been when we were younger, more grown-up, I suppose. I often used to think about her on those nights when my mother was out, when she was left alone in the kitchen listening to the wireless. I used to feel sorry for her.

  And then, in that familiar sudden way, Colin Gregg came back on leave.

  That was the beginning of everything. The evening after he came back was a Saturday, an evening in May. I’d been at the Fryes’ all afternoon and when we’d finished tea we played cards for an hour or so and then Mrs Frye said it was time for me to go home. Belle wanted to walk with me, even though we’d probably have walked in silence. I was glad when her father said no. It was too late and in any case he had to go out himself, to set his rabbit snares: he’d walk with me back to our farm. I said goodbye, remembering to thank Mrs Frye, and with his remaining arm Mr Frye pushed his bicycle on the road beside me. He didn’t talk at all. He was completely different from my father, never making jokes or teasing. I was quite afraid of him because of his severity.

  The sheepdogs barked as I ran across our yard and into the kitchen. My mother had said earlier that she intended to go over to see Mrs Latham that evening. By eight o’clock Betty and Colin Gregg were to be back from the half past four show at the pictures, so that I wouldn’t be in the house alone. It was twenty past eight now, and they weren’t there.

  I ran back into the yard, wanting to tell Mr Frye, but already he’d cycled out of sight. I didn’t at all like the idea of going to bed in the empty house.

  I played with the dogs for a while and then I went to look at the hens, and then I decided that I’d walk along the road to meet Betty and Colin Gregg. I kept listening because at night you could always hear the voices of people cycling in the lanes. I kept saying to myself that my mother wouldn’t want me to go to bed when there was no one in the farmhouse. It was very still, with bits of red in the sky. I took the short-cut through the garden of Challacombe Manor and I wasn’t even thinking about Betty and Colin Gregg when I saw two bicycles in the shrubbery at the back of the summer-house. I didn’t notice them at first because they were almost entirely hidden by rhododendron bushes. They reminded me of the rugs half hidden beneath the tennis net.

  Colin Gregg was going away again on Monday. He was being sent somewhere dangerous, he didn’t know where, but I’d heard Betty saying to my mother that she could feel in her bones it was dangerous. When my mother had revealed that she intended to visit Mrs Latham that evening I’d said to myself that she’d arranged the visit so that Colin Gregg and Betty could spend the evening on their own in our kitchen. But on the way back from the pictures they’d gone into the summer-house, their special place.

  Even now I can’t think why I behaved like Belle Frye, unable to resist something. It was silly curiosity, and yet at the time I think it may have seemed more than just that. In some vague way I wanted to have something nice to think about, not just my imagining the war, and my prayers for Dick’s safety and my concern with people’s eternal lives. I wanted to see Betty and Colin Gregg together. I wanted to feel their happiness, and to see it.

  It was then, while I was actually thinking that, that I realized something was the matter. I realized I’d been stupid to assume they could take the short-cut through the garden: you couldn’t take the short-cut if you were coming from the town on a bicycle because you had to go through fields. You’d come by the lanes, and if you wanted to go to the summer-house you’d have to turn back and go there specially. It seemed all wrong that they should do that when they were meant to be back in the farmhouse by eight o’clock.

  I should have turned and gone away. In the evening light I was unable to see the bicycles clearly, but even so I was aware that neither of them was Betty’s. They passed out of my sight as I approached one of the summer-house’s two small windows.

  I could see nothing. Voices murmured in the summer-house, not saying anything, just quietly making sounds. Then a man’s voice spoke more loudly, but I still couldn’t hear what was being said. A match was struck and in a sudden vividness I saw a man’s hand and a packet of Gold Flake cigarettes on the table, and then I saw my mother’s face. Her reddish hair was untidy and she was smiling. The hand that had been on the table put a cigarette between her lips and another hand held the match to it. I had never in my life seen my mother smoking a cigarette before.

  The match went out and when another one was struck it lit up the face of a man who worked in Blow’s drapery. My mother and he were sitting facing one another at the table, on the two chairs with the red plush seats.

  Betty was frying eggs at the range when I returned to the kitchen. Colin Gregg had had a puncture in his back tyre. They hadn’t even looked yet to see if I was upstairs. I said we’d all forgotten the time at the Fryes’, playing cards.

  In bed I kept remembering that my mother’s eyes had been different, not like they’d been for a long time, two dark-blue sparks. I kept saying to myself that I should have recognized her bicycle in the bushes because its mudguards were shaped like a V, not rounded like the mudguards of modern bicycles.

  I heard Colin and Betty whispering in the yard and then the sound of his bicycle as he rode away and then, almost immediately, the sound of my mother’s bicycle and Betty saying something quietly and my mother quietly replying. I heard them coming to bed, Betty first and my mother twenty minutes later. I didn’t sleep, and for the first time in my life I watched the sky becoming brighter when morning began to come. I heard my mother getting up and going out to do the milking.

  At breakfast-time it was as though none of it had happened, as though she had never sat on the red plush chair in the summer-house, smoking cigarettes and smiling at a man from a shop. She ate porridge and brown bread, reading a book: Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts. She reminded me to feed the hens and she asked Betty what time Colin Gregg was co
ming over. Betty said any minute now and began to do the washing up. When Colin Gregg came he mended one of the cow-house doors.

  That day was horrible. Betty tried to be cheerful, upset because Colin Gregg was being sent to somewhere dangerous. But you could feel the effort of her trying and when she thought no one was looking, when my mother and Colin were talking to one another, her face became unhappy. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. Colin Gregg went back to the war.

  A month went by. My mother continued to say she was going to see Mrs Latham and would leave Betty and me in the kitchen about once a week.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with Matilda?’ I heard Betty saying to her once, and later my mother asked me if I had a stomach ache. I used to sit there at the table trying to understand simultaneous equations, imagining my mother in the summer-house, the two bicycles half hidden in the bushes, the cigarettes and the ashtray.

  ‘The capital of India,’ I would say. ‘Don’t tell me; I know it.’

  ‘Begins with a “D”,’ Betty would prompt.

  He came to the kitchen one evening. He ate cabbage and baked potatoes and fish pie, chewing the cabbage so carefully you couldn’t help noticing. He was scrawny, with a scrawny nose. His teeth were narrowly crowded, his whole face pulled out to an edge, like a chisel. His hair was parted in the middle and oiled. His hands were clean, with tapering fingers. I was told his name but I didn’t listen, not wishing to know it.

  ‘Where’d you get the fish?’ he asked my mother in a casual way. His head was cocked a little to one side. He was smiling with his narrow teeth, making my mother flustered as she used to get in the past, when my father was alive. She was even beginning to blush, not that I could see a cause for it. She said:

  ‘Betty, where did you get the cod?’

  ‘Croker’s,’ Betty said.