The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

Betty smiled at him and my mother said quickly that Croker’s were always worth trying in case they’d got any fish in, although of course you could never tell. It sounded silly the way she said it.

  ‘I like fish,’ he said.

  ‘We must remember that.’

  ‘They say it’s good for you,’ Betty said.

  ‘I always liked fish,’ the man said. ‘From a child I’ve enjoyed it.’

  ‘Eat it up now,’ my mother ordered me.

  ‘Don’t you like fish, Matilda?’ he said.

  Betty laughed. ‘Matilda doesn’t like lots of things. Fish, carrots, eggs. Semolina. Ground rice. Custard. Baked apples, gravy, cabbage.’

  He laughed, and my mother laughed. I bent my head over the plate I was eating from. My face had gone as hot as a fire.

  ‘Unfortunately there’s a war on,’ he said. ‘Hard times, Matilda.’

  I considered that rude. It was rude the way he’d asked where the fish had come from. He was stupid, as well. Who wanted to hear that he liked fish? He was a fool, like Stupid Miller, who’d been at Miss Pritchard’s school. He was ridiculous-looking and ugly, with his pointed face and crushed-together teeth. He’d no right to say there was a war on since he wasn’t fighting in it.

  They listened to the news on the wireless and afterwards they listened to the national anthems of the countries which were fighting against Germany. He offered my mother and Betty cigarettes and they both took one. I’d never seen Betty smoking a cigarette before. He’d brought a bottle of some kind of drink with him. They drank it sitting by the range, still listening to the national anthems.

  ‘Good-night, Matilda,’ he said, standing up when my mother told me it was time to go to bed. He kissed me on the cheek and I could feel his damp teeth. I didn’t move for a moment after he’d done that, standing quite close to him. I thought I was going to bring up the fish pie and if I did I wanted to cover his clothes with it. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have been embarrassed.

  I heard Betty coming to bed and then I lay for hours, waiting for the sound of his bicycle going away. I couldn’t hear their voices downstairs, the way I’d been able to hear voices when Betty had been there. Betty’s had become quite loud and she’d laugh repeatedly. I guessed they’d been playing cards, finishing off the bottle of drink he’d brought. When I’d been there Betty had suggested rummy and he’d said that not a drop of the drink must be left. He’d kept filling up Betty’s and my mother’s glasses, saying the stuff was good for you.

  I crossed the landing to the top of the stairs that led straight down into the kitchen. I thought they must have fallen asleep by the range because when a board creaked beneath my feet no one called out. I stood at the turn of the narrow staircase, peering through the shadows at them.

  Betty had taken one of the two lamps with her as she always did. The kitchen was dim, with only the glow from the other. On the table, close to the lamp, was the bottle and one of the glasses they’d drunk from. The two dogs were stretched in front of the range. My mother was huddled on the man’s knee. I could see his tapering fingers, one hand on the black material of her dress, the other stroking her hair. While I watched he kissed her, bending his damp mouth down to her lips and keeping it there. Her eyes were closed but his were open, and when he finished kissing her he stared at her face.

  I went on down the stairs, shuffling my bare feet to make a noise. The dogs growled, pricking up their ears. My mother was half-way across the kitchen, tidying her hair with both hands, murmuring at me.

  ‘Can’t you sleep, love?’ she said. ‘Have you had a dream?’

  I shook my head. I wanted to walk forward, past her to the table. I wanted to pick up the bottle he’d brought and throw it on to the flags of the floor. I wanted to shout at him that he was ugly, no more than a halfwit, no better than Stupid Miller, who hadn’t been allowed in the Grammar School. I wanted to say no one was interested in his preference for fish.

  My mother put her arms around me. She felt warm from sitting by the range, but I hated the warmth because it had to do with him. I pushed by her and went to the sink. I drank some water even though I wasn’t thirsty. Then I turned and went upstairs again.

  ‘She’s sleepy,’ I heard my mother say. ‘She often gets up for a drink when she’s sleepy. You’d better go, dear.’

  He muttered something else and my mother said that they must have patience.

  ‘One day,’ she said. ‘After it’s all over.’

  ‘It’ll never end.’ He spoke loudly, not muttering any more. ‘This bloody thing could last for ever.’

  ‘No, no, my dear.’

  ‘It’s all I want, to be here with you.’

  ‘It’s what I want too. But there’s a lot in the way.’

  ‘I don’t care what’s in the way.’

  ‘We have to care, dear.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘My own darling,’ my mother said.

  *

  She was the same as usual the next day, presumably imagining that being half-asleep I hadn’t noticed her sitting on the man’s knees and being kissed by his mouth. In the afternoon I went into the summer-house. I looked at the two plush-seated chairs, imagining the figures of my mother and the man on them. I carried the chairs, one by one, to an outhouse and up a ladder to a loft. I put the tennis net underneath some seed-boxes. I carried the two rugs to the well in the cobbled yard and dropped them down it. I returned to the summer-house, thinking of doing something else, I wasn’t sure what. There was a smell of stale tobacco, coming from butts in the ashtray. On the floor I found a tie-pin with a greyhound’s head on it and I thought the treacherous, ugly-looking dog suited him. I threw it into the rhododendron shrubbery.

  ‘Poor chap,’ I heard Betty saying that evening. ‘It’s a horrid thing to have.’ She’d always noticed that he looked delicate, she added.

  ‘He doesn’t get enough to eat,’ my mother said.

  In spite of her sympathy, you could see that Betty wasn’t much interested in the man: she was knitting and trying to listen to Bandwagon. As far as Betty was concerned he was just some half-sick man whom my mother felt sorry for, the way she was supposed to feel sorry for Mrs Latham of Burrow Farm. But my mother wanted to go on talking about him, with a pretended casualness. It wasn’t the right work for a person who was tubercular, she said, serving in a shop.

  I imagined him in Blow’s, selling pins and knitting-needles and satin by the yard. I thought the work suited him in the same way as the greyhound’s-head tie-pin did.

  ‘What’s it mean, tubercular?’ I asked Belle Frye, and she said it meant you suffered from a disease in your lungs.

  ‘I expect you could fake it.’

  ‘What’d you want to do that for?’

  ‘To get out of the war. Like Mrs Laze shot off Roger Laze’s foot.’

  ‘Who’s faking it then?’

  ‘That man in Blow’s.’

  I couldn’t help myself: I wanted it to be known that he was faking a disease in his lungs. I wanted Belle Frye to tell people, to giggle at him in Blow’s, pointing him out. But in fact she wasn’t much interested. She nodded, and then shrugged in a jerky way she had, which meant she was impatient to be talking about something else. You could tell she didn’t know the man in Blow’s had become a friend of my mother’s. She hadn’t seen them on their bicycles; she wouldn’t have wanted to change the subject if she’d looked through the summer-house window and seen them with their cigarettes. Before that I hadn’t thought about her finding out, but now I wondered if perhaps she would some time, and if other people would. I imagined the giggling and the jokes made up by the boys in the Grammar School, and the severity of Mr Frye, and the astonishment of people who had liked my father.

  I prayed that none of that would happen. I prayed that the man would go away, or die. I prayed that my mother would be upset again because my father had been killed in the war, that she would remember the time when he had been in the farmhouse with us. I prayed
that whatever happened she would never discredit him by allowing the man from Blow’s to be there in the farmhouse, wearing my father’s clothes.

  Every day I prayed in the summer-house, standing close to the table with my eyes closed, holding on to the edge of it. I went there specially, and more vividly than ever I could see my father in the tropical garden of his eternal life. I could see old Mrs Ashburton walking among the plants with her husband, happy to be with him again. I could see the bearded face of the Almighty I prayed to, not smiling but seeming kind.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ was all my mother could say, whispering it between her bursts of tears. ‘Oh, my God.’

  Betty was crying too, but crying would do no good. I stood there between them in the kitchen, feeling I would never cry again. The telegram was still on the table, its torn envelope beside it. It might have said that Dick was coming home on leave, or that Colin Gregg was. It looked sinister on the table because Dick was dead.

  I might have said to my mother that it was my fault as well as hers. I might have said that I’d known I should pray only for Dick to be safe and yet hadn’t been able to prevent myself from asking, also, that she’d be as she used to be, that she wouldn’t ever marry the man from Blow’s.

  But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I’d prayed about the man, I just said it was a Thursday again.

  ‘Thursday?’ my mother whispered, and when I explained she didn’t understand. She hadn’t even noticed that the two times my father had come home it had been a Thursday and that the tennis party had been on a Thursday and that the other telegram had come on a Thursday too. She shook her head, as if denying all this repetition, and I wanted to hurt her when she did that because the denial seemed to be part and parcel of the summer-house and the man from Blow’s. More deliberately than a moment ago I again didn’t confess that I had ceased to concentrate on Dick’s safety in my prayers. Instead I said that in a war against the Germans you couldn’t afford to take chances, you couldn’t go kissing a man when your husband had been killed.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ my mother said again.

  Betty was staring at her, tears still coming from her eyes, bewildered because she’d never guessed about my mother and the man.

  ‘It has nothing to do with this,’ my mother whispered. ‘Nothing.’

  I thought Betty was going to attack my mother, maybe hammer at her face with her fists, or scratch her cheeks. But she only cried out, shrieking like some animal caught in a trap. The man was even married, she shrieked, his wife was away in the Women’s Army. It was horrible, worse than ever when you thought of that. She pointed at me and said I was right: Dick’s death was a judgement, things happened like that.

  My mother didn’t say anything. She stood there, white-faced, and then she said the fact that the man was married didn’t make anything worse.

  She spoke to Betty, looking at her, not at me. Her voice was quiet. She said the man intended to divorce his wife when the war came to an end. Of course what had happened wasn’t a judgement.

  ‘You won’t marry him now,’ Betty said, speaking as quietly.

  My mother didn’t reply. She stood there by the table and there was a silence. Then she said again that Dick’s death and the man were two different things. It was terrible, she said, to talk as we were talking at a time like this. Dick was dead: that was the only thing that mattered.

  ‘They used to go to the summer-house,’ I said. ‘They had two of our rugs there.’

  My mother turned her head away, and I wanted Betty to remember as I was remembering and I believe she did. I could sense her thinking of the days when my father was alive, when Dick used to smoke cigarettes on the way home from school, when we were all together in the farmhouse, not knowing we were happy. That time seemed to haunt the kitchen just then, as if my mother was thinking about it too, as if our remembering had willed it back.

  ‘He could never come here now,’ Betty said to my mother. ‘You couldn’t do it to Matilda.’

  I didn’t know why she should have particularly mentioned me since it concerned us all, and anyway I felt it was too late to bother about me. Too much had happened. I felt I’d been blown to pieces, as if I’d been in the war myself, as if I’d been defeated by it, as old Mrs Ashburton had been defeated by her war. The man would come to live in the farmhouse. He would wear my father’s clothes. He would sit by the range, reading the newspaper. He would eat at the table, and smile at me with his narrow teeth.

  My mother left the kitchen. She went upstairs and after a few minutes we heard her sobbing in her bedroom. Sobbing would do no good, I thought, any more than crying would.

  I walked by myself through the fields. Dick’s death wasn’t the same as my father’s. There was the same emptiness and the same feeling that I never wanted to eat anything again or to drink anything again, but it was different because this was the second time. Dick was dead and we’d get used to it: that was something I knew now.

  I didn’t cry and I didn’t pray. Praying seemed nonsense as I walked through the fields; praying was as silly as Belle Frye’s thinking that God was a carpenter or the Reverend Throataway saying God was in weeds. God wasn’t like that in the least. He wasn’t there to listen to what you prayed for. God was something else, something harder and more awful and more frightening.

  I should have known that the man from Blow’s would be married, that he’d have a wife who was helping in the war while he was going on about a disease. It was somehow all of a piece with Betty wanting to hit my mother, and Mrs Laze shooting off her son’s foot so that he could stay alive, and God being frightening. Facts and images rattled in my mind, senselessly jumbled, without rhyme or reason. Dick was there too, dead and unburied in his uniform, something ordinary to get used to.

  I sat in the sunshine on a bank that had primroses on it. I could have returned to the farmhouse and let my mother put her arms around me, but I continued to sit there, still not crying, remembering Mrs Ashburton saying that cruelty in wartime was natural. At the time I hadn’t understood what she’d meant, but I could feel the cruelty she’d spoken of now. I could feel it in myself, in my wanting my mother to be more unhappy than I was. Dick’s death was more bearable because she could be blamed, as Betty had blamed her in speaking of a judgement.

  3. The Drawing-room

  I am writing this in the drawing-room, in fact at Mrs Ashburton’s writing-desk. I don’t think of it as a story – and certainly not as a letter, for she can never read it – but as a record of what happened in her house after the war. If she hadn’t talked to me so much when I was nine there would not be this record to keep, and I would not still feel her presence. I do not understand what has happened, but as I slowly move towards the age she was when she talked to me I slowly understand a little more. What she said has haunted me for thirty-nine years. It has made me old before my time, and for this I am glad. I feel like a woman of sixty; I’m only forty-eight.

  In 1951 the house was bought by people called Gregary. ‘Filthy rich,’ my stepfather said.

  My stepfather had just been made manager at Blow’s drapery in the town. He used to drive off every day in a blue pre-war baby Ford, and I was always glad to see him go. I worked on the farm with Joe and Arthur, like my father had, like my brother Dick would have if he hadn’t been killed in the desert offensive.

  I thought it was typical of my stepfather to know that the Gregarys were rich. It was the kind of information he picked up in Blow’s, conversing across his counter, the gossip enlivening his chisel face. He said Mr Gregary was a businessman involved in the manufacture of motor-car components. He’d made a killing during the war: my stepfather called him a post-war tycoon.

  On my twenty-first birthday my mother insisted on giving a kind of party. We had it in the farmhouse kitchen. We cooked a turkey and a ham and my mother made a great fuss about the vegetables that had been my favourites when I was small: celery and parsnips and carrots, and roast potatoes. The carrots were to be in a parsley sauce, the parsn
ips roasted with the potatoes. We made trifle because trifle had been a childhood favourite also, and brandy-snaps. It was impossible not to recall the preparations for Mrs Ashburton’s tennis party on the Thursday before the war, but of course I didn’t mention that. My mother believed that I didn’t want to live in the present. I often felt her looking at me and when I turned my head I could see for a moment, before she changed her expression, that she believed I dwelt far too much on times that were not our own.

  Fifteen people came to my birthday party, not counting my mother and my stepfather and myself. My sister Betty, who had married Colin Gregg, came with her two children. Belle Frye had married Martin Draper, who’d inherited the mill at Bennett’s Cross: they brought the baby that had made the marriage necessary. Mr and Mrs Frye were there, and Miss Pritchard, who’d taught us all at school. Joe and Arthur, and Joe’s wife, Maudie, came; and Mrs Laze and her son Roger. The idea was, I believe, that I might one day marry Roger, but it wasn’t a prospect I relished. He limped because of his foot, and he hardly ever spoke, being shy like his mother. I didn’t dislike him, I just didn’t want to marry him.

  All the time I kept wishing my mother hadn’t given this party. It made me think of my other birthdays. Not that there was any reason to avoid doing that, except that naturally the past seemed better, especially the distant past, before the war. Miss Pritchard was the only person I ever talked to about things like that. ‘Come and talk to me whenever you want to, Matilda,’ she’d said one day in 1944, and ever since I’d been visiting her in her tiny sitting-room, knowing she was lonely because she was retired now. In a way our conversations reminded me of my conversations with Mrs Ashburton, except that it was Mrs Ashburton, not I, who used to do the talking and half the time I hadn’t understood her. It was I who’d suggested that Miss Pritchard should come to my birthday party. I’d heard my mother saying to my stepfather that she couldn’t understand it: she thought it extraordinary that I didn’t want to invite lots of the boys I’d been at the Grammar School with, that I didn’t want to have a gramophone going and tables of whist. My stepfather said he didn’t think people played whist like they used to. He stood up for me, the way he always did, even though he didn’t know I was listening. He made such efforts and still I couldn’t like him.