The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘Sandra Pond,’ Sarah said sharply. ‘In the polishing department.’

  ‘Polishing, eh? Nice party, Sandra?’

  ‘If you like the type of thing.’

  ‘The drink’s good.’

  ‘It’s free, you mean.’

  ‘That’s what I mean, girlie.’

  He went away. Sandra Pond laughed. She was a little drunk herself, she confessed. It took her like that, quite suddenly, after the fifth or sixth whisky mac. ‘How about you, Sarah?’

  ‘I’m just about right.’

  ‘D’you know what I’d like to do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She looked away, coyly pouting, the dimples in her cheeks working. ‘No, I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you, Sarah.’

  The notion that the girl wanted to share her flat had remained with Sarah while she’d danced with Mr Priddy and while the man had swayed in front of them, saying the party was nice. It was still there now, at the very front of her mind, beginning to dominate everything else. It seemed to be an unspoken thought between them, deliberately placed there by the girl while she’d been saying that Tufnell Park was nice.

  ‘Actually I’m quite pissed,’ the girl was saying now, giggling.

  The expression grated on Sarah. She could never see why people had to converse in an obscene way. It didn’t in any way whatsoever make sense for the girl to say she was urinated when she meant drunk.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sandra Pond said.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I offended you. It showed in your face. I’m sorry, Sarah.’

  ‘Actually, it’s time for me to go home.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’ve driven you away.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Have another drink. I’ve spoiled your evening.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘You know how it is: everything smooth and unruffled and then everything going bonk! You know, Sarah?’

  Sarah frowned, shaking her head.

  ‘Like if you looked down a well and then you dropped a stone in. Know what I mean? There’d be a disturbance. I had a friend said that to me once, we was very close. Hazel she was called.’

  ‘Well, I do know what she meant of course –’

  ‘D’you really, Sarah?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘She was talking about people, see. What happens to people. Like you meet someone, Sarah.’

  It was the kind of cliché that Sarah didn’t care for, still water and someone throwing a stone. It was silly and half-baked, but typical in a way of what was said at an office party.

  ‘She was like that,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘She talked like that, did Hazel.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘When she met me, she meant. A disturbance.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Merry Christmas then, Sarah.’

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  As she edged her way around the dance-floor, she felt glad she’d escaped and was thinking that when Mr Everend collided with her almost. He always gave her a lift home after the Christmas party. He offered to now, sensing that she was ready to go. But he insisted on a last dance and while they danced he thanked her for all the work she’d done during the year, and for being patient with him, which she really hadn’t had to. ‘A last drink,’ he said as they stepped off the dance-floor, just beside where the drinks table was. He found her a gin and tonic and had a tomato juice himself.

  In the arms of a black-haired youth, Sandra Pond danced by while the band played ‘Just One of Those Things’; her thin arms were around the youth’s neck, her head lolled on his shoulder. Her eyes were blank, Sarah noticed in the moment it took the couple to dance by.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Sarah,’ Mr Everend said.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Everend.’

  That night she lay in bed, feeling woozy after all the gin and tonic. Not really wishing to, and yet slowly and quite carefully, she went over everything that had happened since Sandra Pond had addressed her in the Ladies’ Powder Room. She remembered the grip of the girl’s fingers and the pout of her lips, and her bitterness when she spoke of Pollock-Brown and even when she didn’t. Had she really walked in on the dispatch manager’s wife and Chumm in a store-room? It was odd the way she’d spoken to her in the Ladies’ Powder Room, odd the way she’d spoken of Tufnell Park. For some minutes she imagined Sandra Pond sharing her flat with her as Elizabeth had, sharing the things in the kitchen cupboards, the Special Κ and the marmalade and the sugar. The girl was seventeen years younger, she didn’t have the same background or presumably the same interests. Sarah smiled a little in the darkness, thinking about what people would say if she began to share her flat with a polisher of plastic lampshades. People would think she was mad, her brother and his wife in their Harrogate rectory, her other brother and his wife in Africa, the friends whose parties she went to, the Bach choir, Elizabeth, Anne in Montreal. And of course they would all be right. She was well-to-do and middle-aged and plain. Side by side with Mr Everend she had found her way to the top of the firm. She would retire one day and that would be that. It didn’t make sense to share a flat with someone like Sandra Pond, but she sensed that had she stayed in Sandra Pond’s company the flat would have been openly mentioned. And yet surely it must be as clear to Sandra Pond as it would be to everyone else that they’d make a most ill-assorted couple? What was in the girl’s mind, that she could see the picture so differently? Thinking about it, Sarah could find only a single piece of common ground between them. It wasn’t even properly real, based neither on a process of deduction or indeed of observation. It was an instinct that Sandra Pond, unlike Elizabeth or Anne, wouldn’t marry. And for some reason Sarah sensed that Sandra Pond wouldn’t be difficult, as the girl she’d tried to share the flat with after Elizabeth’s departure had been. Her mind rebelliously wandered, throwing up flights of fancy that she considered silly almost as soon as they came to her, flights of fancy in which she educated Sandra Pond and discovered in her an intelligence that was on a par with her own, in which slowly a real friendship developed, and why should it not? Clearly there was a lot that Sandra Pond didn’t know. Sarah doubted that the girl had ever been inside a theatre in her life, except maybe to see something like the Black and White Minstrel Show or a Christmas pantomime. She wondered if she ever opened a book or listened to music or went to an art gallery.

  For a week, at odd moments of the day, or at night, Sarah wondered about Sandra Pond. She half expected that she might hear from her, that the slack accents would drift over her telephone, suggesting a drink. But she didn’t. Instead, with the flights of fancy that she considered silly, she saw herself persevering in her patience and finally rewarded as Sandra Pond, calling on a sensitivity that had remained unaired till now, responded. Something assured Sarah that such a sensitivity was there: increasingly unable to prevent herself, she went over the course of their conversation in search of signs of it. And then, as if rejecting the extravagances of a dream in the first moments of consciousness, she would reject the fantasies that had not required a surrender to sleep. But all of them returned.

  Sarah spent Christmas that year with Elizabeth and her family in Cricklewood. She relaxed with gin and tonic, listened to Elizabeth’s husband complaining about his sister, from whom he had just bought a faulty car. She received presents and gave them, she helped to cook the Christmas dinner. Preparing stuffing for the turkey, she heard herself saying:

  ‘It’s the only thing that worries me, being alone when I’m old.’

  Elizabeth, plumper than ever this Christmas, expressed surprise by wrinkling her nose, which was a habit with her.

  ‘Oh, but you manage so well.’

  ‘Actually the future looks a little bleak.’

  ‘Oh, Sarah, what nonsense!’

  It was, and Sarah knew it was: she had learnt how to live alone. There was nothing nicer than coming back to the flat and putting a record on, pouring herself a drink and
just sitting there listening to Mozart. There was nothing nicer than not having to consider someone else. She’d only shared the flat with Elizabeth in the first place because it had been necessary financially. That period was past.

  ‘It’s just that whatever shall I do when I finish at Pollock-Brown?’

  ‘But that’s years away.’

  ‘Not really. Thirteen years. When I’m sixty.’

  ‘They’ll keep you on, surely? If you want to stay?’

  ‘Mr Everend will be gone. I don’t think I’d want to work for anyone else. No, I’ll retire at sixty. According to the book.’

  ‘But, my dear, you’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘I keep thinking of the flat, alone in it.’

  ‘You’ve been alone in it for years.’

  ‘I know.’

  She placed more stuffing in the turkey and pressed it down with a wooden spoon. Sandra Pond would be forty-three when she was sixty. She’d probably look much the same, a little grey in her hair perhaps; she’d never run to fat.

  ‘How are things going?’ Elizabeth’s husband demanded, coming into the kitchen in a breezy mood. ‘Drink for Sarah?’

  She smiled at him as he took tonic bottles from the fridge. ‘I think she’s got the change,’ she heard Elizabeth saying to him later. ‘Poor thing’s gone all jittery.’

  Sarah didn’t mention the subject of her flat again that Christmas.

  Well Im a les and I thought you was as well, the letter said. Im sorry Sarah I didnt’ mean to of end you I didnt’ no a thing about you, Ive loved other girls but not like you not as much. I really do love you Sarah. Im going to leave bloody PB because I dont want reminding every time I walk into that bloody canteen. What I wanted was to dance with you remember when I said I wanted to do something? Thats what I ment when I said that. Sandra Pond.

  Sarah tried not to think about the letter, which both upset and shocked her. She tried to forget the whole thing, the meeting with Sandra Pond and how she’d felt herself drawn towards having a friendship with the girl. It made her shiver when she thought about all that the letter suggested, it even made her feel a little sick.

  Such relationships between women had been talked about at school and often occurred in newspaper reports and in books, on the television even. Sarah had occasionally wondered if this woman or that might possibly possess lesbian tendencies, but she had done so without much real interest and had certainly never wondered about such tendencies in relation to herself. But now, just as she had been unable to prevent her mind from engaging in flights of fancy after her meeting with Sandra Pond, she was unable to prevent it from straying about in directions that were inspired by the girl’s letter. The man called George, who over the years had become the root of many fantasies, lost his identity to that of Sandra Pond. Yet it was all different because revulsion, not present before, seemed everywhere now. Was it curiosity of a kind, Sarah wondered, that drove her on, enslaving her to fancies she did not care for? No longer did she think of them as silly; malicious rather, certainly malign, like the stuff of nightmares. Grimly she watched while Sandra Pond crossed the floor of a room, coming closer to her, smiling at her. As the man called George had, the hands of the girl undid the buttons of her dress, and then it seemed that fear was added to revulsion. ‘I really do love you, Sarah,’ the slack voice said, as it had said in the letter, as no other voice had ever said. The passion had a cloying kind of headiness about it, like drunkenness. It was adoration, the girl said, whispering now: it was adoration for every inch of skin and every single hair that grew from Sarah’s body and every light in her eyes, and the beauty of her plainness. The pouting lips came closer to her own, the dimples danced. And Sarah, then, would find herself weeping.

  She never knew why she wept and assumed it was simply an extension of her revulsion. She felt no desire to have this kind of relationship with a person of her own sex. She didn’t want a girl’s lips leaving lipstick on her own, she didn’t want to experience their softness or the softness of the body that went with them. She didn’t want to experience a smell of scent, or painted fingernails.

  In rational moments Sarah said to herself that as time passed this nightmare would fog over, as other occurrences in her life had fogged over with the passing of time. She had destroyed the letter almost as soon as she’d read it. She had made inquiries: Sandra Pond, as she’d promised, had left Pollock-Brown.

  Sarah visited Elizabeth and her family more frequently, she spent a weekend with her brother and his wife in Harrogate, she wrote at length to her other brother, saying they must not lose touch. She forced her mind back into childhood, to which it had regularly and naturally drifted before its invasion by Sandra Pond. It was a deliberate journey now, requiring discipline and concentration, but it was possible to make. Her father ambled into the sitting-room of the rectory, the spaniel called Dodge ambling after him. The wood fire brightly burned as indoor games were played, no one sulky or out of temper. ‘And the consequences were,’ her brother who was an engineer said, ‘fire over England.’ In the sunny garden she read about the girls of the Chalet School. Her brothers, in short trousers and flannel shirts, ran about catching wasps in jam jars. ‘The peace of God,’ her father’s voice murmured, drifting over his small congregation. ‘Of course you’ll grow up pretty,’ her mother softly promised, wiping away her tears.

  The passing of time did help. The face of Sandra Pond faded a little, the wording of the ill-written letter became jumbled and uncertain. She would never hear of the girl again, she said to herself, and with an effort that lessened as more months passed by she continued to conjure up the distant world of the rectory.

  Then, one Saturday morning in November, nearly a year after the Christmas party, Sandra Pond was there in the flesh again. She was in the Express Dairy, where Sarah always did her Saturday-morning shopping, and as soon as she saw her Sarah knew the girl had followed her into the shop. She felt faint and sickish when Sandra Pond smiled her pouting smile and the two dimples danced. She felt the blood draining away from her face and a tightening in her throat.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sandra Pond said instead of saying hullo, just standing there.

  Sarah had a tin of Crosse and Blackwell’s soup in one hand and a wire shopping basket in the other. She didn’t know what to say. She thought she probably couldn’t say anything even if she tried.

  ‘I just wanted to say I was sorry,’ Sandra Pond said. ‘I’ve had it on my mind, Miss Machaen.’

  Sarah shook her head. She put the Crosse and Blackwell’s soup back on the stack of tins.

  ‘I shouldn’t have written that letter’s what I mean.’

  The girl didn’t look well. She seemed to have a cold. She didn’t look as pretty as she had at the Christmas party. She wore a brown tweed coat which wasn’t very smart. Her shoes were cheap-looking.

  ‘I don’t know why I did it, Miss Machaen.’

  Sarah tried to smile because she didn’t want to be unkind. She ran her tongue about the inside of her mouth, which was dry, as though she’d eaten salt. She said:

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does to me. I couldn’t sleep nights.’

  ‘It was just a misunderstanding.’

  Sandra Pond didn’t say anything. She let a silence gather, and Sarah realized that she was doing so deliberately. Sandra Pond had come back to see how things were, to discover if, with time, the idea appealed to Sarah now, if she’d come to terms with the strangeriess of it. As she stood there with the wire basket, she was aware that Sandra Pond had waited for an answer to her letter, that even before that, at the Christmas party, she had hoped for some sign. The girl was staring down at the cream-coloured tiles of the floor, her hands awkwardly by her sides.

  The flights of fancy tumbled into Sarah’s mind, jogging each other for precedence. They came in flashes: she and Sandra Pond sitting down to a meal, and walking into the foyer of a theatre, and looking at the Madonna of the Meadow in the National Gallery, and then a scene
like the scene with the man called George occurred.

  Sandra Pond looked up and at once the flights of fancy snapped out, like lights extinguished. What would people say? Sarah thought again, as she had on the night of the party. What would her brothers say to see passion thumping at their sister from the eyes of Sandra Pond? What would Elizabeth say, or Anne, or Mr Everend, or her dead father and mother? Would they cry out, amazed and yet delighted, that her plainness should inspire all this, that her plainness at last was beauty? Or would they shudder with disgust?

  ‘I can’t help being,’ Sandra Pond said, ‘the way I am.’

  Sarah shook her head, trying to make the gesture seem sympathetic. She wanted to explain that she knew the girl had come specially back, to see what passing time had done, but she could not bring herself to. To have mentioned passing time in that way would have begun another kind of conversation. It was all ridiculous, standing here in the Express Dairy.

  ‘I just wanted to say that and to say I was sorry. Thank you for listening, Miss Machaen.’

  She was moving away, the heels of her shoes making a clicking noise on the cream-tiled floor. The smooth back of her head was outlined against packets of breakfast cereals and then against stacks of Mother’s Pride bread. Something about her shoulders suggested to Sarah that she was holding back tears.

  ‘Excuse me, dear,’ a woman said, poking around Sarah to reach for oxtail soup.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ Mechanically she smiled. She felt shaky and wondered if her face had gone pale. She couldn’t imagine eating any of the food she’d selected. She couldn’t imagine opening a tin or unwrapping butter without being overcome by the memory of Sandra Pond’s sudden advent in the shop. Her instinct was to replace the goods on the shelves and she almost did so. But it seemed too much of a gesture, and too silly. Instead she carried the wire basket to the cashier and paid for what she’d chosen, transferring everything into her shopping-bag.

  She walked away from the Express Dairy, by the newsagent’s and the butcher’s and the Martinez Dry Cleaners, who were offering a bargain, three garments cleaned for the normal price of one. She felt, as she had when the man called George had suddenly lost interest in her body, a pain inside her somewhere.