The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  He hadn’t married again. He lived on his own in a flat in Waterloo Road, his income accumulating from a variety of sources, several of them to do with horse-racing. He’d explained that to her when she’d asked him once about this, wondering if he went to an office every day. She had never been to his flat, but he had described it to her because she’d wondered about that too.

  ‘We’ll take the trifle?’ he suggested, the only alternative offered by Fitzgerald’s being something called Bonanza Cream, over which Tom the waiter had years ago strenuously shaken his head.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

  When they’d finished it her father had a glass of whiskey and Cecilia another orange soda, and then he lit the third of his afternoon’s cigarettes. They never had lunch upstairs at Fitzgerald’s, where the restaurant proper was. ‘Now come and I’ll show you,’ her father had offered a year or so ago, and they had stared through a glass door that had the word Fitzgerald’s in elaborate letters running diagonally across it. Men and women sat at tables covered with pink tablecloths and with scarlet-shaded electric lamps on them, the lamps alight even though it was the afternoon. ‘Ah no, it’s nicer downstairs,’ her father had insisted, but Cecilia hadn’t entirely agreed, for downstairs in Fitzgerald’s possessed none of that cosiness. There were green tiles instead of the pink peacock wallpaper of the upper room, and stark rows of gin and whiskey bottles, and a workmanlike mahogany food-lift that banged up and down loaded with plates of oysters. Tom the waiter was really a barman, and the customers were all men. Cecilia had never seen a woman downstairs in Fitzgerald’s.

  ‘Bedad, isn’t her ladyship growing up,’ Tom said when her father had finished his whiskey and they both stood up. ‘Sure, it’s hardly a day ago she was a chiseler.’

  ‘Hardly a day,’ Cecilia’s father agreed, and Cecilia blushed again, glancing down at her wrists because she didn’t know where else to look. She didn’t like her wrists. They were the thinnest in Class Three, which was a fact she knew because a week ago one of the boys had measured everyone’s wrists with a piece of string. She didn’t like the black hair that hung down on either side of her face because it wasn’t curly like her mother’s. She didn’t like her eyes and she didn’t like the shape of her mouth, but the boy who had measured her wrists said she was the prettiest girl in Class Three. Other people said that too.

  ‘She’s a credit to yourself, sir,’ Tom said, scooping up notes and coins from the bar. ‘Thanks very much.’

  Her father held her coat for her, taking it from a peg by the door. It and the hat he handed her were part of her school uniform, both of them green, the hat with a pale blue band. He didn’t put on his own overcoat, saying that the afternoon wasn’t chilly. He never wore a hat.

  They walked past Christ Church Cathedral, towards Grafton Street. Their lunchtime encounters always took place on a Saturday, and sometimes in the middle of one Cecilia’s father would reveal that he had tickets for a rugby international at Lansdowne Road, or a taxi-driver would arrive in Fitzgerald’s to take them to the races at Phoenix Park. Sometimes they’d walk over to the Museum or the National Gallery. Cecilia’s father no longer drove a car.

  ‘Will we go to the pictures?’ he said today. ‘Reap the Wild Wind at the Grafton?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer because he knew she’d want to go. He walked a little ahead of her, tidy in his darkish suit, his overcoat over his arm. On the steps of the cinema he gave her some money to go up to Noblett’s to buy chocolate and when she returned he was waiting with the tickets in his hand. She smiled at him, thanking him. She often wondered if he was lonely in his flat, and at the back of her mind she had an idea that what she’d like best when she left school would be to look after him there. It gave her a warm feeling in her stomach when she imagined the flat he had described and thought about cooking meals for him in its tiny kitchen.

  After the cinema they had tea in Roberts’ and then he walked with her to the bus stop in the centre of the city. On the way he told her about an elderly couple in the café who’d addressed him by name, people who lived out in Greystones and bred Great Danes. ‘Till next time then,’ he said as the bus drew in, and kissed her shyly, in the manner of someone not used to kissing people.

  She waved to him from her seat by the window and watched him turn and become lost in the crowded street. He would call in at a few public houses on his way back to the flat in Waterloo Road, places he often referred to by name, Toner’s and O’Donoghue’s and the upstairs lounge of Mooney’s, places where he met his friends and talked about racing. She imagined him there, with men like the man who’d asked if he should chance his money on Persian Gulf. But again she wondered if he was lonely.

  It was already dark and had begun to rain by the time Cecilia reached the white house in Chapelizod where her father had once lived but which was occupied now by her mother and Ronan, and by Cecilia and her two half-brothers. A stove, with baskets of logs on either side of it, burned in the square, lofty hall where she took her coat and hat off. The brass door-plates and handles gleamed in the electric light. From the drawing-room came the sound of the wireless. ‘Ah, the wanderer’s returned,’ Ronan murmured when she entered, smiling, making her welcome.

  Her half-brothers were constructing a windmill out of Meccano on the floor. Her mother and Ronan were sitting close together, he in an armchair, she on the hearthrug. They were going out that night, Cecilia could tell because her mother’s face was already made up: cerise lipstick and mascara, smudges of shadow beneath her eyes that accentuated their brownness, the same brown as her own. Her mother was petite and dark-haired – like Claudette Colbert, as Maureen Finnegan had once said.

  ‘Hullo,’ her mother said. ‘Nice time?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  She didn’t say anything else because they were listening to the wireless. Her father would be drinking more stout, she thought, his overcoat on a chair beside him, a fresh cigarette in his mouth. There wasn’t a public house between Stephen’s Green and Waterloo Road in which he wouldn’t know somebody. Of course he wasn’t lonely.

  The voices on the wireless told jokes, a girl sang a song about a nightingale. Cecilia glanced at her mother and Ronan, she snuggling against his legs, his hand on her shoulder. Ronan was very thin, with a craggy face and a smile that came languidly on to his lips and died away languidly also. He was never cross: in the family, anger didn’t play the part it did in the households of several of Cecilia’s school friends, where there was fear of a father or a mother. Every Sunday she went with Ronan to the workshops where the furniture was made and he showed her what had been begun or completed during the week. She loved the smell of wood-shavings and glue and French polish.

  When the programme on the wireless came to an end her mother rose to go upstairs, to finish getting ready. Ronan muttered lazily that he supposed he’d have to get himself into a suit. He stacked logs on to the fire and set the fireguard in place. ‘Your tweed one’s ironed,’ Cecilia’s mother reminded him sternly before she left the room. He grimaced at the boys, who were showing him their completed windmill. Then he grimaced at Cecilia. It was a joke in the family that Ronan never wanted to put on a suit.

  Cecilia went to a school across the city from Chapelizod, in Ranelagh. It was an unusual place in the Dublin of that time, catering for both boys and girls, for Catholics and Protestants and Jews, and for Mohammedans when that rare need arose. Overflowing from a large suburban house into the huts and prefabricated buildings that served as extra classrooms, it was run by a headmaster, assisted by a staff of both sexes. There were sixty-eight pupils.

  In spite of the superficially exotic nature of this establishment Cecilia was the only child whose parents had been divorced, and in the kind of conversations she began to have when she was twelve the details of that were increasingly a subject of curiosity. Divorce had a whiff of Hollywood and wickedness. Betsy Bloom claimed to have observed her parents naked on their bed, engaged in the act of love; Enid
Healy’s father had run amok with a sofa leg. What had happened within the privacy of Cecilia’s family belonged in that same realm, and Cecilia was questioned closely. Even though her parents’ divorce had had to be obtained in England owing to the shortcomings of the Irish law, the events leading up to it must clearly have occurred in Chapelizod. Had Cecilia ever walked into a room and found her mother and her stepfather up to something? Was it true that her mother and her stepfather used to meet for cocktails in the Gresham Hotel? What exactly were cocktails? Had detectives been involved? Her mother and Ronan were glanced at with interest on the very few occasions when they put in an appearance at a school function, and it was agreed that they lived uρ to the roles they had been cast in. The clothes her mother wore were not like the all-purpose garments of Mrs O’Reily-Hamirton or Kitty Benson’s mother. ‘Sophisticated,’ Maureen Finnegan had pronounced. ‘Chic.’

  But in the end Cecilia was aware of her schoolfellows’ disappointment. There had been no detectives that she could recall, and she didn’t know if there had been meetings in the Gresham Hotel. She had never walked into a room to find something untoward taking place and she could remember no quarrels – nothing that was even faintly in the same category as Enid Healy’ father brandishing a sofa leg. In America, so the newspapers said, kidnappings occasionally took place when the estranged couples of divorce could not accept the dictates of the law where their children were concerned. ‘Your daddy never try that?’ Maureen Finnegan hopefully prompted, and Cecilia had to laugh at the absurdity of it. A satisfactory arrangement had been made, she explained for the umpteenth time, knowing it sounded dreary: everyone was content.

  The headmaster of the school once spoke to her of the divorce also, though only in passing. He was a massively proportioned man known as the Bull, who shambled about the huts and prefabricated buildings calling out names in the middle of a lesson, ticking his way down the columns of his enormous roll-book. Often he would pause as if he had forgotten what he was about and for a moment or two would whistle through his breath ‘The British Grenadiers’, the marching song of the regiment in which he had once served with distinction. The only tasks he had ever been known to perform were the calling out of names and the issuing of an occasional vague announcement at the morning assemblies which were conducted by Mr Horan. Otherwise he remained lodged in his own cloudlands, a faint, blue-suited presence, benignly unaware of the feuds that stormed among his staff or the nature of the sixty-eight children whose immediate destinies had been placed in his care.

  To Cecilia’s considerable surprise the Bull sent for her one morning, the summons interrupting one of Miss O’shaughnessy’s science periods. Miss O’shaughnessy was displaying how a piece of litmus paper had impressively changed colour, and when Mickey, the odd-job boy, entered the classroom and said that the headmaster wanted Cecilia an immediate whispering broke out. The substance of this was that a death must have taken place.

  ‘Ah,’ the Bull said when Cecilia entered the study where he ate all his meals, read the Irish Times and interviewed prospective parents. His breakfast tray was still on his desk, a paper-backed Sexton Blake adventure story beside it. ‘Ah,’ he said again, and did not continue. His bachelor existence was nicely expressed by the bleak furnishings of the room, the row of pipes above a damply smouldering fire, the insignia of the Grenadier Guards scattered on darkly panelled walls.

  ‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ Cecilia eventually inquired, for the suggestion that a death might have occurred still echoed as she stood there.

  The headmaster regarded her without severity. The breathy whistling of the marching song began as he reached for a pipe and slowly filled it with tobacco. The whistling ceased. He said:

  ‘The fees are sometimes a little tardy. The circumstances are unusual, since you are not regularly in touch with your father. But I would be obliged, when next you see him, if you would just say that the fees have of late been tardy.’

  A match was struck, the tobacco ignited. Cecilia was not formally dismissed, but the headmaster’s immense hand seized the Sexton Blake adventure story, indicating that the interview was over. It had never occurred to her before that it was her father, not her mother and Ronan, who paid her school fees. Her father had never in his life visited the school, as her mother and Ronan had. It was strange that he should be responsible for the fees, and Cecilia resolved to thank him when next she saw him. It was also embarrassing that they were sometimes late.

  ‘Ah,’ the Bull said when she had reached the door. ‘You’re – ah – all right, are you? The – ah – family trouble…?’

  ‘Oh, that’s all over, sir.’

  ‘So it is. So it is. And everything…?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, sir.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  Interest in the divorce had dwindled and might even have dissipated entirely had not the odd behaviour of a boy called Abrahamson begun. Quite out of the blue, about a month after the Saturday on which Cecilia and her father had gone to see Reap the Wild Wind, Abrahamson began to stare at her.

  In the big classroom where Mr Horan’s morning assemblies were held his eyes repeatedly darted over her features, and whenever they met in a corridor or by the tennis courts he would glance at her sharply and then glance away again, trying to do so before she noticed. Abrahamson’s father was the solicitor to the furniture-making business and because of that Abrahamson occasionally turned up in the house in Chapelizod. No one else from the school did so, Chapelizod being too distant from the neighbourhoods where most of the school’s sixty-eight pupils lived. Abrahamson was younger than Cecilia, a small olive-skinned boy whom Cecilia had many times entertained in the nursery while his parents sat downstairs, having a drink. He was an only child, self-effacing and anxious not to be a nuisance: when he came to Chapelizod now he obligingly played with Cecilia’s half-brothers, humping them about the garden on his back or acting the unimportant parts in the playlets they composed.

  At school he was always called by his surname and was famous for his brains. He was neither popular nor unpopular, content to remain on the perimeter of things. Because of this, Cecilia found it difficult to approach him about his staring, and the cleverness that was reflected in the liquid depths of his eyes induced a certain apprehension. But since his interest in her showed no sign of diminishing she decided she’d have to point out that she found it discomfiting. One showery afternoon, on the way down the shrubbed avenue of the school, she questioned him.

  Being taller than the boy and his voice being softly pitched, Cecilia had to bend over him to catch his replies. He had a way of smiling when he spoke – a smile, so everyone said, that had to do with his thoughts rather than with any conversation he happened to be having at the time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, Cecilia. I didn’t know I was doing it.’

  ‘You’ve been doing it for weeks, Abrahamson.’

  He nodded, obligingly accepting the truth of the accusation. And since an explanation was required, he obligingly offered one.

  ‘It’s just that when you reach a certain age the features of your face aren’t those of a child any more. I read it in a book: a child’s face disguises its real features, but at a certain age the disguise falls off. D’you understand, Cecilia?’

  ‘No, I don’t. And I don’t know why you’ve picked on me just because of something you read in a book.’

  ‘It happens to everyone, Cecilia.’

  ‘You don’t go round staring at everyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry, Cecilia.’

  Abrahamson stopped and opened the black case in which he carried his school-books. Cecilia thought that in some clever way he was going to produce from it an explanation that made more sense. She waited without pressing the matter. On the avenue boys kicked each other, throwing caps about. Miss O’shaughnessy passed on her motorized bicycle. Mr Horan strode by with his violin.

  ‘Like one?’ Abrahamson had taken from his case a
carton containing two small, garishly iced cakes. ‘Go on, really.’

  She took the raspberry-coloured one, after which Abrahamson meticulously closed the carton and returned it to his case. Every day he came to school with two of these cakes, supplied by his mother for consumption during the eleven o’clock break. He sold them to anyone who had a few pence to spare, and if he didn’t sell them at school he did so to a girl in a newsagent’s shop which he passed on his journey home.

  ‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he said as they walked on. ‘I’m sorry you noticed.’

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing.’

  ‘Call it quits now, will we?’ There was the slightest of gestures towards the remains of the cake, sticky in Cecilia’s hand. Abrahamson’s tone was softer than ever, his distant smile an echo from his private world. It was said that he played chess games in his head.

  ‘I’d like to know, Abrahamson.’

  His thin shoulders just perceptibly shifted up and down. He appeared to be stating that Cecilia was foolish to insist, and to be stating as well that if she continued to insist he did not intend to waste time and energy in argument. They had passed through the gates of the school and were standing on the street, waiting for a number 11 bus.

  ‘It’s odd,’ he said, ‘if you want to know. Your father and all that.’

  ‘Odd?’

  The bus drew up. They mounted to the upper deck. When they sat down Abrahamson stared out of the window. It was as if he had already said everything that was necessary, as if Cecilia should effortlessly be able to deduce the rest. She had to nudge him with her elbow, and then – politely and very swiftly – he glanced at her, silently apologizing for her inability to understand the obvious. A pity, his small face declared, a shame to have to carry this burden of stupidity.