The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  ‘No,’ Strafe said. ‘No, we really cannot, dear.’

  ‘This place that is an idyll for us was an idyll for them too: the trees, the ferns, the wild roses near the water spring, the very sea and sun they shared. There was a cottage lost in the middle of the woods: they sometimes looked for that. They played a game, a kind of hide-and-seek. People in a white farmhouse gave them milk.’

  For the second time I offered Cynthia the plate of scones and for the second time she pointedly ignored me. Her cup of tea hadn’t been touched. Dekko took a scone and cheerfully said:

  ‘All’s well that’s over.’

  But Cynthia appeared to have drifted back into a daze, and I wondered again if it could really be possible that the experience had unhinged her. Unable to help myself, I saw her being led away from the hotel, helped into the back of a blue van, something like an ambulance. She was talking about the children again, how they had planned to marry and keep a sweetshop.

  ‘Take it easy, dear,’ Strafe said, which I followed up by suggesting for the second time that she should make an effort to drink her tea.

  ‘Has it to do with the streets they came from? Or the history they learnt, he from his Christian Brothers, she from her nuns? History is unfinished in this island; long since it has come to a stop in Surrey.’

  Dekko said, and I really had to hand it to him:

  ‘Cynth, we have to put it behind us.’

  It didn’t do any good. Cynthia just went rambling on, speaking again of the girl being taught by nuns, and the boy by Christian Brothers. She began to recite the history they might have learnt, the way she sometimes did when we were driving through an area that had historical connections. ‘Can you imagine,’ she embarrassingly asked, Our very favourite places bitter with disaffection, with plotting and revenge? Can you imagine the treacherous murder of Shane O’Neill the Proud?’

  Dekko made a little sideways gesture of his head, politely marvelling. Strafe seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. Confusion ran through Irish history, Cynthia said, like convolvulus in a hedgerow. On 24 May 1487, a boy of ten called Lambert Simnel, brought to Dublin by a priest from Oxford, was declared Edward VI of all England and Ireland, crowned with a golden circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. On 24 May 1798, here in Antrim, Presbyterian farmers fought for a common cause with their Catholic labourers. She paused and looked at Strafe. Chaos and contradiction, she informed him, were hidden everywhere beneath nice-sounding names. ‘The Battle of the Yellow Ford,’ she suddenly chanted in a singsong way that sounded thoroughly, peculiar, ‘the Statutes of Kilkenny. The Battle of Glenmama, the Convention of Drumceat. The Act of Settlement, the Renunciation Act. The Act of Union, the Toleration Act. Just so much history it sounds like now, yet people starved or died while other people watched. A language was lost, a faith forbidden. Famine followed revolt, plantation followed that. But it was people who were struck into the soil of other people’s land, not forests of new trees; and it was greed and treachery that spread as a disease among them all. No wonder unease clings to these shreds of history and shots ring out in answer to the mockery of drums. No wonder the air is nervy with suspicion.’

  There was an extremely awkward silence when she ceased to speak. Dekko nodded, doing his best to be companionable. Strafe nodded also. I simply examined the pattern of roses on our teatime china, not knowing what else to do. Eventually Dekko said: ‘What an awful lot you know, Cynth!’

  ‘Cynthia’s always been interested,’ Strafe said. ‘Always ‘had a first-rate memory.’

  ‘Those children of the streets are part of the battles and the Acts,’ she went on, seeming quite unaware that her talk was literally almost crazy. ‘They’re part of the blood that flowed around those nice-sounding names.’ She paused, and for a moment seemed disinclined to continue. Then she said:

  ‘The second time they came here the house was being rebuilt. There were concrete-mixers, and lorries drawn up on the grass, noise and scaffolding everywhere. They watched all through another afternoon and then they went their different ways: their childhood was over, lost with their idyll. He became a dockyard clerk. She went to London, to work in a betting shop.’

  ‘My dear,’ Strafe said very gently, ‘it’s interesting, everything you say, but it really hardly concerns us.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Quite emphatically Cynthia shook her head, appearing wholly to agree. ‘They were degenerate, awful creatures. They must have been.’

  ‘No one’s saying that, my dear.’

  ‘Their story should have ended there, he in the docklands of Belfast, she recording bets. Their complicated childhood love should just have dissipated, as such love often does. But somehow nothing was as neat as that.’

  Dekko, in an effort to lighten the conversation, mentioned a boy called Gollsol who’d been at school with Strafe and himself, who’d formed a romantic attachment for the daughter of one of the groundsmen and had later actually married her. There was a silence for a moment, then Cynthia, without emotion, said:

  ‘You none of you care. You sit there not caring that two people are dead.’

  ‘Two people, Cynthia?’ I said.

  ‘For God’s sake, I’m telling you!’ she cried. ‘That girl was murdered in a room in Maida Vale.’

  Although there is something between Strafe and myself, I do try my best to be at peace about it. I go to church and take communion, and I know Strafe occasionally does too, though not as often as perhaps he might. Cynthia has no interest in that side of life, and it rankled with me now to hear her blaspheming so casually, and so casually speaking about death in Maida Vale on top of all this stuff about history and children. Strafe was shaking his head, clearly believing that Cynthia didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Cynthia dear,’ I began, ‘are you sure you’re not muddling something up here? You’ve been upset, you’ve had a nightmare: don’t you think your imagination, or something you’ve been reading –’

  ‘Bombs don’t go off on their own. Death doesn’t just happen to occur in Deny and Belfast, in London and Amsterdam and Dublin, in Berlin and Jerusalem. There are people who are murderers: that is what this children’s story is about.’

  A silence fell, no one knowing what to say. It didn’t matter of course because without any prompting Cynthia continued.

  ‘We drink our gin with Angostura bitters, there’s lamb or chicken Kiev. Old Kitty’s kind to us in the dining-room and old Arthur in the hall. Flowers are everywhere, we have our special table.’

  ‘Please let us take you to your room now,’ Strafe begged, and as he spoke I reached out a hand in friendship and placed it on her arm. ‘Come on, old thing,’ Dekko said.

  ‘The limbless are left on the streets, blood spatters the car-parks. Brits Out it says on a rockface, but we know it doesn’t mean us.’

  I spoke quietly then, measuring my words, measuring the pause between each so that its effect might be registered. I felt the statement had to be made, whether it was my place to make it or not. I said:

  ‘You are very confused, Cynthia.’

  The French family left the tea-lounge. The two Dalmatians, Charger and Snooze, ambled in and sniffed and went away again. Kitty came to clear the French family’s tea. things. I could hear her speaking to the honeymoon couple, saying the weather forecast was good.

  ‘Cynthia,’ Strafe said, standing up, ‘we’ve been very patient with you but this is now becoming silly.’

  I nodded just a little. ‘I really think,’ I softly said, but Cynthia didn’t permit me to go on.

  ‘Someone told him about her. Someone mentioned her name, and he couldn’t believe it. She sat alone in Maida Vale, putting together the mechanisms of her bombs: this girl who had laughed on the seashore, whom he had loved.’

  ‘Cynthia,’ Strafe began, but he wasn’t permitted to continue either. Hopelessly, he just sat down again.

  ‘Whenever he heard of bombs exploding he thought of her, and couldn’t un
derstand. He wept when he said that; her violence haunted him, he said. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t sleep at night. His mind filled up with images of her, their awkward childhood kisses, her fingers working neatly now. He saw her with a carrier-bag, hurrying it through a crowd, leaving it where it could cause most death. In front of the mouldering old house that had once been Glencorn Lodge they’d made a fire and cooked their food. They’d lain for ages on the grass. They’d cycled home to their city streets.’

  It suddenly dawned on me that Cynthia was knitting this whole fantasy out of nothing. It all worked backwards from the moment when she’d had the misfortune to witness the man’s death in the sea. A few minutes before he’d been chatting quite normally to her, he’d probably even mentioned a holiday in his childhood and some girl there’d been: all of it would have been natural in the circumstances, possibly even the holiday had taken place at Glencorn. He’d said goodbye and then unfortunately he’d had his accident. Watching from the cliff edge, something had cracked in poor Cynthia’s brain, she having always been a prey to melancholy. I suppose it must be hard having two sons who don’t think much of you, and a marriage not offering you a great deal, bridge and holidays probably the best part of it. For some odd reason of her own she’d created her fantasy about a child turning into a terrorist. The violence of the man’s death had clearly filled her imagination with Irish violence, so regularly seen on television. If we’d been on holiday in Suffolk I wondered how it would have seemed to the poor creature.

  I could feel Strafe and Dekko beginning to put all that together also, beginning to realize that the whole story of the red-haired man and the girl was clearly Cynthia’s invention. ‘Poor creature,’ I wanted to say, but did not do so.

  ‘For months he searched for her, pushing his way among the people of London, the people who were her victims. When he found her she just looked at him, as if the past hadn’t even existed. She didn’t smile, as if incapable of smiling. He wanted to take her away, back to where they came from, but she didn’t reply when he suggested that. Bitterness was like a disease in her, and when he left her he felt the bitterness in himself.’

  Again Strafe and Dekko nodded, and I could feel Strafe thinking that there really was no point in protesting further. All we could hope for was that the end of the saga was in sight.

  ‘He remained in London, working on the railways. But in the same way as before he was haunted by the person she’d become, and the haunting was more awful now. He bought a gun from a man he’d been told about and kept it hidden in a shoe-box in his rented room. Now and again he took it out and looked at it, then put it back. He hated the violence that possessed her, yet he was full of it himself: he knew he couldn’t betray her with anything but death. Humanity had left both of them when he visited her again in Maida Vale.’

  To my enormous relief and, I could feel, to Strafe’s and Dekko’s too, Mr and Mrs Malseed appeared beside us. Like his wife, Mr Malseed had considerably recovered. He spoke in an even voice, clearly wishing to dispose of the matter. It was just the diversion we needed.

  ‘I must apologize, Mrs Strafe,’ he said. ‘I cannot say how sorry we are that you were bothered by that man.’

  ‘My wife is still a little dicky,’ Strafe explained, ‘but after a decent night’s rest I think we can say she’ll be as right as rain again.’

  ‘I only wish, Mrs Strafe, you had made contact with my wife or myself when he first approached you.’ There was a spark of irritation in Mr Malseed’s eyes, but his voice was still controlled. ‘I mean, the unpleasantness you suffered might just have been averted.’

  ‘Nothing would have been averted, Mr Malseed, and Certainly not the horror we are left with. Can you see her as the girl she became, seated at a chipped white table, her wires and fuses spread around her? What were, her thoughts in that room, Mr Malseed? What happens in the mind of anyone who wishes to destroy? In a back street he bought his gun for too much money. When did it first occur to him to kill her?’

  ‘We really are a bit at sea,’ Mr Malseed replied without the slightest hesitation. He humoured Cynthia by displaying no surprise, by speaking very quietly.

  ‘All I am saying, Mr Malseed, is that we should root our heads out of the sand and wonder about two people who are beyond the pale.’

  ‘My dear,’ Strafe said, ‘Mr Malseed is a busy man.’

  Still quietly, still perfectly in control of every intonation, without a single glance around the tea-lounge to ascertain where his guests’ attention was, Mr Malseed said:

  ‘There is unrest here, Mrs Strafe, but we do our best to live with it.’

  ‘All I am saying is that perhaps there can be regret when two children end like this.’

  Mr Malseed did not reply. His wife did her best to smile away the awkwardness. Strafe murmured privately to Cynthia, no doubt beseeching her to come to her senses. Again I imagined a blue van drawn up in front of Glencorn Lodge, for it was quite understandable now that an imaginative woman should go mad, affected by the ugliness of death. The garbled speculation about the man and the girl, the jumble in the poor thing’s mind – a children’s story as she called it— all somehow hung together when you realized they didn’t have to make any sense whatsoever.

  ‘Murderers are beyond the pale, Mr Malseed, and England has always had its pales. The one in Ireland began in 1395.’

  ‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened has nothing whatsoever to do with calling people murderers and placing them beyond some pale or other. You witnessed a most unpleasant accident, dear, and it’s only to be expected that you’ve become just a little lost. The man had a chat with you when you were sitting by the magnolias and then the shock of seeing him slip on the seaweed –’

  ‘He didn’t slip on the seaweed,’ she suddenly screamed. ‘My God, he didn’t slip on the seaweed.’

  Strafe closed his eyes. The other guests in the tea-lounge had fallen silent ages ago, openly listening. Arthur was standing near the door and was listening also. Kitty was waiting to, clear away our tea things, but didn’t like to because of what was happening.

  ‘I must request you to take Mrs Strafe to her room, Major,’ Mr Malseed said. ‘And I must make it clear that we cannot tolerate further upset in Glencorn Lodge.’

  Strafe reached for her arm, but Cynthia took no notice.

  ‘An Irish joke,’ she said, and then she stared at Mr and Mrs Malseed, her eyes passing over each feature of their faces. She stared at Dekko and Strafe, and last of all at me. She said eventually:

  ‘An Irish joke, an unbecoming tale: of course it can’t be true. Ridiculous, that a man returned here. Ridiculous, that he walked again by the seashore and through the woods, hoping to understand where a woman’s cruelty had come from.’

  ‘This talk is most offensive,’ Mr Malseed protested, his calmness slipping just a little. The ashen look that had earlier been in his face returned. I could see he was beside himself with rage. ‘You are trying to bring something to our doorstep which most certainly does not belong there.’

  ‘On your doorstep they talked about a sweetshop: Cadbury’s bars and different-flavoured creams, nut-milk toffee, Aero and Crunchie.’

  ‘For God’s sake pull yourself together,’ I clearly heard Strafe whispering, and Mrs Malseed attempted to smile. ‘Come along now, Mrs Strafe,’ she said, making a gesture. ‘Just to please us, dear. Kitty wants to clear away the dishes. Kitty!’ she called out, endeavouring to bring matters down to earth.

  Kitty crossed the lounge with her tray and gathered up the cups and saucers. The Malseeds, naturally still anxious, hovered. No one was surprised when Cynthia began all over again, by crazily asking Kitty what she thought of us.

  ‘I think, dear,’ Mrs Malseed began, ‘Kitty’s quite busy really.’

  ‘Stop this at once,’ Strafe quietly ordered.

  ‘For fourteen years, Kitty, you’ve served us with food and cleared away the teacups we’ve drunk from. For fourteen years we’ve played our bridge and walk
ed about the garden. We’ve gone for drives, we’ve bought our tweed, we’ve bathed as those children did.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Strafe said again, a little louder. Bewildered and getting red in the face, Kitty hastily bundled china on to her. tray. I made a sign at Strafe because for some reason I felt that the end was really in sight. I wanted him to retain his patience, but what Cynthia said next was almost unbelievable.

  ‘In Surrey we while away the time, we clip our hedges. On a bridge night there’s coffee at nine o’clock, with macaroons or petits fours. Last thing of all we watch the late-night News, packing away our cards and scoring-pads, our sharpened pencils. There’s been an incident in Armagh, one soldier’s had his head shot off, another’s run amok. Our lovely Glens of Antrim, we all four think, our coastal drives: we hope that nothing disturbs the peace. We think of Mr Malseed, still busy in Glencorn Lodge, and Mrs Malseed finishing her flower-plaques for the rooms of the completed annexe.’

  ‘Will you for God’s sake shut up?’ Strafe suddenly shouted. I could see him struggling with himself, but it didn’t do any good., He called Cynthia a bloody spectacle, sitting there talking rubbish. I don’t believe she even heard him.

  ‘Through honey-tinted glasses we love you and we love your island, Kitty. We love the lilt of your racy history, we love your earls and heroes. Yet we made a sensible pale here once, as civilized people create a garden, pretty as a picture.’

  Strafe’s outburst had been quite noisy and I could sense him being ashamed of it. He muttered that he was sorry, but Cynthia simply took advantage of his generosity, continuing about a pale.

  ‘Beyond it lie the bleak untouchables, best kept as dots on the horizon, too terrible to contemplate. How can we be blamed if we make neither head nor tail of anything, Kitty, your past and your present, those battles and Acts of Parliament? We people of Surrey: how can we know? Yet I stupidly thought, you see, that the tragedy of two children could at least be understood. He didn’t discover where her cruelty had come from because perhaps you never can: evil breeds evil in a mysterious way. That’s the story the red-haired stranger passed on to me, the story you huddle away from.’