The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  Deborah did not recognize these telltale signs. She did not remember that when first she and Edwin exchanged information about one another’s childhoods Edwin had sometimes just smiled, as if his mind had drifted away. It was only a slight disappointment that he didn’t wish to hear about Flitts, Hay and Co., and Miss Royal’s scratches: no one could possibly get into a state about things like that. Deborah saw little significance in the silly quarrel they’d had about the teddy-bears’ picnic, which was silly itself of course. She didn’t see that it had had to do with friends who were hers and not Edwin’s; nor did it occur to her that when they really began to think about the decoration of 23 The Zodiac it would be Edwin who would make the decisions. They shared things, Deborah would have said: after all, in spite of the quarrel they were going to go to the teddy-bears’ picnic. Edwin loved her and was kind and really rather marvellous. It was purely for her sake that he’d agreed to give up a whole weekend.

  So on a warm Friday afternoon, as they drove from London in their Saab, Deborah was feeling happy. She listened while Edwin talked about a killing a man called Dupree had made by selling out his International Asphalt holding. ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree,’ she said.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’

  ‘It’s by A.A. Milne, the man who wrote about Pooh Bear. Poor Pooh!’

  Edwin didn’t say anything.

  ‘Jeremy’s is called Pooh.’

  ‘I see.’

  In the back of the car, propped up in a corner, was the blue teddy-bear called Binky which Deborah had had since she was one.

  The rhododendrons were in bloom in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden, late that year because of the bad winter. So was the laburnum Edwin remembered, and the broom, and some yellow azaleas. ‘My dear, we’re so awfully glad,’ old Mrs Ainley-Foxleton said, kissing him because she imagined he must be one of the children in her past. Her husband, tottering about on the raised lawn which Edwin also remembered from his previous visit, had developed the shakes. ‘Darlings, Mrs Bright has ironed our tablecloth for us!’ Mrs Ainley-Foxleton announced with a flourish.

  She imparted this fact because Mrs Bright, the Ainley-Foxletons’ charwoman, was emerging at that moment from the house, with the ironed tablecloth over one arm. She carried a tray on which there were glass jugs of orange squash and lemon squash, a jug of milk, mugs with Beatrix Potter characters on them, and two plates of sandwiches that weren’t much larger than postage stamps. She made her way down stone steps from the raised lawn, crossed a more extensive lawn and disappeared into a shrubbery. While everyone remained chatting to the Ainley-Foxletons – nobody helping to lay the picnic out because that had never been part of the proceedings – Mrs Bright reappeared from the shrubbery, returned to the house and then made a second journey, her tray laden this time with cake and biscuits.

  Before lunch Edwin had sat for a long time with Deborah’s father in the summer-house, drinking. This was something Deborah’s father enjoyed on Sunday mornings, permitting himself a degree of dozy inebriation which only became noticeable when two bottles of claret were consumed at lunch. Today Edwin had followed his example, twice getting to his feet to refill their glasses and during the course of lunch managing to slip out to the summer house for a fairly heavy tot of whisky, which mixed nicely with the claret. He could think of no other condition in which to present himself – with a teddy-bear Deborah’s mother had pressed upon him – in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden. ‘Rather you than me, old chap,’ Deborah’s father had said after lunch, subsiding into an armchair with a gurgle. At the last moment Edwin had quickly returned to the summer-house and had helped himself to a further intake of whisky, drinking from the cap of the Teacher’s bottle because the glasses had been collected up. He reckoned that when Mrs Ainley-Foxleton had kissed him he must have smelt like a distillery, and he was glad of that.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ Jeremy said in the glade where the picnic had first taken place in 1957. He sat at the head of the tablecloth, cross-legged on a tartan rug. He had glasses and was stout. Peter at the other end of the tablecloth didn’t seem to have grown much in the intervening years, but Angela had shot up like a hollyhock and in fact resembled one. Enid was dumpy, Pansy almost beautiful; Harriet had protruding teeth, Holly was bouncy. Jeremy’s wife and Peter’s wife, and Pansy’s husband – a man in Shell – all entered into the spirit of the occasion. So did Angela’s husband, who came from Czechoslovakia and must have found the proceedings peculiar, everyone sitting there with a teddy-bear that had a name. Angela put a record on Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s old wind-up gramophone. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ a voice screeched, ‘without consulting me.’ Mr and Mrs Ainley-Foxleton were due to arrive at the scene later, as was the tradition. They came with chocolates apparently, and bunches of buttercups for the teddy-bears.

  ‘Thank you, Edwin,’ Deborah whispered while the music and the song continued. She wanted him to remember the quarrel they’d had about the picnic; she wanted him to know that she now truly forgave him, and appreciated that in the end he’d seen the fun of it all.

  ‘Listen, I have to go to the lav,’ Edwin said. ‘Excuse me for a minute.’ Nobody except Deborah seemed to notice when he ambled off because everyone was talking so, exchanging news.

  The anger which had hung about Edwin after the quarrel had never evaporated. It was in anger that he had telephoned his mother, and further anger had smacked at him when she’d said she hoped he would have a lovely time. What she had meant was that she’d told him so: marry a pretty little thing and before you can blink you’re sitting down to tea with teddy-bears. You’re a fool to put up with rubbish like this was what Deborah’s father had meant when he’d said rather you than me.

  Edwin did not lack brains and he had always been aware of it. It was his cleverness that was still offended by what he considered to be an embarrassment, a kind of gooey awfulness in an elderly couple’s garden. At school he had always hated anything to do with dressing up, he’d even felt awkward when he’d had to read poetry aloud. What Edwin admired was solidity: he liked Westminster and the City, he liked trains moving smoothly, suits and clean shirts. When he’d married Deborah he’d known-without having to be told by his mother – that she was not a clever person, but in Edwin’s view a clever wife was far from necessary. He had seen a future in which children were born and educated, in which Deborah developed various cooking and housekeeping skills, in which together they gave small dinner-parties. Yet instead of that, after only six months, there was this grotesque absurdity. Getting drunk wasn’t a regular occurrence with Edwin: he drank when he was angry, as he had on the night of the quarrel.

  Mr Ainley-Foxleton was pottering about with his stick on the raised lawn, but Edwin took no notice of him. The old man appeared to be looking for something, his head poked forward on his scrawny neck, bespectacled eyes examining the grass. Edwin passed into the house. From behind a closed door he could hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright, talking about buttercups. He opened another door and entered the Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room. On the sideboard there was a row of decanters.

  Edwin discovered that it wasn’t easy to drink from a decanter, but he managed it none the less. Anger spurted in him all over again. It seemed incredible that he had married a girl who hadn’t properly grown up. None of them had grown up, none of them desired to belong in the adult world, not even the husbands and wives who hadn’t been involved in the first place. If Deborah had told him about any of it on that Sunday afternoon when they’d visited this house he wondered, even, if he would have married her.

  Yet replacing the stopper of the decanter between mouthfuls in case anyone came in, Edwin found it impossible to admit that he had made a mistake in marrying Deborah: he loved her, he had never loved anyone else, and he doubted if he would ever love anyone else in the future. Often in an idle moment, between selling and buying in the office, he thought of her, seeing her in her different clothes and sometim
es without any clothes at all. When he returned to 23 The Zodiac he sometimes put his arms around her and would not let her go until he had laid her gently down on their bed. Deborah thought the world of him, which was something she often said.

  In spite of all that it was extremely annoying that the quarrel had caused him to feel out of his depth. He should have been able to sort out such nonsense within a few minutes; he deserved his mother’s gibe and his father-in-law’s as well. Even though they’d only been married six months, it was absurd that since Deborah loved him so he hadn’t been able to make her see how foolish she was being. It was absurd to be standing here drunk.

  The Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room, full of silver and polished furniture and dim oil paintings, shifted out of focus. The row of decanters became two rows and then one again. The heavily carpeted floor tilted beneath him, falling away to the left and then to the right. Deborah had let him down. She had brought him here so that he could be displayed in front of Angela and Jeremy and Pansy, Harriet, Holly, Enid, Peter, and the husbands and the wives. She was making the point that she had only to lift her little finger, that his cleverness was nothing compared with his love for her. The anger hammered at him now, hurting him almost. He wanted to walk away, to drive the Saab back to London and when Deborah followed him to state quite categorically that if she intended to be a fool there would have to be a divorce. But some part of Edwin’s anger insisted that such a course of action would be an admission of failure and defeat. It was absurd that the marriage he had chosen to make should end before it had properly begun, due to silliness.

  Edwin took a last mouthful of whisky and replaced the glass stopper. He remembered another social occasion, years ago, and he was struck by certain similarities with the present one. People had given a garden party in aid of some charity or other which his mother liked to support, to which he and his brother and sister, and his father, had been dragged along. It had been an excruciatingly boring afternoon, in the middle of a heatwave. He’d had to wear his floppy cotton hat, which he hated, and an awful tan-coloured summer suit, made of cotton also. There had been hours and hours of just standing while his mother talked to people, sometimes slowly giving them recipes, which they wrote down. Edwin’s brother and sister didn’t seem to mind that; his father did as he was told. So Edwin had wandered off, into a house that was larger and more handsome than the Ainley-Foxletons’. He’d strolled about in the downstairs rooms, eaten some jam he found in the kitchen, and then gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He’d rooted around for a while, opening drawers and wardrobes, and then he’d climbed a flight of uncarpeted stairs to a loft. From here he’d made his way out on to the roof. Edwin had almost forgotten this incident and certainly never dwelt on it, but with a vividness that surprised him it now returned.

  He left the dining-room. In the hall he could still hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright. Nobody had bothered with him that day; his mother, whose favourite he had always been, was even impatient when he said he had a toothache. Nobody had noticed when he’d slipped away. But from the parapet of the roof everything had been different. The faces of the people were pale, similar dots, all gazing up at him. The colours of the women’s dresses were confused among the flowers. Arms waved frantically at him; someone shouted, ordering him to come down.

  On the raised lawn the old man was still examining the grass, his head still poked down towards it, his stick prodding at it. From the glade where the picnic was taking place came a brief burst of applause, as if someone had just made a speech. ‘… today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ sang the screeching voice, faintly.

  A breeze had cooled Edwin’s sunburnt arms as he crept along the parapet. He’d sensed his mother’s first realization that it was he, and noticed his brother’s and his sister’s weeping. He had seen his father summoned from the car where he’d been dozing. Edwin had stretched his arms out, balancing like a tightrope performer. All the boredom, the tiresome heat, the cotton hat and suit, were easily made up for. Within minutes it had become his day.

  ‘Well, it’s certainly the weather for it,’ Edwin said to the old man.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The weather’s nice,’ he shouted. ‘It’s a fine day.’

  ‘There’s fungus in this lawn, you know. Eaten up with it.’ Mr Ainley-Foxleton investigated small black patches with his stick. ‘Never knew there was fungus here,’ he said.

  They were close to the edge of the lawn. Below them there was a rockery full of veronica and sea-pinks and saponaria. The rockery was arranged in a semicircle, around a sundial.

  ‘Looks like fungus there too,’ Edwin said, pointing at the larger lawn that stretched away beyond this rockery.

  ‘Eh?’ The old man peered over the edge, not knowing what he was looking for because he hadn’t properly heard. ‘Eh?’ he said again, and Edwin nudged him with his elbow. The stick went flying off at an angle, the old man’s head struck the edge of the sundial with a sharp, clean crack. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, drifting through the sunshine over the scented garden. Edwin glanced quickly over the windows of the house in case there should be a face at one of them. Not that it would matter: at that distance no one could see such a slight movement of an elbow.

  They ate banana sandwiches and egg sandwiches, and biscuits with icing on them, chocolate cake and coffee cake. The teddy-bears’ snouts were pressed over the Beatrix Potter mugs, each teddy-bear addressed by name. Edwin’s was called Tomkin.

  ‘Remember the day of the thunderstorm?’ Enid said, screwing up her features in a way she had – like a twitch really, Edwin considered. The day he had walked along the parapet might even have been the day of the thunderstorm, and he smiled because somehow that was amusing. Angela was smiling too, and so were Jeremy and Enid, Pansy, Harriet and Holly, Peter and the husbands and the wives. Deborah in particular was smiling. When Edwin glanced from face to face he was reminded of the faces that had gazed up at him from so far below, except that there’d been panic instead of smiles.

  ‘Remember the syrup?’ Angela said. ‘Poor Algernon had to be given a horrid bath.’

  ‘Wasn’t it Horatio, surely?’ Deborah said.

  ‘Yes, it was Horatio,’ Enid confirmed, amusingly balancing Horatio on her shoulder.

  ‘Today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ suddenly sang everyone, taking a lead from the voice on the gramophone. Edwin smiled and even began to sing himself. When they returned to Deborah’s parents’ house the atmosphere would be sombre. ‘Poor old chap was overlooked,’ he’d probably be the one to explain, ‘due to all that fuss.’ And in 23 The Zodiac the atmosphere would be sombre also. ‘I’m afraid you should get rid of it,’ he’d suggest, arguing that the blue teddy-bear would be for ever a reminder. Grown up a bit because of what had happened, Deborah would of course agree. Like everything else, marriage had to settle into shape.

  Pansy told a story of an adventure her Mikey had had when she’d taken him back to boarding-school, how a repulsive girl called Leonora Thorpe had stuck a skewer in him. Holly told of how she’d had to rescue her Percival from drowning when he’d toppled out of a motor-boat. Jeremy wound up the gramophone and the chatter jollily continued, the husbands and wives appearing to be as delighted as anyone. Harriet said how she’d only wanted to marry Peter and Peter how he’d determined to marry Deborah. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, and then came Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s scream.

  Everyone rushed, leaving the teddy-bears just anywhere and the gramophone still playing. Edwin was the first to bend over the splayed figure of the old man. He declared that Mr Ainley-Foxleton was dead, and then took charge of the proceedings.

  The Time of Year

  All that autumn, when they were both fourteen, they had talked about their Christmas swim. She’d had the idea: that on Christmas morning when everyone was still asleep they would meet by the boats on the strand at Ballyquin and afterwards
quite casually say that they had been for a swim on Christmas Day. Whenever they met during that stormy October and November they wondered how fine the day might be, how cold or wet, and if the sea could possibly be frozen. They walked together on the cliffs, looking down at the breaking waves of the Atlantic, shivering in anticipation. They walked through the misty dusk of the town, lingering over the first signs of Christmas in the shops: coloured lights strung up, holly and Christmas trees and tinsel. They wondered if people guessed about them. They didn’t want them to, they wanted it to be a secret. People would laugh because they were children. They were in love that autumn.

  Six years later Valerie still remembered, poignantly, in November. Dublin, so different from Ballyquin, stirred up the past as autumn drifted into winter and winds bustled around the grey buildings of Trinity College, where she was now a student. The city’s trees were bleakly bare, it seemed to Valerie; there was sadness, even, on the lawns of her hall of residence, scattered with finished leaves. In her small room, preparing herself one Friday evening for the Skullys’ end-of-term party, she sensed quite easily the Christmas chill of the sea, the chilliness creeping slowly over her calves and knees. She paused with the memory, gazing at herself in the looking-glass attached to the inside of her cupboard door. She was a tall girl, standing now in a white silk petticoat, with a thin face and thin long fingers and an almost classical nose. Her black hair was straight, falling to her shoulders. She was pretty when she smiled and she did so at her reflection, endeavouring to overcome the melancholy that visited her at this time of year. She turned away and picked up a green corduroy dress which she had laid out on her bed. She was going to be late if she dawdled like this.

  The parties given by Professor and Mrs Skully were renowned neither for the entertainment they provided nor for their elegance. They were, unfortunately, difficult to avoid, the Professor being persistent in the face of repeated excuses – a persistence it was deemed unwise to strain.