The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  Occasionally, pursuing such lines of thought, she wondered if she would marry again. She couldn’t help herself; she had no desire to remarry, yet widows did so, it was something that quite often occurred. At the golf club there was Sweetman, a few years younger than herself, a bachelor all his life, pleasantly sociable but bleary when he had drink taken, and according to Dolores Fitzfynne a tightwad. There was Corkin, who was her own age, but it was hard to think of Corkin without thinking also of the Mrs Corkin there had been, a drear of a woman who had played neither golf nor bridge, who hadn’t even had children: Corkin had been infected by her dreariness or else had infected her in the first place. There was no one else, except perhaps Agnew, with his sallow face and his hands, which were sallow also, gesturing in the air, and his faintly high-pitched voice. He was younger than the others, younger than she was herself by seven or eight years, yet she often thought of him in this connection. She thought about him in a different way on the morning her son, Cathal, decreed that the toy factory would have to go. For seventeen years Agnew had been its manager.

  In a blue-and-yellow paisley dressing-gown which she’d had all her married life she sat on the edge of her bed, listening to her son on the telephone saying that the people at the toy factory could easily be absorbed elsewhere, that for a long time now he had systematically been running the business down. The toy factory had been profitable only in the immediate postwar years, unable ultimately to sustain the competition which had so ominously built up: long before his death her husband had threatened that it would sooner or later have to close. It was a tiny concern, the loss would not be great.

  ‘All they’re making now are the fox-terriers,’ Cathal said on the telephone, referring to wooden dogs on wheels.

  ‘The building?’ she said. ‘Best to have it down, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I could bale garden peat there. I’m going into that, you know.’

  She did not say anything. She did not trust this dark-faced son she’d given birth to. Ceasing to be a toy factory, the building would be expanded when it became the location for one of his enterprises. There might be noise, even a smell of chemicals. You simply couldn’t guess what would come along in order that more money might be made. And why should it matter since only a lone woman lived near by?

  ‘We’ll have to see,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, of course, of course. No hurry at all.’

  She did not ask about Agnew. She could not see him being absorbed into the turf business or the coal business, and in any case Cathal didn’t like him. Cathal would have him out on the street while you’d wink.

  Cathal had his father’s wedge of a head, his forehead and wide-apart, narrow eyes. He was the first of their children to be born, the one who had received most attention because the others were girls. Heir to so much, he had been claimed by a thrusting entrepreneur’s world from infancy. The girls, except for Siobhan in Philadelphia, had been more mundanely claimed by men.

  She wouldn’t have minded any of the others being in Arcangelo House, but Thelma had a greedy way of looking at her, as if she couldn’t wait to get into the place. Mrs O’Neill dearly wished that her son hadn’t married this girl, but he had and that was that. She sighed as she replaced the receiver, seeing Thelma’s slightly puffy face, her nose too small for the rest of it. She sat for a moment longer, endeavouring to release her imagination of that face and in the end succeeding. Then she dressed herself and went down to the toy factory. Agnew was in the inner office, standing by the window, his back to her as she entered.

  ‘Mr Agnew.’

  ‘Ah, Mrs O’Neill. Come in, come in, Mrs O’Neill.’ He moved so swiftly in turning to greet her that she was reminded of the assured way he danced the quickstep. He came every December to the Golf Club Dance even though he was not a club member and had once confided to her that he had never played the game. ‘Croquet,’ he’d confided also. ‘I used to be quite snappy at croquet.’ He had his own expressions, a way of putting things that sometimes sounded odd. Typical that he should mention an old-fashioned game like croquet.

  ‘I hope you’re not busy, Mr Agnew. I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘Heavens above, why would you be? Won’t you take a chair, Mrs O’Neill? A cup of tea now?’

  There was always this formality. He offered it and seemed shyly to demand it. Her husband had always used his surname, and so did Cathal; at the Golf Club Dance she’d heard other men call him by his initials, B.J. She couldn’t in a million years imagine him addressing her as Norah.

  ‘No, I won’t have tea, thank you.’

  ‘A taste of sherry at all? I have a nice sweet little sherry –’

  ‘No, thanks. Really, Mr Agnew.’

  He smiled, gently closing a glass-fronted cabinet he had opened in expectation of her accepting his hospitality. He was wearing a brown suit chalked with a pinstripe, and a green silk tie. He said:

  ‘Well, it seems we have come to the end of the road.’

  ‘I know. I’m awfully sorry.’

  ‘Mr O’Neill saw it coming years ago.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’

  He smiled again; his voice was unperturbed. ‘The first day I came up to Arcangelo House I was terrified out of my wits. D’you remember, Mrs O’Neill? Your husband had an advertisement for the job in the Irish Times.’

  ‘It seems an age ago.’

  ‘Doesn’t it, though? An age.’

  His face had acquired a meditative expression. He drew a packet of cigarettes from a pocket of his jacket and opened it slowly, folding back the silver paper. He advanced a single cigarette by knocking the packet on the surface of his desk. He leaned towards her, offering it. His wrists were slim: she had never noticed his wrists before.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Agnew.’

  He leaned across the desk again, holding the flame of a cigarette-lighter to the tip of her cigarette. It gleamed with the dull patina of gold, as slender as a coin.

  ‘No, I don’t entirely know what I’ll do.’ He lit his own cigarette and then held it, dangling, in his long fingers.

  ‘Cathal should have something for you. It was my husband’s intention, you know, that everyone at the toy factory should be offered something.’

  She wanted to make that clear; she wanted to record this unequivocal statement in the inner office so that later on, if necessary, she could quote herself to Cathal. She inhaled some smoke and released it luxuriously through her nostrils. She was fond of the occasional cigarette, although she never smoked when she was on her own.

  ‘I’m not so sure I’d entirely fit in, Mrs O’Neill. I don’t know anything about selling turf.’

  She mentioned coal, which after all was the fuel that had made the O’Neills wealthy. There was still a thriving coal business, the biggest in the county.

  He shook his head. His hair, once black, was almost completely grey now. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘I’d be at home in coal.’

  ‘Well, I only thought I’d mention it.’

  ‘It’s more than kind, Mrs O’Neill.’

  ‘My husband wouldn’t have wanted anyone not looked after.’

  ‘Oh, indeed I know it.’

  She stared at the lipstick mark on her cigarette and then raised the cigarette to her mouth again. It was awkward because she didn’t want to walk out of the factory smoking a cigarette, yet it was too soon to crush it out on the ashtray in front of her.

  ‘If there’s any way the family can help, you’ll say, Mr Agnew?’

  ‘I suppose I’ll go to Dublin.’

  The remark was not accompanied by one of his glancing smiles; he gave no sign whatsoever that he’d touched upon a fascinating topic. No one knew why he spent weekends occasionally in Dublin, and a certain curiosity had gathered round the mystery of these visits. There was some secret which he kept, which he had not even confided to her husband in his lifetime. He came back melancholy was all her husband had ever reported, and once or twice with bloodshot eyes, as if he had spent
the time drinking.

  ‘Though I’d rather not end up in Dublin,’ he added now. ‘To tell you the full truth, Mrs O’Neill, it’s not a city I entirely care for.’

  She bent the remains of her cigarette in half, extinguishing it on the ashtray. She stood up, thinking it odd that he’d said Dublin wasn’t somewhere he cared for since he visited it so regularly.

  ‘The toy factory was a favourite of my husband’s. It saddened him to see it decline.’

  ‘It had its heyday.’

  ‘Yes, it had its day.’

  She went, walking with him from the office, through a shed full of unassembled terriers on wheels. The white cut-out bodies with a brown spot around the tail, the brown heads, the little platforms that carried the wheels, the wheels themselves: all these dislocated parts lay about in stacks, seeming unwanted. No one was working in the shed.

  He walked with her through other deserted areas, out on to the gravel forecourt that stretched in a semicircle around the front of the small factory. A man loaded wired cartons on to a lorry. They were still meeting orders in England, Agnew told her. The paint shop was as active as ever, three girls on full time.

  He held his hand out, his sallow features illuminated by another smile. His palm was cool, his grip gentle. He asked her not to worry about him. He assured her he’d be all right.

  There were gusts of laughter in the clubhouse. Dessie Fitzfynne had told a Kerry joke, concerning eight Kerry gardai and a cow. Dolores Fitzfynne, who’d just gone round in eighty-two and wanted to talk about that instead, requested that he shouldn’t tell another. Sweetman was talking about horses, arranging something about going to the Curragh. Sweetman loved getting parties together to go racing or to Lansdowne Road, or for a weekend down in Kelly’s at Rosslare. Paunchy and rubicund, Flanagan kept saying it was his turn and what did anyone want?

  ‘I heard the factory’s winding up,’ the solicitor, Butler-Regan, remarked in his rowdy voice and she nodded, suddenly feeling dismal. She had forgotten about the toy factory while she’d been on the golf-course, going round in ninety-one, taking three to get out of the rough at the eighth. She’d been playing with Dessie Fitzfynne, opposing Dolores and Flanagan. They’d been beaten, of course.

  It was silly to feel dismal just because the facts of commerce dictated the closure of an unprofitable concern. As both Cathal and Agnew had intimated, the end had been a matter of anticipation for years. Only sentiment had prevented such a decision in the lifetime of her husband.

  ‘Ah well, there you are,’ Butler-Regan said noisily. ‘’Tis better let it go, Norah.’

  Flanagan handed her another gin and French even though she hadn’t asked for one. Overhearing the reference to the toy factory, he said:

  ‘I hear Agnew’s wondering what to do with himself.’

  ‘The bold Agnew!’ Butler-Regan laughed. He, too, was paunchy and rubicund. He added, laughing again, shouting through this laughter: ‘Oh, Master Agnew’ll fall on his feet, I’d say.’

  They all liked Agnew even though he was so different. He was an easy companion for half an hour or so if you happened to run into him in the bar of the Commercial Hotel; he was always willing to drop into conversation with you on the street. He had digs with the Misses McShane in a house called St Kevin’s, where he was regularly to be seen tending the front garden, behind silver-painted railings set in a low concrete wall. He also walked the Misses McShane’s dog, Mandy, about the town, and on Sundays he attended the Protestant church unless he happened to be in Dublin.

  ‘We’d all miss Agnew,’ Flanagan said. ‘That wild Protestant man.’ He laughed, making much the same explosive sound that the solicitor did. Did any of them realize, she wondered, that Agnew’s quickstep put them all to shame every December?

  ‘Oh, wild is right,’ Butler-Regan agreed. ‘Wasn’t he in the city again a week ago?’

  The two men laughed in unison, the burst of noise causing Rita Flanagan to glance sharply across the bar to ascertain if her husband was already drunk. In dog’s-tooth skirt and soft fawn golfing-jacket, Mrs O’Neill wondered what any of them would think if they knew that, quite involuntarily as she stood there, she had again begun to speculate on the possibility of not remaining for ever the widow she presently was. She sipped her gin and French, not taking part in a conversation about Sweetman’s outing to the Curragh. In the same involuntary manner she found herself following a thread of thought that led her back to her wedding-day. The O’Neills had insisted on paying for the reception, since her own family were not well-to-do. Old Canon Kenny – neither old nor a canon then – had conducted the service, assisted by a curate called Colquhoun, who had later left the priesthood. They had gone to Bray for their honeymoon and on their first night in the International Hotel she had been jittery. She hadn’t known how it should be, whether she should simply take her clothes off or wait for him to say something, whether or not there was going to be preliminary kissing. She’d gone as red as anything after they’d come up from the restaurant. ‘I think that waiter knew,’ she’d whispered on the stairs, not noticing there was a maid just behind them. He’d been jittery too, and in the end it was she who inaugurated the kissing and in fact had taken his tie off. What on earth would it be like being in a bedroom in Bray with Agnew? There was fat on her shoulders now, which hadn’t been there before, and naturally her thighs and her hips were no longer the same. Her body had been forgotten in that particular way for many years before her husband’s death, almost since the birth of Siobhan. They had come to occupy separate bedrooms in Arcangelo House, having reached the decision that Cathal and the three girls were enough. At first, when it was safe to do so, she had visited the other bedroom, but the habit had dwindled and then ceased. Would it be a form of unfaithfulness to resume it in different circumstances now? It wasn’t easy to guess how such things stood at fifty-nine.

  Corkin, the widower of the woman who’d been a drear, approached her with the usual sorrowful look in his eyes, as if he still mourned the wife who had played neither bridge nor golf. The eyes themselves, lurking in their despondent wateriness behind spectacles, had pinkish rims and were the only feature you noticed in Corkin’s flat face, except possibly his teeth, which moved uncomfortably in his jaw when he ate. He was eating now, chewing crisps from a transparent Tayto bag. His hair was like smooth lead; his limbs jutted from his clothes. There was no doubt whatsoever that Corkin, the manager of a butter business, was looking for a housekeeper in the form of a second wife. There was always a nudge or two in the clubhouse when he approached Mrs O’Neill for a chat.

  ‘Ah, didn’t I have a terrible round? Did you see me in front of you, Norah? Wasn’t I shocking?’

  She denied that. She hadn’t noticed his misfortunes, she said, which indeed she hadn’t. She might have added that the butter manager couldn’t be shocking if he tried for the rest of his life.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘Would you be interested in a bunch of delphiniums from the garden, Norah?’

  She drank more gin and French. She had plenty of delphiniums at Arcangelo House, she replied, though it was very good of him to offer her more.

  ‘Or the asparagus fern? D’you grow that stuff?’

  ‘I grow asparagus all right. Only I eat it before the fern comes.’

  ‘Ah well, why wouldn’t you, Norah,’

  Sweetman, at the bar, was sweating like an animal. No woman in her senses would want to marry Sweetman. His trouble with perspiration ironically denied his name, and the caginess Dolores Fitzfynne claimed for him would hardly have been easy to live with. He had a tendency towards forgetfulness when his round came up in the clubhouse and, according to Dolores, the parties he organized for race-meetings or Lansdowne Road were done so to his own pecuniary advantage. ‘Too mingy with himself to look sideways at a woman,’ Dolores had said, and probably she was right. He was a surveyor with the county council; and if he gave you a lift in his car he had a way of mentioning the high price of petrol.
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br />   She watched Sweetman while Corkin continued in his tedious manner, offering her marigold plants. It had surprised her when Agnew had said he’d never in his life played golf. She’d thought afterwards that he would probably have been good. He had the look of someone who had been athletic in his time. His dancing suggested ball sense, she didn’t know why.

  ‘To tell you the honest truth, I don’t much care for marigolds.’

  ‘The wife loved them. Give Mrs Corkin a box of marigolds arid she’d be pricking them out till Kingdom come.’

  He wagged his head; she nodded hers. She allowed a silence to develop in the hope that he’d go away. He said eventually:

  ‘D’you ever watch that thing they have, Dynasty is it called?’

  ‘I watched it the odd time.

  ‘Will you tell me this, Norah: where do they get the stories?’

  ‘I suppose they invent them.’

  ‘Isn’t America the shocking place though?’

  ‘I have a daughter there.’

  ‘Ah, sure, of course you have.’

  At the bar Butler-Regan looked as though he might sing. Very occasionally he did, striking the bar rhythmically with his fist, trying to make people join in. The club secretary, Dr Walsh, had had to speak to him, explaining that it wasn’t usual to sing in a golf club, even adding that he didn’t think it quite the thing for a solicitor to sing anywhere. But Butler-Regan had done so again, and had again to be warned. It was said that his wife, who like the late Mrs Corkin played neither bridge nor golf, had a terrible time with him.

  ‘Does your girl ever remark on the Dynasty thing to you?’ Corkin was inquiring. ‘I mean, if it might be accurate?’

  ‘Siobhan has never mentioned Dynasty.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that extraordinary?’

  Ten minutes later the drinking in the clubhouse broke up and Mrs O’Neill drove back to Arcangelo House. She made scrambled egg and watched a film about drug-running on the television. The police of several nations pursued a foursome of gangsters and finally ran the ringleader to earth in Los Angeles. She dozed off, and when she woke up a priest with a Cork accent was talking about the feast of Corpus Christi. She listened to him until he’d finished and then turned the television off.