‘We concern one another,’ she had said in the kitchen of the hotel, and had said it again and repeatedly. She had whispered in the kitchen of people in distant parts of the world, and people in her own life, and people in the lives of Agnes Quin and Morrissey, people who were unknown to those who were present. Strangers were the concern of strangers, she had repeatedly said, and she had proved it in a kind of way, for she, like an itching conscience, was his concern, in her asylum room. She would take a toll of him, he knew that well, for sometimes her madness was knitted into sense. His voice might continue for ever in her ears yet she would not hear it, and all the pillars of the Church could not stifle her private, poor man’s God. She had spoken so often of victims that he wondered if, without her knowing it or willing it, he had become hers: a cross to bear at the end of his life. And yet it was not entirely so: when she talked about the hotel as it might have been he sometimes felt that he could listen to her for ever.
He left the bus and walked towards Thaddeus Street, past wastelands and houses boarded up. Such happiness he had never seen before, and he thought of the strangers who had by chance made it for her, whose lives went ordinarily on. That story, he imagined, might indeed make a coffee-table volume that people could pick up in a room where Bach played as a background to their conversation. She had come a long way since the Sunday morning when the cheery Londoner had been felled by his dog. She had lived in bitterness, and with her camera she had taken some kind of revenge even without wishing to. In her beautiful documentary form she had shown the ugliness of people, their violence and their weakness, their viciousness, their agonies and their fears. All that, he guessed, didn’t matter much one way or the other: what mattered more was herself, and her fingers gripping a camera like a weapon, her mind respecting no privacy, cruelty coming from cruelty. She had caused revulsion in him once, as a bird of prey might cause revulsion. He had been unable to imagine her as a child, yet being with her now was like being with a child.
On the last day of that summer Father Hennessey entered Thaddeus Street and looked towards the mouldering yellow edifice that was O’Neill’s Hotel. The evening sun softly lit it, picking out the letters of its title that were strung in white between rows of windows. For a moment he imagined that painters had come to paint the walls and shine the decorations, that inside there throbbed the life she’d lingered over, that the happiness in her voice ran about among the people, up and down the stairs and into all the rooms. It would be a good thing to happen, he thought, and yet too strange for any world but that of make believe or madness. Slowly he turned his head and walked the last few paces to his house.
‘I’m back,’ he called, from habit, in the hall.
He mounted the stairs, his thoughts the same as always they were now at this time on Tuesdays. He wondered and sought to understand, and came to few conclusions. In the mood that possessed him the single certainty he felt was that on her behalf there was something he had to render thanks for. For her at least there was a happy ending.
About the Author
William Trevor KBE was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by the Estate of William Trevor
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5811-7
This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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WILLIAM TREVOR
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Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 29
