The Hill Bachelors

by William Trevor

  ‘Not that I feel my age,’ she suddenly hears now, and wonders if he has finally acknowledged that there has been a birthday in the house and has said when his is, in August, as he has said before. ‘Miskolc is where that woman is. She has a little English.’

  He has never, that Clione can remember, met her eye, for he doesn’t go in for that with anyone; yet still she knows. For several years — and before, for she senses that it has been longer — there has been something that even now seems extraordinary: it is incredible that Michingthorpe can love anyone; incredible too that he can be mysterious. Burning the cardboard she has collected, continuing not to listen to what is said, she wonders yet again if he is aware that she senses his attachment.

  ‘We can sell the house at last.’

  She hears James passing this information on and looks to see the vagueness it inspires in Michingthorpe’s plump features, as happens when something utterly without interest requires his attention.

  ‘We’ve found an oast-house,’ she says herself.

  There is a different reaction now. For the first time in Clione’s entire acquaintance with him, Michingthorpe allows his mouth to open in what appears to be shock. Nor does it close. His small eyes stare harshly at the air. He sits completely still, one hand grasping the other, both pressed into his chest.

  ‘This is the country?’

  ‘Well, yes. Sussex.’

  There is a pause, and then recovery. Michingthorpe stands up. ‘Originally my family came from Sussex. But a long time ago. Michingthorpe Ales.’

  ‘We shall miss you.’ Clione notices herself sounding as mischievous as one of her children. There is no protestation that they’ll be missed themselves. For a long moment their empty-handed visitor is silent. But before he goes there’s more about the Internet.

  *

  Pouring coffee at breakfast five days later, Clione waits to hear the content of an early-morning telephone call: only Michingthorpe gets in touch at five to eight. It has occasionally been earlier.

  ‘He has been to see it.’

  ‘What? Seen what?’

  ‘The oast-house. He’s been down there. Well, he was near, I think. Anyway, he has looked it over.’

  ‘But why on earth?’

  ‘It’s decidedly unlike him, but even so he has. I think I told him where it was. Not that he asked.’

  ‘You mean, he went along and bothered those people for no reason?’

  ‘He just said he’d looked it over.’

  A flicker of unease disturbs Clione. It might have amused her if ever she had confessed that Michingthorpe has feelings for her; but to have confessed as well that he has never displayed them, that her woman’s intuition comes in here, would have led too easily on to a territory of embarrassment. Could it all not be imagination on her part? Or put more cruelly, a fading beauty’s yearning for attention? ‘Oh, but surely,’ Clione has heard James’s objection, the amusement all his now. Better just to leave it, she has always considered.

  ‘He knows our offer has been accepted?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he knows.’

  Two days later, in the early afternoon, they visit again the house they have bought, received there by an elderly man — a Mr Witheridge whom they have not met before, whose daughter and son-in-law showed them around. They are permitted to take measurements, and in whispers speak of structural changes they hope to make.

  ‘Nice that your friend liked it too,’ the old man says, waiting downstairs with teacups on a tray when they have finished.

  Profuse apologies are offered, and explanations that sound lame. Some silly muddle, James vaguely mutters.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no! Oast-houses are in Mr Michingthorpe’s family, it seems. Michingthorpe Ales, he mentioned.’

  The garden is little more than a field with a few shrubs in it. The present occupants came in 1961; Mr Witheridge moved in when his wife died. All this is talked about over cups of tea, and how mahonias do well, and winter heathers. But there are no heathers, of any season, that Clione and James can see, and herbs have failed in brick-edged beds in the cobbled yard.

  ‘Martins nest every year but they aren’t a nuisance,’ the old man assures them. ‘I’d stay here for ever, actually.’ He nods, then shrugs away his wish. ‘But we need to be nearer to things. Not that we’re entirely cut off. No, I don’t want to go at all.’

  ‘We’re sorry to take it from you.’ James smiles, again apologetic.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no! It’s just that it’s a happy place and we want you to be happy here, too. There’s a bus that goes by regularly at the bottom of the lane. I explained that to your friend when he said he didn’t drive.’

  ‘Yes, I dare say he’ll visit us.’ Clione laughs, but doubts — and notices James doubting it too — that Michingthorpe often will, not being the country kind. The long acquaintanceship seems already over, the geography of their lives no longer able to contain it.

  ‘Your friend was interested in the outhouses.’

  *

  ‘You’re intending to live with us?’ Clione stares into the puffy features, but the slaty eyes are blank, as everything else is. His voice is no more lifeless than it usually is when he explains that he happened to be in the neighbourhood of the oast-house, a library he had to look over at Nettleton Court.

  ‘Not fifteen minutes away. Nothing of interest. A wasted journey, I said to myself, and that I hate.’

  ‘You mentioned converting the outhouses to that old man.’

  ‘I have a minikin’s lifestyle. I like a certain smallness, I like things tidy around me. I throw things out, I do not keep possessions by me. That’s always been my way, I’ve been quite noted for it.’

  ‘We’ve no intention of converting the outhouses.’

  Michingthorpe does not respond. He takes his spectacles off and looks at them, holding them far away. He puts them on again and says:

  ‘What d’you think I got for the Madox Ford? Remember the Madox Ford?’

  ‘We’ve never talked about your living with us.’

  It is impossible to know if this is acknowledged, if there is a slight gesture of the head. Michingthorpe Ales were brewed at Maresfield, Clione learns, but that was long ago. In the 1730s, then for a generation or two.

  ‘I never took much interest. Just chance that I stumbled across the family name. In Locke’s Provincial Byeways, I believe it was.’

  ‘We’ll move down there in May.’

  Quite badly foxed, the Ford, the frontispiece gone. ‘Well, you saw yourself. Six five, would you have thought it?’

  *

  Later, Clione passes all that on. The faint unease she experienced when she heard that Michingthorpe had been to Sussex is greater now. For more than twenty years he has had the freedom of a household, been given the hospitality a cat which does not belong to it is given, or birds that come to a window-sill. Has he seen all this as something else? It seems to Clione that it must be so, that what appears to her children and her husband to have come out of the blue is a projection of what was there already. Michingthorpe’s clumsy presumption is the presumption of an innocent, which is what his unawareness makes him. She should say that, but finds she cannot.

  She listens to family laughter and when the children are no longer there says she is to blame, that she should have anticipated that something like this would one day happen.

  ‘Of course you’re not to blame.’

  ‘It was my fault that he presumed so.’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  She tells because at last she has to, because what didn’t matter matters now. A misunderstanding, she calls it. She knew and she just left it there, permitting it.

  ‘Oh, but surely this can’t be so? Surely not?’

  ‘I’ve always thought of it as harmless.’

  ‘You couldn’t have imagined it?’

  She does not let a stab of anger show. Her husband is smiling at her, standing by the windows of the sitting-room they soon will leave for ever. Hi
s smile is kind. He is not mocking or being a tease.

  ‘No, I haven’t imagined it.’

  ‘Poor bloody fool!’

  ‘Yes.’

  She does not confess that after her recent conversation with Michingthorpe she felt sorry she’d been cold, that bewilderingly she dreamed these last few nights of his shadow thrown on snow that had fallen in the oast-house garden, his shadow on sunlit grass, an imprecise reflection in a pool on the cobbles where the outhouses were. His fleshy palms were warmed by a coffee mug while his talk went on, while she beat up a soufflé, while again he recalled the dressmaker who had made him rock buns.

  ‘It’s horrid,’ she says. ‘Dropping someone.’

  ‘I know.’

  James does know; she is aware of that, drawn into his thoughts, as their closeness so often allows. Dropping someone is not in James’s nature, yet why should they pander to the awkward selfishness of an oddity? There are the memories that go back to A Whiter Shade of Pale, the settlements and compromises of the marriage they were determined to make work. Her friends have not always been her husband’s kind, nor his hers, and there were other differences that, with time, didn’t matter either. The intimacy they have come to know is like a growth of roots, spreading and entangling, making them almost one. Why should there be embarrassment now?

  ‘For it would be like that,’ she hears James say. ‘Day after day.’

  ‘He has a nothing life.’

  She pleads before she knows she’s doing so, and realizes then that she has done so before. In the car when they drove away after the revelation in the oast-house she suggested that the old man might have misheard, that it was probably gratuitous information on his part about the buses passing near, not the answer to a question. You can pity a child, Clione finds herself thinking, no matter what a child is like.

  ‘It’s a different kind of love,’ she murmurs, hesitating over every word.

  ‘It’s fairly preposterous, whatever it is.’

  ‘For all the time we’ve known him we have looked after him. You as much as I.’

  ‘My dear, we can’t play fantasies with a fully grown man.’

  She sees again the shadow from her dream, distorted when it crosses the cobbles from the outhouses, cast bulkily on the kitchen floor, taking sunlight from the table spread with her cooking things. Being a shadow suits him, as being a joke once did.

  ‘It was just a thought he had,’ she says.

  *

  On a cool May morning, piece by piece, the furniture is carried across the pavement to the removal vans. The men are given cups of tea, the doors of the vans are closed. Clione passes from one room to the next through the emptiness of the house where her three children were born, the house in which they grew up and then left, leaving her too. Who will listen to him now? Who’ll watch him talking to the air? Who’ll not want to know what a splendid find he has come across at another auction? Who’ll not want to know that oysters don’t agree with him?

  He is there when they drive off but does not wave, as if already he does not know them, as if he never did. ‘Oh, he’ll latch on to someone else,’ the children have said, each of them putting it in that same way. ‘He won’t mind your going much.’ She cannot guess how he’ll mind, what form his minding will take, where or how the pain will be. But the pain is there, for she can feel it.

  Their unpresentable friend won’t come, not even once. Because he does not drive, because there is no point in it, because the pain would be too much. She does not know why he will not come, only that he won’t. She does not know why the pity she feels is so intensely there, only that it is and that his empty love is not absurd.

  Low Sunday, 1950

  She put the wine in the sun, on the deep white window-sill, the bottle not yet opened. It cast a flush of red on the window-sill’s surface beside the porcelain figure of a country girl with a sheaf of corn, the only ornament there. It felt like a celebration, wine laid out to catch the last of the warmth on a Sunday evening, and Philippa wondered if her brother could possibly have forgotten what Sunday it was when he brought the bottle back from Findlater’s on Friday.

  There was no sound in the house. Upstairs, Tom would be reading. At this time of day at weekends he always read for a while, as she remembered him so often as a child, comfortable in the only armchair his bedroom contained. He had been tidier in the armchair then, legs tucked beneath him, body curled around his book; now the legs that had grown longer sprawled, spilt out from the cushions, while one arm dangled, a cigarette smouldering from the fingers that also turned the pages.

  Philippa was petite by comparison, fair-haired, her quiet features grave in repose, a prettiness coming with animation. She took care with her clothes rather than dressed well. Her blouse today was two striped shades of green, one matching her skirt, the other her tiny emerald earrings. She was thirty-nine in the Spring of 1950, her brother three years older.

  They did not regret, either of them, the fruits of the revolution that by chance had changed their lives in making them its casualties. They rejoiced in all that had come about and even took pride in their accidental closeness to the revolution as it had happened. They had been in at a nation’s birth, had later experienced its childhood years, unprosperous and ordinary and undramatic. That a terrible beauty had transformed the land they had not noticed.

  In the garden Philippa picked lily tulips and bluebells, and sprigs of pink hazel. Tom’s vegetable beds were raked and marked to indicate where his seeds had not yet come up, but among the herbs the tarragon was sprouting, and apple mint, and lovage. Chives were at their best, sage thickening with soft fresh growth. Next weekend, he’d said, they should weed the long border, turn up the caked soil.

  On the long wooden draining-board in the kitchen she began to arrange the flowers in two vases. Tom always bought the wine in Findlater’s, settling the single bottle into the basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle. They didn’t make much of Sunday lunch — a way of arranging the day that went back to their Aunt Adelaide’s lifetime — and only on Sundays was there ever wine at supper. In the other house — before Philippa and her brother had come to Rathfarnham — decanters of whiskey and sherry had stood on the dining-room sideboard, regularly replenished, not there for appearance’s sake. ‘What you need’s a quick one,’ her father had said on the Sunday of which today was yet another anniversary, and poor little Joe Paddy hadn’t been able to say anything in response, shivering from head to toe as if he had the flu. ‘What d’you say to a sharpener?’ had been another way of putting it — when Mr Tyson or Mr Higgins came to the house — or sometimes, ‘Will we take a ball of malt?’ When the outside walls were repainted, the work complete, the men packing up their brushes and their ladders, they had been brought in to have glasses filled at the sideboard. A credit to Sallymount Avenue, her father had said, referring to the work that had been done, and the glasses were raised to it.

  ‘Well, I’ve finished that,’ Tom said, knowing where to find her.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She married the naval fellow.’

  ‘They’ll manage.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She felt herself watched. Clipping the stems to the length she wanted each, shaping the hazel, she heard the rattle of his matches and knew if she turned her head she would see cigarettes and matches in one hand, the ashtray in the other. Players he smoked, though once it had been Woodbines, what he could afford then. ‘You’ve been smoking, Tom!’ Aunt Adelaide used to cry, exasperated. ‘Tom, you are not to smoke!’

  He came further in to the kitchen, tipped the ashtray into the waste bucket beneath the sink, washed it under the tap and put it aside to carry back upstairs later.

  ‘Where’s the old dog?’ he asked. ‘Come back, has he?’

  She shook her head and then, together, they heard their dog in the garden, the single bark that indicated his return from the travels they could not control. She glanced up, through the window above the sink
, and there he was, panting on the grass, a black and white terrier, his smooth coat wringing wet.

  ‘He’s been in the Dodder,’ she said. ‘Or somewhere.’

  ‘He’ll be the death of me, that dog.’

  The word could be used; they neither of them flinched. It had a different resonance when applied so lightly to the boldness of their dog. Different again when encountered in lines of poetry. Even the Easter Passion — recently renewed for both of them in the Christ Church service on Good Friday evening — gave death a hallowed meaning, and softened it through the miracle of the Resurrection. But death as it had affected their lives was still raw, the moment of its awful pain still terrible if they let it have its way.

  ‘I’ll be an hour or so,’ Tom said.

  He scolded the exhausted dog on the lawn, and the dog was sheepish, hunching himself in shame and only daring then to wag his tail. Philippa watched from the window and guessed — and was right — that, exhaustion or not, Tom would be accompanied on his walk.

  ‘No hurry.’ She unlatched the window to call out, to smile because she realized, quite suddenly, that she hadn’t during their conversation. This year she would go, she thought. She would go, and Tom would live his life.

  *

  Rathfarnham had hardly changed in all the years he’d known it; that was yet to come. This evening no one was about, the few small shops closed, the Yellow House — where he sometimes had a drink on weekdays — not open either. Low in the sky, the sun cast shadows that were hardly there.

  ‘We’re invited to Rathfarnham for tea,’ Tom remembered his mother so often announcing in Sallymount Avenue, her tone reflecting the pleasure she knew the news would bring. The tram and then the long walk, for which it had to be fine or else, at the last minute, they wouldn’t go. ‘Oh, Aunt Adelaide’ll know why,’ their mother would say, and it was always only a postponement. Twice, Tom remembered, that happened, but probably there had been another time, now forgotten. The great spread on the dining-room table, the mysterious house — for it was mysterious then — were what the pleasure of those announcements had been about. Aunt Adelaide made egg sandwiches and sardine sandwiches, and two kinds of cake — fruit and sponge — and there were little square buns already buttered, and scones with raisins in them. In the garden, among the laurels, there was a secret place.