The Hill Bachelors

by William Trevor

  Not that Guy objected to being invited. He was as fond of the farm and the island as he was of the Buissonnets themselves. He delighted in the dry, parched earth, the crêtes, the unsafe cliffs. Dust coated the vegetation, the giant cacti, the purple or scarlet ipomoea with which the villagers decorated their walls, the leaves of brambles and oleander. It invaded cypresses and heather and the rock roses that Guy had never seen in flower. Only the huge stones and well-washed pebbles of the little bays escaped its grey deposit. Only the eucalyptus trees and the plane trees rose above it.

  The accompaniments of the soupe de langoustines came, the waiter unfamiliar, new this season as the waiters often were. He placed the dishes he brought where they might easily be reached by all three diners, then ladled out the soup. He poured more Macon Fuissé.

  ‘What style!’ Madame Buissonnet whispered when he had passed on to another table, and then, ‘How good you are to take us here again, Guy!’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Oh, but yes, it is, my dear.’

  The restaurant of the hotel had views over a valley to a lush growth of trees, unusual on the island. A carpet of grass, broken by oleander beds, formed the valley’s base, far below the level of the restaurant itself. This was shadowy now in the September twilight, the colour drained from its daytime’s splendour. The lengths of blue and white awning that earlier had protected the lunchtime diners from the sun had been rolled in, the sliding glass panels closed against mosquitoes. Thirty tables, a stiff white tablecloth on each, were widely separated in the airy, circular space, a couple of them unoccupied tonight. Monsieur Perdreau, the hotel’s proprietor for as long as Guy and the Buissonnets had been dining in its restaurant, was making his evening tour, pausing at each table to introduce himself or to ensure that everything was in order.

  The Buissonnets knew him well, and by now so did Guy. He stayed a while, receiving compliments, bowing his gratitude, giving some details of his season, which had, this year, been particularly good, even if the restaurant was not quite full tonight. The hotel itself was, he explained: it was just that at the moment there were fewer yachts moored at the harbour.

  ‘You are getting to be my oldest client, Guy,’ he said, shaking hands before he went away.

  It was then that Guy noticed that the girl two tables away had been joined by a companion. She was in white, fair-haired, slight; the man was bulky, in a bright blue suit. Guy had noticed the girl earlier and had thought it singular that being on her own she should want to occupy so prominent a table.

  ‘Splendid!’ Monsieur Buissonnet exclaimed when the waiter returned with the soup tureen.

  *

  The evening advanced, pleasurably and easily, as in previous Septembers so many others had. The loup de mer was as good as ever; glasses of Margaux accompanied the cheese. Madame Buissonnet’s disappointment that Guy had been unable to report a new relationship in his life was kept in check. She asked about Colette, who for a time had been Guy’s fiancée, and bravely smiled when she heard that Colette had become engaged to André Délespaul. Monsieur Buissonnet talked about the olive harvest, the coldest November he could remember on the island because of the bitter wind, how it had suddenly got up and remained for weeks, a mistral out of season. But none the less the harvest had been a good one.

  Vanilla ice-cream came, a mango coulis. The little boules were so elegantly arranged on the green, yellow-rimmed plates that Madame Buissonnet said it was a pity to disturb them. The man in the blue suit had again left his companion on her own. She sat very still, eating nothing now. Coffee was brought to her but she did not pour it out. A cup and saucer were placed for her companion, beside his crumpled napkin.

  ‘They are a pest sometimes,’ Monsieur Buissonnet said, an observation he now and again made about the tourists who came to the island, ‘even if they bring a bit of life.’

  The tourists hired bicycles at the harbour or in the village and rode about the sandy tracks. They came for the day or lodged in one of the small village hotels if not in Monsieur Perdreau’s rather grander one. The only vehicles that were permitted on the island were the farm trucks, the tractors, the delivery vans, and the minibus that delivered and collected guests. Cigarettes were forbidden in wooded areas because of the risk of fire.

  ‘Oh, we enjoy the tourists,’ Madame Buissonnet commented. ‘Of course we do.’

  One by one, the tables were deserted. When the waiter whom Madame Buissonnet considered stylish brought chocolates and coffee, only a few were still occupied — the one at which the girl sat alone, a corner one at which Italian was spoken, a third at which a couple now stood up. The man in the blue suit returned, his progress unsteady and laboured, an apologetic smile thrown about, as if he were unaware that the chairs he circumvented were empty. He sat down noisily and at once stood up again, seeming to seek the attention of a waiter. When one approached he waved him away but, still on his feet, filled his glass and spilt it as he sat down. The girl poured coffee. She did not speak.

  ‘É oritologo,’ someone said at the Italian table, a woman’s voice carrying across the restaurant. ‘Scrive libri sugli uccelli.’

  The man in the blue suit stood up and again looked around him. He pulled at the knot of his tie, loosening it. He groped beneath it for the buttons of his shirt. His companion stared at the tablecloth. Was she weeping? Guy wondered. Something about her bent head suggested that she might be.

  There was a glisten of sweat on the man’s forehead and his cheeks. He raised his glass in the direction of the Italians, smiling at them foolishly. One of them — a man in a suede jacket — bowed stiffly.

  The waiters stood back, perfectly discreet. Amused at first by the scene, Madame Buissonnet now glanced away from what was happening. They should be going, she said.

  ‘Mi dà i brividi,’ one of the Italians exclaimed quite loudly, and they all got up, the women gathering handbags and shawls, one of the men lighting a fresh cigarette.

  Watching them go, Guy realized that all evening he had been stealing glances at the girl who shared the drunk man’s table. Especially when she was alone he had kept glancing at her, unable to prevent himself. She was very thin. He had never seen a girl as thin. All the time he had talked about Gérard and Jean-Claude, and André Délespaul and Colette, all the time he had listened to the details of the olive harvest, while he’d shaken Monsieur Perdreau’s hand and laughed at his joke, he had imagined being with her in the little bay where he swam and at Le Nautic or the Café Vert in the village. He had looked for a wedding ring, and there it was.

  The drunk man laughed. He waved at the Italians, his laughter louder, as if he and they shared some moment of comedy. The one who’d just lit a cigarette waved back.

  ‘Hi!’ the drunk man called after them, and lurched across the restaurant, knocking into the chairs and tables, apologizing to people who weren’t there. He stopped suddenly, as if his energy had failed him. He was confused. He frowned, shaking his head.

  It wasn’t a real smile when the girl smiled at Guy; it was too joyless for that, with a kind of pleading in it. She smiled because all evening she had been aware he’d been unable to take his eyes off her. Had she really once married this man? Guy wondered. Could they really be husband and wife?

  ‘Thank you, Guy,’ Madame Buissonnet said, as she always did when the evening ended. The bill came swiftly when he gestured for it. He signed the carte bancaire.

  ‘Yes,’ Monsieur Buissonnet said. ‘Thank you.’

  It was then that the man fell down. He fell on to an unlaid table and slithered sideways to the ground. Waiters came to help him up, but he managed to scramble to his feet by himself. His wife didn’t look. Guy was certain now she was his wife.

  ‘Hi!’ the man shouted at the Buissonnets. ‘Hi!’

  He was laughing again and he shouted something else but Guy couldn’t understand what it was because the man spoke in either English or German; it was difficult to distinguish which because his voice was slurred. He cl
attered down, into the chair he’d been sitting on before. He spread his arms out on the tablecloth and sank his head into them. The girl said something, but he didn’t move.

  Guy didn’t let his anger show. He was good at that; he always had been. It could happen like this that you fell in love, that there was some moment you didn’t notice at the time and afterwards couldn’t find when you thought back. It didn’t matter because you knew it was there, because you knew that this had happened.

  ‘I talked to those people on my walk today.’ It seemed hardly a lie, just something it was necessary to say. Anything would have done.

  Madame Buissonnet displayed no surprise, accepting Guy’s claim without a knowing smile. A man of the world in such matters, Monsieur Buissonnet said the key to the farmhouse would be where it always was when it was left outside: in the dovecot. ‘Madame must have her beauty sleep,’ he added, tucking his wife’s arm into his.

  *

  ‘It is no trouble.’

  Again Guy imagined being with her in the little bay, and telling her in Le Nautic or the Café Vert why he was on the island, explaining about the Buissonnets, explaining why it was that he had been in the restaurant when first they saw one another, how he had told the Buissonnets a lie, how they had guessed it was a lie, and how that didn’t matter.

  ‘Madame,’ a waiter murmured, offering help, repeating what Guy had said — that it was no trouble — pretending that nothing much had happened.

  The man in the blue suit was awake and on his feet, squeezing his eyes closed, as if to clear what was faulty in his vision, blinking them open again. Guy and the waiter helped him across the restaurant, across the foyer to the lift. The girl who had been humiliated whispered her gratitude, seeming not to have the confidence to raise her voice. She looked even thinner, even frailer, when she was on her feet.

  On Sunday, on the last of the evening ferries, Guy would leave the island, his visit over. Even sooner she might go herself, first thing in the morning, hurrying off with her companion because of the shame they shared. In the lift there was no embarrassment when they touched, her shoulder pressed on Guy’s because the lift was small. He felt panic spreading, affecting his heartbeat, a dryness in his mouth. Yet how could she go so swiftly when she had pleaded so? Where had the pleading come from if not from their being aware of one another? Alone at her table when her boorish husband left her to fend for herself, she had been disturbed by a stranger’s gaze and had not rejected it. Why had she not unless she’d known as certainly as he? Even before they heard one another’s voices, there had been that certainty of knowing. All intuition, all just a feeling across a distance, and yet more than they had ever known before.

  ‘Voilà!’ the waiter murmured, producing the key of the couple’s room from one of the man’s pockets. A moment before there had been consternation when it could not be found.

  Love was conversation: Gérard had said that, and Guy had never understood until tonight. They would sit on the rocks and their conversation would spread itself around them, their two lives tangling, as in a different way they had already begun to. Club 14, Gérard, Jean-Claude, Jean-Pierre, Colette, Michelle, Dominique, Adrien, the walk from the rue Marceau to the Café de la Paix after a badminton game, his mother, and all the rest of what there was: tomorrow and Saturday were not enough. Well, of course they did not have to be.

  She gave the waiter a hundred-franc note when the man had been dumped on the bed. The waiter put the room key on the writing-table. When he went he did not seem surprised that Guy did not go also, perhaps sensing something of what had come about. Only once in a whole lifetime, Guy thought, fate offered two people this. ‘How much a visitor you are!’ Michelle said once, and truth to tell he had always felt so, not quite belonging in the group, not even with his mother. And with the Buissonnets, of course, he was a visitor too. All that would come into the conversation; everything would in the end.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking in English, and then in French in case he had not understood. But he could manage a little English, and wondered if these were Americans or English people. On the bed the man was snoring.

  ‘Please,’ she said, opening the minibar and gesturing toward its array of little bottles. ‘Please have something.’

  He wanted to say she mustn’t feel embarrassed. He wanted to reassure her absolutely, to say that what had occurred downstairs was of no possible consequence. He wanted to talk of all the other matters immediately, to tell her that years ago he had guessed that Monsieur Buissonnet was his father, that he was certain he owed his position in the Crédit Lyonnais to Monsieur Buissonnet’s influence. He wanted to tell her that nothing was ever said — not a word — by Madame Buissonnet about his mother, or by his mother about Madame Buissonnet, that he had long ago guessed his mother had been a woman in Monsieur Buissonnet’s life before his marriage. It would have been before his marriage; it was not Monsieur Buissonnet’s style to be unfaithful.

  ‘Oh, then, a cognac,’ he said.

  It was not ever said that the farm would one day be his. That was why Monsieur Buissonnet talked so often and so much about it, why Madame Buissonnet asked if this was right, or that, when she chose the colours for a room she wanted to have repainted.

  Guy took the glass that was held out to him and for a second his fingers brushed the fingers of the girl he had fallen in love with. He had not known until tonight that it was something you could tell in minutes, even seconds, when you first loved somebody.

  ‘You have been kind,’ she said. She sat in a low armchair beside the minibar and Guy sat by the writing-table. She flattened the skirt of her white dress over her knees. So much about her was like a child, he thought: her hands as they passed over the white material, the outline of her knees, her feet in high-heeled shoes. Her fair hair fell tidily, framing an image of features in which he believed he could still detect the lingering of the hurt she’d suffered. Her eyes were blue, as pale as the sky there’d been that day.

  ‘Are you American?’ he asked, carefully speaking English, translating the question from the French.

  ‘Yes, American.’

  It was awkward, the man being there, even though he was asleep. His mood might not be pleasant if he woke up, yet it did not seem to matter; it was only awkward. Guy said:

  ‘I have only been in the restaurant of the hotel before. Not in a room.’

  ‘You are not staying here?’

  ‘No, no.’

  She went to the bed and pushed the man on to his side, exerting herself to do so. The snoring ceased.

  ‘I come every year to the island,’ Guy said. ‘The Buissonnets have a farm.’

  ‘The people you were with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have never been here before.’

  ‘People find it tranquil.’

  ‘Yes, it’s that.’

  When she sat down again the gaze they held one another in was as bold as for each of them it had been downstairs, as open and as confident. Guy hadn’t realized then that this confidence had been there, and the openness. He wondered if — until she smiled — he had assumed that in the unobtrusive lighting of the restaurant she had failed to notice his obsessive interest. He couldn’t remember what he had assumed and it didn’t seem to be important. He wondered what she was thinking.

  ‘We came by chance here,’ she said. ‘To the island.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please don’t get up and go.’

  He shook his head. She smiled and he smiled back. He would show her everything on the island, and when the moment for it came he would tell her that he loved her. He would tell her that never before had he loved a girl like this, had only been attracted in the more ordinary way. That could be because he was what Michelle had called a visitor, always a little on his own. It could have to do with the circumstances of his birth, so little being said, nothing whatsoever really. Who can tell? Guy wondered. Who can tell what makes a person what he is?

  ‘May I ask yo
ur name?’

  ‘It’s Guy.’

  She didn’t give hers. Guy was nice, she said, especially as it was said in France. It suited him, the French way of saying it.

  ‘Some more?’ she offered.

  He had hardly drunk a drop. He shook his head. She reached out to close the door of the minibar, shutting away the light that through its array of bottles had been falling on the thin calves of her legs. They would have a marriage like the Buissonnets’; in the farmhouse it would be like that. Slowly she reached down and took her shoes off.

  *

  The jaw of the man on the bed had fallen open. An arm hung down, fingers trailing the carpet quite close to where they were.

  ‘Guy,’ she whispered, her white dress in a bundle on the floor, one of her shoes on its side. ‘My dear,’ she whispered.

  There was an urgency in her resistance to his drawing back from the act that was pressed upon him. There were no whispers now, and no caresses. Instinctively Guy knew there was no pleasure for her. She laughed when it was over, a soundless laugh, different from her husband’s yet it echoed that.

  The room was stifling, the air gone stale, infected by the rank breath of the man who slept. Naked, she stood above him, looking down at his slumbering features, at the stubble that was beginning on his chin and neck, a dribble running from a corner of his mouth. She touched his shoulder, and for an instant his eyes opened. She said nothing, and he slept again. For all this — for what had happened, for what was happening still — she had returned a stranger’s gaze. Destruction was present in the room; Guy was aware of that.

  She turned away, from the bed where her husband lay, from Guy. The drink she’d poured herself had not been touched. Guy watched her cross the room and close a door behind her. He heard the running of her bath.