The Love Department

by William Trevor

  ‘Have you no interest?’ cried Eve accusingly, angered by the sight of her husband. ‘Why don’t you do something else when you come in? You’re forever drinking brandy.’

  ‘What would you have me do?’

  Eve was silent. She wished to say something, a great deal in fact, but for the moment all she could think of was the breeding of tropical birds and fish. James said:

  ‘Would you have me up on a ladder mending a ball-cock somewhere? I am not that kind of man.’

  ‘You once were interested. We bought things for the house. We chose our wallpaper; we bought the armour in the hall and new materials for chair-covers. We did a few things together.’

  ‘I will choose a wallpaper any day,’ said James agreeably. ‘I’ll discuss furniture and fittings till the cows come home.’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘I could get into casual clothes, I suppose, and start in every evening, rubbing my hands together and making a village out of old cardboard. Is that an idea? Should I take it up?’

  She tried to see his world again: she tried to see the building with ten floors, the offices within it, the eight fat men sitting with spectacles on around a table. She tried to see Miss Brown and Lake, but she failed completely.

  ‘One of the eight,’ said James, ‘does remarkable things with matchsticks.’

  In Gloucestershire that morning his father had remarked that there would be no nasturtiums if they weren’t careful. ‘Go out like a good girl,’ he had commanded his nurse, ‘and take a few cuttings. This is the time for it.’ The nurse had taken his pulse instead, thinking about a story she’d been reading, by Jeffery Farnol. ‘That’ll do now,’ she had said mechanically, but a conversation had ensued that had resulted in her telephoning James. In anger, she had reported to him a version of this talk, altering the facts here and there since it was necessary to do so in order to add emphasis, and being unable occasionally to remember accurately because her memory was not perfect. Coming on top of the letter he had read at breakfast-time, the nurse’s report had weighed drearily upon him, remaining with him in detail during the day.

  ‘Do?’ his father had apparently inquired. ‘What’ll do? What do you mean?’ The nurse replied that she wished he’d be a good chap rather than a bother to her, and heard her patient state again that for his part he wished she’d place some cuttings in a cold frame. A garden, he said, was not a garden without nasturtiums. He promised he’d lie quite happily in his bed while she worked with her hands in the soil; he’d close his eyes and be able to see the small cuttings laid out beside her, and her hands moving about, patting down the bed. He told the nurse it did her good to get out, and added that the job would suit her, crouched there in her black stockings, looking a picture. The nurse with patience had shaken his pillows for him. ‘A garden’s not a garden without them,’ Mr Bolsover repeated. ‘I said it to my wife.’ The nurse saw him thinking about his wife and realizing for a moment at least that his wife was dead and that the woman with him now was a state registered nurse. ‘I had a dream about our strawberries,’ said he. ‘I dreamed that she and I were cutting off runners. Bring me a leaf or two from the strawberry beds, Nurse, and let me see how good they are.’ But hearing that, the nurse’s patience had snapped. She told him that already she had written to his son, that his son this very morning would be reading a letter that listed all the complaints: the requests to go out to the garden and bring back vegetation for a sick man to inspect, the rudeness that was quite unnecessary, and the unbalanced talk that was on the increase. ‘He’ll be reading that letter now,’ said the nurse. ‘And I shall get on to the telephone as well, sir, if you are going to start. I’m not here to be spoken to like an agricultural labourer.’ The nurse had brought her teeth together with a snap and had felt her face becoming red. She cleared up the plates from which Mr Bolsover had eaten his breakfast, banging them about. ‘I am in love,’ said Mr Bolsover, ‘which is the cause of everything.’ Mr Bolsover looked directly at the nurse and saw her rage increase, knowing that it would. ‘I will not have it,’ she cried. ‘Why should I? I’m not here, Mr Bolsover, for unbalanced talk like this stuff.’ But the old man had continued to look at her, intent upon saying what he wished to say, the words that she called unbalanced. ‘I am in love with a dead wife,’ he said. ‘I am keen to join her. We will be together on a marble ledge.’ Mr Bolsover went on to say that he had known of old fellows who had wished to rise from their beds and take their young nurses to the altar. He told the nurse to have no fear of that, for all he wished to do was to fall down dead and find himself on the marble ledge. ‘Not that I dislike you, Nurse,’ he said. ‘I’m fond of you for your appearance’s sake: you’re a very pretty nurse.’ Mr Bolsover had paused, giving weight to that compliment. ‘I like a woman with a few years behind her,’ he had added. ‘You are mature in your way.’ The nurse left the room then, and walked straight to the telephone and spoke to James in London. ‘You have just received a letter from me,’ she said, ‘which is the second in two days. I regret I am obliged to ring you into the bargain, sir.’ She complained that the old man’s fantasies were becoming hard to bear. He was utterly confused in his mind, thinking half the time that she was an agricultural labourer employed in his derelict market garden, and thinking the other half that she was his wife. ‘Have you come to get me?’ he had said to her the previous evening. ‘Take off those stockings, love, and leap into this bed. Have you died before? We’ll die together this time.’ The nurse said the old man’s mind was in a torment of confusion. It was hard on her, she said, being called mature and talked to about a marble ledge. ‘It’s not right for a young woman,’ she had said to James. ‘I’m only saying I may have to move elsewhere. My nerves are torn.’ The nurse spoke for a long time to James. She offered the theory that the old man was feeling guilty because he had allowed the market garden to fall into such a bad state, and would thus be able to leave his son neither money nor a going concern. ‘Everything’s squandered,’ said the nurse, ‘so he tells me himself. It’s Freudian guilt, sir: he’s escaping, see, when he says he’s in love with the wife. It’s back to mother really, all the stuff about a ledge.’ Listening to the nurse, James had imagined her, although in fact he had never seen her: he imagined her eating a biscuit and drinking coffee, and talking on the long-distance telephone while she did so. ‘I’ll come down,’ James had said, ‘as soon as I possibly can.’ The nurse replied that she was grateful to hear it. She could not be expected, she repeated, to do work in a garden and deal with a nerve case. She knew nothing whatsoever about gardening, she said, and never had.

  James told Eve that the nurse had telephoned, and added that middle age was a time of pressure, it appeared. ‘The old are dying,’ he said. ‘The young grow up. Both make a fuss to catch us others with. It has been said before.’ He did not repeat in any detail the nurse’s conversation; he did not say that the nurse had gone on at length about his father’s love for a dead wife and his nostalgia for a garden; nor did he repeat that the nurse had discovered a pattern in the confusion of the old man’s utterances, something she had seen as guilt. The nurse, James considered, was wide of the mark in that: he saw no reason for his father to feel a stab of guilt. It might be true, James thought, what his father stated: that he was in love with the soul of his wife. Why should he not be?

  Eve said she was sorry to hear that there had again been trouble in Gloucestershire. She spoke politely. James said:

  ‘Should trouble in Gloucestershire interest you much? I don’t see that it should. You have enough to do, dear: you have a world of your own.’

  ‘Of course it interests me,’ cried Eve, not knowing whether or not she was telling a lie.

  James smiled and shook his head. ‘Still, you know, you are not too badly off. Nor am I. Though maybe you are right about cardboard villages.’

  ‘I did not mention cardboard villages.’

  ‘And rightly: what good’s a cardboard village in this day and age?’


  Cows dashed across the Bolsovers’ television screen. Cowboys fired pistols into the air, their horses neighing and rearing beneath them. A few of the men shouted wildly and swirled lassoes about. James, watching closely, said:

  ‘Other wives do not have Mrs Hoop, who will stay here all day whenever you want her to. Mrs Hoop has given you your freedom. You can spend the day more or less as you wish.’

  ‘I am lucky to have Mrs Hoop. I know that. I am not complaining about the domestic side of things. I have an easy life in that way.’ A burly cowboy said, ‘Get back on that wagon, Morgan.’ He stood with his legs apart, waving a pistol, while Eve thought about the mothers and their cars. She thought about Mrs Hoop and the children, and the day, years ago now, when she and James had found the suit of armour and had bought it on an impulse. ‘We’ll set a fashion in the suburbs,’ James had said, and they almost had.

  ‘Go to the pictures more often,’ suggested James, ‘if you need taking out of yourself.’

  ‘I don’t feel the need of that. I don’t think the pictures would do much good.’

  ‘Why not try? There are big cinemas all round, within a few minutes’ drive. Why not take in an afternoon show now and again? They open early.’ The cattle roared in the Bolsovers’ sitting-room, and the guns cracked noisily. Men fell down dead. ‘In a few years’ time,’ said Eve, ‘my conversation will be all complaints.’

  ‘The men say their wives complain. Linderfoot’s lies all day on a sofa. Clinger’s wife keeps company with the monkey. Captain Poache’s puts the fear of God into him.’

  ‘You’ve told me that before. I know about them well, James: the woman lying down, the other with a monkey, and Captain Poache and Mrs Poache.’ In her mind the voice of Septimus Tuam said, ‘A pair of Bear Brand. In Autumn Mist,’ and she frowned when she heard it, because she couldn’t understand what the voice was doing there, returning to her mind for no reason at all.

  James had discovered that his assistant, Lake, was attempting to undermine his prestige and the security of his position. James knew that Lake had persuaded Miss Brown to act in a treacherous manner; that Lake had spread items of nonsensical gossip about the firm; that Lake in his prankish way had even gone so far as to convey to the office a tinful of flour in order to scatter it over the back of James’s clothes when James wasn’t looking. Yet, knowing all this, James took no action: he regarded Lake as the carrier of his salvation. Not possessing the heart or the courage to organize salvation for himself, he possessed enough of both not to stand in the way of Lake’s machinations, or whatever it was they were. He knew that there was now only the hope of Lake succeeding: the absurdity of his mad frolicking must harden into reality, and the eight men must finally be faced with it, and must shake their heads and ask James to go away. Failure, he felt, would surely have some pleasure after the tedium of the other.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Eve. ‘I’m full of complaints already.’

  ‘Look, take some brandy,’ said James. ‘We’re all full of complaints these days.’

  But Eve said only that he was becoming a soak with all his brandy. She saw him, as she said it, keenly holding out a glass to her. She raised the palms of her hands to her forehead and cried:

  ‘Are we the same couple, James? Are we? Can we possibly be?’

  ‘Well, after all,’ said James, ‘it’s ten years later.’

  Lake sat in an arm-chair in Miss Brown’s bed-sitting-room in Putney, with his exercise book on his knees and papers spread about him on the floor. He had taken off his jacket and his tie, having previously explained that it was necessary for him to rest himself. Miss Brown, in a plastic apron, was stirring a saucepan on a gas-ring.

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Lake, on hearing from her that James’s father was giving trouble again. ‘Well done, Brownie.’

  He wrote in his exercise book, checking the fact against previous information that James’s father was an old man who had once worked in London in a respectable way and then had opened up a market garden on inherited money. He was a thorn in James Bolsover’s flesh, Lake reckoned, a worry that was probably keeping Bolsover awake at night.

  ‘Bolsover’s driving them round the bend in the board-room,’ said Lake. ‘Apparently he goes in there covered in filth.’

  Miss Brown stirred silently on. Walking with Lake that evening, she had drawn his attention to pictures of weddings in a photographer’s shop window. She had hoped he would say, ‘Our turn next, then?’ or ‘What about it?’ but Lake had said nothing like that at all. He had looked closely at the photographs and said that they were poor ones, advising her that if ever she had a photograph to be taken, she should not approach the man responsible for these.

  ‘It’s an upright ladder,’ said Lake from his arm-chair. ‘I’ve recognized that for some time.’

  He had suggested to her that she should take a tin of green pea soup and turn it out into a saucepan and add cooked potatoes and sausage meat. His mother had made this dish, he had said, but Miss Brown felt that he must somehow have got the recipe wrong. She repeated the ingredients to him now, but Lake laughed and said he couldn’t remember quite. He added, with truth, that he didn’t mind what he ate.

  ‘I didn’t come out top at College,’ said Lake, referring to a school of commerce at which he had undergone brief instruction. ‘But the man in charge was extremely pleased and didn’t hesitate to say so. I asked him if I was suitable for the business world and he replied that I was suitable in several ways. I don’t think you could claim that I had let that man down?’ Lake laughed. ‘ “Well done, Lake,” he said, and told me in confidence that there were some in my class who would spend their lives licking stamps. He was a Mr Timms; a man with a metal leg. He gave me a reference.’

  Lake smiled, glanced at a few recent notes in his exercise book, and yawned, stretching his arms above his head.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s the simplest thing in the world. When Bolsover says to you, “What about that letter to so-and-so?” all you say is, “Sir, what letter is that? Letter to so-and-so? You never dictated a word of it.” ’

  Lake paused, laughing, allowing his intentions to crystallize in Miss Brown’s mind. ‘Well, Brownie? Does that make sense at all?’

  Miss Brown, tasting from her spoon, nodded. Lake said:

  ‘It’s psychological, you understand. It’s the attack used by the nation’s spy department. I have nothing whatsoever against Bolsover,’ he added.

  Miss Brown tried to smile and, noticing the effort, Lake smiled more broadly still, happy that she was able to see his point of view. ‘When it happens a couple of times – you standing up and saying the letters were never dictated – Bolsover’ll begin to think he has trouble upstairs. D’you understand me?’

  Miss Brown said yes, implying that she clearly understood, implying too that she would play with diligence any part he cared to allot to her.

  Lake watched the stooped form of the woman who loved him. He watched her with a smile on his face, but the smile was not related to what he saw, for he was thinking of himself: he saw himself in various poses, dressed differently, going to race meetings and taking a seat in an opera house. Press photographers hung about him, snapping their cameras and asking him to look this way or that; reporters asked him what he had to say. He thought of this while Miss Brown stirred potatoes and sausage meat into the green pea soup. She stirred more tenderly because he had given her the instructions for the dish; and in her small bed-sitting-room that evening her love was everywhere, bouncing off the man like a ball off a wall.

  10

  Septimus Tuam was opposed to haste and the appearance of haste. When he failed with women it seemed always, in retrospect, a degree of haste that had been the culprit. Two hours after he had telephoned Eve Bolsover he lay on his narrow bed, examining a calendar. A day had elapsed since the damaging of the stocking. A day had elapsed or, to be more accurate, twenty-eight hours. Further days would elapse before Mrs Bolsover would lay her eyes on him again: he
sneered, reflecting that many a person in his shoes would be around at the woman’s house within the next fourteen hours, with a package in an eager palm. ‘Thank you very much,’ was what Mrs Bolsover would say. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered yourself.’ And that would be that.

  Septimus Tuam marked a date on the calendar and placed the calendar on a ledge beside his bed, where he could see it easily, so that it would catch his eye. The date, neatly ringed in pencil, was seven days hence, Wednesday, September 8th, the day after the one on which three of James Bolsover’s board-men were due to arrive for dinner in the Bolsovers’ house. For two minutes Septimus Tuam eyed the calendar and thought about the woman who had given her name as Bolsover and had usefully added a telephone number. He wondered what she was up to now, and guessed correctly that she was engaged with her husband upon the perusal of a television screen, occasionally saying something to the husband, exchanging a view or two. He ringed a second date on the calendar – October 12th – and nodded his head over the choice of it. ‘A Tuesday,’ said Septimus Tuam. ‘Nine hundred and sixty-four hours away.’ Then he banished Eve Bolsover from his mind.

  He relaxed his bones and his muscles and thought of neither the past nor the future, nor of love, nor hatred, nor any emotion of any kind at all. He remained in this condition for twenty-five minutes, and then roused himself slightly to reach out a hand for an unexacting periodical. He read part of a serial story that he had read four times before, sniffing and sighing over the details.

  He has the eyes of an animal with a soul. He brings me the joy that once I knew. Yet what can I do? He is a younger man; he has a life to lead. I am fifty-nine.

  Lady Dolores read that about him, sitting at her desk in the love department, in a red silken dressing-gown. She expected the words before her eyes fell on them, for she knew the letters about Septimus Tuam off by heart. ‘He has green fingers with women,’ said Lady Dolores. ‘I’ll admit that.’ Some of the letters were long, telling her everything, not seeking advice but sharing an experience; others sought help and comfort.