Death in Summer

by William Trevor

  Mrs. Biddle says Albert is as a son to her. She would prefer it if he didn’t go out every night, but he has pointed out that cleaning up the Underground is work that has to be done. He is fortunate to have the work, he explains, a stroke of good fortune come his way.

  ‘You OK then, Mrs. Biddle?’ he inquires after he has stuck up the Spookee stickers. ‘You manage to eat a bit?’

  Mrs. Biddle has eaten everything. In the sitting-room where she also sleeps she is still in bed, watching television, a game show with numbered boxes. She turns it off because when Albert is there she likes to hear his news.

  ‘Yeah, I been down the shops,’ he answers when she asks. ‘I paid the gas.’

  ‘You get the woman with the hair?’

  ‘Yeah, I got her. Violet she’s called. She has it on her badge.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised what she’s called, that woman.’ Albert says it takes all sorts. He stacks the dishes Mrs. Biddle has eaten from, making room on a tray for the metal teapot she has herself carried to her room. For a moment he worries, reminded by the teapot of her picking her steps from the kitchen, shuffling dangerously along, the teapot’s handle wrapped in a cloth where the black plastic binding fell off years ago. A trip and she could be scalded, lying there while he’s out or asleep. But when Mrs. Biddle decides to make her own tea she will not be moved from doing so.

  ‘No hurry on them dishes. Rest in the chair, Albert. Keep me company a bit.’

  Even more than hearing Albert’s news Mrs. Biddle likes to share with him the memories that keep her going when she’s alone. As Gracie de Lisle, girl assistant to Halriati the Sicilian, and before that as one of the four Singing Cow-slips, she has not been unknown. When Mr. Biddle married her she was professionally engaged, twice nightly at the Tottenham Grand Empire.

  In the small, crowded room — rows of cottages on shelves and in cabinets, camels and elephants and reindeer on the mantelpiece — Albert hears further highlights from the theatres and the halls. The cottages are of china, dully glazed so that a sense of reality is retained; the animals are of a brown material that has been grained to resemble carved wood. Theatrical photographs are displayed in mock-wooden frames on two tables and on the walls.

  ‘Nineteen forty-eight, the old Hip in Huddersfield. Puss in Boots and the lights failed.’

  ‘What did you do, Mrs. Biddle?’ Albert asks, although he knows.

  ‘Candles we had to resort to, the usherettes’ flashlights, you name it we had it. The day after Boxing Day. Spoilt it for the kiddies, they said.’

  Albert never minds hearing a highlight more than once, throwing in the odd response in order to keep company with her because it’s company she’s after. He stayed with her all day the time her front-garden ornaments disappeared, and again when the social services wrote about her pension, saying it could be reduced, and again when they sent a request to know when it was she’d died. Keeping company is the heart of looking after people, as Albert first experienced in his Morning Star days. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’ they used to say, a catchphrase it became. The time the youths laughed when the man with elephantiasis sat down to rest himself on the edge of the pavement he stayed with him until the youths went away, even though the man said he was used to abuse on the streets.

  ‘“Milk that cow!” Aubrey shouted from the stilts, and then the back kicked the bucket away and the front did the little dance that had them in stitches. Harry Sunders was the best back in the business. Clowny took the front, and those two always had strong beer in the cow. A couple of Stingos in their pockets and sometimes they spilt it. Brought the house down when the Stingo dribbled out. They’d be prancing about, not knowing they was leaving little pools.’

  ‘Yes,’ Albert says. Everything is on the tray now. He tidies the bed, gathering up pages of the local newspaper and a magazine, listening to further tales while he does so. When there’s a pause he says:

  ‘You know you can be in the Salvation Army without musical knowledge, Mrs. Biddle?’

  Mrs. Biddle sniffs. Peculiar in this day and age, the Salvationists. Grown men and women with their tambourines. Dismissively, she shakes her head. She could do without the Salvationists this morning.

  ‘You hear of Joseph of Arimathea, Mrs. Biddle?’

  Mrs. Biddle doesn’t know if she has heard of Joseph of Arimathea or not. There was Joseph and Dan Saul, kept a greengrocer’s, Jewish boys. The father was a Joseph, too. The family moved up West, Dan Saul went into jewellery. Flashy he always was.

  ‘Time of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea. He took the body. There was another bloke come down out of a tree and carries the Cross. The time the Army was preaching I went up to them and asked the one with the glasses how they’re spelling Arimathea.’

  Albert spells it now. Arimathea was a place, he explains, a desert locality, not so much as a bush to shade the ground. No water, nothing. Put seeds down and they wouldn’t grow.

  You can’t live without water, Mrs. Biddle tetchily agrees, anyone living there should have moved away. Street preachers will tell you anything, Adam and Eve, feed the multitude with a fish. ‘Anything comes into their heads and then they get the tambourines out.’

  ‘They didn’t have no tambourines the day I asked the man, Mrs. Biddle. In their lunch hour it was.’

  ‘Same difference to me, Albert. All that about a burning bush, all that about a star. They lull you with the music.’

  Albert doesn’t protest further. He collects a cup and saucer he hasn’t noticed on the window-ledge. Mrs. Biddle says there’s trouble with the Lottery.

  ‘Some man strung himself up. Win the Lottery and it’s the end of you, the new thing is.’

  Albert asks about that, picking up the tray. It could be you have to pay for the uniform. Stands to reason, the Army couldn’t go handing out clothes. Albert understands that, but doesn’t say so now because her attention wanders whenever he mentions the Army — the way it does when he says SAS or Air India has just gone over, or when he tries to tell her about Joey Ells. The time he told her about scratching his initials on the brick under the windowsill at the Morning Star she fell asleep.

  ‘A couple of thousand you’d get in the Irish Sweep. Enough for anyone.’

  ‘Course it is, Mrs. Biddle.’

  Twice he put his initials there, A. L., and the year, 1983. It was Mrs. Hoates who told him his other name was Luffe, something he hadn’t known. She’d chosen Luffe because it suited him, she said. Albert Luffe. She spelt it for him when he asked and he wrote it down.

  ‘Get us a curry later on, Albert? Something from Ishi Baba’s?’

  Albert holds the tray with one hand while he opens the door. No problem about a curry. He’ll have a sleep and then he’ll see what’s on offer.

  ‘You know what I’d like, Albert?’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘You make me a jelly, Albert? You make me a jelly and put it in the ice compartment for tonight?’

  He nods, and Mrs. Biddle declares that with a jelly to look forward to she’ll get up. She’ll get up and she’ll catch the afternoon sun by the window. Then there’ll maybe be something on the TV. A load of rubbish, that show with the boxes was, the man’s clothes too tight on him.

  ‘Good for you to get up.’ Albert repeats what a woman in the KP told him when he reported that sometimes he has difficulty persuading Mrs. Biddle to leave her bed. Bedsores there could be, apparently. Joints seizing up if you lay there.

  ‘You got a red jelly at all, Albert?’

  ‘Yeah, I got one.’

  The Morning Star has come into his mind because of remembering the initials. Miss Rapp in the mornings with ‘O Kind Creator’, her fingers dashing along the piano keys. Mrs. Cavey on her hands and knees in the bootroom, red polish on a hairbrush. Plaster falls from the stairway wall, the smell of boiling cabbage creeps upstairs. The cars come on a Sunday, the coats hang on the hallstand, big heavy coats worn to Rotary and to church, dark hats on the curved pegs, the uncles’ gloves
on the shelf below the mirror. Johneen Bale was given a dress and socks an uncle’s children had grown out of, Leeroy a bottle-opener, the mongol girl a bangle she sold to Ange, Ahzar and Little Mister frisbees. Cakes and jamrolls there were, beads and rings and plastic puzzles: he found the places to hide when they didn’t want to take the presents any more. ‘Don’t bother me now, boy,’ Mr. Hoates said every time he tried to tell, Mr. Hoates gone sleepy, his hour of Sunday rest, his gas fire hissing. Mrs. Cavey said wash your mouth out. ‘Stay by me, Albert,’Joey Ells begged, but he couldn’t that time and she hid in the rainwater tank, crawling under the strands of barbed wire, making a gap in the planks that covered the manhole. ‘Who’s seen Joey Ells?’ Mr. Hoates asked at Sunday tea and someone said there was snow on the ground, there’d be her footprints. ’Shine your torch down, Albert,’ Mr. Hoates said, and she was there with her legs broken. Mrs. Hoates went visiting on a Sunday afternoon, when the uncles came. ‘Now, what d’you want to do that for?’ she said to Joey Ells when she returned. ‘Frightening the life out of us.’

  In the kitchen Albert washes up. The Chicken Madras is always the preference from Ishi Baba’s. He doesn’t mind himself, the Chicken Madras or the beef, whatever’s on. He separates the squares of a Chivers’ strawberry jelly and when the water on the gas jet boils he pours it on to them, stirring until they dissolve.

  No way will Pettie have money for the rent if she doesn’t go back to the Dowlers or start in somewhere else. Come Friday there’ll be the knocking on the ceiling with the walking-stick and Mrs. Biddle saying she’s not a charity. She never wanted that girl in the house in the first place, she’ll remind him, which from time to time she does anyway, rent or no rent. It rouses her suspicion that Pettie keeps a low profile in the house, hardly making a sound on the stairs or when she opens the front door or closes it behind her. Claiming that the sitting-room has a smell, she never looks in for a chat with Mrs. Biddle. It worries Albert that she won’t be able to find other employment and will make for the streets where Marti Spinks and Ange hang about, where Little Mister’s with the rent boys. ‘Don’t ever go up Wharfdale,’ he has warned her often enough, but sometimes she doesn’t answer.

  Finding room for the jelly among packets of frozen peas and potato chips in the refrigerator, Albert’s concern for Pettie gathers vigour. She won’t be able to give him back the money she borrowed, and when he asks her what she’s doing for work she won’t say. She’ll sit there in the Soft Rock, making butterflies out of the see-through wrap of a cigarette packet or tapping her fingers if the music is on, not hearing what’s said to her because of this house she has been to. He’ll say again that he should go round to the Dowlers to try to get the job back. The chances are she won’t answer.

  A fluffy grey cat crawls along the windowsill, pausing to look in at him. Albert doesn’t like that cat. Closing the refrigerator door, and catching sight of the animal again as he turns around, he remembers how it once jumped down from the opening at the top of Mrs. Biddle’s window and landed on her pillow, terrifying her because she was asleep. The cat is another worry Albert has, though nothing like as nagging a one as his worry about Pettie. As if it knows this and is resentful, it mews at Albert through the glass, displaying its pointed teeth. There’s a cat that goes for postmen’s fingers when they push the letters into the box, vicious as a tiger, a postman told him.

  The mewing ceases and Albert is spat at. Claws slither on the window-pane, the fluffy grey tail thrashes the air, and then the creature’s gone. It’ll be the end of her if Pettie goes up Wharfdale, same’s it was for Bev.

  At a scarf counter she unfolds scarves she can’t afford to buy, trying some of them on. Busy with another customer, the sales assistant isn’t young, a grey, bent woman whom Pettie feels sorry for: awful to be on your feet like that all day long, at the beck and call of anyone who cares to summon you, forever folding the garments that have been mussed up.

  In the coat department the assistant is younger, a black girl with a smile. She keeps repeating that the blue with the ows at the collar suits Pettie, and brings her a yellow and a green of the same cut. ‘Course the bows slip on and off, you have what colour bow you want,’ the black girl points out, and Pettie is reminded of Sharon Lite, who had to have electric-shock treatment years afterwards. Albert occasionally comes across someone from the home, someone who recognizes him on the street or in an Underground, who passes on bits of news like that. ‘No, sorry,’ Pettie apologizes, and the black girl says she’s welcome.

  In a shoe shop she tries on shoes, fifteen pairs in all. She walks about with a different shoe on either foot. She asks for half a size larger and begins again. She asks about sandals, but sandals are scarce at the moment, she’s told, everyone after them. She examines the tights on a rack by the doors and leaves the shop with a pair of navy blue and a pair of taupe. No way you can walk out of a store with a coat, but at least she has a scarf with horses’ heads on it, and a blue bow and a silvery one, and the tights.

  On the street again she examines spectacles in an optician’s window. All of them are more attractive than hers. She saw the grandmother looking at hers, not thinking much of them. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ the grandmother would have said to him behind that closed door, and he’d have argued that he didn’t see why not. But the grandmother would have gone on and on.

  ‘Of course, you could go for contacts,’ the woman in the optician’s suggests, although she’s wearing glasses herself, with jewels in the hinge area and silver trim on the side pieces. Disposable contact lenses you can have now, she points out, no more than a film over the eyes, throw them away every night. Available on EasiPlan, the woman says.

  ‘How much, though?’ Pettie asks, and there are questions then, and calculations, and a form to fill in, information required about the applicant’s bank account, name and address of employer, length of time in present position, if credit has ever been refused or withheld. Pettie says she’ll think about it. The scarf with the horses’ heads on it is draped over a pair of smoky blue frames which Pettie is about to take into her possession. But she can tell that the woman with the jewelled hinges is sharp, and changes her mind.

  ‘Excuse me, please.’

  For a moment she imagines the man outside the optician’s is a detective who has followed her from the scarf counter or the shoe shop, but when he speaks again it is to ask the way to Marble Arch. Pettie directs him, repeating the directions because he isn’t quick on the uptake. When she has finished and has told him how long she estimates the journey will take on foot, which is how he has indicated he intends to make it, he invites her to have a cup of tea or coffee. ‘Maybe stronger?’ he offers also. He’s sallow-skinned, from somewhere in the East, Pettie speculates. Beer? he suggests, still smiling. Maybe barley wine, which bucks you up?

  Pettie walks away. In Leicester Square she sits at the end of a damp wooden seat otherwise occupied by a couple fondling one another. There was a smell of lavender when she was waiting in the hall, maybe coming from the polish on the panelling because you could smell a waxiness, too. There was a gong like the one the slave hits at the beginning of old films, only smaller, and through an open door she could see the dining-room silver — little ornamental fowls on a big oval table, and salt and pepper containers — and blue glasses on a sideboard, and a fireguard that was a seat as well, upholstered in red leather and buttoned. The silver was valuable, anyone could tell that. One of the fowls would have gone into her bag so’s you’d hardly notice the bulge, spoons from the sideboard, a little china box from the table in the hall. But she didn’t even consider it.

  The couple who have been fondling one another go away. She took her glasses off when the grandmother was out of the room. She held them for a minute, wanting him to see her without them, but unable to see him properly herself. ‘I hope you didn’t find the journey too terrible,’ he said, and she shook her head; the journey was nothing. ‘There would be adequate time off,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘We c
ould arrange that between us.’ He had made his mind up then. He had made his choice; he was a man who knew immediately. Time off she would spend in the garden or just walking about the country, not ever bothering to go back to the streets. She would have told him that if the grandmother hadn’t come back then.

  A black man, talking, sits down where the couple were. He scatters crumbs for the pigeons, breaking up bread he takes from a pocket. He is speaking about someone for whom he would lay down his life or obtain money by whatever means. His eyes are bloodshot, his teeth flash as he converses, seeming occasionally to address the pigeons, who softly coo for him. Two women go by, talking about their health.

  It was just before the old woman said they’d go upstairs to the nursery that she knew she definitely had feelings for him. She looked back from the door and he was stroking the dog again, a consolation in his hurting. That grave would have been in his mind, and his motherless baby.

  It has helped, going round the shops: it’s nice to think of the scarf in her handbag, and the bows from the coats, and the tights. If she’d walked out of the optician’s with the smoky frames she would have had to find out in another shop if she could replace her wire ones with them, which would cost her — some exorbitant amount, as always is the case when you want something. Tuesday or Wednesday she’ll take what she’s got to the car-boot man, with a few more items added in the meantime. No point in going out there with only three.

  Taking possession of things touches a part of Pettie she does not understand, stirring an excitement in her that never fails to brighten up the day. The first time she did it in a shop — her fingers edging towards a blue ballpoint pen — she experienced a throb of fear and hesitated, thinking she couldn’t. Yet a moment later she did. ‘No, over to the right,’ she instructed the man behind the counter, who had to stand on a stool to reach a box of chocolates with a castle on it. Her fingers drew the ballpoint towards her, then closed around it. A bigger box was what she was after, she said, and flowers she’d prefer to a castle. Outside, she threw the ballpoint away.