Two Lives

by William Trevor

  ‘It’s really beautiful down there,’ Aimée told him. ‘A monk patted my head.’

  As we moved towards the car I managed to draw Otmar aside, to reassure him that his proposal for paying what was owing was quite acceptable, and to repeat that he, too, was welcome to remain in my house for as long as he wished.

  ‘I have no skills for the work. I bring no knowledge.’

  I reassured him on this point also, and for some reason as I did so a vivid picture came into my mind: of his buying the railway tickets to Milan on 5 May and counting the notes he received in change. ‘Shall we have a cappuccino?’ Madeleine suggested. ‘There’s time.’ I might have placed a hand on the shoulder from which his arm had been cut away, but somehow I could not bring myself to do so. I might have said he must not blame himself. Without knowing anything, I might have said it was all right.

  ‘It is possible,’ I said instead. ‘A life you did not think of when you lay in that hospital is possible, Otmar.’

  For a second the eyes behind the large spectacles fearfully met mine. I remembered his fingers interlaced with Madeleine’s, and the old man as straight as a ramrod beside his daughter. I remembered the two children arguing in whispers, and a workman with a shovel, standing by the railway line.

  ‘She is going back to America,’ Otmar said, and there our conversation ended.

  In the car Quinty regaled Mr Riversmith with information he’d picked up somewhere about St Mary of Egypt. ‘Singer and actress she used to be,’ his voice drifted back to where I was sitting, and he went on about how scavenging dogs wouldn’t touch the remains of St Bibiana, and how the Blessed Lucy endured a loss of blood through her stigmata every Wednesday and Friday for three years. I was unable to hear how Mr Riversmith responded and didn’t particularly try to, because that Quinty was having a field day didn’t matter any more. What mattered was that Mr Riversmith was an ambitious man: that hadn’t occurred to me before. He was ambitious and Francine was ambitious for him, and for herself. There were other professors with microscopes, watching other colonies of ants in other trees. He and Francine had to keep ahead. They had to get there first. What time could they devote to a child who had so tiresomely come out of the blue? Would serious ambition be interrupted in Virginsville, Pennsylvania? That’s what I wondered as Quinty continued to be silly and Mr Riversmith, poor man, was obliged to listen.

  When we returned I lay down for an hour; it was almost seven when I appeared downstairs again. Aimée was in bed, the General said, and wished to say good-night to her uncle and myself. He and I went together to her room, where the shutters had been latched to create an evening twilight. When Mr Riversmith spoke her name she answered at once. I sat on the edge of the bed. He stood.

  ‘Aimée, I would like you to have the hen I bought. It’s a present for you.’

  To my surprise, she seemed bewildered. Her face puckered, as if what I’d said made no sense. Then she turned to her uncle.

  ‘I didn’t ever know there was a quarrel.’

  ‘It wasn’t important.’

  ‘But it happened.’

  ‘Yes, it happened.’

  Since that seemed inadequate, I added:

  ‘Disagreements don’t much matter, Aimée.’ And deliberately changing the subject, I added: ‘Remember the picture of the shepherds?’

  ‘Shepherds?’

  ‘The shepherds with their dog.’

  ‘And a hen?’

  ‘No, no. The hen was what I bought for you.’

  ‘What else was in the picture?’

  ‘Well, sheep in a pen.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘There were hills and houses,’ Mr Riversmith said, and although I wasn’t looking at him I guessed that that familiar frown was gathering on his brow.

  ‘And eight trees,’ I added. ‘Don’t you remember, we counted them?’

  Through the gloom I watched her shaking her head. Her uncle said:

  ‘I guess you remember the angel in the sky, Aimée?’

  ‘Have you come to say good-night? I’m sleepy now.’

  I mentioned the visit to the monastery, but the entire day except for that reference to a quarrel appeared to have been erased from Aimée’s memory. Her breathing deepened while we remained with her. I could tell she was asleep.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ her uncle said.

  Of course the man was upset; in the circumstances anyone would be. He asked if he might telephone Dr Innocenti, and did so from the hall. I listened on the extension in my private room, feeling the matter concerned me.

  ‘Yes, there will be this,’ Dr Innocenti said.

  ‘The child’s suffering from periodic amnesia, doctor.’

  ‘So might you be, signore, if you had experienced what your niece has.’

  ‘But this came on so suddenly. Was it the excitement today, the visit to Siena?’

  ‘I would not say so, signore.’

  Mr Riversmith said he had arranged to return to Pennsylvania with Aimée in four days’ time. He wondered if he’d been hasty. He wondered if his niece should be taken back to the hospital for observation.

  ‘The journey will not harm your niece, signore.’

  ‘All day she seemed fine.’

  ‘I can assure you, signore, she has recovered more of herself than we once had hopes of in the hospital. What remains must be left to passing time. And perhaps a little to good fortune. Do not be melancholy, signore.’

  Naturally, in all honesty, Dr Innocenti had had to say that the journey would not be harmful. It was not the journey we had to dwell upon but the destination. And this was not something Dr Innocenti could presume to mention. There were further reassurances, but clearly Mr Riversmith remained far from relieved. No sooner had the conversation with Dr Innocenti come to an end than he made a call to his wife in Virginsville. I guessed he would, and again picked up the receiver in my room. She was not surprised, the woman said. In a case like this nothing could be expected to be straightforward. Her voice was hoarse, deep as a man’s, and because I’d heard it I at last pictured without difficulty the woman to whom it belonged: a skinny, weather-beaten face, myopic eyes beneath a lank fringe, eyebrows left unplucked.

  ‘What you need’s a good stiff drink,’ I said a little later, when Mr Riversmith appeared in the salotto. He looked shaken. For all I knew, she’d given him gip after I’d put the receiver down. For all I knew, this weather-beaten woman blamed him for the mess they’d got into – having to give a home to a child who by the sound of things was as nutty as a fruitcake. Added to which, the heat in Siena might well have adversely affected the poor man’s jet-lag. I poured him some whisky, since whisky’s best for shock.

  10

  After I’d had my bath that evening I happened to catch a glimpse of myself, as yet unclothed, in my long bedroom mirror. My skin was still mottled from the warm water, the wounds of 5 May healed into vivid scars. A dark splotch of stomach hair emphasized the fleshiness that was everywhere repeated – in cheeks and thighs, breasts, arms and shoulders. To tell you the truth, I think it suits me particularly well in my middle age. I’d feel uneasy scrawny.

  I chose that evening a yellow and jade outfit, a pattern of ferns on a pale, cool ground. I added jewellery – simple gold discs as earrings, necklace to match, rings and a bangle. Not hurrying, I made my face up, and applied fresh varnish to my fingernails. My shoes, high-heeled and strapped, matched the jade of my dress.

  ‘You’re putting us to shame tonight,’ the General remarked as we sat to dinner on the terrace, and you could see that Otmar was impressed as well. But Mr Riversmith reacted in no way whatsoever. All during dinner you could tell that he was worried about the child.

  ‘You mustn’t be,’ I said when we were alone. A local man who hired machines for ploughing had arrived, and the General and Otmar had gone to talk to him at the back of the house.

  ‘She’s suffering from a form of amnesia,’ Mr Riversmith said. ‘She draws the pictures and then forgets she’
s done them. She’s forgotten a whole day.’

  ‘We’re lucky to have Dr Innocenti here.’

  ‘Why did the German say he’d drawn the pictures?’

  ‘I suppose because there must be an explanation for the pictures’ existence. It would be worrying for Aimée otherwise.’

  ‘It isn’t true. It causes a confusion.’

  Because of his distress he was as forthcoming as he’d been when he’d felt guilty about his sister. Distress brings talk with it. I’ve noticed that. In fairness you couldn’t have called him ambitious now.

  ‘Look at it this way, Mr Riversmith: an event such as we’ve shared draws people together. It could be that survivors understand one another.’

  His dark brows came closer together, his lips pursed, then tightened and then relaxed. I watched him thinking about what I’d said. He neither nodded nor shook his head, and it was then that it occurred to me he bore a very faint resemblance to Joseph Cotten. I didn’t remark on it, but made the point that all four of us would not, ordinarily, have discovered a common ground.

  ‘D’you happen to know if they’ve given up on the case?’ he asked, not responding to what I’d said.

  I didn’t know the answer to this question. Since the detectives had ceased to come to my house we’d been a little out of touch with that side of things. The last I’d heard was that they considered their best hope to be the establishing of a connection between the events of 5 May and some other outrage, even one that hadn’t yet occurred. I repeated all that, and Mr Riversmith drily observed:

  ‘As detective-work goes, I guess that’s hardly reassuring.’

  I sipped my drink, not saying anything. It was Joseph Cotten’s style, rather than a resemblance. A pipe would not have seemed amiss, clenched between his strong-seeming teeth. You didn’t often see those teeth because he so rarely smiled. Increasingly that seemed a pity.

  ‘There are mysteries in this world,’ I said as lightly as I could. ‘There are mysteries that are beyond the realm of detectives.’

  He didn’t deny that, but he didn’t agree either. If he’d had a pipe he would have relit it now. He would have pressed the tobacco into the cherrywood bowl and drawn on it to make it glow again. I was sorry he was troubled, even though it made it easier to converse with him. Around us the fireflies were beginning.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get to know you, Mr Riversmith.’

  Perhaps it was a trick of the twilight but for a moment I thought I saw his face crinkling, and the bright flash of his healthy teeth. I tapped out a cigarette from a packet of MS and held the packet toward him. He hadn’t smoked so far and he didn’t now. I asked him if he minded the smell of a cigarette.

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘You brought up mysteries, Mr Riversmith.’ I went on to tell him about the feeling I continued to experience – of a story developing around us, of small, daily details apparently imbued with a significance that was as yet mysterious. I spoke of pieces of a jigsaw jumbled together on a table, hoping to make him see that higgledy-piggledy mass of jagged shapes.

  ‘I don’t entirely grasp this,’ he said.

  ‘Survival’s a complicated business.’

  From the back of the house the voice of the Italian with the motorized ploughs came to us, a halting line or two of broken English, and then the General’s reply. As soon as possible, the old man urged. It would do no harm to turn the earth over several times, now and in the autumn and the spring. The Italian said there would have to be a water line, a trench dug for a pipe from the well. There would be enough stone in the ruined stables, no need to have more cut. Dates were mentioned, argued about, and then agreed.

  ‘It’s been a long day.’

  As he spoke, Mr Riversmith stood up. I begged him, just for a moment longer, to remain. I poured a little wine into his glass, and a little into mine. Because of his American background, I told him how I’d found myself in Idaho. I mentioned my childhood fascination with the Old West, first encountered in the Gaiety Cinema. I even mentioned Claire Trevor and Marlene Dietrich.

  ‘Idaho is hardly the Wild West.’

  ‘I was misled. I was no more than a foolish child.’

  I told him how Ernie Chubbs had been going to Idaho in search of orders for sanitary-ware and had taken me with him on expenses; I told him how he’d taken me with him to Africa and then had disappeared. In the Café Rose they said they expected I’d met Mrs Chubbs, and it was clear what they were hinting at. ‘A healthy woman,’ they used to say. ‘Chubbs’s wife was always healthy.’ All I knew myself was that every time Ernie Chubbs referred to his wife he had to cough.

  I described Ernie Chubbs because it was relevant, his glasses, and tidy black hair kept down with scented oil. I explained that he didn’t travel with the sanitary-ware itself, just brochures full of photographs. In order to illustrate a point, I was obliged to refer again to the Café Rose, explaining that he took an order there but when the thing arrived eight or so months later it had a crack in it. ‘The place was unfortunate in that respect. “I Speak Your Weight”, a weighing-machine said in the general toilet, but when you put your coin in nothing happened. Chubbs sold them that too. He used to be in weighing-machines.’

  ‘I see.’

  There was another line Chubbs had, what he called the ‘joke flush’. When you pulled the chain, a voice called out, ‘Ha! ha!’ You kept pulling it and it kept saying, ‘Ha! ha!’ What was meant to happen was you’d give up in desperation; then you’d open the door to go out and the thing would flush on its own. But what actually happened was that when people installed the joke flush the voice said, ‘Ha! ha!’ and they couldn’t make it stop, and the flush didn’t work no matter what they did. Another thing was, when the light was turned on in the toilet, music was meant to play but it hardly ever did.

  ‘In the end the defective goods people caught up with Ernie Chubbs.’

  ‘I really think I must get along to bed now.’

  Women were Ernie Chubbs’s weakness: he was Aries on the cusp with Taurus, a very mixed-up region for a man of his sensual disposition. Before my time he took someone else round with him on expenses, but when she wanted to marry him he couldn’t afford to because of the alimony. It was then that Mrs Chubbs conveniently turned up her toes, and after that the other lady wouldn’t touch him with a pole. Maybe she got scared, I wouldn’t know. I was eighteen years old when I first met Ernie Chubbs, green as a pea. ‘All very different from your ants,’ I said.

  The engine of a motor-car started. ‘Buonanotte!’ the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.

  Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my titles in the glass-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.

  ‘You’re an author, Mrs Delahunty?’

  I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Café Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I said:

  ‘You might like to call me Emily.’

  There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he’d said he didn’t grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was reassurance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn’t. Clever men probably always need drawing out.

  ‘You’re Capricorn,’ I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. ‘The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.’

  He turned the first few pages of Bloom of Love. There was a flicker of astonishment in the eyes that had been so expressionlessl
y opaque a moment before. He picked up Waltz Me to Paradise, then returned both volumes to where he’d taken them from.

  ‘Most interesting,’ he said.

  ‘Your ants are interesting too, Tom.’

  Perhaps it was ridiculous to think that a professor of entomology in his middle years would ask if he might take Little Bonny Maye or Two on a Sunbeam to bed with him, but even so it was a disappointment when he didn’t. We stood without saying anything for a moment, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. I kept seeing his ants, running all over the place, a few carrying others on their backs, all of them intent upon some business or other.

  ‘I would listen if you told me, Tom. About your ants.’

  He shook his head. His research was of academic interest only, and was complex. An explanation of it did not belong in everyday conversation.

  ‘What was it you didn’t grasp, Tom?’

  ‘What?’

  I smiled encouragingly, wanting to say that if he smiled more himself everything would be easier for both of us, that it was a pity to possess such strong teeth and not ever to display them. I asked him to pick out Precious September. By Janine Ann Johns, I said, and watched him while he did so.

  ‘Open it, Tom.’

  I asked him to look for Lady Daysmith, and to read me a single sentence concerning her. There was an initial hesitation, a shifting of the jaw, the familiar tightening of the lips. I sensed a reminder to himself of the care, and love, that had so cosseted his sister’s child in this house.

  ‘Lady Daysmith knelt,’ he read eventually. ‘She closed her eyes and her whisper was heard in the empty room, beseeching mercy.’

  He replaced the volume on its shelf and closed the glass-paned door on it.

  ‘Sit down, Tom. Have a glass of grappa with me.’

  He rejected this, but I begged him and in the end he did as I wished because I said it was important. I poured us each a glass of grappa. I said:

  ‘Lady Daysmith had her origins in a Sunday-school teacher.’ I described the humility of Miss Alzapiedi, her gangling height, the hair that should have been her crowning glory. ‘Flat as a table up front. I turned her into an attractive woman, Tom.’