Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  ‘That you will be taken from this place,’ continued the judge, ‘where you now stand to the place whence you came, and that you be hanged by the neck until your body be dead.’

  ‘Track in fast on Constance,’ commanded the toylike director. ‘Did anyone know she used to crucify slugs?’

  Joy was standing in the kitchen of the flat picking at the label on a jar of raspberry jam. Small shreds of paper had accumulated on the kitchen table. At the draining-board Doris turned the contents of a tin of ravioli into a saucepan.

  ‘For God’s sake stop moaning,’ she snapped. ‘You’d think you were the Queen Mother the fuss you make. And leave that jam alone.’

  ‘I can’t eat the stuff you’re cooking. I can’t eat anything reminds me of vomit.’

  ‘Joy, will you please stop talking about vomit?’ She spoke quietly, determined not to lose her temper. A smile flittered wearily in her face, an effort at friendliness. ‘You know it’s horrid, Joy.’

  Joy gazed through her spectacles at the pot of jam, as if concerned about it. There were smears of food on her green and yellow school tie and on her matching skirt. She said she couldn’t help it if something looked like vomit, and then she left the kitchen. Doris sighed, her narrow shoulders sloped over the orange mess in the saucepan. She felt tired and in the dumps. It would be lovely to be enjoying a repetition of the little outing to the Pizzaland, lovely to be with him afterwards in the sitting-room, when Joy was asleep. In the shoe department she’d planned to tell him the next time he phoned that she’d had a little cry last night, upset because he wasn’t spending the night on the sofa and wouldn’t allow her to come to the Rembrandt Hotel.

  Leaving the ravioli to simmer on its own for a minute, she rooted behind the packets of sugar in the cupboard by the sink. She could hear the sound of the TV coming from the living-room, so that was all right. Swiftly she poured a couple of inches of vodka into a cup. If she’d known they wouldn’t be going to the Pizzaland she’d have bought some eggs, which Joy always ate without comment, especially when they were fried. Then she realized that in fact she had known, that the telephone call had come at half past eleven and she could have bought the eggs at lunchtime. For a moment she wondered why she hadn’t, until she remembered that she’d been too upset to buy anything. It was all right when he was there on the phone, it was afterwards that the depression began.

  She had another drink and then followed her daughter into the sitting-room. Joy was looking funny, glazed about the eyes as if something had gone wrong with her spectacles. Cartoon figures were cavorting on the television screen.

  ‘What was she like?’ Doris inquired, interrupting the high-pitched quacking of the cartoon characters, the sharpness in her voice causing Joy to give a little jump. ‘The girl he was with that time, what was she like?’

  ‘She had a blue dress on –’

  ‘You told me about the dress. I mean, what did she seem like, Joy? What kind of person, I mean.’

  ‘She’s the one puts the kid down the toilet. Small she was, long hair, black –’

  ‘A Negro, you mean?’

  ‘Her hair was black. The rest of her was white.’

  ‘Listen, Joy, was she laughing? I mean, when you saw them were they walking along the street laughing?’

  No, Joy said, they hadn’t been laughing. They’d just been talking. In the bar she’d been sitting down and he’d been getting drinks. The girl was good-looking, she added.

  Doris returned to the kitchen. The ravioli’s tomato sauce had cooked away to nothing, so she added some water to the saucepan. She poured herself some more vodka, and cleared up the shreds of paper from the table before laying it for their meal.

  As soon as something happened where this Uncle Manchester was concerned she and Frankie would definitely have to have a moment in private together. They’d have to talk about Joy not being able to read. They’d have to talk about the money situation and how the mat-making had become difficult. She couldn’t help it if her hands shook, she couldn’t help it if the gold rim on the Big Ben ones hadn’t been quite right. She had attempted to explain all that to them in a letter, but they hadn’t even answered, which was typical nowadays. On top of everything else the flat needed to be redecorated. Through no fault of her own the kitchen plaster was falling down, and only the other night she’d noticed the bathroom walls were as grimy as a coal-house, running with sweat due to the steam.

  Doris knew he’d want her to share these troubles with him, like he’d shared with her the thing about his Uncle Manchester being on his last legs. It was he, after all, who’d suggested the mats to her in the first place, just as he’d suggested the second-hand dealer in Crawford Street. She washed the cup she’d drunk from under the tap. There was enough in the bottle to keep her going for the evening; if she could manage to, it would be nice to leave a drop for the morning but sometimes that wasn’t easy. ‘Supper ready, Joy,’ she cried loudly, spooning the ravioli on to two plates.

  There was no response from the sitting-room. The sound of quacking continued, and eventually she opened the adjoining door. ‘It’ll be getting dried up, dear,’ she began to say cheerily, and then she noticed that something was the matter. Ignoring a drama about a frog and some kind of bird, Joy was leaning back on the sofa, apparently in a stupor.

  In the Rembrandt Hotel, in the restaurant called the Carver’s Table, Francis ate roast beef, and drank half a bottle of last year’s Beaujolais. Every evening since the unpleasant visit to the Pizzaland he had eaten alone in the hotel, with the Evening Standard propped up in front of him, now and again looking around at the people. Occasionally a child or a woman would recognize him as the man from the tobacco advertisements and it was pleasant to watch whispering take place. When he was glanced at as people passed his table he always inclined his head in return.

  He might go for a walk, he thought, perhaps call in somewhere for a glass of brandy before bedtime. It was pleasant to take things slowly and easily on a summer’s evening in London, mingling with the tourists. But before any of that he would telephone Julia Ferndale, as he always did after dinner. ‘I’ll have the trifle, I think,’ he said to the Vietnamese waitress, trying to make her smile at him. ‘Yes, with cream, please.’ He had coffee as well. He thought about having a glass of brandy now rather than later, but changed his mind.

  In his bedroom, Room 408, he sat on the edge of his bed and listened while Julia told him that everything was well in Swan House; that Mrs Spanners became daily more excited about the wedding, that Mrs Anstey’s arthritis had eased quite a bit due to the continuing spell of dry weather. ‘I thought I’d better make my will,’ her rather faint voice reported.

  ‘Will?’

  ‘The girls pointed out –’

  ‘What girls, Julia?’

  ‘Henrietta and Katherine. They suggested at the weekend that I really should, before the wedding.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Julia.’

  ‘So I did it at Warboys, Smith and Toogood when I was leaving in some typing. It can be rather a nuisance if there’s no will. I mean, if anything happens.’

  ‘Happens, Julia?’

  ‘Well, we’re flying to Italy after all.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Roger didn’t leave a will, you see. Everything was higgledy-piggledy for quite a while.’

  ‘Yes, of course it would be.’

  ‘I just thought I’d tell you, darling.’

  Francis listened, and then spoke himself. He answered questions about the rehearsals, embroidering a little in a mechanical way. He tried not to think about what had been said concerning the making of a will, and it was with relief that he finally replaced the receiver. Tiny beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead and his chin. He washed his face at the basin and then replaced the small amount of make-up he wore. He found it difficult to do so because his hands were shaking.

  Why had she suddenly made a will? Why had she gone behind his back to a ridiculously named firm of soli
citors? Her two sharp-eyed daughters had put her up to that, homing in on her like vultures. Her mother too, no doubt. He’d never trusted the daughters, or the mother either come to that. For hours he’d listened to the old woman going on about the house she’d lived in when the family had possessed more money, as though it could possibly interest anyone. He was glad her husband had gone bankrupt, he was glad she had arthritis; he hoped the two daughters would make wretched marriages. Hotly, anger gathered within him. It was all of a piece, his own voice shouted at him, thunderously exploding in his mind. It was all of a piece with the dressmaker picking over pieces of meat in Sainsbury’s, telling him to get out of her sight when he wanted to forgive her.

  Francis left his bedroom, took the lift to the ground floor and dropped the key of Room 408 into a slot in the hall-porter’s desk. He passed through the swing-doors and out into Brompton Road. The evening was warm and mellow, but he was no longer in a mood to appreciate it. Sweat had again broken out on his forehead, and on his back and legs. The tourists he had earlier imagined he might pleasurably mingle with looked grotesque, and so did the Victoria and Albert Museum and Brompton Oratory. The anger continued to smash at his thoughts, preventing his efforts to shape them. A fortnight ago he had given up his room in Folkestone, selling off the accumulated oddments of a lifetime, retaining only a selection of his clothes. Nothing could change that now; there was no turning back, even if he’d wanted to, which of course he didn’t. That Julia Ferndale had just signed a will made not the slightest difference to any of it, one way or the other: he hadn’t even been thinking of a will when he’d let down the tyre of her motor-car. She’d gone to a firm of solicitors without thinking how it would hurt him, not caring. ‘But you’ve proved untrustworthy, Francis,’ the Massmith sisters had said, and the same unjust verdict had now been passed in Swan House. ‘We don’t have lies between friends, Francis,’ the debt-collector had said, arranging the defence of Le Haye Sainte by the King’s German Legion.

  He walked to South Kensington tube station and took a train to Victoria. He wanted to stand in Folkestone among the ironing-boards and the dressmaking dummies, among tape-measures and thread, and patterns cut out of old newspaper. He wanted to point at the mark on the wall where the sewing-machine cover had hit it. ‘The trouble with you,’ he wanted to say, ‘is you’re sixty-five years of age and gross and white and ugly. No wonder your husband dropped dead at a race-meeting.’

  On the tube he closed his eyes and seemed already to be walking from Folkestone railway station, through familiar suburban streets. He rang the doorbell of the house and when she opened the door there was the sound of a television set. Pins decorated the bodice of her dress. There was a sty in one of her eyes.

  She said at once that she despised him. He was worse than the dirt on the roads. He was nothing, she said. But he only smiled. ‘I’ve come to tell you something,’ he explained, causing a West Indian on the tube to glance at him.

  Francis closed his eyes again, pushing her back into the hall of the house he should have inherited years ago. Nothing had changed in the workroom: half-completed garments hung around the walls, he could almost hear the whispery gossip of her customers. ‘A girl called Constance Kent,’ he said. ‘Extraordinary, she was.’ Slowly he repeated the story of her crime, pointing out that she, too, had been driven into corners, destroyed by other people. ‘You are a hideous woman,’ he said in the workroom, ‘eating ice cream in Folkestone. You are full of cruelty, leching after men on the sea-front because you are alone, because nobody can be bothered with you. You picked me up and I was kind to you. I forgave you, but all you wanted to do was to be alone again, not caring if you hurt a person. What kind of a life is it, trailing from room to room of this big old house, with money hoarded away? What kind of a life is it, carrying your own shopping-bags, cooking for yourself and a budgerigar?’ He reached for her scissors and her blood leapt in spurts across the room, staining the garments on the walls, and the dummies and the newspaper patterns. It spattered the wall that had been damaged when she threw the sewing-machine cover. It spattered the ceiling and the windows, and the three electric irons and the white covers of the ironing-boards, and the budgerigar in its cage.

  At Victoria Francis walked among the holiday crowds instead of taking a Folkestone train. He watched the foreigners, boys and girls with haversacks, Cypriots and Sicilians pulling suitcases on little castors. He reflected that it was a railway station he particularly liked, and then he began to count up the number of journeys he had made to Folkestone from it, possibly six hundred he thought. Strange really, to have stayed on in Folkestone for all these years just to persuade a dressmaker that he forgave her.

  Slowly he returned to the Underground, his anger still upsetting him, though less so than it had. He would forgive Julia Ferndale for treating him badly: he felt better, thinking about that, and again he closed his eyes. At once he thought of German cities: Hamburg and Berlin and Munich. He had never been to any of them, but in whichever seemed right there would be a modern, quite luxurious flat, not unlike the one he had told the two women he occupied in Folkestone. He would learn the language. His friend would teach him German cooking. His friend might be a girl as young as Susanna Music, a boy or an older man, a sympathetic woman. It never mattered.

  He got off the train at Piccadilly and walked about the Underground station. All the women who might have been sympathetic were hurrying. A girl waited by the newspaper stand, and Francis smiled a little as he glanced in her direction, but pointedly she ignored him. A woman in black went by, and for a moment he imagined he was in Germany already. ‘Oh yes, I understand,’ this woman said in their pleasant flat, giving him presents because she knew he liked to receive them. ‘Take this, dear,’ she said, offering him little trinkets she had finished with, and German coins her father had collected. The dressmaker had never understood for an instant, nor had the doctor’s wife, nor any of the others. They made him ask for things, as men did too. And Julia Ferndale wouldn’t understand either. She’d start on about wills, there’d be the look in her mother’s eyes, her awful daughters would make life miserable. He wanted to cry when he thought of Julia Ferndale in her house in that town, how he’d hoped at first she’d be sympathetic enough to give him things without his having to be ashamed and ask.

  He thought of going to the dance-hall in Leicester Square or the one near the Strand. It was lovely when a girl he was dancing with recognized him, or when interest came into a woman’s face. But for some reason he didn’t feel up to a dance-hall tonight, having to smile and buy vodka and lime instead of having something bought for him. In the men’s lavatory he combed his hair, seeing himself reflected in a mirror attached to a white-tiled wall. He could see as well the youths who stood around behind him, some of them pretending to wash their hands and then drying them under jets of air. There were older men also, one of them with his shirt open at the neck, his grey hair greased and brushed straight back.

  ‘Hullo,’ Francis said.

  ‘I’m sorry, caller, there’s no reply.’

  ‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain?’

  ‘No reply from 408, caller. If you hold the line, please, I’ll page the hotel.’

  There being no telephone in her flat, Doris was making the call from the telephone-box outside the Bricklayer’s Arms. Her maroon mackintosh hung open, her large black handbag was suspended from her shoulder. She had managed to wake Joy and had helped her to get into bed. She’d looked terrible, her eyes peculiar as if she’d gone blind, and all the time she’d kept giggling and talking about an elephant.

  ‘Sorry, caller, Mr Tyte is not in the hotel.’

  He’d still be at the old people’s home, sitting with his uncle. She tried to remember the name of the place, and then decided that he’d never mentioned a name. In the telephone-box there were the usual crumpled, filthy telephone directories, but no Yellow Pages. She found a set in the Bricklayer’s Arms and began to telephone the old people’s homes in
the Hampton Wick area, repeatedly returning to the bar for change and drinks. It was almost ten o’clock before there was a response that wasn’t entirely negative.

  ‘Sundown Home,’ Miss Purchase said.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m looking for a Mr Tyte. He’s sitting with his uncle somewhere out in the Hampton Wick area –’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, the residents are not permitted to take telephone calls in the evenings.’

  ‘It’s not a resident. It’s a Mr Francis Tyte who’s visiting his uncle. Is this the right place I’ve got?’

  ‘This is the Sundown Home, Hampton Wick. Mr Tyte resides here, but residents are not –’

  ‘It’s the younger Mr Tyte I want. He’s sitting with his uncle.’

  Miss Purchase tightened her lips. ‘Visiting time is Sunday afternoons, two-thirty to five. No visitor is at present on the premises.’

  ‘It’s a special case because his uncle’s in a bad way. All I’m asking you is to go and get Mr Francis Tyte-’

  ‘The younger Mr Tyte has not set foot in this house for six years.’

  ‘Look, I think you’ve got your wires crossed. Frankie’s been out to see his uncle every night for the past fortnight. The old chappie’s poorly with his water-works. It’s touch and go, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘If you’re referring to Mr Francis Tyte’s father, there’s nothing the matter with his water-works. We have Francis Tyte’s father here, and his mother. We have no uncle.’

  ‘Frankie’s mum and dad were killed in a train crash, back in the fifties. I’m talking about his Uncle Manchester.’

  ‘Manchester?’

  ‘They called him that apparently. Because he lived there.’

  ‘Look here, who is this? Are you family?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Francis Tyte’s. I’m ringing on a very urgent matter. I need to speak to Frankie immediately.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I cannot help you. Mr Tyte’s father is well and his mother is well. I naturally know nothing about some uncle in Manchester. If I were you, madam, I’d contact the authorities up there.’