Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  ‘Oh my God, it’s terrible, Charle.’ She collapsed on to a chair, shaking her head and sobbing.

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Father Lavin, ‘your wife should have a cup of tea.’ He had stopped beside her on her way from Swan House and, having broken the news and established that Mrs Anstey’s Times was not due to be delivered for another hour, he’d given her a lift home.

  ‘Tea?’ said Mr Spanners.

  ‘I’ll make it if you tell me where everything is.’

  ‘Kettle won’t be up yet,’ Mrs Spanners interjected, her face working beneath the patina of make-up. ‘Oh God, I can’t believe it, Charle.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Where’s the man gone to?’

  Father Lavin explained that the information they had was slight, but what it looked like was a rather extraordinary case of desertion.

  He wondered if he should mention bigamy or not, and decided against it.

  Mrs Spanners said again that she couldn’t believe it. Her husband took a large brown tea-pot from a cupboard and from another a packet of Lipton’s Green Label tea. He couldn’t believe it himself, he confessed.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s most unpleasant,’ Father Lavin said. ‘Whatever it is I’m afraid it’s painful.’

  Mrs Spanners shook her head in further incredulity. When she spoke it was to remind her husband to heat the pot. Then she said: ‘

  Was it a quarrel? Will they maybe get together again?’

  ‘It didn’t sound as if they would.’

  Mr Spanners heaped spoons of tea into the warmed pot. ‘Well, I never,’ he said. ‘A man like Tyte.’

  Tears smudged his wife’s face. She continued to sob and to shake her head, rallying a little when Father Lavin pressed a cup of tea on her.

  ‘He was a lovely person,’ she said, as if Francis Tyte no longer existed.

  When Mrs Anstey descended the stairs at nine o’clock Father Lavin was standing in the hall. Seeing him, she at once recalled the early telephone call and sensed that something was the matter. The Times was in his hands, neatly folded.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll sit with you while you have breakfast.’

  ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

  ‘Is it Julia?’

  ‘Julia’s quite safe.’

  She had paused on the stairs. She now continued her descent. He came towards her, as if to take her arm. He didn’t, however, but walked beside her into the dining-room. ‘I’ve been reading your Times,’ he said on the way. It was most odd for the priest to call at this hour, and even odder that he should pressed it wasn’t. It was a bit like a dream, his saying out of the blue that he’d been reading her newspaper.

  As soon as she sat down, the breakfast Mrs Spanners had cooked was placed in front of her, with a Wedgewood-patterned pot of coffee and heated milk in a matching jug. Mrs Spanners was gone before she even noticed her, which added to the strangeness.

  ‘It’s Francis,’ he said. ‘Something has happened in Italy.’

  ‘Happened?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s very bad news.’

  ‘Julia-’

  ‘Francis appears to have deserted her.’

  She stared at the pale scrambled eggs, and then raised her eyes and asked that the statement should be repeated. When it was, she still found it impossible to believe. Father Lavin was pouring coffee for her, but the last thing she wanted was a cup of coffee.

  ‘What has happened, Father?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  He told her that Julia had telephoned Swan House first, just in case something might have wormed its way into the paper. She’d been thinking of the tobacco advertisements, he imagined, which had made Francis’s face quite well known. It would be news of a kind that his marriage had lasted only a single day.

  ‘It would have shocked me more to have heard it from Mrs Spanners. Is it in the paper?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Julia didn’t deserve this.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s something worse.’

  He told her that Francis had committed bigamy, that Julia had called their marriage a farce. He stood there for a moment with The Times still in one hand, watching the old woman’s features for any signs of weakness. When none appeared he put the paper down on the dining-table and went to the hall to telephone the office where Henrietta was employed.

  Slowly Mrs Anstey lifted the cup of coffee he’d poured for her but found she could not even sip it. The smell of the scrambled eggs made her want to retch. It was typical of Mrs Spanners to cook an enormous meal for someone who had to be told such ghastly news.

  ‘Henrietta’ll pass it on to Katherine,’ Father Lavin said, returning and sitting down.

  ‘Poor Julia,’ she said. ‘Poor vulnerable Julia.’

  ‘I’m afraid Francis is some kind of imposter.’

  ‘I guessed,’ she said, startling him. She told him of her conversation with Henrietta and Katherine, but did not blame them. She had known the depth of her unease and had failed to convey it because at the time it hadn’t made any sense. ‘I still don’t know why I thought it,’ she said, and added that this was the worst thing that had ever happened to her daughter.

  ‘You mustn’t feel guilty, Mrs Anstey.’

  ‘Of course I shall feel guilty. It was I who invited him to tea.’

  For another hour they sat at the dining-room table, listening to the showers of rain that came and went, spattering the window-panes. Then they walked in the damp garden, down to the river and back again, and then he said he had better go. She would be all right, she reassured him when he left her in the drawing-room, and she would telephone immediately if she wasn’t. She thanked him for his help and heard him murmuring in the hall to Mrs Spanners.

  She sat where he had left her, finding comfort only in her hating of the man she’d once been so happy for her daughter to marry. The familiar reflection that ever since childhood Julia had been an easy target for lame ducks was no consolation, only a source of further guilt.

  Having left Swan House, Father Lavin did not return at once to the priests’ house but drove into the country. He drove slowly, the windscreen-wipers rattling back and forth, rubber screeching on wet glass. Other cars passed him, he turned the radio on. A gritty voice was talking about North Sea oil, elsewhere there was clamorous music. He turned it off again.

  The road narrowed, reducing the traffic to a crawl. He took a fork to the left and after a mile pulled on to a wide verge by a spinney of birch trees. It was still raining, but only slightly now and in the wood the trees were a protection. Beyond the birches was the denser foliage of conifers, a sloping, silent forest of them. Only here, among the trees, did Father Lavin ever allow himself to reflect upon his love for Julia. He had loved her for as long as he had known her, a well-mannered love from which he’d drained away the passion. Only a trace of anguish remained, and emptiness instead of jealousy; nor did there ever seem to be virtue in his sacrifice. When Mrs Anstey had first drawn his attention to the Filippo Lippi madonna he had gazed for ages at the postcard she’d held out to him, easily believing that Julia as a girl possessed the madonna’s countenance that had since become her daughters’. But it was the countenance he was more familiar with which appeared now in his mind, Julia’s own eyes and her lips, the pleasant roundness of her face, the few faint freckles on her forehead, the hint of red in her hair.

  He walked for half a mile, dawdling slowly, and then began the unhurried journey back. One expression after another altered her features; she smiled, she frowned. Her hands placed a dish on the dining-table in Swan House, she crossed a lawn with Michaelmas daisies she had cut. Not once in his reveries did a finger of his touch one of hers, not once did he say what he might have said.

  He remembered the first time he had visited Swan House, invited to dinner soon after his arrival in Stone St Martin. He’d considered the occasion alarming: the velvety dresses of the two wome
n, the fire that blazed busily behind his chair in the dining-room, warming the small of his back. He’d felt awkward, as now and again he did in England. As a curate, he’d come to a parish in London many years before that, fresh from Co. Cork and more than a little on the raw side. It was true that in the meantime he had acquired a certain polish, but in Swan House that night he was aware of its shallowness. Julia had recently become a widow; the shadow of death hung over the house, which naturally hadn’t helped his awkwardness. There’d been talk of her years abroad, in East Africa and Malaya and Germany, and talk from Mrs Anstey about the house in the locality she would have liked to live in still.

  The bankruptcy of one husband and the untimely death of the other had left them with a provincial Irish priest at their dinner table: he couldn’t help thinking that, and already felt that in time it might be he who became the man about this house, as a source of help in difficulty. He didn’t resent the role and never had since.

  That night, after dinner, the three of them had sat for an hour in the drawing-room. There was a silver-framed photograph of Roger Ferndale in officer’s uniform and the stern portrait of Mrs Anstey’s husband over the fireplace. A small quantity of Cointreau was drunk with coffee, and it was his turn, then, to tell them about himself, to establish that nothing could have been more different from the room he sat in than the farmhouse near Clonakilty where his mother and sister still lived. His mother always wore black, belonging to a generation of women in that part of the country who had for centuries favoured the colour. His sister reared turkeys and had once hoped to marry a man called Ned Tone, a quarry worker, but Ned Tone had remained a bachelor. The farmhouse was white and gaunt, its unused rooms full of furniture that years of sunshine had patchily bleached. The yard, where the turkeys strode, was muddy in winter, the earth of its surface baked hard in summertime. Twelve children had played there in his childhood, and it was sometimes odd to return and find the farmhouse such a quiet place. When it was sunny he liked to carry two chairs from the kitchen into the yard and sit there with his mother, while they talked about the family. He was the only one of the twelve who’d become a priest and she’d been delighted when he had.

  Yet what would she think if she knew he had permitted himself to love a woman? He imagined her face turning slowly away from him, her eyes intently staring at some object in the yard, the old cart in a corner, sunshine on the turkeys’ feed containers. At least she would never have to suffer that; he would visit her in a few weeks’ time and they would talk once more about the family.

  He paused and for a moment stood still, wishing he were a child again in the farmhouse, the family crowded around the kitchen table. What had happened in Italy? In what manner had Francis Tyte deserted his wife? It was easy now to think of him as he had not seemed, a man who for reasons of his own had led a widow on. In newspapers you read of it all the time, except that usually the widow was rich.

  He told himself that had he recognized Francis as an imposter he could not have saved her from him. Women in love go their own way; he might have protested and argued, but none of it would have been any good. Even so, it seemed to Father Lavin that he need not have so unquestioningly accepted the illusion that had been presented to all of them. Without admitting it to himself, had he hoped that the marriage would knock the heart out of his own tormenting passion? As he continued to walk slowly through the trees, he knew that that was the truth, and felt selfish as well as desiccated. His well-mannered love, his sacrifice and his priestly discipline, seemed like a mess of failure. On the crackling telephone there had been in her voice such pain as he had rarely heard in the voice of any human being.

  He started the engine of his car and began the journey back to the priests’ house, to the lunch Father Dawne would have cooked. He prayed, since it was all he could do.

  At the pavement café the white stick of a blind man touched the back of Julia’s chair, but Julia didn’t turn her head to see what it was. Haiti, it said on her coffee cup; Controllate il vostro peso on a blue weighing-machine at the edge of the pavement. Not far from that a traffic signal kept changing from red to green and back again: Alt, Avanti, Alt, Avanti. The table she sat at was round, with a pink table-cloth held in place by a shiny metal band around the table’s rim. She hadn’t drunk her coffee, the foam of milk on its surface had collapsed.

  ‘Yes, I thought you were English,’ the man at the next table said, a bronzed American, in early middle age. His cameras were spread out in front of him, with postcards and a guidebook. ‘You can always tell an English woman,’ he said, affecting a little bow to indicate that he was paying a compliment. With a swish of airbrakes a yellow and white bus halted at the lights. The lights changed, the bus crawled on. A woman weighed herself on the weighing-machine.

  ‘Stopping long in Pisa?’ the American inquired.

  ‘No, not long.’

  She wore a white linen dress and a white, brimmed hat. Around her neck were amber-coloured beads.

  ‘Galileo’s city,’ the American said. ‘I really appreciate it.’

  She placed some coins beside her saucer and picked up her sun-glasses. The man called some kind of farewell after her but she didn’t reply. Almost four more hours had to pass before her flight back to England.

  She walked in the Via Maria, dragging with her the jungle of her nightmare. Through it tourists drove their cars, charabancs endlessly disgorged their loads. Guides held coloured umbrellas high above their heads, stall-holders sold replicas of the leaning tower. The sun hung like a furnace, but Julia’s dark glasses transformed it into a harmless disc, laid out against a pastel sky.

  She turned into the Piazza Dante. On her honeymoon in Wales the weather had been balmy, late September. Roger had studied maps and found walks among the hills and by the sea. They’d sat one afternoon for hours, crouched in the sand dunes, watching the sea birds.

  ‘Hullo, hullo,’ a man said, walking with her. ‘Bellissima, lady. Bellissima, signora.’ He was small and dark-faced in a linen suit. He kept pulling at the lapels of his jacket to rid them of creases. ‘You like gelati, lady? Fragola? Cioccolata? Lady, you like panforte?’

  She told him to go away, but he only nodded. She remembered telling Roger that she was pregnant, and Roger’s delight, the smile that had broken all over his face, his arms around her. Henrietta had been an easy baby to bear, Katherine more difficult. I hate to see them growing up, she’d noted in a diary, and then had crossed it out.

  ‘I no marry Italian woman,’ the man beside her said. ‘Since child I like inglese. I show you place, lady. We have drink, Stock, caffe? Il signor Guzzinati, lady.’

  ‘Please go away,’ she said.

  ‘I love inglese. Molto, molto.’

  ‘Please leave me alone.’ She ceased to walk as she spoke. She faced the man. There was something the matter with one of his eyes, skin disease on the lid. ‘Please,’ she repeated.

  ‘Where you go, signora? We have caffe in your hotel? Il signor Guzzinati. Signor Leonardo Guzzinati, lady. We have wine? Vino, signora?’

  She shook her head. They’d left the Piazza Dante and were off the tourist track, in a narrow street that was empty of other people. In her distress she hadn’t noticed that before. She hadn’t even been aware of turning into this sunless alley.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I want to be alone. Please just leave me.’

  He caught her arm. ‘Please lady,’ he said. ‘We go Tirrenia. We buy vino, signora.’

  ‘No, really not. No, thank you.’ She tried to smile at him. Her handbag contained a small amount of money, her traveller’s cheques and her passport. He could easily snatch it, or he could bundle her into a doorway. In her weakened state she felt she would not have protested. She would not even have screamed, she would let him do what he wished to do; it was nothing that she should be assaulted or raped.

  Still holding her arm, he said that Tirrenia was good. It was only a short distance from Pisa, a short trip on a bus.

  ‘In you
r hotel is husband, signora?’ The hand that was not gripping her arm reached out and touched her breast. ‘Bellissima,’ he said.

  She pulled herself away from him and ran over the uneven paving stones. He didn’t follow her. When she reached the end of the street she looked back once and saw that he was standing where she had left him, pretending to be bewildered.

  People hurried by her, women carrying shopping-bags, men in shirtsleeves and light-weight suits, children with school-books. Roger, too, had called her beautiful. Roger had said her eyes were the most beautiful of all the women’s he’d ever known, and afterwards she’d looked at them in the bathroom mirror. I’m lucky, she’d written once, to be quite pretty. She didn’t know why she kept thinking about Roger.

  She was in the Via D’Azeglio. Noticing in the distance the grey and brown façade of the railway station, she walked towards it in the hope that there she might be left in peace. But in the waiting-room she felt that people looked at her, no doubt discerning her distress. Heavy Italian women, all dressed in black, sat in a line opposite her, a huge battered suitcase in front of each. An elderly couple, the man unshaven and bent, ate bread and salami. No one spoke.

  She took her hat off and put it on the seat beside her. The eyes of the women opposite passed from her pale dress and the shoes that fashionably matched it, and then glanced over her face and hair. She had been wrong to imagine that anyone could discern her distress: her eyes were blank behind dark glasses, her face would have an empty look. A silly kind of woman, the people thought, silly to spend money on clothes, silly to be a tourist. She moved from the waiting-room and stood on a platform, watching other people climbing on to a train. No one ran after her from the waiting-room with the hat she’d left behind. On the platform a dark-faced boy slowly pushed a trolley loaded with drinks and chocolate and picnic bags. The hat didn’t matter; it wasn’t worth going back for.

  She walked from the station. In a shop window there were polishes and brushes, and in another an array of motor-cycle components, and in another cheeses. She went on walking, out on to the Livorno road because it was the first one she came to. Lorries and cars spewed up dust, drivers blew their horns or shouted. A tourist bus slowed as it passed her by. Faces gazed at her, two or three cameras were raised. To Denmark or Munich or Atlantic City they would take back a picture of a woman on the road to Livorno, her face begrimed with dust and sweat, her hair untidy. They’d puzzle maybe over the picture of a woman, wondering why she walked through the heat of an Italian day, where she was going or who she was.