Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  She thought of Roger again, on their honeymoon and afterwards. She thought of her father, his voice gruffly telling her a story, his bulkiness weighing down the edge of her bed when she had measles. She knew she had conjured up their faces to remind herself that they were men who had always been kind to her, who had not taken advantage of her foolishness. But the cruelty that had been practised on her could not be miraculously expunged by thoughts of kindness; the nightmare couldn’t be changed into one she would wake up from.

  She turned back. Huge advertisements decorated the auto-strada, garish with trade names: Olivetti, Campari, Agip, Michelin. A girl on a swing paused in mid-air, her hair and short pink skirt caught in the wind, her mouth fixedly smiling. Typewriters tumbled about, and tyres, and panforte, a dragon breathing fire. Her own name yelled at her: Julia la grappa. Confused at a roundabout, she did the wrong thing and an open Fiat skidded to avoid her. Music came from it, with shouts of laughter, no one angry that she had almost caused an accident.

  Abruptly she remembered a newspaper item she’d read before she left England: a group of missionaries of the Pentecostal Church had been assassinated in Africa. They had been made to watch the killing of their children first, and then they had been killed themselves. She didn’t know why she thought of that again, something that had horrified her for a moment while she prepared for her wedding. She imagined how they’d felt, lined up on their compound, unable to believe that such a thing was happening to them. It seemed like part of the nightmare that this horror had so suddenly tumbled into her mind and for another moment haunted her.

  In the open spaces of the city tourists sought relief from the sun, resting on shady steps with gangs of ageing hippies. An elderly scholar led his Swan’s Tour to the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto, busily explaining that this work had been an inspiration to Liszt. ‘Hullo, hullo,’ a voice said. ‘Hullo, lady.’

  She was by the Arno, on the Lungarno Sonnino; the man with the skin disease had appeared out of nowhere. ‘Bellissima,’ he said, and she realized he didn’t recognize her without her floppy hat and because she’d become dishevelled. ‘You like gelati, lady? Fragola? Cioccolata? Il signor Guzzinati, lady.’

  She moved away from him, trying to hurry. A car drew up beside them and a woman held out a piece of paper with a drawing of the leaning tower on it. Julia gestured, indicating that the tower was on the other side of the river. In excited Italian Signor Guzzinati began to explain the city’s one-way traffic system. The bridge to cross was the Ponte de Mezzo, he insisted, and again she hastened to escape him.

  Boys played football on the hard clay of a park. The walls of a church were drenched with crimson signs and admonitions, with slogans and counter-slogans, hammers and sickles, swastikas in black. Morte! Morte! was everywhere crudely daubed. ‘Strega?’ Signor Guzzinati suggested. ‘Caffe? Stock, lady?’

  There were other people on the street beside them, but they didn’t seem to notice that a woman was being plied with unwelcome attentions. Her mother had laughed about the ways of Italian men, and so had Henrietta and Katherine. ‘We go your hotel, lady. We go now?’

  They were by the café where she had earlier not drunk her coffee, near the blue weighing-machine. She sat down, not caring now when the man sat down as well. Excitedly he beckoned the waiter, ordering brandy.

  ‘Il signor Guzzinati,’ he said. ‘Always I am here in Pisa, never I marry. I am rich man now, signora, direttore della ditta Pieroni.’

  She felt sorry for him because of his diseased eye. She doubted that he was the director of a company; his only occupation was to follow women on the streets, tourist women who wouldn’t report him to the police. Not once before, in all the tourist seasons he’d known, had a woman sat down with him.

  ‘You are pretty lady, signora.’

  His hand had seized one of hers and she didn’t withdraw it. In less than a quarter of an hour she would have to walk away from him again, and it wouldn’t matter if he followed her, even to her hotel, the Hotel la Pace. He might follow her to the airport, sitting beside her in the taxi, but still it wouldn’t matter.

  ‘I love you, signora,’ he said, his bad eye blinking and running a bit. He raised a grimy handkerchief to it and she took her hand from his and drank some of the brandy the waiter had brought. She had come to Italy on her honeymoon, she said, but had got no farther than Pisa. She had not seen a single picture or eaten a meal. Her husband had married her for five pieces of jewellery that weren’t even properly hers.

  ‘You have husband, signora? Signor Guzzinati said. ‘This husband in Pisa, lady?’

  She didn’t answer. It seemed pointless talking to the man, and then it seemed pointless not to. She said:

  ‘My husband has left me. I signed a piece of paper for him and then he went away.’

  ‘This husband in Pisa, no?’

  ‘My husband’s in Germany by now. The manager of my hotel misunderstood things. He got in touch with the police –’

  ‘Police? Polizia?’

  As he spoke, Signor Guzzinati scuttled off into the crowds, and she found money in her handbag to pay for their drinks. He came from some poor part of the city, he was probably a thief. Instead of the beauty of Fra Angelico and chirlandaio, or the madonnas of Filippo Lippi whom she had once resembled, she would remember the skin disease on his eyelid when she thought of Italy.

  9

  Julia in Francis’s

  Julia was met at London Airport by her daughters, who had borrowed a Mini in order to help her on her journey. It had been arranged that Father Lavin should meet her at Cheltenham, and she was now driven to Reading, where she could catch an afternoon train. Henrietta and Katherine had wired her at the Hotel la Pace as soon as they heard the news and she’d wired back, assuring them she was all right. But she wasn’t and they knew it; in the car their anger was like ice. ‘We’ll never mention it again,’ Mrs Anstey had said to them on the telephone, referring to the intuition she had failed to convey.

  Julia knew she should try to explain to her daughters. She should begin at the beginning, with the toothpaste smiles of the trim Alitalia girls on the flight to Pisa, with her surprise when Francis had not taken her arm as they crossed the tarmac. She should end by telling them how she had walked for hours in the heat. But she didn’t.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Mummy?’ Henrietta inquired as they said goodbye at Reading station.

  ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right.’ She thanked them for meeting her, and apologized for being so silent. They said they understood.

  It was a comfort to see the English countryside again, the unpretentious hills and brick farmhouses, cool fields of grass. A single night it had taken in their room in the Hotel la Pace, eight hours to dismantle what there had seemed to be. They hadn’t undressed or even attempted to lie down. They’d sat at a square table and he’d told her about his life, how once he’d wanted to be married to Kim Novak.

  In the room she had wished she were no longer alive. The horror of the shock, like a gigantic weight, pressed down on her; coherent thought wouldn’t come. She wept but he had appeared not to notice. His voice went on about himself, and when other people were mentioned it was because of the parts they had played in his life. ‘People do terrible things,’ he said. ‘Like poor Constance Kent did.’

  He didn’t say he’d done a terrible thing himself. He had always known she would want to help him was how he put it instead, and then he spoke of the marriage service, the priest’s hand raised in blessing, the smell of incense and candle-grease, Bach on the organ. For months he’d looked forward to it; for months he’d imagined them standing in the garden of Swan House, while people drank champagne. Every morning when he woke all that had come rushing into his mind; at night he’d sent himself to sleep with it. He would never forget a single detail of that whole afternoon; her voice accepting him as her husband would echo for him until the moment of his death.

  He spoke as if the marriage had taken place purely for the occasion i
t presented, as if in some bizarre way the memory of the wedding afternoon would be enough for her also. His deceiving her and the fact that the marriage was illegal, his asking her for money and for her jewellery, seemed irrelevant and unimportant. ‘Just enough to get me away somewhere,’ he begged, and then he rooted among her possessions and spread the jewellery out on the table between them. ‘It’s everything to me,’ he said, ‘that we stood together in that little church.’

  Even then she’d pleaded with him, drying away her tears. She loved him, he didn’t have to go away. They could live together in Swan House, they could be happy because of love. But he’d shaken his head, and had begun all over again to tell her about himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Julia,’ Father Lavin said, carrying two white suitcases from the train at Cheltenham station.

  In the car she said as little as she had in the Mini her daughters had borrowed. Ever since she’d begun her journey home she’d been telling herself that it was all quite simple: she was a silly kind of person, deserving of what had happened to her. Every single word Francis Tyte had spoken she had believed; his caresses had easily enticed her; she’d longed to lie in bed with him. ‘Yes, I’ll give you some money too,’ she had promised in their hotel bedroom, and in the morning had cashed her traveller’s cheques for the amount he’d suggested. A stranger on the street had fondled her breast yet she had later sat down at a pavement café with him: her silliness was all of a piece.

  ‘Stupid,’ she said in Father Lavin’s car, feeling heavy and unattractive. ‘A stupid middle-aged woman.’

  ‘No, Julia.’

  It was after six o’clock; shadows were lengthening, the weather was still showery. They skirted the town, taking the road by the Orchard Motel. Nevil Clapp was in trouble again, Father Lavin said, and for a moment she did not know who Nevil Clapp was and then remembered he was the boy who worked at the motel, the boyfriend of the girl who did her hair. ‘Oh, poor Diane,’ she said.

  ‘At least it’s all over, Julia.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Standing with the aid of her sticks, Mrs Anstey awaited her daughter in the hall of Swan House, and slowly moved forward to embrace her. Mrs Spanners was hovering in the background, ready to be greeted and to greet. No tears were shed, though Mrs Spanners displayed a tendency to sniff. ‘Thank you for coping,’ Julia said to her, and then invited Father Lavin to have a glass of sherry with them. ‘No, we would like you to,’ she insisted when he shook his head, for it seemed to Julia to be part of what had happened that she and her mother and the priest should drink a glass of sherry together, as they might have after a funeral.

  They drank it in the drawing-room, although they might easily have taken their glasses outside, since the evening had become fine. But it seemed appropriate to stay indoors while the sun was shining. She knew she should talk about it to them also, for it was their due, just as it had been the due of her daughters. But she still found it difficult to say anything at all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Father Lavin murmured again, lifting his glass slowly. Her mother murmured also.

  It was easier having the priest there. There was the effort imposed by a visitor, conversation shared among three. Alone with her mother, delicate pauses would have gathered, like webs between them.

  ‘You’ll stay to supper?’ she said.

  ‘No, no, I really mustn’t.’

  ‘Please do, Father.’

  Mrs Spanners had gone, taking away her transistor and her night clothes in a carrier-bag. She’d left cold meat which they could have, and lettuce and tomatoes. In a suitably low voice she had explained all that.

  ‘Francis is a psychopath,’ Julia said. She added, after a silence had followed that statement, ‘He wanted my jewellery. His parents are alive. They live in a home in Hampton Wick.’

  Her mother asked about the jewellery and Julia said she’d given it to him. As she spoke, she saw again her dragon brooch on the table between them, and her sapphires and her pearl necklace.

  ‘It was family jewellery,’ her mother sharply pointed out. ‘He stole it is what it amounts to.’

  ‘No: I gave it to him. I signed a letter to that effect.’

  ‘It wasn’t entirely yours to give, Julia.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  She explained how she had waited another day, not wanting to return to England, and how the manager of the Hotel la Pace had misunderstood her distress and had approached the police to inquire if an accident had befallen an English tourist in the city. She’d had to go to a police station herself to say that what had happened was that her husband had left her. She must have mentioned a honeymoon because it was a woman deserted on her honeymoon that had become a newspaper item. ‘I’m sorry I make mistake,’ the manager of the hotel had later apologized, drawing her attention to the item, apologizing for that too.

  ‘I guessed about him,’ Mrs Anstey said, and added that never in her life had she hated anyone as much as she hated Francis Tyte now. She hated his awful Leslie Howard face, his elegance and his smile, the striped grey clothes he wore. For as long as he lived, she hoped he would never be happy.

  ‘I shan’t bear his name,’ Julia said. ‘But I don’t want any charges brought because of his bigamy, Father. I don’t want him persecuted, wherever he is.’

  ‘It’s a criminal offence of course.’

  ‘I just want it all forgotten.’

  Her mother’s weeping ceased. At supper Father Lavin told them about the builder in Cheltenham who had promised to paint the gutters of St Martin’s for nothing. Julia was aware of his dogged hunt for this conversational topic and his determination in keeping it going. She imagined the builder arriving at the little church with his ladders on an autumn day, the trees in the graveyard losing their leaves, the smell of an autumn bonfire. Would enough time have passed, she wondered, would the pain be less by then?

  In the kitchen she made coffee and carried the tray into the drawing-room. Her mother and Father Lavin were again making an effort to converse, he listening while her mother spoke of something that had happened in her youth. From above the mantelpiece Julia’s father continued severely to survey all three of them. He would have seen through the deception, Julia suddenly thought, and she would have protested that he was being unjust.

  Even here, at home, it still continued to feel like a nightmare, its reality still lost in the shock that had not ceased to numb her. She was just another person among the people he had told her about, people in whose houses he had stayed. Casually he had married a dressmaker in Folkestone in the hope of inheriting her money. Casually he’d caused a child to be born, just to see what it felt like to be a father. But casually or otherwise there had been no need to marry a second time, no need for all the long palaver of deceit and falsity: if he’d asked her for the jewellery she would have given it to him. As long ago as the day they met in the coffee lounge of the Queen’s Hotel he must have noticed her dragon brooch and estimated its worth, and must afterwards have deduced that the household’s only valuable objects were its jewellery. Was it just for them that he had charmed his way into her life, or had he married her in order to set another piece of cruelty in motion, to humiliate her with the truth? ‘You’re a good woman,’ he’d said in Italy. ‘You’re a special kind of person, Julia.’ It was hard to keep remembering that he said whatever suited him. It was hard to remember that he lived in fantasies and make-belief, that not for an instant did he cease to practise his actor’s art, smiling nicely. Of course it was out of cruelty that he had bigamously married her, of course it was to mock her and insult her. He hated the kind of person she was; he had begun to revenge himself from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.

  ‘It’s been very kind of you to let me stay.’ Father Lavin stood up, though it was still early in the evening. ‘Please just phone,’ he said to Julia, ‘if I can ever help.’

  He shook hands with both of them, as he always did, and Julia walked through the hall with him. Outside there were still
streaks of light in the sky, but the night air was chilly.

  ‘There’s nothing I can say to you, Julia. Friends are inadequate in these circumstances.’

  ‘You haven’t been inadequate, Father.’

  He started the car and waved into the darkness as he drove away. She remained for a moment alone, remembering the evening of the cocktail party when she and Francis had stood where she was standing now, bidding goodbye to the guests while her mother was asleep in the garden. She’d taken his arm afterwards, as they turned back to the house.

  ‘You should try a sleeping pill,’ her mother advised in the hall, about to go upstairs.

  ‘I think I’ll sleep all right. You mustn’t let it worry you. It’s over now.’

  Mrs Anstey nodded. With one hand on the banister, the other grasping a stick, she dragged herself from step to step. ‘Malign,’ she suddenly said, stopping and turning around. ‘He brought malevolence to us.’

  ‘That’s what we have to live with now.’

  Days crawled by, the showery weather continued. Julia had made no real explanation of Francis’s absence to Mrs Spanners, and to the people of Stone St Martin it remained mysterious also, the subject of gossip and conjecture. She imagined that the interesting story of a woman deceived would be told to weekend visitors and to people when they settled in the area. New shopkeepers in Stone St Martin would inquire who she was; information would be given, with some details of the Anstey family, who had always been a bit different anyway because of their Catholic connexions. The marriage to an army officer called Roger Ferndale would be touched upon, and the birth of two daughters who’d grown to be beautiful. Held until last would be the extraordinariness: how a small-time actor had wriggled his way into this woman’s affections, had married her and then had walked away, leaving her to suffer.