Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  ‘I’m glad we came down to see you,’ Doris said, still walking about the room with her drink and her cigarette. ‘We’ve tied up an end or two.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment I’ll see to lunch.’

  ‘I don’t take much lunchtime, dear. An hour we get on the floor and I generally just have a little drink. Not that I’m an alcoholic, you know.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you’re not.’

  In the kitchen Julia took from the oven of the Rayburn the shepherd’s pie she’d placed there before driving to the station. She’d made a salad to go with it, and afterwards there’d be raspberries. Joy had found the orange juice because the door of the fridge was open and the empty carton was on the draining-board.

  ‘What’s the dog called?’

  ‘We haven’t thought of anything to call him yet.’

  ‘Rover or something?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  The spaniel was trying to seize the strap of Joy’s sandal between his teeth. He kept darting at it and yelping. Joy asked if he wanted to bite her, Mrs Anstey said she didn’t think so. She had ceased to weed: crouched on her stool, an hour at a time was quite enough. She reached for her sticks and with one hand on the seat of the stool eased herself to her feet.

  ‘What’s your own name?’ she asked Joy.

  ‘Joy Smith. D’you think Harry O would be a name for that dog?’

  ‘Well yes, it might be.’

  ‘There’s Harry O on the television.’

  ‘There was a dog here a few weeks ago called Baloney.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nonsense. Peculiar name for a dog, I thought, but nobody really agreed.’

  ‘Harry O’s my favourite detective actually.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t watch much television.’

  ‘Another one’s Frank Cannon. And The Streets of San Francisco.’ Mrs Anstey nodded. She slowly shifted from one foot to the other in order to restore the circulation in her legs. Her back had begun to ache a bit, as it usually did after weeding, but the pain would lessen during the walk to the house.

  ‘I have to give myself plenty of time,’ she explained. ‘I’m rather slow on the move.’

  ‘Is there something the matter with you?’

  ‘I have arthritis.’

  The child’s eyelashes were almost white behind her plastic-rimmed spectacles and her eyes blinked too often, as if from nervousness. Tiny pimples erupted around her mouth.

  ‘Do you think you could carry the stool for me? And if that dog’s a nuisance just give him a little kick.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to hurt him.’

  ‘He has to learn.’

  ‘It’s a very nice garden, this.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  The spaniel continued to snap at the sandal strap as the journey was made, past petunias gaudily in bloom, and the rosebeds.

  ‘He’s still in the pipe ads,’ Joy said. ‘He was in one last night.’ ‘Was he? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘On an oil rig.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘I’m illegitimate, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose that worries you much.’

  ‘I’d rather not be in a way.’

  Julia called out from the house. ‘Yes, she’s with me,’ Mrs Anstey called back. ‘Lunch is ready,’ she said to Joy, but they didn’t hasten their pace.

  ‘I don’t think he’s taken his life,’ Joy said. ‘I think she’s got it all wrong.’

  ‘No, I don’t imagine for a second that he has.’

  ‘She gets everything wrong.’

  It was a difficult meal. Doris had again filled her glass with gin and Cinzano and had brought it to the table. Joy did not like the meat in the shepherd’s pie and asked instead for cream crackers, of which there weren’t any. Another kind of biscuit was found for her, and some Gentleman’s Relish, which she’d never tasted before and didn’t care for. ‘Must pop to the loo,’ Doris said, emptying her glass and taking it with her. She returned with it full, and said the house was the most beautiful she’d ever been in. She had taken her handbag from her shoulder but she hadn’t removed her mackintosh.

  ‘I think we’ve had our summer,’ Mrs Anstey said.

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘I said I think summer’s been and gone.’

  ‘Isn’t your mother great?’ Doris whispered to Julia, and Mrs Anstey thought she’d never in her life seen anyone who looked more unhealthy.

  Julia asked Joy what food she liked, and Joy said a lot of food made her sick. She’d been sick all over a postman’s letters once. Chips she didn’t mind, and Pizzaland Special.

  ‘Real gourmet she is.’ Doris pushed away her own unfinished shepherd’s pie and drank from her glass, laughing to emphasize that she was making a joke. ‘Finicky as fi’pence,’ she said.

  A bowl of raspberries remained uneaten. Joy said Miss Upuku. claimed that anything acid should be avoided if you wanted to have a glowing skin. Doris laughed again, saying you should see Miss Upuku’s skin, black as your boot. When Julia went to the kitchen to make coffee she found that Joy had followed her.

  ‘Would you like some cake?’ Julia suggested.

  Joy shook her head. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ she said. ‘She’s drunk.’ ‘Your mother’s naturally upset. We’re all upset.’ Grinding the coffee beans, she added:

  ‘Miss Upuku’s one of your teachers, is she?’

  ‘I don’t go to school any more.’

  Julia nodded, not quite knowing how to comment on that.

  ‘The latest thing was tattoos, only I don’t want to get tattooed.’

  Julia made the coffee, aware that every movement of her hands was being closely watched.

  ‘He didn’t take his life, d’you think?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘He said he was going to come and live with us one day. I think it was just a lie.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sure it wasn’t.’

  ‘Anyone’d prefer a place like this.’

  ‘Look, you’ll find a bowl of lump sugar in the cupboard in front of you. Would you put it on the tray with the cups?’

  ‘I quite like that dog.’

  ‘It was your father’s, in a way. He ordered it.’

  ‘Did he like it?’

  ‘The dog wasn’t born then.’

  When they returned to the dining-room Doris was crying. ‘Now, now, now,’ Mrs Anstey was saying. Joy averted her eyes.

  ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry,’ Doris sobbed. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, getting up and going away with her glass again.

  ‘She suddenly caved in,’ Mrs Anstey explained. ‘I was telling her about lupins because she asked me the name of them.’

  ‘She’s always caving in these days,’ Joy said.

  A silence gathered. Julia poured her mother’s coffee. Mrs Anstey said:

  ‘Joy suggested we should call the dog Harry O, after a detective. Quite a nice name really.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Do you drink coffee, Joy?’

  ‘Maxwell House I never stop drinking.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry –’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Doris returned, seeming cheerful again. She smiled her skeleton’s smile and said she was a nuisance. Her glass had been refilled, she’d lit another cigarette. Her hands, Julia noticed, had begun to shake in spite of her return to composure.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Just a tiny, dear. Joy, run along to the toilet.’

  ‘I don’t want the toilet –’

  ‘Then go and play with that dog. He’s eating a rag outside the lounge windows.’

  Slowly Joy moved across the room, pausing to examine the sideboard. When she’d gone Doris said:

  ‘Course the girls at work know all about Joy same’s they know about Frankie. A few of them argued to me I should jack the whole thing in. Go out with another bloke, see. But of course I never would. I’m a bit of a loner, Julia, as I was ex
plaining to your mum.’

  Neither Julia nor her mother commented on that. Doris attempted to light another cigarette and abandoned the effort because she couldn’t get it going. ‘There was a bloke in Shavers’, eight or nine years ago it would be, quite interested. Well, more than interested, if you get what I mean. Then again, a youngish chap in the warehouse. But you can’t, can you? ‘Course I never told the girls about Frankie being so particular about you know what. Harm the poor kid for life, he used to say, two people having sex the other side of a partition. I mean, I said to him a few times we could go to the bathroom but he wasn’t keen. Well, you wouldn’t, would you, cramped on the floor there, the walls sweating grime on top of you?’

  ‘I think,’ Mrs Anstey interrupted, ‘we might talk about something else now.’

  ‘Dear, I was only explaining.’

  ‘Yes, I do know that.’

  ‘Look, dear, I work in this shoe department. In the evenings I make mats for people’s tables. Can you follow that, dear? I’ve kept up the mats for a long number of years because of the understanding between Frankie and myself, but, as Irene in Handbags says, you could get tired of making mats.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Julia interrupted, ‘I’d like to drive you to the station now.’

  ‘Put it this way, Julia, when Frankie and me sat in the Spread Eagle that day in ’66 I’ve never known another human person to be as interested. I’ve never known another human person wanting to hear every single detail, Dad and myself and then Dad getting married again, and all about the shoes and the girls and what the fashions were, the time Gloria couldn’t get the boot off the customer’s leg, the time Mavis Soper hit her customer in the stomach. Put it this way, Julia, I was an eyeful in those days. I know I’m not now. I’m a bit of a weirdo myself, if you get what I mean. Oh, I’m definitely aware of that, dear.’

  ‘The train’s at five past four.’

  ‘All these years I tried to pay him back, Julia. I made things nice for him while we were waiting for the day when we could be together. Then along comes yourself, Julia, and then this Susie Music. Susanna she calls herself, matter of fact, no better than a prostitute when you think about it –’

  ‘Oh, will you please stop?’ Julia was on her feet, two spots of red glowing in her cheeks. Her voice was shrill and unsteady. ‘We’re trying to forget Francis ever entered our lives. We don’t want to talk about him or remember him.’

  ‘Dear, that’s hard about a person who’s taken his life.’

  ‘He’s not dead, people like that never are. He’s eaten up with self-pity, he damages everyone who has the misfortune to encounter him.’

  ‘Oh, dear me no, Julia,’ Doris said quietly. ‘There’s not a word of truth in that.’

  ‘Of course it’s true. Every single fact in his life has been twisted inside out so that it might seem to be something else. He created an illusion for a silly widow to fall in love with, and then he smashed it to pieces in order to watch her face. Your child was born just for fun. It was fun to commit bigamy on a summer’s afternoon, fun to have a mockery of a honeymoon. He sent you to that home in Hampton Wick, knowing what would happen.’

  ‘Dear, Frankie wouldn’t ever have sent me.’

  ‘Of course he did. And I wish you were right: I wish he’d committed suicide.’

  Julia turned away from the table, her face still flushed with anger and emotion. Before she left the room she said she’d be waiting by the car in front of the house.

  ‘She’s distressed,’ Doris observed to Mrs Anstey.’I’m afraid I’ve gone and distressed her, dear.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid you have.’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t want Joy to be a weirdo like Frankie and myself. It’s that what worries me, Mrs Anstey. It’s being awake nights, thinking about poor Joy. And then I can’t help seeing him lying there under a foreign sky. D’you mind me saying that, dear? The trouble is, when I get a drink in I always want another.’

  Mrs Anstey replied that it didn’t much matter what was said, and at the front of the house Julia and Joy waited. Joy was again talking about the difficulties she had with digestion when Father Lavin drove up, and Julia remembered he’d been invited to tea earlier in the week. ‘Hullo,’ he said to Joy.

  ‘Oh dear, we should have done the washing-up,’ Doris cried, emerging from the house. ‘Whatever’ll they think of us, Joy?’

  But Joy was already in the back of the car, pressed into a corner with her eyes closed.

  ‘She came to allocate blame,’ Mrs Anstey said, clearing the table with the priest’s assistance. They put the cutlery that hadn’t been used back in a drawer of the sideboard. With a damp sponge-cloth she wiped mats that had a design of sunflowers on them. He brushed crumbs from the mahogany surface. The moment he’d seen them he’d guessed who the visitors were. Julia had told him about the telephone call.

  ‘Would you like some raspberries, Father? Nobody wanted them.’

  He protested that he couldn’t eat raspberries and cream in the middle of the afternoon, but the old woman spooned some on to a plate for him and made him sit down. ‘I think I’ll have some myself,’ she said.

  They ate the raspberries, still talking about Francis and the woman whose sofa he had slept on when he had to be in London.

  ‘That child hasn’t much to keep her going,’ Mrs Anstey said.

  ‘Her mother doesn’t appear to have much either.’

  ‘Wasted lives they call them.’

  ‘Francis –’

  ‘Oh yes, of course: Francis too.’

  They finished their plates of raspberries and cream, and then he carried the dishes to the kitchen. Together they washed and dried them.

  ‘There are cherry slices we might have,’ Mrs Anstey said, in a tone of voice which suggested to Father Lavin that the subject of the visitation had been aired and should not again be referred to.

  He found the cherry slices and arranged them on a plate.

  ‘I doubt we’ll meet again,’ Doris said at the station. ‘I’m sorry about all that, Julia.’

  ‘Goodbye. Goodbye, Joy.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘And goodbye from me,’ said Doris, holding out her hand.

  They passed through the barrier. Julia waved. She turned and walked back to the car. She had reached it when she heard shouting somewhere behind her. ‘Julia! Julia!’ Doris cried, hurrying out of the station. She was panting when she reached Julia, who’d walked back towards her, fearful lest the train should be missed.

  ‘Thank you, dear. Thanks for everything, dear.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was such a nuisance, crying like that. It’s just that I loved him.’

  ‘Yes, I do know.’

  ‘That’s why I can’t help hating this Susie Music.’

  ‘She wasn’t responsible for anything, you know.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t hurt him, like all the others did. I couldn’t ever hate you, Julia.’

  She went scurrying off, her loping stride only a little unsteady, her curiously held body making her noticeable among the other travellers. That image of her remained in Julia’s mind as she drove through Cheltenham and out on to the Stone St Martin road, even though she did not wish to think about her. By common consent they would never have to meet again.

  In the drawing-room Father Lavin had lit a fire because of the continuing cold. He and her mother were drinking tea and nibbling cherry slices. ‘Come along, dear,’ her mother said, in a brisk voice that belonged to the past, to the time when Julia was a child. But Julia stood by the door, looking at the two of them by the blazing fire, tea and tea-cups on a little table by her mother’s arm-chair.

  In the train there’d be the journey to the bar, and the child staring out at the passing landscape, not wanting to be tattooed. In Folkestone there was a harmless dressmaker whose misfortune it had been to meet Francis Tyte on the sea-front. In other parts of England there were other people, who shuddered when they recall
ed his name. In Hampton Wick the confusion was as he wished it to be.

  When he had spent the money her jewellery raised, his letter with its German stamp would arrive. He would exact his self-allocated due as he always had from the people he came across, but it wasn’t that that concerned Julia now. For the second time that summer a woman’s intuition nagged uncomfortably in Swan House: the pattern she had once been unable to discern, not even then being aware of the people it involved, spread itself chillingly through her. Connections suddenly were everywhere, an ugly sense crept out of hiding.

  ‘Tea, dear?’ her mother offered.

  12

  Julia’s

  I have lived too long among flowerbeds, Julia wrote, I move from room to room of my doll’s house. I type out conveyances and deeds of release, I have borne two children and seen a husband die. I pray to my childhood God, yet in this pretty town my life has been less real than other people’s.

  She put away her diary and again tried to forget, though the ordinariness of everyday existence remained shadowed by the visit of the woman and her child. Leech-like, the visit clung, vivid in retrospect. It hovered over the people of the household, over Mrs Spanners on Mondays with her dusters, and Nevil Clapp on Mondays with his grass-cuttings, and Mrs Anstey finding corners to read in. A letter with a German stamp did not arrive, but another letter did:

  Dear Mrs Ferndale, we have traced you through a newspaper cutting and I address you so because I have been informed that your marriage to Francis Tyte was not legal. The source of that information is a Miss Smith, who visited here and left the newspaper cutting behind her. She is an unreliable woman, but I trust that at least she was correct in her references to yourself. I write to you because of your connection with Francis Tyte, whose parents are in this home. I have no one else to turn to, and from Miss Smith’s conversation I take it that you are connected with her also.

  We at the Sundown would be grateful if this person did not again attempt to visit the Tytes. She has upset Mrs Tyte beyond measure with her talk of death. Miss Smith was not sober when she came here, in fact the hall smelt like a brewery and had to be air-sprayed. Mrs Tyte is now on drugs, and the staff here have made every effort to convince her that the visitor was just someone who’d seen her son in the television advertisements and hadn’t known what she was talking about. I would be grateful if you would contact Miss Smith and inform her of the damage she has done, and inform her further that she will not be admitted if she returns.