Other People's Worlds

by William Trevor

  ‘Of course, Mr Tyte.’

  He hesitated. His face was blurred with elderly freckles, his eyes the same blue as his son’s. He said:

  ‘At first when we were here our lodger from Rowena Avenue used to visit us, Mrs Ferndale. Newberry Fruits he always brought.’

  ‘There’s no need to remember it all for me, Mr Tyte. Please don’t upset yourself.’

  ‘A man with an interest in military campaigns, you’d say, nothing much to him. But then I guessed, Mrs Ferndale, looking at him one Sunday afternoon. He knew and never came back.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He’s dead now, but he hasn’t taken his evil with him. Francisguessed in turn that I had added things together. That’s why he doesn’t come to see us.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m glad he doesn’t. I don’t want ever to know what he has become.’

  ‘Please, Mrs Ferndale,’ Miss Purchase called and that was the end of it. Julia caught a glimpse of stained-glass panels on either side of the hall door, and then she and Joy were descending steps that led to a crazy-paving path. The visit had lasted less than ten minutes.

  ‘I’m concerned about your mother,’ Julia said, looking for a taxi outside the Blue Feathers, where Doris had spent some, time after her visit to the Sundown Home. ‘I hope she’s returned.’

  But the flat in Fulham was empty.

  ‘It’s all right really,’ Joy said. ‘She looks after herself when she’s drinking.’

  ‘I’ll come back later, Joy. I want to talk to her.’

  Julia had a bath in the Rembrandt Hotel. Afterwards she sat in the huge, open lounge where Doris and Francis had sat on their last evening together. ‘I’d like some whisky,’ she said to the Sicilian waiter who was smiling at her. At the table next to hers a party of Japanese businessmen were drinking, and talking in English. She didn’t know why she’d asked for whisky since she rarely drank it. ‘Thank you,’ she said when the man returned, jingling ice in a glass, still agreeably smiling at her.

  She guessed that Doris had been sacked. She guessed she would not return until the public houses had closed. She wished there was a telephone in the flat in Fulham so that she could ring later on. She’d done her duty by Francis’s mother, not that going to the old people’s home had seemed to be anything more than a waste of everyone’s time. But she’d done it, she’d made the journey from Gloucestershire, she’d stood in the flat Francis had spoken of, with its table-mats and the pictures of Negresses. There’d been the line of old overcoats and the smell of milk pudding in the Sundown Home.

  She finished her whisky. People were passing through the bar on their way to dinner in the restaurant. The Japanese businessmen were calling for more lager, one of them saying that as far as he could see the British tie industry was failing. She took the lift to her room on the third floor and looked up the name Music in the telephone directory by her bed. There was an Albert Music and an A. M. Music. There was a C. H. Music, at an address that somehow seemed right. She wrote the number down on a piece of paper. Then she telephoned her mother, who said she was managing perfectly well. Mrs Anstey had insisted that Mrs Spanners should not move in overnight; the spaniel, she’d said, was protection and company enough.

  Julia took the lift downstairs again. She went out and bought an evening paper and read it carefully, standing in the hall: no atrocity had been committed, no actress lay dead in a house in SW 1. In the restaurant called the Carvers’ Table she tried to eat roast beef but found she could not. Afterwards she ordered coffee in the spacious lounge and sat over it, listening to the Japanese businessmen, who were still practising their English. Eventually she took a taxi back to Fulham.

  Joy was watching The Streets of San Francisco. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘No, she’ll still be boozing. She’s an alcoholic, actually.’

  Julia nodded bleakly. An advertisement appeared on the television screen. A woman sprayed polish on to the top of a table and said that the polish brought out the natural quality of the wood. Without the use of this polish the table was only half alive, she claimed. Joy laughed.

  ‘I look away now when he appears,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to hate him.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that, Joy.’

  ‘If he appeared I’d want to spit on the screen.’

  But he didn’t appear. There was an advertisement for margarine and one for a breakfast food that was likened to central heating. Then The Streets of San Francisco returned.

  Julia left. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t just walk into a police station and say a woman she hardly knew had been talking wildly about killing a young actress. She returned to the Rembrandt and made another telephone call to Stone St Martin.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you so late,’ she said. She told Father Lavin that Doris Smith had not been back to her flat. She reported that she had taken the child to the Sundown Home. ‘I just wanted to know,’ she said. ‘Did you pray, Father?’

  In the office of the priests’ house he replied that he had, and when the conversation came to an end he knelt again by the metal desk.

  Julia knelt also, addressing herself to the emptiness where her childhood image once had been. No reassurance consoled her, no warmth was generated, and when she rose her mind was full of the man she had allowed herself to fall in love with. She lifted her dress over her head, confessing the truth for the first time since he had taken her jewellery and gone: love couldn’t so swiftly dissipate, no longer could she withhold her pity. She had called him a psychopath but that was just another word.

  Slowly she took off the rest of her clothes. In the wardrobe looking-glass she examined the reflection of her nakedness, as she had on the night of the cocktail party. She was only a little plump. Men would desire her full breasts and the softness of her thighs, the bush of hair spreading towards her stomach. Signor Guzzinati had desired her; on trains and in the street men sometimes eyed her. Yet in the hotel in Pisa she’d been no more than furniture. Vividly, all that returned to her: his low voice talking about himself, the dim light in the room, the chair he sat in on one side of the shuttered window, his back half turned to her. In some moment then, still suffering from the shock, she had begun to love him for what he should have been.

  She put a nightdress on, creamy white with a pattern of forget-me-nots. Her blue-green eyes stared back at her from the wardrobe looking-glass, the reddish tinge of her hair caught in the light. In the hotel in Pisa she had been bludgeoned by the shock, but within a minute of receiving it she had wanted to make the best of what there was. Even now she would have reached out towards him: he might have practised cruelty and infected Doris Smith with his own malevolence, but she wanted to caress away the pain she knew was there, to rescue him at last from his awful world. The shadow he’d dressed up in order to deceive her was nothing, what concerned her was the untouchable person.

  She closed the wardrobe door and got into bed. It was different from the love she’d felt for Roger, and different totally from the love she felt for her mother and her daughters. Francis inspired such passion, and not only in herself. His mother suffered from it, as Doris did, and Joy. Escaping it, Joy hated him in the end; Doris’s grief had created his death. But for as long as she lived Mrs Tyte would not be free of it.

  Julia lay in the warm gloom, wondering if she’d ever become free of it herself. She closed her eyes; he gave her flowers. She walked with him in Italy, they sat in the cool of churches. In the garden of Swan House they worked together, he slowly getting better, becoming as he should have been because her sympathy was the help he’d always needed. But even while these fantasies remained she murmured into the void he’d left her with, betraying her feelings by asking for strength. She prayed that the attachment she felt, her love and her pity, might be lifted from her. She prayed that Doris might be saved from the destruction which had been wrought in her. She prayed for Joy, and that Mrs Tyte might be at peace. She got out of bed and knelt at the edge of it, distantly seeing herself
in her mind’s eye, head pressed on clasped hands, her bare feet, and the forget-me-nots of her nightdress. She begged again for intervention and a moment later she telephoned the number she’d written down on a piece of paper. When a voice quite cheerfully answered she replaced the receiver.

  Doris followed the two men down a flight of stone steps which were slippery with moisture. The men moved slowly, one of them limping, both grasping the metal rail of the balustrade that divided the descent. On short, grimy pedestals, set in this balustrade, lights burned weakly at intervals of a dozen yards or so.

  When the floor supervisor had sacked her Doris had gone straight to Value Wines, and then she’d sat in Hyde Park waiting for the Spread Eagle to open. She’d returned to the park when it had closed in the afternoon. Hours later she’d got on to a bus when another public house, somewhere in Edgware Road, had closed. She’d sat on the bus, not caring where it went, and then she’d walked for hours. In the public house she had tried to buy half a bottle of vodka but the man had refused to sell it to her. There was none in the flat, which was why there wasn’t any point in returning there.

  At the bottom of the steps there was an archway, lit dimly also. Into the gloom of this the men advanced, the one with the limp pausing briefly to beckon Doris on. He wore a tattered double-breasted suit that had once been tailored for someone of greater height and girth. The other man was wrapped in a buttonless overcoat that had a naval look about it. All around them, like bundles of rags, a mass of people huddled on the ground. A cracked, old woman’s voice sang dismally in the shadows.

  ‘Con,’ the man with the limp said, shaking one of the bundles.

  His companion, unshaven, with rheumy eyes, nodded at Doris. This effort at communication, intended to be one of encouragement, a way of saying that the end of the journey had been reached, that all would now be well, didn’t register as such with Doris. For a moment she had forgotten what she was doing with these two men or why it was she had descended a flight of steps with them. She tried to think, saying to herself it was ridiculous to forget.

  She could remember the river, lights twinkling on the dark water. She could remember her father taking her on a boat trip on her birthday, but that was ages ago. ‘Dorrie, I’m thinking of getting married again,’ were the words her father had used on another occasion and when she’d repeated them to Frankie her hand had already been in his, the very first time.

  ‘She’ll stand a bottle, Con,’ the man with the limp was saying. ‘A full one for the three of us.’

  The need for a drink had assailed her when she’d walked along by the embankment wall, looking down at the twinkling lights: sheremembered now. She remembered the two men, how they had been poking through the contents of a waste-bin attached to a lamp-post. She remembered how the one who didn’t limp had raised a bottle to his lips.

  ‘God, I was dreaming about the wife,’ said the man called Con. ‘She had a broken rib.’

  ‘This woman wants a drink, Con.’

  ‘Ah, don’t ye all want drinks? Isn’t it drinks the entire long time with ye?’

  His voice was like a voice there had been the day she’d taken the train to Cheltenham, with Joy. Someone had spoken like that, another man she didn’t know, a small and grey-faced man in black, a clergyman of some kind, standing in front of the house in the country.

  ‘Have you got it, Con? Have you a bottle on you?’

  ‘Have ye two notes?’

  ‘Two,’ the man with the limp said to Doris.

  ‘That’s very cheap, missus,’ his companion threw in, attempting to wag his head. ‘That’s good value all round.’

  ‘You can rest yourself here, missus,’ the man with the limp said. ‘We’ll keep an eye on you.’

  ‘I’m not an alcoholic,’ Doris said, finding the money in the bag that hung from her shoulder. ‘It’s just that a friend’s gone.’

  ‘It’s shocking, that,’ agreed the man with the limp.

  Doris sat down on the ground with them and the bottle was passed from mouth to mouth. It was difficult to drink more than a sip at a time because the taste was so harsh. She leaned against the brickwork of the archway, happy at least that she’d managed to find a drink. ‘Get away out of that,’ one or other of her two companions kept repeating, addressing the figures that crept along the ground towards them, begging a mouthful.

  Hands reached out and touched her or fingered her handbag, but when she moved or spoke they darted away. Then women arrived and dispensed soup from a huge container. They seemed distressed to see her there, and spoke sorrowfully about a new face. One of them wished to drive her somewhere in a car, to a place that sounded like an institution. She didn’t take any of the soup they offered.

  The women were no longer there, and in a little while the bottle was empty. The men beside her slept, the hands ceased to reach out towards her. She might have been dreaming, she didn’t know; she could hear her own voice whispering. ‘Oh, Frankie,’ it said. ‘Oh love, love. Oh Frankie darling.’ Close to him on the soft brown plush of the upstairs bar she explained how she had waited on a sunny day while her father fished in the canal. She had carried home the little folding-stool, her other hand in her father’s, her feet skipping to keep up. And all the time Frankie listened, his blue eyes full of happiness because of her own happiness when she was little. Always in their long love affair there had been that, the happiness when she was little, and Frankie making the happiness seem even more than it had been. A million times his presence had made up for things, a million times his smile had chased away the blues.

  ‘You’ll spare us something, missus?’ the man with the limp said, and Doris realized that everyone was awake again. The silent figures were upright now, revealing the newspapers and lengths of cardboard that had been their beds. She looked for some coins to give the men but discovered that her handbag now contained no money. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and the men muttered obscenities at her. ‘I think it’s been stolen,’ she said.

  She climbed the flight of slippery steps, not caring much about the theft. Dawn was breaking as she stood again by the embankment wall which she had remembered in the night. It wasn’t the money: the trouble was that Frankie was in a mess, the trouble was that Frankie was dead. His slim body was rotting away in its foreign grave, even though his voice still spoke to her, as it had on the last night in the flat. All over again it told her the story of poor little Constance Kent, who had suffered as he had and as she had herself.

  *

  When Joy awoke to find that her mother had not returned she was not surprised. Her mother was drunk more often than sober these days, and quite often did not return to the fiat at night. She’d become dirty, Joy noticed, and once she’d fallen down in the kitchen and had just lain there.

  She smeared blackcurrant jam on a slice of bread and took it to the sitting-room. Television hadn’t started yet so she stood by the window, looking out. She was still there when the doorbell rang.

  ‘No, she hasn’t come back,’ she said to Julia, nibbling at what remained of the bread.

  ‘Excuse me, madam,’ Doris said in Victoria Street.