Last Stories

by William Trevor

  She drove past the tinkers at the Cross, the children in their rags running about, feet bare, heads cropped. The woman whom the noise of the Dodge always brought out stared stonily, continuing to stand there when the car went on, a still image in the driving mirror. ‘We’d do it for four and a half,’ the man in Finnally’s had offered when she’d asked the price of the electric cooker that was still in the window. Not a chance, she’d thought.

  About to be fifty and putting on more weight than pleased her, Martina had once known what she wanted, but she wasn’t so sure about that any more. Earlier in her life, a careless marriage had fallen apart, leaving her homeless. There had been no children although she had wanted them, and often since had thought that in spite of having to support them she might have done better if children had been there to make a centre for her life.

  She drove through the turf bogs, a Bord na Móna machine drawn up at the cuttings, an uncoupled trailer clamped so that it would stay where it was. Nothing was going on, nothing had changed at the cuttings for maybe as long as nine months. The lack of activity was lowering, she considered every time she saw, yet again, the place as it had been the last time.

  She turned at Laughil, the road darkened by the trees that overhung it. She couldn’t remember when it was that she’d last met another car on this journey. She didn’t try to. It didn’t matter.

  * * *

  * * *

  The two men drove away, pleased that they’d found work, talking about the man who’d called out and said come in when they’d knocked on the door. All the time they were there he had remained in his chair by the fire of the range, and when the price was agreed he’d said go to the scullery and get the whiskey bottle. He had gestured impatiently when they didn’t understand, lifting his fist to his mouth, tossing back his head, the fist going with it, until they realized what he meant.

  He was convivial then; and they noticed the glasses on the dresser and watched while he put them out on the table. They were uncertain only for a moment, then one of them unscrewed the cap on the bottle.

  ‘We heard about Poland,’ he said. ‘A Catholic people. We’ll drink to the work, will we?’

  They poured more whiskey for him when he held out the glass. They had more themselves before they left.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘Who was here?’

  Martina put the bag of groceries on the table as she spoke. The whiskey bottle was there, out of his reach, two empty glasses beside it, his own, empty also, in his hand. He held it out, his way of asking her to pour him more. He wouldn’t stop now, she thought; he’d go on until the bottle was empty and then he’d ask if there was one unopened, and she’d say no, although there was.

  ‘A blue van,’ she said, giving him more drink, since there was no point in not.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what colour it was,’ he said.

  ‘A blue van was in the boreen.’

  ‘Did you get the list?’

  ‘I did.’

  He’d had visitors, he said, as if the subject were a new one. ‘Good boys, Martina.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked again.

  He wanted the list back, and the receipt. With his stub of a pencil, kept specially for the purpose, he crossed off the items she took from the bags they were in. In the days when Costigan had been more lively she had enjoyed these moments of deception, the exact change put down on the table, what she had saved still secreted in her clothes until she could get upstairs to the Gold Flake tin.

  ‘Polish lads,’ he said. ‘They’ll paint the outside for us.’ Two coats, he said, a fortnight it would take.

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Good Catholic boys. We had a drink.’

  She asked where the money was coming from and he asked, in turn, what money she was talking about. That was a way he had, and a way of hers invariably to question any money’s source: the subject, once raised, had a tendency to linger.

  ‘What’d they take off you?’ she asked.

  With feigned patience, he explained he’d paid for the materials only. If the work was satisfactory he would pay what was owing when the job was finished.

  Martina didn’t comment on that. Angrily, she pulled open one of the dresser’s two drawers, felt at the back of it and brought out a bundle of euro notes, fives and tens in separate rubber bands, twenties, fifties, a single hundred. She knew at once how much he had paid. She knew he would have asked the painters to reach in for the money since he couldn’t himself. She knew they would have seen the amount that was left there.

  ‘Why would they paint a house when all they have to do is walk in and help themselves?’

  He shook his head. He said again the painters were fine Catholic boys. With patience still emphatic in his tone, he repeated that the work would be completed within a fortnight. It was the talk of the country, he said, the skills young Polish boys brought to Ireland. An act of God, he said. She wouldn’t notice them about the place.

  * * *

  * * *

  They bought the paint in Carragh, asking what would be best for the walls of a house. ‘Masonry,’ the man said, pointing at the word on a tin. ‘Outside work, go for the masonry.’

  They understood. They explained that they’d been given money in advance for materials and they paid the sum that was written down for them.

  ‘Polish, are you?’ the man enquired.

  Their history was unusual. Born into a community of stateless survivors in the mountains of what had once been Carinthia, their natural language a dialect enlivened by words from a dozen others, they were regarded often now as gypsies. They remembered a wandering childhood of nameless places, an existence in tents and silent night-time crossings of borders, the unceasing search for somewhere better. They had separated from their family without regret when they were, they thought, thirteen and fourteen. Since then their lives were what they had become: knowing what to do, how best to do it, acquiring what had to be acquired, managing. Wherever they were, they circumvented what they did not call the system, since it was not a word they knew; but they knew what it meant and knew that straying into it, or their acceptance of it, however temporarily, would deprive them of their freedom. Survival was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

  They bought brushes as well as the paint, and white spirit because the man said they’d need it, and filler because they’d been told the mortar required attention: they had never painted a house before, and didn’t know what mortar was.

  Their van was battered, pale blue patched up a bit with a darker shade, without tax or insurance although there was the usual evidence of both on the windscreen. They slept in the van, among the tools of one kind or another they had come by, with their mugs, plates, a basin, saucepan, frying pan, food.

  In the dialect that was their language the older brother asked if they would spare the petrol to go to the ruins where they were engaged in making themselves a dwelling. The younger brother, driving, nodded and they went there.

  * * *

  * * *

  In her bedroom Martina closed the lid of the Gold Flake tin and secured it with its rubber band. She stood back from the wardrobe looking-glass and critically surveyed herself, ashamed of how she’d let herself go, her bulk not quite obese but almost now, her pale blue eyes – once her most telling feature – half lost in folds of flesh. She had been still in her thirties when she’d first come to the farmhouse, still particular about how she looked and dressed. She wiped away the lipstick that had been smudged by Costigan’s rough embracing when for a few minutes she had been alone with him in the shop. She settled her underclothes where he had disturbed them. The smell of the shop – a medley of rashers, fly spray and the chickens Costigan roasted on a spit – had passed from his clothes to hers, years ago. ‘Oh, just the shop,’ she used to say when she was as
ked about it in the kitchen, but she didn’t bother saying it any more.

  They were distantly related, had been together in the farmhouse since his mother died twelve years ago and his father the following winter. It was another relative who had suggested the union, since Martina was on her own and only occasionally employed. Her cousin – for they had agreed that they were cousins of a kind – would have otherwise to be taken into a home; and she herself had little to lose by coming to a farm where the grazing was parcelled out, rent received annually, where now and again another field was sold. Martina’s crippled cousin, who since birth had been confined as he was now, had for Martina the attraction of a legal stipulation: in time she would inherit what was left. Often people assumed that he had died. In Carragh they did, and people from round about who never came to the farmhouse did; talking to them, you could feel it. Martina didn’t mention him herself except when the subject was brought up: there was nothing to say because there was nothing that had become different, nothing she could remark on.

  He was asleep after the whiskey when she went downstairs and he slept until he was roused by the clatter of dishes and the frying of their six o’clock meal. She liked to keep him to time, to do what it said to do. She kept the alarm clock on the dresser wound, accurate to the minute by the wireless morning and evening. She collected, first thing, what eggs had been laid in the night. She got him to the kitchen from the back room as soon as she’d set the breakfast table. She made the two beds when he had his breakfast in him and she had washed up the dishes. On a day she went to Carragh she left the house at quarter past two; she’d got into the way of that. Usually he was asleep by the range then, as most of the time he was unless he’d begun to argue. If he had, it could go on all day.

  ‘The Poles would be a nuisance about the place.’ She had to raise her voice because the liver on the pan was spitting. The slightest sound – of dishes or cooking, the lid of the kettle rattling – and he said he couldn’t hear her when she spoke. But she knew he could.

  He said he couldn’t now and she ignored him. He said he’d have another drink and she ignored that too.

  ‘They’re never a nuisance,’ he said. ‘Lads like that.’

  He said they were clean, you’d look at them and know. He said they’d be company for her.

  ‘One month to the next you hardly see another face, Martina. Sure, I’m aware of that, girl. Don’t I know it the whole time.’

  She cracked the first egg into the pool of fat she’d made by tilting the pan. She could crack open an egg and empty it with one hand. Two each they had.

  ‘It needs the paint,’ he said.

  She didn’t comment on that. She didn’t say he couldn’t know; how could he, since she didn’t manage to get him out to the yard any more? She hadn’t managed to for years.

  ‘It does me good,’ he said. ‘The old drop of whiskey.’

  She turned the wireless on and there was old-time music playing.

  ‘That’s terrible stuff,’ he said.

  Martina didn’t comment on that either. When the slices of liver were black she scooped them off the pan and put them on their plates with the eggs. She got him to the table. He’d had whiskey enough, she said when he asked for more, and nothing further was said on the subject in the kitchen.

  When they had eaten she got him to his bed, but an hour later he was shouting and she went to him. She thought it was a dream, but he said it was his legs. She gave him aspirins, and whiskey, because when he had both the pains would go. ‘Come in and keep me warm,’ he whispered, and she said no. She often wondered if the pains had maddened him, if his brain had been attacked, as so much else in his body was.

  ‘Why’d they call you Martina?’ he asked, still whispering. A man’s name, he said; why would they?

  ‘I told you the way of it.’

  ‘You’d tell me many a thing.’

  ‘Go to sleep now.’

  ‘Are the grass rents in?’

  ‘Go back to sleep.’

  * * *

  * * *

  The painting commenced on a Tuesday because on the Monday there was ceaseless rain. The Tuesday was fine, full of sunshine, with a soft, drying breeze. The painters hired two ladders in Carragh and spent that day filling in where the stucco surface had broken away.

  The woman of the house, whom they assumed to be the crippled man’s wife, brought out soda scones and tea in the middle of the morning, and when she asked them what time was best for this – morning and afternoon – they pointed at eleven o’clock and half past three on the older brother’s watch. She brought them biscuits with the tea at exactly half past three. She stayed talking to them, telling them where they could buy what they wanted in Carragh, asking them about themselves. Her smile was tired but she was patient with them when they didn’t understand. She watched them while they worked and when they asked her what she thought she said they were as good as anyone. By the evening the repairs to the stucco had been completed.

  Heavy rain was forecast for the Wednesday and it came in the middle of the afternoon, blown in from the west by an intimidating storm. The work could not be continued and the painters sat in their van, hoping for an improvement. Earlier, while they were working, there had been raised voices in the house, an altercation that occasionally gave way to silence before beginning again. The older painter, whose English was better than his brother’s, reported that it had to do with money and the condition of the land. ‘The pension is what I’m good for,’ the crippled man repeatedly insisted. ‘Amn’t I here for the few bob I bring in?’ The pension became the heart of what was so crossly talked about, how it was spent in ways it shouldn’t be, how the crippled man didn’t have it for himself. The painters lost interest, but the voices went on and could still be heard when one or other of them left the van to look at the sky.

  Late in the afternoon they gave up waiting and drove into Carragh. They asked in the paint shop how long the bad weather would last and were advised that the outlook for several days was not good. They returned the ladders, reluctant to pay for their hire while they were unable to make use of them. It was a setback, but they were used to setbacks and, enquiring again in the paint shop, they learnt that a builder who’d been let down was taking on replacement labour at the conversion of a disused mill – an indoor site a few miles away. In the end the gaffer agreed to employ them on a day-to-day basis.

  * * *

  * * *

  The rain affected the crippled man. When it rained he wouldn’t stop, since she was confined herself, and when they had worn out the subject of the pension he would begin again about the saint she was named after. ‘Tell me.’ He would repeat his most regular request, and if it was the evening and he was fuddled with drink she wouldn’t answer, but in the daytime he would wheedle, and every minute would drag more sluggishly than minutes had before.

  He did so on the morning the painters took down their ladders and went away. She was shaking the clinkers out of the range so the fire would glow. She was kneeling down in front of him and she could feel him examining her the way he often did. You’d be the better for it, he said when she’d tell about her saint, and you’d feel the consolation of a holiness. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  She took the ash pan out to the yard, not saying anything before she went. The rain soaked her shoulders and dribbled over her face and neck, drenching her arms and the grey-black material of her dress, running down between her breasts. When she returned to the kitchen she did as he wished, telling him what he knew: that holy milk, not blood, had flowed in the body of St Martina of Rome, that Pope Urban had built a church in her honour and had composed the hymns used in her office in the Roman breviary, that she had perished by the sword.

  He complimented her when she finished speaking, while she still stood behind him, not wanting to look at him. The rain she had brought in with her dripped on to the broken flags of the floor. />
  * * *

  * * *

  The painters worked at the mill conversion for longer than they might have, even though the finer weather had come. The money was better and there was talk of more employment in the future; in all, nine days passed before they returned to the farmhouse.

  They arrived early, keeping their voices down and working quickly to make up for lost time, nervous in case there was a complaint about their not returning sooner. By eight o’clock the undercoat was on most of the front wall.

  The place was quiet and remained so, but wisps of smoke were coming from one of the chimneys, which the painters remembered from the day and a half they’d spent there before. The car was there, its length too much for the shed it was in, its rear protruding, and they remembered that too. Still working at the front of the house, they listened for footsteps in the yard, expecting the tea that before had come in the morning, but no tea came. In the afternoon, when the older brother went to the van for a change of brushes, the tea tray was on the bonnet and he carried it to where the ladders were.

  In the days that followed this became a pattern. The stillness the place had acquired was not broken by the sound of a radio playing or voices. The tea came without additions and at varying times, as if the arrangement about eleven o’clock and half past three had been forgotten. When the ladders were moved into the yard the tray was left on the stop of a door at the side of the house.