Last Stories

by William Trevor

  Sometimes, not often, glancing into the house, the painters caught a glimpse of the woman whom they assumed to be the wife of the crippled man they had drunk whiskey with, who had shaken hands with both of them when the agreement about the painting was made. At first they wondered if the woman they saw was someone else, even though she was similarly dressed. They talked about that, bewildered by the strangeness they had returned to, wondering if in this country so abrupt a transformation was usual and often to be found.

  Once, through the grimy panes of an upstairs window, the younger brother saw the woman crouched over a dressing-table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept. She looked up while he still watched, his curiosity beyond restraint, and her eyes stared back at him but she did not avert her gaze.

  That same day, just before the painters finished their work, while they were scraping the last of the old paint from the kitchen window-frames, they saw that the crippled man was not in his chair by the range and realized that since they had returned after the rain they had not heard his voice.

  * * *

  * * *

  Martina washed up their two cups and saucers, teaspoons with a residue of sugar on them because they’d been dipped into the bowl when they were wet with tea. She wiped the tray and dried it, and hung the damp tea-towel on the line in the scullery. She didn’t want to think, even to know that they were there, that they had come. She didn’t want to see them, as all day yesterday she had managed not to. She hung the cups up and put the saucers with the others, the sugar bowl in the cupboard under the sink.

  The ladders clattered in the yard, pulled out of sight for the night in case they’d be a temptation for the tinkers. She couldn’t hear talking and doubted there was any. A few evenings ago when they were leaving they had knocked on the back door and she hadn’t answered.

  She listened for footsteps coming to the door again but none came. She heard the van being driven off. She heard the geese flying over, coming from the water at Dole: this was their time. Once the van had returned when something had been left behind and she’d been collecting the evening eggs and had gone into the fields until it was driven off again. In the kitchen she waited for another quarter of an hour, watching the hands of the dresser clock. Then she let the air into the house, the front door and the back door open, as the kitchen windows were.

  * * *

  * * *

  The dwelling they had made for themselves at the ruins was complete. They had used the fallen stones and the few timber beams that were in good condition, a doorframe that had survived. They’d bought sheets of old galvanized iron for the roof, and found girders on a tip. It wasn’t bad, they said to one another; in other places they’d known worse.

  In the dark of the evening they talked about the crippled man, concerned – and worried as their conversation advanced – since the understanding about payment for the painting had been made with him and it could easily be that when the work was finished the woman would say she knew nothing about what had been agreed, that the sum they claimed as due to them was excessive. They wondered if the crippled man had been taken from the house, if he was in a home. They wondered why the woman still wasn’t as she’d been at first.

  * * *

  * * *

  She backed the Dodge into the middle of the yard, opened the right-hand back door and left the engine running while she carried out the egg trays from the house and settled them one on top of another on the floor, all this as it always was on a Thursday. Hurrying because she wanted to leave before the men came, she locked the house and banged the car door she’d left open. But the engine, idling nicely, stopped before she got into the driver’s seat. And then the blue van was there.

  They came towards her at once, the one with glasses making gestures she didn’t understand at first, before she saw what he was on about. A rear tyre had lost some air; he appeared to be saying he would pump it up for her. She knew, she said; it would be all right. She dreaded what would happen now: the Dodge would let her down. But when she turned off the ignition and turned it on again, and tried the starter with the choke out, the engine fired at once.

  ‘Good morning.’ The older man had to bend at the car window, being so tall. ‘Good morning,’ he said again, when she wound the window down although she hadn’t wanted to. She could hear the ladders going up. ‘Excuse me,’ the man who was delaying her said, and she let the car creep on, even though he was leaning on it.

  ‘He’s in another room,’ she said. ‘A room that’s better for him.’

  She didn’t say she had eggs to deliver because they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t say when you got this old car going you didn’t take chances with it because they wouldn’t understand that either.

  ‘He’s quiet there,’ she said.

  She drove slowly out of the yard and she stalled the engine again.

  * * *

  * * *

  The painters waited until they could no longer hear the car. Then they moved the ladders from one upstairs window to the next until they’d gone all the way round the house. They didn’t speak, only glancing at one another now and again, conversing in that way. When they had finished they lit cigarettes. Almost three-quarters of the work was done: they talked about that, and calculated how much paint was left unused and how much they would receive back on it. They did no work yet.

  The younger brother left the yard, passing through a gateway in which a gate was propped open by its own weight where a hinge had given way. The older man remained, looking about, opening shed doors and closing them again, listening in case the Dodge returned. He leant against one of the ladders, finishing his cigarette.

  Cloudy to begin with, the sky had cleared. Bright sunlight caught the younger brother’s spectacles as he came round the side of the house, causing him to take them off and wipe them clean as he passed back through the gateway. His reconnoitre had led him through a vegetable patch given up to weeds, into what had been a garden, its single remaining flowerbed marked with seed packets that told what its several rows contained. Returning to the yard, he had kept as close to the walls of the house as he could, pressing himself against the stucco surface each time he came to a window, more cautious than he guessed he had to be. The downstairs rooms revealed no more than those above them had, and when he listened he heard nothing. No dogs were kept. Cats watched him without interest.

  In the yard he shook his head, dismissing his fruitless efforts. There was a paddock with sun on it, he said, and they sat there munching their stale sandwiches and drinking a tin of Pepsi Cola each.

  ‘The crippled man is dead.’ The older brother spoke softly and in English, nodding an affirmation of each word, as if to make his meaning clear in case it was not.

  ‘The woman is frightened.’ He nodded that into place also.

  These conjectures were neither contradicted nor commented upon. In silence the two remained in the sun and then they walked through the fields that neglect had impoverished, and in the garden. They looked down at the solitary flowerbed, at the brightly coloured seed packets marking the empty rows, each packet pierced with a stick. They did not say this was a grave, or remark on how the rank grass, in a wide straight path from the gate, had been crushed and recovered. They did not draw a finger through the earth in search of seeds where seeds should be, where flowers were promised.

  ‘She wears no ring.’ The older brother shrugged away that detail, depriving it of any interest it might have had, irrelevant now.

  Again they listened for the chug of the car’s unreliable engine but it did not come. Since the painting had made it necessary for the windows to be eased in their sashes, any one of them now permitted entry to the house. This was not taken advantage of, as yesterday it would have been, this morning too. Instead, without discussion, the painting began again.

  Undisturbed, they worked until the light went. ‘She will be here tomorrow,’ the older
brother said. ‘She will have found the courage, and know we are no threat.’

  In the van on the way back to their dwelling they talked again about the woman who was not as she had been, and the man who was not there. They guessed and wondered, supposed, surmised. They cooked their food and ate it in uncomfortable confinement, the shreds and crumbs of unreality giving the evening shape. Neither impatience nor anger had allowed a woman who had waited too long to wait again, until she was alone: they sensed enough of truth in that. They smoked slow cigarettes, instinct directing through. The woman’s history was not theirs to know, even though they were now part of it themselves. Their circumstances made them that, as hers made her what she had become. She held the whip hand because it was there for her to seize. She’d see to it that still the pension came. No one would miss the crippled man, no one visited a lonely place. Tomorrow the woman would pay for the painting of the house. Tomorrow they would travel on.

  At the Caffè Daria

  Along a single wall of the Caffè Daria the scarlet upholstered banquettes haven’t changed, the ornate brass foot-rail at the counter remains. The mural flower patterns have yet again been renewed in the same pastel shades, the tables are still not set too close together. The floor, although it’s tiled, still does not echo footsteps.

  Often crowded, noisy with chatter, the caffè is quiet in the early morning. Business people hurry in then, for the breakfast that was forgone in earlier-morning haste. The first of the shoppers come later, on their way from the suburbs to the exhausting bustle of the streets. Friends meet then, regulars reach for the newspapers on their wooden hangers.

  The croissants are famous. The lunchtime scrambled eggs with smoked salmon is said to be the best in London, the coffee is never less than it should be. The little apple tarts are a recent speciality, the tarte au citron is borrowed from the French.

  The caffè has a story. In 1949 Andrea Cavalli sold the family vineyards he had inherited before the war and left Piedmont, and Italy, for ever. He was not embittered, even when the wife he still loved was taken from him by a poet who dedicated to her all he subsequently composed. Desolate and alone, Andrea Cavalli travelled the shattered countries of a Europe that reflected his melancholy, a Europe that would never be the same again. Nor, he knew, would he. He took with him on his lonely wanderings a woman’s countenance he knew he would never in reality see again, a voice that softly echoed even while he slept, a desire that would not go away. How dull he was, he thought, knowing only the clay of estates that were no longer his, and the ripening of grapes. The poet, whom he had never met, he imagined: a careless, handsome fellow whom no woman could be blamed for loving. As he travelled, Andrea Cavalli knew that he could never challenge the skilful rhyming of words, or clever thoughts.

  Without a destination as he went on, the cruel landscape of devastation ever grimmer, he found himself finally wandering the broken streets of London. Such was the lowness of his spirits that he was seized, in desperation, with an eccentricity: to do something to confirm his existence, an unknown man in a country strange to him, to offer it what he could, since it had so little itself. That he was rich was his only power: among London’s bomb sites he created the Caffè Daria, immortalizing as he did so his lost wife. He honoured her because he wanted to, knowing that for him there could only ever be this gesture. It pleased him that he had found the courage to make it, that her name would always be there in this distant city, that nothing of what he’d done had been a mistake.

  * * *

  * * *

  One morning long after the time of Andrea Cavalli, the slight figure of a quietly dressed woman in her middle age occupies in the Caffè Daria the table she particularly likes. The waitresses smile at her as they pass and she smiles too; the young Italian manager has greeted her warmly on her arrival. It may be that she has been coming to the Caffè Daria for longer than anyone else; she doesn’t know, but it’s not unlikely, for she remembers when she was five being here with her father, who was attracted by the caffè’s stylishness. Years later – at a time for her of wretchedness and disappointment – that same stylishness was a solace, as other people’s lives observed were. Her features now are slightly lined but her eyes are clear and even bright, her hair skilfully streaked, a grey pervasiveness kept at bay.

  Once a dancer, she is a publisher’s reader now and often brings to the caffè the typescripts she has been asked to comment on. She has come with two this morning, a medieval murder-mystery and a tale of passion set in the Australian outback. Neither enthrals her; in both the quality of the writing is poor, which she records with professional politeness, while holding nothing back. She is touched sometimes, drawn into what has been written, as she was when she read only for pleasure. She did so hungrily and widely then, and as perceptively as she now assesses promise or achievement. No one has taught her that skill, but it is there and makes a living for her.

  She pours more coffee, all that’s left in her cafetière, then looks about her. A few of the faces at the other tables are familiar, the banquettes too far away to observe in any detail. Behind her somewhere a couple edgily disagree, the timbre of their voices suggesting the beginning of a quarrel. She doesn’t try to listen; she would have once and often still does, here or anywhere.

  In the 1970s, before she knew what a publisher’s reader was, Anita Lyde, as she was then, danced with the Fireflies, delighting in the excitement of being a television song-and-dance girl. She was admired by an older man with charm to burn, and handsome in his way, who in time asked her if she could bear to marry him. She meant it when she said she couldn’t bear not to.

  A waitress brings more hot milk before she asks for it. She opens the letters she picked up before she left her flat but there is nothing of interest among them and she puts them back in their envelopes to drop into a waste-bin later. She doesn’t mind being alone. She did once but doesn’t now, and supposes that being alone has become part of her, as her mornings in the Caffè Daria have too.

  She gathers up her papers and reads again what she has written, makes changes, adds a little. ‘Temporary interruption’ is a clue in a crossword she earlier almost finished. Pause, she fills in now, annulled for ‘Declared invalid’. A woman who has just come in hesitates at the door, appears to be about to go away, then changes her mind. A striking figure in well-cared-for middle age also, she makes her way through the tables. Watching her, Anita realizes she is Claire. The classic beauty passed on by a Danish mother – with sky-blue eyes and Scandinavian fairness – is still there. That protruding chairs are pulled back to allow her more room to pass, that occasionally a man stands up, that she is smiled at, are somehow reminders of Claire too. Anita’s instinct is not to let herself be seen but she knows she has been.

  They played with dolls once upon a time, Anita round-faced and trusting, Claire beautiful already. They shared their childhood fears, their knowledge as they came to know it, confessed their adolescent guilt. They giggled together at fat Miss Sumac of their boarding school and smoked the cigarettes the French girl gave them; they cut out photographs of Steve McQueen, collected the same good wishes in their autograph books. They danced together with the Fireflies and it was then that the Caffè Daria became their most special place. Anita told the tale of Andrea Cavalli’s consuming love, and both so admired his generosity that between them they transformed him into a figure of heroic awe. They touched the things he’d touched and called themselves ridiculous for doing so, and yet they did it. The Fireflies’ reign as television’s favourite dance group was over when Anita had her wedding party in the caffè’s private room, but the Fireflies danced again, for one last time, that afternoon. Soon afterwards, so Anita has heard, Veronica tried to become a nun but they wouldn’t have her. Eunice runs a dogs’ hotel near Ashford. Dolly Olden married four times, Tilda lives in Weston-super-Mare. Alice went to Canada, Maisie became a beautician. And Claire is here.

  ‘Why have you come?’ Anita
asks, and Claire for a moment seems not to know. Yet nothing else in her manner suggests that she is here today without a purpose. Her voice is empty of expression when she speaks. She looks away for an instant before she does.

  ‘Just after four I sensed his stillness. I turned the light on and I saw.’

  ‘Gervaise has died?’

  Claire nods, is silent. How patronizing, Anita reflects, the smile that isn’t there today once was, how treacherous the sky-blue eyes. How much she detested then the Scandinavian beauty and wished the perfect profile maimed, how often made the graceful walk a dragging slouch.

  This bitterness, too long possessed, no longer shames Anita but has instead become a nourishment, her way out of managing disappointment. Politely she offers coffee, and indicates the table’s only other chair.

  ‘The house?’ she asks, to use up time.

  ‘The house will go. Since there are debts.’

  They both have lived in it. Anita made it as she wanted it to be, Claire moved the furniture about and painted doors and windowsills a colour she preferred. She changed the lampshades, the wallpaper in the hall, replaced the knives and forks. Gervaise at thirty-four was Anita’s older man when she came to his house as a bride of nineteen, artless and in love. A legacy made life easy for Gervaise. He lived as he wished to live: playing the cello, teaching himself Russian, buying the unfashionable paintings he admired. As well, he dabbled a bit with words, he used to say, but nothing much ever came of that. Tall, fair-haired, with sleepily amused eyes, he gambled modestly, the pleasures of racecourses attracting him as much as his unfashionable paintings did, or Proust or Stendhal.