Last Stories

by William Trevor

  She led the clergyman back through the hall while he repeated at second-hand what had been described to him. The driver of a van – delivering flowers, it was thought – had denied negligence. The proprietor of a betting shop had been about to cross the street also, but the pedestrian light had changed to red. The girl had gone on, he said, not waiting, as he and everyone else had. The van had been in a traffic filter and had come unexpectedly and perhaps too fast. But in spite of someone saying afterwards that there was drink on the driver’s breath it was generally felt that he could not be blamed. It had almost seemed deliberate, the betting-shop proprietor had said, the way the girl hadn’t waited for the light to change.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the clergyman apologized. ‘I have distressed you, Mrs Balfour.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Thank you for coming.’

  * * *

  * * *

  Harriet wished he hadn’t. All that morning, doing her weekly stint at the Oxfam shop, she wished he hadn’t. Sorting books that had recently been left, she put aside Around the World in Eighty Days to read sometime to the old men of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. She listened to Miss Chantry bringing her up to date on her brother-in-law’s angina. She arranged for shoes and garments, no use to anyone, to be disposed of. But increasingly she felt haunted by the spare, elderly features of the clergyman who had briefly been an awkward presence in her drawing room. He had said that Emily Vance had always paid the rent promptly where she lived, that she came and went so quietly she was hardly noticed, that she was no trouble.

  After she left the Oxfam shop, and with time on her hands, Harriet had coffee in Caffè Nero before she began the long walk back to her house. Emily Vance had been a special person: often she had thought so. Dark-haired and sombre, as quiet as the clergyman described, she’d been attractive in an unaffected way, her delicate features arranged in an oval that made the most of them. Conscientious as an employee, she’d been a godsend too. Yet, without a word beforehand or a note sent afterwards, she had one day not come back.

  Timing her lunchtime boiled egg, brown-bread slices toasting, Harriet remembered searching, bewildered, for an explanation and deciding that none she found was entirely likely. She had banished conjecture then, since it was no more than that and offered nothing. But today, while listening to Miss Chantry passing on the newest details of her brother-in-law’s angina, and in the Caffè Nero, and now, the same conjecture nagged, its source the contents of a moment.

  She’d been on the way downstairs. In the hall Emily Vance was washing the tiles, Stephen, passing, tiptoeing across the wet floor. No glance that Harriet had seen had been exchanged by the two, no words, no gesture. But Emily Vance who did not often smile had smiled when again she was on her own, as if recalling a moment of pleasure. There was no more than that, but still Harriet had wondered, and wondered now more than she had before. Only weeks had passed before her cleaner had failed to come back.

  She told herself, as she had then, that she was being fanciful. Deception was not Stephen’s way and surely it was straining speculation to assume that, as well as a clandestine relationship, there had been a quarrel that brought it to an end; that her son, unlike herself, had been careless in what he’d said. Anxiety played cruel tricks, she sensibly reminded herself.

  It was still early – not yet three – when she began to read another chapter of Beau Geste to the old men of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home. Afterwards she stayed with them for a little longer because they liked to talk about what they had heard, or simply liked to talk, and reminisce.

  It was then, while listening to their memories, that the nagging began again. It would go, she thought, but it didn’t, and it didn’t while she waved goodbye to the little group that had formed.

  The afternoon was fine, pale April sunlight glancing off shop-window glass and the façades of houses, dipping into trim front gardens. But before Harriet reached the Common – which was the pleasantest part of the walk – she changed her mind about going home immediately and waited for a bus that went in the opposite direction.

  It took her ages to find Camona Street but when she did she saw the stationer’s shop at once and was told the stairs to the flat above it were through a storage room at the back. She hesitated then, among stacks of packaged paper and cardboard boxes in piles, and jars of glue, and chalk and ballpoint pens, tied-up waste bags. People talking, she said to herself, no more than that it would have been, people saying anything, adding something extra to the drama that had so suddenly happened. The clergyman had been cautious, not stating in any certain way that Emily Vance had taken her life.

  ‘Up there is what you want.’ Appearing suddenly, the man who’d directed her to the back of the shop pointed at uncarpeted stairs. The smell of food recently cooked drifted down to them. Harriet nodded and went up as she was directed.

  * * *

  * * *

  They did not sit down. The man, who was thin and small with pallid features, kept turning away, a wiry jerkiness about his movements. The woman was small too, with bushy grey hair falling to her shoulders.

  ‘She had the rooms,’ the woman said. ‘Two rooms, the door between, the bathroom she could use.’

  Harriet was shown the table on which Emily Vance’s handbag had been examined by people who came after the accident. Police it was who emptied the handbag there.

  ‘No need they should do that,’ the woman said.

  The man added that Emily Vance had said she was a cleaner of people’s houses when first she came to ask about the rooms. A silence completed these revelations, and then Harriet said, ‘There has apparently been talk about whether or not your lodger took her life. Do you think perhaps she did?’

  That brought no comment, except, again, that they did not know, that they were not there, that they had witnessed nothing. One and then the other said it. But as Harriet was leaving, the door held open for her, she was told that in all the time Emily Vance had lived in the two rooms she had not ever sat with them in the evening, not even once. They spoke about this inadequacy together too, one speaking, then the other, their disappointment shared.

  ‘Such a thing on the street,’ the woman said.

  * * *

  * * *

  In her kitchen Harriet lifted down plates to be warmed in the oven later, and her heavy blue casserole dish. She assembled what otherwise she needed for her cooking, and opened wine. She chopped up parsley, washed celery stalks and mushrooms, measured out a cup of rice. Smoke curled for a moment from the oil she heated, she seared the meat she had sliced. She poured out cream and turned on the machine that whipped it for her. Her own confection of apricots and Cointreau had earlier been prepared.

  It surely could not have been much, she thought, whatever there had been, if there’d been anything. Nor was there any reason why she should imagine otherwise just because of today. The clergyman expected her to attend the funeral, and she would. For his sake, because he had come quite a long way, because he was doing his best. But even so Harriet wished she hadn’t brought him to the drawing room and allowed him to get going. She should have kept him at the door, the way you had to with Jehovah’s Witnesses. She wished she had done that.

  Dvořák was on the radio when she turned it on and with time on her hands, for she had got on well, she sat down and listened to it. The last movement ended just before her son called out from the hall, saying he was back.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘What kind of a day?’ Fair-haired and lanky, Stephen carried their two heated plates, with the casserole, to the dining room. Harriet followed with rice and broccoli.

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said. There’d been the shopping, her visit to the old men, and walking back across the Common in the evening. She didn’t mention anything else.

  ‘How good you are to people!’ Softly spoken, Stephen sounded like his father, who had often said Harri
et was good. They both remembered that and Stephen smiled, as if they had said more. Harriet shook her head, which had been her response to the compliment in the past.

  ‘I like this chicken,’ Stephen commented, pouring more wine for both of them.

  Several times in the course of the day Harriet had wondered about mentioning the clergyman’s visit. Before she finished in the Oxfam shop she had begun to think she wouldn’t, and had thought so again later, and later still, after she had been to Camona Street. She knew it would be more interesting to recount her day more fully, as usually she did, to pass on the bad news it had brought. ‘There’s money in a drawer,’ the woman in Camona Street had said. ‘Would do for a funeral.’

  But at dinner they talked of other matters, easily, lightly, for conversation was never difficult, and this evening, as on other evenings, an undemanding affection one for the other made their relationship more than it might have been. Their closeness came naturally, neither through obligation nor for a reason that was not one of feeling; and it was never said, but only known, that different circumstances, coming naturally also, would change everything. They lived in a time-being, and accepted that.

  In the kitchen they shared the washing-up, and Stephen laid the table there, ready for breakfast. He had achondroplasia to read up on, he said, and tonight he would rather do that than watch television or whatever. His father had been a paediatrician. He was to be one himself.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sir Felix had his work to do, and was willing to do it – as far as such willingness could go with him . . . Harriet slept then, taking Sir Felix and his work with her, the page open on her pillow. A moment later, her book fell and woke her. Leaving it where it was, she turned the light off.

  And Stephen, finishing with achondroplasia an hour later, stretched and yawned, undressed and washed and went to bed. He slept at once.

  There was no movement then in the house that once Emily Vance had cleaned. No mice crept about, for what mice there were had eaten unwisely all that had been left out for them and were no longer alive. No would-be burglar tried the windows. No cats came to the garden, careless of the broken glass that crowned its high walls. Nor was the spectre of Emily Vance anywhere, neither in the house nor in the garden, where she’d so often been urged to sit in the sun for her coffee, to pick the lily of the valley when it was profuse, and daffodils before they drooped. Emily Vance was not in dreams and came back only with the light of dawn, alive in Harriet’s memory as yesterday returned. But what had yesterday attracted unease and doubt was calmly presented now, and Harriet was calm herself. She did not fret. With a precision free of apprehension, she saw again her cleaner kneeling in the hall, her sodden cloth completing her washing of the red-and-black tiles. The front door banged as Stephen left the house and this morning it seemed to Harriet that what she had witnessed – more likely than a secret concealed – was the shyness of undeclared love. And she imagined her cleaner delighting in the pinned-up photographs on the walls of Stephen’s bedroom, and in his bedside books, and the reproduction he had framed himself of Bonnard’s boats, the postcard portrait of Anna Akhmatova, his pop-singer fish that sang a song. His shirts and ties were stroked, his pillow smoothed, his overcoat settled on its hanger. How often had the heady thrill of his voice, his laughter, come from somewhere else in the house and been the moment of the day? How often was the cup he’d drunk from washed up last, so precious was the unseen imprint of his lips?

  These snatches of illusion crowded Harriet’s consciousness and, though touched by death because death had come, they offered a consolation that continued. She was right to say nothing, for why should Stephen bear a burden that was not his to bear? She slept again, more deeply than before, and woke at seven.

  The air was cold in the garden when she walked there, the early-morning noise of the city muffled. She tidied a flowerbed, picked the last of the double-headed narcissi and brought them to the kitchen. There would be a funeral. The episode would end with that.

  * * *

  * * *

  An organist played Bach and then was silent. The clergyman who had broken the news of the death to Harriet spoke old-fashioned words that still were beautiful and she knew that that was why they had been chosen.

  She had come to the funeral not only because she felt it was expected of her but because she expected it of herself. In the church there were two other women, each on her own, found no doubt as she’d been found. The couple from Camona Street were there.

  ‘“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday . . . as soon as thou scatterest them, they are even as a sleep: and fade away suddenly like the grass.”’

  Beautiful as the words were, they seemed not to belong. A week had passed since the clergyman’s visit but time, accumulating, had contributed nothing. Neither to the life there had been nor to the death, and in this place, which isolated the spiritual and honoured it, no truth began.

  ‘“In the morning it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered . . . all our days are gone: we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”’

  The voice echoed, the name at last was spoken. In a whisper at the door as Harriet entered the church, she had been asked if she was aware of another given name; but she knew only Emily, and so that alone was used.

  ‘“In the midst of life we are in death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts . . .”’

  No hymn was sung. There was no eulogy, and the coffin remained when the service ended later, to be conveyed to the crematorium.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’ In the awkward pause there was outside the church the old clergyman said the same to everyone. ‘You’ll take a little tea with me?’ half-heartedly he invited.

  The two women who were also on their own apologized for their presence, each murmuring her appreciation of the service. The couple from Camona Street went away quickly. A limping sexton carried out the flowers.

  ‘It was too little,’ the clergyman said. His name was on a board in front of the church, gold letters on black. The Reverend C. R. Malfrey. ‘Too slight. Too empty.’

  ‘No. No, not at all,’ Harriet assured him.

  ‘I wish I had found the family.’

  Slowly he led her among the graves. He was widowed, Harriet thought; there were all the signs of that. On his own in some shabby rectory, managing as best he could.

  ‘She left a few books behind,’ he said. ‘Her clothes were given to charities, but the books were left. I said I’d take them: we have a book sale every autumn.’

  The coffin was being removed from the church. Harriet knew this was why she had been led away. No voices reached them where they walked. A door of whatever vehicle was there closed softly and then another one did.

  * * *

  * * *

  Summer that year was fine and warm, September began well then was wet, October cold. In late November Harriet gave a party to celebrate Stephen’s twenty-sixth birthday. Afterwards, in the early hours of the next day when everyone had gone, she and Stephen restored the rooms which more than a hundred people had disordered. Doing so, they talked about their guests, most of them of Stephen’s generation; and in the kitchen Harriet washed up cutlery and glasses, Stephen dried and put away. They were in the drawing room again, plumping up cushions, finding what they had overlooked, when Stephen said, ‘Do you remember Emily Vance? One of your cleaners?’

  In the months that had passed since the funeral there had hardly been a day when Emily Vance hadn’t come into Harriet’s thoughts. When the clergyman had led her into the graveyard, the first drops of a shower had begun to spatter the tombstones. He had been inadequate. He would always know he had been, he said, as, unseen by both of them, the unknown girl was taken from the church where she’d found peace. And Harriet then had felt inadequate too.

  The fire in the drawing r
oom had long ago died down, but even so she put the fireguard in place. They should go to bed now. There wasn’t much of the night left.

  ‘When you were out we often were alone, Emily Vance and I,’ Stephen said.

  The stem of a glass had broken off, and Harriet watched him feeling where it had fallen for the dampness that would become a stain on the carpet. Finding nothing, he said the glass must have been empty.

  ‘She thought it was kind of you to let her have her coffee in the garden when it was fine. Sometimes I had mine there too. She was a lonely person.’

  In the kitchen he dropped the broken glass into the waste-bucket beneath the sink. Empty bottles crowded the draining boards. A blue cardigan, left behind by someone, was draped over the back of a chair.

  ‘She doesn’t know the names of flowers,’ Stephen said. ‘Not a single one. We walked about the garden and she would ask and I would tell.’

  Harriet said they had done enough for one night and ran the hot water in the sink, brushing it round the sides to leave it clean. In the hall there was a scarf they hadn’t noticed on the floor, left behind too. The telephone was off the hook. Stephen put it on again.

  ‘Emily Vance died,’ Harriet said on the stairs, because it had to be said now. ‘I should have told you. I’m sorry.’

  Stephen shook his head. He asked about the death and didn’t flinch when he was told, was not surprised. ‘She talked to me a bit,’ he said. ‘Not that it was easy for Emily Vance to talk to anyone.’

  ‘She loved you.’

  Stephen opened his bedroom door, turned on the light. It was a room that never changed. What was there he had chosen carefully, had taken nothing away, had added nothing. He was like that, which Harriet knew and he did not.

  Standing with him in the open doorway, she heard a denial of what she had said. His voice was empty of emotion, as if already he was a consultant in a hospital. A child ran off from fear. A father promised. An acquiescent mother promised too. But still the child ran off, to search for strength in her concealment of herself, not ever to return, not ever to be found.