The Boarding-House

by William Trevor

  Gallelty had been asleep. She blinked, thinking of her bed.

  ‘Well, a man, Mr Studdy. A solicitor fellow, he wants to see us all. It’s Mr Bird’s will.’

  So at ten thirty-one Studdy entered the television lounge with Gallelty trailing behind him. He looked with displeasure at the expectant faces of the residents and then sat down.

  ‘That is Mr Studdy. We are all here now,’ said Rose Cave to the solicitor; and he, blowing his nose, drew from his bag papers on which nothing was written, and then found the will in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ cried Venables on learning that Mr Scribbin had inherited a pair of porcelain book-ends and a clock.

  ‘To Major Eele,’ said the solicitor, having paused, ‘Astronomy Made Easy. The title of a book,’ he added, fearing they might imagine him to be talking gibberish.

  And when he had finished, and had gathered up the blank pieces of paper, and had passed the will around for all to see, he rose and said he must go. He went, and Nurse Clock and Studdy did not look at one another, but sat, he with a scowl and she smiling, both of them with thoughts of their own, though thoughts that were inspired from the same direction. The Boarding-House belonged to them jointly, to Studdy and Nurse Clock, provided they continued it as such, provided they made no change in its residents or its staff, unless death should dictate one, or unless, for their own reasons, staff or residents should wish to leave.

  5

  Of Rose Cave Mr Bird had written in Notes on Residents:

  Miss Cave (52) was encountered by me in a cinema queue on April 22nd, 1954. The film was a re-issue of the famous musical entertainment of the ’thirties. The Ziegfeld Follies. Due to pressure of demand, neither Miss Cave nor I gained admittance and were eventually obliged to walk disconsolate away. It was at this point that I approached Miss Cave, simply by saying what a pity it was and how surprising too, for one did not nowadays expect to be driven away from a cinema. ‘That is so,’ said Miss Cave, a little suspicious I thought, a trifle stand-offish, but who is to blame her? ‘I have seen you at St Joseph’s Church,’ I next remarked, which I fear was an untruth. I guessed that she was a resident of these parts and I guessed from her attire and from something in her manner (I had closely observed the lady for an hour in the queue) that she was of the church-going class. She might, of course, have been a Methodist or a Baptist or a Witness, and in that case she would no doubt have sent me off with a flea in my ear. However, I am not unsubtle in these matters, and I took my chance and plumped for the Church of England. ‘I do not go regularly,’ said Miss Cave. ‘Nor I,’ I replied, pleased to be able to speak the truth. ‘Of late years I have taken to observing the Sabbath in a way of my own, quietly in my room. My leg’ – at this point I struck the left limb – ‘does not always allow me to act as I wish. It surprises me,’ I added hastily, ‘that tonight I was permitted to stand so long on this street.’ ‘Your leg?’ said Miss Cave, and I explained at once that it was not normal, walking a few steps to make my point. ‘Bird the name is. William Wagner Bird.’ I essayed a small joke: ‘Sir William as they used to call me in the far-off days when I was obliged to labour for my daily loaf.’ The lady blossomed forth at this, and I thought at once that she was certainly a possibility. I pressed her to join me over a cup of coffee, remarking later, and very much in passing, that a vacancy had just occurred at The Boarding-House.

  Miss Rose Cave is troubled for reasons of her own. I have listened at her door and have heard her cry out in her sleep.

  At half past eight on the morning of August 20th, a warm, bland morning, full of promise for the day ahead. Rose Cave walked down Jubilee Road, thinking about the visit of the solicitor and the tidings he had brought. She had grown used to the district, to the house itself and to the people it contained. She liked her room, the view from the window of trees and other houses, of the church spire in the far distance, of the rank garden nearer at hand. There were other boarding-houses, she imagined; and then she thought there might not be, not at least of the order that she required. Boarding-houses were becoming a thing of the past: bed-sitters and shared flats were the mid-century rage in London.

  Already, in Rose Cave’s time, SW17 had greatly changed. The big late-Victorian houses were being levelled, and rectangular buildings with many windows were going up in their place. The leases were running out in a clockwork way, street by street, avenue after avenue. But Jubilee Road and Peterloo Avenue, with Crimea Road and Mantle Lane and Lisbon Drive, formed a small pocket of resistance. They held out stubbornly, their leases still alive, like ancient soldiers of an imperial age. There were similar pockets all over SW17: the old order persisted, while paint peeled on window frames and doors, and garden gnomes, chipped and cracked, were varnished every spring.

  At the junction of Jubilee Road and Peterloo Avenue Rose Cave passed St Dominic’s, a Christian Brothers’ house. One of the brothers, taking in milk, bade her good-morning. He offered a sympathetic word or two. ‘We shall miss the familiar figure,’ he added, and sadly shook his head.

  That August in London there were protests in high places against dogs that were bred not to bark. A hairdresser confessed to a Sunday newspaper and wrote out his confessions for publication; huge posters carried this news at railway stations and on hoardings by the roadside. The Rainbow Men, in cars with caravans, were travelling all England bringing gifts to housewives. On the very day that Rose Cave walked to the bus-stop, thinking about the visit of the solicitor, a seventeen-year-old ginger tom-cat, kidnapped the previous Friday and held to ransom for a thousand pounds, was returned unharmed to its elderly owner. Waiting at the bus-stop, Rose Cave read in the Daily Express that marijuana had been discovered in the hollowed-out handles of tennis rackets. The weather that day was to be fine and warm.

  Rose Cave, with short grey hair worn close to her head, had a face that had been once attractive in profile though a little sharp, full on. It belied her nature with its sharpness; it suggested somehow a grasping nature, even a certain ruthlessness and ambition. Rose Cave possessed no such qualities. She seemed sharp only when she recognized injustice, or thought she recognized it.

  She boarded the bus and sat two seats from the front, beside a broad-shouldered man who did not give her sufficient room. She did not mind: the man could not help the width of his shoulders, she recognized that, and the alternative would be to stand, for there were no other empty seats. She read the front page of her newspaper, bought her ticket, and as she neared the stop where she daily left the bus she half closed her eyes and did what she did on that bus journey every day: thought about her mother’s death.

  ‘You are late,’ said a man to Venables, a man with a moustache who always said such things to people, who was employed for that reason.

  ‘Traffic has become so awful.’ Venables smiled, and the man looked sour, noting that Venables had dandruff on the shoulders of the blue blazer he wore. He remarked on this also, causing Venables to flush and remove the blazer. ‘Not here, old boy,’ the man with the moustache said, speaking in a snarl.

  Venables took his blazer to the men’s washroom and brushed off the dandruff with his hand. It cut him to the quick that this personal remark should have been made so openly about his clothes, implying a condition in his hair. He began to shiver, and he felt tears mounting behind his eyes. With his blazer over his arm, he locked himself into one of the lavatory cubicles to calm himself.

  ‘What should I do without you?’ asked Mr Sellwood who once had won an OBE. ‘Have you ever forgotten a thing in your life, Miss Clerricot?’

  Miss Clerricot paused in the walk from Mr Sellwood’s desk to the door that led to the alcove where she typed. Not before, as she remembered, had Mr Sellwood spoken to her in that way, praising her memory, raising the idea that she was indispensable. Often he had thanked her and said she had done good work, but that was to be expected, that was something that was a politeness in their relationship, a cliche that was used to keep her happy, to keep her peck
er up when the work was onerous.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ said Miss Clerricot. ‘Thank you, Mr Sellwood.’

  Sellwood, thought Miss Clerricot, looking at the man; Sellwood once meant, she supposed, a man or a family responsible for the selling of timber, probably in small quantities. Probably, she thought, a man had once sold wood from a cart in a Midland town, wood bound into bundles, and had shouted his wares through the streets and had come to be given the title, having previously been something more simple, like Jack or Thomas. She examined Mr Sellwood’s face, glancing rapidly, fearful of being rude. It was an odd reflection, connecting the small Home Counties moustache, the bifocal lens and the bald dome with a man astride a load of bound wood upon a cart. She blinked back the laugh that came quickly to her. She glanced again at the face of the man who would never now sit on a cartload of timber. The small moustache moved. The grey lips separated and met again. No teeth were seen. Mr Sellwood was speaking.

  ‘No, no. Miss Clerricot, what I say is true. I do believe my affairs would be a thorough, awful mess – my desk would be a bear-garden without you! ‘

  How odd to say a bear-garden, thought Miss Clerricot. Now, why had he said a bear-garden? Why liken a disorganized desk to that? It did not make much sense, yet she saw what was meant. She was used to him of course, that accounted for that; she understood the way his mind worked things out; quite often, in the letters she typed, she altered certain of his expressions. He never seemed to notice. Or, if he did, it was to pause and compliment himself on the neatness of his phraseology.

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Mr Sellwood.

  She stood by the door, which she had reached while thinking it odd of him to use the word bear-garden. She looked back at Mr Sellwood, who looked at her from behind the ordered beauty of his desk, which in fact was due less to her efforts than to the small amount of labour that Mr Sellwood daily performed. It would have taken, reflected Miss Clerricot, many a long month to have turned Mr Sellwood’s desk into anything like a bear-garden.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Sellwood. He was a man of fifty-five who had lived for twenty-three years in Sevenoaks and came to London every day by train; a journey he enjoyed because he was a railway enthusiast. Mr Scribbin of The Boarding-House was a railway enthusiast too, as Miss Clerricot knew to her cost, but not really one of the same ilk as Mr Sellwood. Mr Sellwood enthused about the British railway system in the same way as he enthused about the country’s gas and electricity services. He waxed keen about the Pearl Assurance Company, and about several other, smaller, insurance companies. ‘Banking,’ Mr Sellwood proclaimed, ‘is an interesting thing. Do you know how a bank works, Miss Clerricot?’ Miss Clerricot, knowing fairly well, would only smile. ‘A bank offers you what is called an overdraft. Now, an overdraft …’ Mr Sellwood referred to trains, electricity, gas, insurance and banking as services to the community. He was interested in all of them.

  Miss Clerricot was not a large person. She weighed seven stone and eight pounds on this August day, and the greater part of it lay about the lower area of her body, her hips and her thighs, although beneath her summer dress, grey with medallions on it, she did not seem unduly bulky in that region.

  ‘I wonder,’ began Mr Sellwood, looking at Miss Clerricot and seeing there a woman he had seen for several years: a black-haired woman with a face efficiently built around black-rimmed spectacles. He finished his sentence, inviting her to lunch with him.

  Rose Cave thought about her mother’s funeral until the bus drew in at her stop. All her life, until her mother died, she had lived with her, far out in Ewell, journeying to her work five days a week. She had never known her father, because, as her mother told her when she was fourteen, Rose had been born ‘a child of love’. They had lived, mother and daughter, in a rented bungalow and had not often spoke of this father, though occasionally a look came into the elder Miss Cave’s eye and Rose knew that she was thinking of him; thinking, she guessed, of a brief and violent courtship, for the man by all accounts had been a person employed by her mother’s parents to hang wallpaper. ‘Forgive us, my dear,’ the elder Miss Cave had pleaded on her death-bed, and Rose had pressed her hand and held back the tears. Her mother had been her greatest friend. She died at sixty-two when Rose was forty-one.

  The cremation had been so quick, casual almost, like some medical thing, some slight ailment that must be, and is, efficiently put right. Afterwards she wept in the rented bungalow, looking around it and not ever wishing to live there again. The wretchedness that her birth had brought to her mother, the snootiness it had caused in her mother’s family, the difficulty it had placed her in, a single woman with a child to account for: all that had drawn them close together. She had felt she wished to share the wretchedness, at least in some way to alleviate it. Rose Cave lived a selfless life until her forty-first year, until the day her mother died. And then, when she moved closer in to London, closer to the work she did, she found it hard to feel that she was not alone. She joined clubs and societies to give herself something to do, but one night when she glanced around it seemed to her that she was just a little older than the other people present, and it seemed that the fact was noticeable.

  ‘That cat’s been returned, that kidnapped cat. An old-age pensioner gets a big reward. Fancy, Miss Cave.’ The woman who brought round the cups of tea was smiling about the cat at her, in ecstasy on the stairs. Rose Cave smiled back; and just at that moment Miss Clerricot smiled too, saying yes to Mr Sellwood, saying she would like very much to have lunch with him.

  Venables wept in the lavatory. He had tried to control his tears, but they came with a quick gush just when he thought that it was going to be all right. He sat down on the lavatory seat, holding his forehead in his left hand and his blazer in his right. He tried to think of something else, to banish away the face of the man who had been rude, but all that came into his mind was the scene in the television lounge the night before when the solicitor had said that The Boarding-House was now the property of Studdy and Nurse Clock. Chagrined, he thought that neither he nor any of them had ever valued Mr Bird to the full. Mr Bird had been like a father to him; but why had he done that strange thing, leaving The Boarding-House in that way? Venables could not see at all; he could not see why a man like Mr Bird, who had always seemed to be knowledgeable and sensible, had performed so foolish an act as to make out such a will. And why had Mr Bird left him a legacy of two pieces of cloth, antimacassars they might be, that were a sort of silk and had come originally from Australia? Venables could not understand.

  ‘I can hear you, Venables. Venables, do you know what time it is?’

  The man with the moustache, the punctuality man, was shaking the door of the lavatory.

  ‘Coming now. Coming, coming.’

  Venables waited for the sound of feet moving away, but did not hear it. He remembered his father banging on the lavatory door when he was a child and shouting through it, just as the punctuality man had. Venables sighed, wiping the marks of his tears with a piece from the paper roll. Would he ever, he wondered, escape from people who banged on the doors he locked to demand his egress? His father’s big brooding face, with a moustache eight times as large as the punctuality man’s, flashed into his mind. He could hear his voice: ‘What are you up to, you scut? Come quick now or feel the razor strop.’ And, as Venables remembered, he felt the razor strop whether he came out at once or not. He felt it almost every day of his childhood, for sins like picking his nose or standing on the outside edges of his feet or spending too long in the lavatory. His father, who had lately become a Seventh Day Adventist, was now in Wales somewhere.

  ‘He came here in 1940,’ Mr Bird had written,

  and remained during the war years and indeed ever since. Thomas Orpen Venables (49), psychologically unfit to play a part in the hostilities, is a man given over to loneliness and tears. I do not recall the precise manner of his entry here, but I rather imagine he was recommended by a resident who has long since taken leave of The Boarding-House and
the greater world. He it was who gave me the idea of collecting my solitary spirits together, and for that I have always had a kind thought for him. Venables goes in fear of his life, escaping a Mr and Mrs Flatrup, a couple of no doubt foreign extraction, whose daughter he put in the family way and did not bear the consequences. He suffers, perhaps as a result of his terror, from a stomach ailment. Venables, I believe, is dying.

  He could hear the punctuality man washing his hands. He pulled the chain and replaced his blazer.

  ‘You should see to that before you leave the house in the mornings,’ remarked the punctuality man. ‘You’re meant to set an example, old boy.’

  Nurse Clock’s bicycle, fitted with an engine to aid her on her many journeys’, coughed temperamentally on Athens Hill.

  ‘It doesn’t like an incline,’ said Nurse Clock to Mrs Maylam. ‘It doesn’t like an incline and that’s the truth of it! ‘

  She smiled blithely and deposited her small black bag on the table beside Mrs Maylam’s chair. She took off her coat, revealing a crisply starched apron and the blue dress of her uniform.

  Mrs Maylam asked: ‘What doesn’t like an incline? I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Well, of course you don’t! Now, now, we mustn’t worry about not understanding. It’s only my little bicycle that doesn’t like an incline.’

  ‘You didn’t say that. We’re not bloody mind-readers, you know.’

  ‘Of course we’re not!’ cried Nurse Clock. ‘And we cannot be expected to associate the splutter of Nurse Clock’s cycle with the first words she utters. It is nothing to worry about. Even in the prime of life we might not be so nippy in our thoughts.’

  Once upon a time, many years ago now, Nurse Clock had come across a small type-set advertisement in Nursing World; it caught her eye with the headline What Would You Do if the Queen Called? The advertisement went on to speak of a pair, a Sir James and Lady Lord-Blood, who organized a charm course with guaranteed results and were at present enrolling for the summer months. Nurse Clock, who did not entirely believe that the Queen would call, nevertheless thought that the course might be useful to her in her work. She paid out some money and reported at the church hall where, mornings only, the charm course took place.