The Boarding-House

by William Trevor

  ‘I will try nothing on. It is up to the police. Did I not make that clear?’

  ‘I am seeing my solicitor tonight.’

  ‘How amusing. In the meanwhile you will be arrested for libel and blackmail. You need to get your skates on, Studdy.’

  ‘I will contact you first thing tomorrow morning, missus. Will we make that a bargain now?’

  ‘As you wish, though I see no point in delay.’

  ‘Good evening,’ said Mr Obd, coming through the hall-door. ‘I am getting on fine.’

  ‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Studdy.

  Nurse Clock smiled and did not say anything. She watched Studdy at the open door, staring into Jubilee Road, examining the evening. She saw his hand reached out to close the door behind him and a moment later heard him blowing his nose and talking to himself on the front steps.

  ‘There is a smell of petrol,’ said Major Eele that night, for Mr Obd had worked hard all day, coming into The Boarding-House with several gallons of lower grade petrol.

  ‘The potatoes taste queer,’ said Mr Scribbin, for Mr Obd in his keenness had poured petrol over the potatoes and later they roasted and exploded, those that were not already in the stomachs of The Boarding-House residents.

  In Miss Clerricot’s room, Mr Obd, distributing fire-lighters, found two bottles of aspirin tablets in a drawer. It was an item he had forgotten to purchase himself that day, although he had written the word aspirin on a list. He took Miss Clerricot’s, arguing that since he was leaving behind him fire-lighters without charge he had some right to her aspirins.

  ‘We thought you had moved away,’ cried Gallelty to Mr Scribbin. ‘Your room vacated and your bed-clothes gone.’

  ‘I have moved to the attic,’ said Mr Scribbin, and made for that place in haste.

  The solicitor who occasionally came into the public house did not come that night, and Studdy wagged his head as he sat alone, admitting defeat and thinking in terms of the midnight flit recommended by his adversary. He did not wish to see her face to face again, and he was suddenly frightened lest matters had already progressed too far. ‘Three large Scotches,’ said Studdy to the barman, who questioned the order, since Studdy was alone. ‘Three,’ repeated Studdy, and when the drinks arrived he tipped them, one after the other, quickly into his mouth. ‘Twelve shillings,’ said the barman, but Studdy claimed to have left his wallet elsewhere and arranged with the proprietor to pay the following morning.

  ‘I will take a few hours’ nap,’ he said to himself as he entered The Boarding-House. He sniffed, and added: ‘Someone has spilt something.’ He passed through the hall and mounted the stairs to his room. In the darkened television lounge Mr Obd was pouring petrol on the cushions.

  High in The Boarding-House, in the attic where Mr Bird had lived and died, the double-chimneyed Lord Faringdon burst from a tunnel with a mighty steel roar. Mr Scribbin, who had stretched on his bed to relax and savour the moment, dropped into a nap. The needle moved from the last spiral of the record, slithering on the smooth surface.

  Rose Cave dreamed that she had given up her job and was tending an old woman in a wheel-chair. She tucked a red plaid rug about the old woman’s knees and looked up to smile at her. But there was no face where a face should have been, only a tight line of a mouth bobbing in the air. ‘Mother,’ said Rose Cave, and the mouth turned to one side as though a head had turned away from her.

  Major Eele sat back and watched the black breasts in the Ti-Ti Club. He heard himself shout, but he could not catch the words. The man who held the torch trained it on him for a moment, and Major Eele put his hand over his eyes. When he took it away he saw that Mrs le Tor was on the stage, taking off her brassière. ‘She is black, she is black,’ shouted Major Eele, and Mrs Andrews hit him on the head with a powder compact with roses on it.

  Miss Clerricot slept and did not dream. Venables dreamed in unsatisfactory snatches: faces appeared and did not stay long; the punctuality man was threatening; there was a procession in the streets, and Venables knew that it was the Seventh Day Adventists, who had walked from Wales to London. He awoke and lay awake for a while, plump and white in his bed, not thinking of anything very much. When he returned to sleep he dreamed properly. Old Mr Flatrup chased him with a ham knife, round and round an enormous kitchen. ‘You killed our beautiful girl,’ cried a mountainous woman, the old man’s wife. Mr Flatrup crept and Venables crept before him, and suddenly he saw that the kitchen had no door.

  Studdy moved his heavy body about his bed, snoring, fast asleep. A suitcase was packed on the floor beside him. He did not dream.

  Nurse Clock smelt burning and slipped her feet into her fuzzy slippers. Mrs Slape turned from her back to her side, awoke and saw at the foot of her bed a flame. Gallelty heard her cry and turned the light on. Smoke was everywhere.

  26

  The flames lit the sky, coming out of the windows, mingling with smoke. Clouds ran across the moon, and the moon gleamed like a thin coin suspended. A breeze blew, as though nothing had happened.

  They stood in their night-clothes with overcoats and dressing-gowns pulled about them. Venables had seized his flannel trousers as he left his room; he had them now in one hand, with an electric razor in the other. They watched the firemen battle with the blaze, directing spurts of water and climbing on ladders. ‘It is going up like a tinder-box,’ one of the firemen said, and somebody repeated this and then somebody else.

  ‘Sooner or later they’ll pull down all of Jubilee Road,’ a man from a neighbouring building remarked. He said it because he was reminded of the greater destruction by the evidence of destruction which he now beheld. He said it to comfort the people of The Boarding-House, saying really: ‘Soon we shall all be in the same boat.’

  Major Eele stood in blue and red striped pyjamas, with a tattered dressing-gown on top of them. He had been watching Mrs le Tor and had been struck by Mrs Andrews, and then the holocaust had broken. People had hammered on his door. He remembered what Mrs Andrews had said when she discovered the match-ends in their bed: ‘You could have burnt me alive.’ She had not for a single moment understood his condition of distress that night.

  ‘Where is Mr Obd?’ Rose Cave asked.

  They looked about them, looking at each other, checking the fact that one or another was alive. Miss Clerricot had cried at first. The smoke had stung her eyes and she had held the tears back and then released them. The redness of her face had deepened a little; there was a dark mark, a smudge or a bruise, on her left cheek. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief given to her by a strange man.

  ‘Where is Mr Obd?’ Rose Cave asked again.

  But Mr Obd, with two bottles of aspirin tablets in his stomach, was asleep and alight.

  ‘There’s a man inside,’ shouted Major Eele, trying to attract the attention of the firemen. ‘One other man, an African. You overlooked him in the darkness.’

  The firemen looked into the rage of flames and shook their heads. ‘Someone inside,’ one of them called out, but the words were a formality, or sounded like one, as though a fact had to be registered and that was that.

  Studdy wore his overcoat and a suit that he had swapped for one of Mr Bird’s. By chance, he was better off than anyone else because he had lain down in the clothes he wore, thinking he would shortly be on his way. He had carried his suitcase from the burning house and placed it against a lamp-post.

  In the attic room the flames caught Mr Scribbin’s records in a cupboard; they blackened and then burnt the suits that Mr Scribbin had not so long ago defended in the hall. They tore at the wainscoting, leaping along it towards the pile of old magazines, causing pages to curl and crackle. Low in the pile, close to the floor, was Mr Bird’s Notes on Residents. In time it burnt, as did almost everything else.

  ‘He never took out an insurance policy,’ said Studdy. ‘Did Nurse Clock know that?’

  She was standing a foot or so away from him. She said nothing. She did not look at him.

  ‘Many’s t
he time he told me that,’ said Studdy. ‘Mr Bird thought insurance a mug’s game.’

  Mr Bird had said that to others too; he had said it to Nurse Clock, but she had not thought of it until that moment.

  ‘Mr Bird did not approve,’ said Major Eele.

  Miss Clerricot thought of Mr Sellwood and reflected how he would have been disappointed in this lack of faith in insurance, and how he would have held up as an example of his argument the predicament they found themselves in now. There was a little humour in that consideration of Mr Sellwood. Though her position was not enviable, Miss Clerricot was moved to smile.

  ‘Funny,’ said Studdy. ‘Isn’t that the funny thing, missus?’

  Nurse Clock moved away, but Studdy picked up his suitcase and followed her.

  ‘I was leaving like you told me. Well, there’ll never be old folk in the garden now.’

  ‘Mr Obd is dying and all you can say are unpleasant things. Have you not got feelings, Studdy?’

  ‘Have you, missus? I think you have feelings OK. I think you’re lost now, your evil ways have found you out. You tried everything on, Nurse. You’re a terrible woman.’

  ‘Go your way, Studdy. Leave us in peace now.’

  ‘We’re all going our ways, isn’t that so?’

  ‘You should be inside there. You should be fast asleep. Well, you’ll soon see prison bars.’

  ‘And you’ll never see old folk in the–’

  Nurse Clock turned and seemed as though she might raise her arm to strike him.

  ‘Nurse Clock is quarrelling with Studdy,’ said Major Eele.

  ‘What a time for it,’ said Mr Scribbin.

  In Wimbledon Mrs Rush, who had been Janice Brownlow, slept and did not know, or ever know, about the fire in The Boarding-House. Mrs Maylam knew because an hour or so later Studdy knocked on the door of her flat and asked for a couch to rest on. Mrs le Tor knew in time because she heard about it, and wondered until she was told to the contrary if Major Eele had perished. ‘A black man died,’ her informant said, and Mrs le Tor recalled that Major Eele had talked about African women but had not touched upon the African male.

  ‘I will be on my way to Plymouth, as I was when first I called,’ cried Gallelty in an excited way. ‘I shall hitch a lift from a lorry and then take another one, and tomorrow or the next day I shall be in Plymouth, that sailors’ town where I shall meet my fate.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Mrs Slape, placing a hand on her arm. ‘Stay behind and maybe we’ll take on positions in another house.’

  Gallelty shook her head. ‘Where is the house like Mr Bird’s house? We should have left when he died. We could not hope to carry on without him. ’Twas destiny sent me, ’twas destiny destroyed the beautiful boarding-house.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Slape. But Gallelty moved away, the first to leave the scene.

  Studdy went near to Nurse Clock and lifted a pin out of the material of his overcoat and stuck it hard into her arm. Nurse Clock felt pain and shouted out. She turned on Studdy. ‘He has tried to kill me,’ she shouted out. ‘He tried to knife me.’

  Studdy laughed and held out his hands to show that he did not carry a knife.

  ‘Please,’ said Rose Cave. ‘Please not now.’

  ‘I am going on my way,’ said Studdy. ‘I was saying good-bye to this ugly woman.’ He laughed again, feeling in his heart the heavy throb of hatred that for so many weeks he had kept in order. Nurse Clock felt it too, as she had felt it the night before, as she would feel it always for his memory.

  ‘What a thing for Mr Bird to have done,’ said Rose Cave, ‘to have thrown those two together. What on earth was he thinking of?’

  In the hallstand drawer the tennis balls of 1912 caught in the flames and were at once consumed. The Watts reproductions fell from the wall by the staircase, but the china geese at first did not. In the television lounge the antimacassars and the wedding photograph that Mr Bird had placed on a side table, and all that the room contained, went up in a ravaging gulp. The fire bit into the machinery of the television set; there were small explosions and the melting of metal parts.

  The breeze increased. People shivered in Jubilee Road. Neighbours, informed that the fire was now under control and would spread no farther, spoke of cups of tea and offered hospitality to the people of The Boarding-House. Water ran down the gutters of the road; something crashed in the dying inferno. ‘It does not seem under control to me,’ said Major Eele. ‘Does the man know what he is talking about?’

  A fireman said to be careful of falling wood that might be hot and dangerous. He spoke hurriedly, telling everyone to stand well back. Pieces of glowing wood, like mammoth sparks, fell into the garden of The Boarding-House.

  ‘He is a criminal,’ cried Nurse Clock. ‘He writes letters to strangers. He extorts money from women. Mrs le Tor. Mrs Rush. Mrs Maylam. Mrs Sellwood.’

  There was a silence for a moment after that. Miss Clerricot had heard the name of Mrs Sellwood on Nurse Clock’s lips for the second time. She did not understand what Nurse Clock was talking about: had Studdy written to Mr Sellwood’s wife, extorting money from her? How on earth, wondered Miss Clerricot, had Studdy ever come across Mrs Sellwood? Or was Nurse Clock confused or driven out of her mind by the calamity? Miss Clerricot did not know that her two bottles of aspirin were now in the stomach of Mr Obd. She herself lived to a great age; and though no man ever tried anything on, the years became easier as the years passed by.

  ‘Mad as a hatter,’ said Studdy.

  ‘Did you take money off le Tor?’ asked Major Eele.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nurse Clock. ‘He’s going behind bars.’

  ‘Well, that’s a good one,’ said Major Eele.

  Then Studdy went. ‘Hell take the lot of you,’ he said, and he walked away in a different direction from that taken by Gallelty. To the end of his days he carried a pin in his lapel to remind him of the night of the fire, of the moment when in front of everyone he had driven it deep into Nurse Clock’s arm.

  Nurse Clock wept for the first time since her life had changed. She had last been close to tears that morning in the Lord-Bloods’ room when Sir James had been frank and his wife had agreed. Now, at a dispiriting hour and in awful circumstances, in her fuzzy slippers and dressing-gown, she wept unrestrainedly. What Studdy had said was true: the aged now would never achieve their greatest years in her house and in her care. Studdy, once and briefly her ally, had insulted her with a marriage proposal and had spat into her face and stuck a pin in her arm. Studdy walked away a free man, because she had no proof against him and in any case it no longer mattered. She thought of Mr Bird on his death-bed exhorting her to inform the newspapers of the manner of his passing; of how he had later appeared to her in the only dream of her life to admonish her for her failure; how Gallelty and a daily woman had said they had seen him in the kitchen when he was buried a month; how Mr Obd had talked of him and called him a traitor.

  Far away, in her flat at the top of the flights of stone stairs, Annabel Tonks slept and knew nothing of the fire. She stretched in her sleep and was aware of the luxury of the movement.

  Nurse Clock’s tears abated. She sighed and looked at the window that had been the window of her room, and she thought of Mr Obd. Around her, the other people of The Boarding-House thought at that moment of Mr Obd too. And had Mr Obd been with them then he would have glanced into the night sky and said that he saw there the floating form of William Wagner Bird, displayed in the darkness like a neon advertisement. But the others saw nothing: not Mr Bird in golden raiment, playing a trumpet or seated on a chair in glory. They thought of Mr Obd, and Mr Obd died in the moment they thought of him, and did not feel a thing. And William Bird, called Wagner after a character in a book, died again as his boarding-house roared and spat, and his people watched in Jubilee Road. They stood alone and did not say much more, as the morning light came on to make the scene seem different, and the sun rose over London.

  About the Author

  W
illiam Trevor KBE was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1965 by the Estate of William Trevor

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5810-0

  This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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  WILLIAM TREVOR

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