The Collected Stories

by William Trevor

  The children still were quiet, their faces still not registering the comment she wished to make. It was because she’d been clumsy, she thought. All she’d meant to tell them was never to despair. All she had meant to do was to prepare them for a future that looked grim. She had been happy, she said again. The conversation of Mr Purce had been full of the truth but it hadn’t made sense because the years had turned the truth around.

  To the children she appeared to be talking now to herself. She was old, a few of them silently considered; that was it. She didn’t appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed with guns.

  ‘I only hope,’ they heard her saying, ‘she knows that strangers mourn her.’

  Another silence lingered awkwardly and then she nodded at a particular child and the child rose and rang a hand-bell. The children filed away, well-mannered and docile as she had taught them to be. She watched them in the playground, standing in twos and threes, talking about her. It had meant nothing when she’d said that people change. The gleam of hope she’d offered had been too slight to be of use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part of life. Yet she could not help still believing that it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters for ever. It wasn’t much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that. She wished she could have made her point.

  Twenty minutes later, when the children returned to the schoolroom, her voice no longer quivered, nor did it seem to struggle against tears. The older children learnt about agriculture in Sweden, the younger ones about the Pyrenees, the youngest that Munster had six counties. The day came to an end at three o’clock and when all the children had gone Attracta locked the schoolroom and walked to the house she had inherited in North Street.

  A week later Archdeacon Flower’s successor came to, see her, his visit interrupting further violence on the television news. He beat about the bush while he nibbled biscuits and drank cups of tea by the fire; then he suggested that perhaps she should consider retiring one of these days. She was over sixty, he pointed out with his clerical laugh, and she replied that Mr Ayrie had gone on until seventy. Sixty, the clergyman repeated with another laugh, was the post’s retirement age. Children were a handful nowadays.

  She smiled, thinking of her sixteen docile charges. They had chattered to their parents, and the parents had been shocked to hear that they’d been told of a man decapitated and a girl raped seven times. School was not for that, they had angrily protested to the clergyman, and he had had no option but to agree. At the end of the summer term there’d be a presentation of Waterford glass.

  ‘Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. It matters that she died in despair, with no faith left in human life.’

  He was brisk. For as long as most people could remember she had been a remarkable teacher; in no way had she failed. He turned the conversation to more cheerful topics, he ate more biscuits and a slice of cake. He laughed and even made a joke. He retailed a little harmless gossip.

  Eventually she stood up. She walked with her visitor to the hall, shook hands with him and saw him out. In the sitting-room she piled the tea things on to a tray and placed it on a table by the door. She turned the television on again but when the screen lit up she didn’t notice it. The face of Penelope Vade came into her mind, the smile a little crooked, the freckled cheeks.

  A Dream of Butterflies

  Various people awoke with a sense of relief. Sleepily, Colin Rhodes wondered what there was to be relieved about. As he did in the moment of waking every morning, he encased with his left hand one of his wife’s plump breasts and then remembered the outcome of last night’s meeting. Miss Cogings, alone in her narrow bed and listening to a chorus of house-martins, remembered it with the same degree of satisfaction. So did the Poudards when their Teasmade roused them at a quarter to seven. So did the Reverend Feare, and Mr Mottershead and Mr and Mrs Tilzey, and the Blennerhassetts, who ran the Village Stores. Mrs Feare, up since dawn with an ailing child, was pleased because her husband was. There would be peace when there might have been war. A defeat had been inflicted.

  The Allenbys, however, awoke in Luffnell Lodge with mixed feelings. What to do with the Lodge now that it remained unsold? How long would they have to wait for another buyer? For having made their minds up, they really wanted to move on as soon as possible. A bridging loan had been negotiated at one point but they’d decided against it because the interest was so high. They planned to buy a bungalow in a part of Cornwall that was noted for its warmth and dryness, both of which would ease Mrs Allenby’s arthritis. Everything that had been said at the meeting made sense to Mr and Mrs Allenby; they quite understood the general point of view. But they wished, that morning, that things might have been different.

  ‘That’s really bizarre,’ Hugh said in the Mansors’ breakfast-room.

  ‘Dreams often are.’

  ‘But butterflies –’

  ‘It has to do with the meeting.’

  ‘Ah, of course, the meeting.’

  He saw at once what had been happening. He traced quite easily the series of his wife’s thoughts, one built upon the last, fact in the end becoming fantasy.

  Emily buttered toast and reached for grapefruit marmalade. ‘Silly,’ she said, not believing that it was.

  ‘A bit,’ he agreed, smiling at her. He went on to talk of something else, an item in The Times, another airliner hijacked.

  The sun filled their breakfast-room. It struck the bones of his compact features; it livened his calm grey hair. It found the strawberry mark, like a tulip, on her neck; it made her spectacles glint. They were the same age, fifty-two, not yet grandparents but soon to be. He dealt in property; she’d once been a teacher of Latin and Greek. She was small and given to putting on weight if she wasn’t careful: dumpy, she considered herself.

  ‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Hugh said, folding The Times for further perusal on the train.’It’s all over now.’

  He was handsome in his thin way, and she was plain. Perhaps he had married her because he had not felt up to the glamour of a beautiful woman: as a young man, unproved in the world, he had had an inferiority complex, and success in middle age had not managed to shake it off. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the heights he’d scaled in his business world all of a sudden turned out to be a wasteland. He specialized in property in distant places, Jamaica, Spain, the Bahamas: some economic jolt could shatter everything. The house they lived in, on the edge of a Sussex village, was the symbol of his good fortune over the years. It was also his due, for he had worked doggedly; only his inferiority complex prevented him from taking it for granted. It puzzled him that he, so unpromising as a boy at school, had done so well; and occasionally, but not often, it puzzled him that they’d made a success of their marriage in times when the failure rate was high. Perhaps they’d made a go of it because she was modest too: more than once he’d wondered if that could be true. Could it be that Emily, so much cleverer than he, had found a level with him because her lack of beauty kept her in her place, as his inferiority complex kept him? She had said that as a girl she’d imagined she would not marry, assuming that a strawberry mark and dumpiness, and glasses too, would be too much for any man. He often thought about her as she must have been, cleverest in the class; while he was being slow on the uptake. ‘You’re very kind’ was what most often, in the way of compliments, Emily said to him.

  ‘Have a good day’ was what she said now, forcing cheerfulness on to her face, for the dream she’d had still saddened her and the memory of the meeting worried her.

  ‘I’ll be on the five o’clock.’ He touched her cheek with his lips, and then was gone, the door of the breakfast-room opening and closing, the hall door banging. She listened to the starting of the car and the sound
of the wheels on the tarmac, then the engine fading to nothing in the distance.

  She felt as he did, that together they had not done badly in twenty-seven years of marriage. She’d been a Miss Forrest; becoming Mrs Mansor had seemed the nicest thing that yet had happened to her; and for all their married life – the worries during the lean years, the bringing up of their three children-she had regretted nothing, and in the end there’d been the reward of happiness in middle age. She missed their son and daughters, all of whom were now married themselves, but in compensation there was the contentment that the house and garden brought, and the unexacting life of the village. As well, there were the visits of their children and her memories of girls whom she had taught, some of whom kept up with her. It was still a pleasure to read Horace and the lesser Greek poets, to find in an experimental way a new interpretation in place of the standard, scholar’s one.

  Their house, in the style of Queen Anne though in fact of a later period, was hidden from the road and the surrounding fields by modest glades of silver birches. It was a compact house, easy to run and keep clean, modernized with gadgets, warm in winter. Alone in it in the mornings Emily often played Bach or Mozart on the sitting-room hi-fi system, the music drifting into the kitchen and the bedrooms and the breakfast-room, pursuing her agreeably wherever she went.

  But this morning she was not in the mood for Bach or Mozart. She continued to sit as her husband had left her, saying to herself that she must come to terms with what had happened. She had raised her voice but no one had cared to listen to it. Only Golkorn had listened, his great tightly cropped head slowly nodding, his eyes occasionally piercing hers. At the meeting her voice had faltered; her cheeks had warmed; nothing had come out as she’d meant it to.

  Unladylike assortment of calumnies. In the train on the way to Waterloo he couldn’t think of a nine-lettered word. As a chore, he did The Times crossword every day, determined to do better with practice. There’s none of the Old Adam in a cardinal (6). He sighed and put the paper down.

  It worried him that she’d been so upset. He hadn’t known what to say, or to do, when she’d stood up suddenly at the meeting to make her unsuccessful speech. He’d felt himself embarrassed, in sympathy or shame, he couldn’t tell which. He hadn’t been quite able to agree with her and had been surprised when she’d stood up because it wasn’t like her to do anything in public, even though she’d been saying she was unhappy about the thing for months. But then she was so unemphatic as a person that quite often it was hard to guess when she felt strongly.

  With other suited men, some carrying as he did a briefcase and a newspaper, he stepped from the train at Waterloo. He strode along the platform with them, one in an army, it often seemed. In spite of how she felt, he really couldn’t help believing that the village had been saved. Their own house and garden, and the glades of silver birches, would in no way suffer. The value of the house would continue to rise with inflation instead of quite sharply declining. There would be calm again in the village instead of angry voices and personal remarks, instead of Colin I hodes saying to Golkorn’s face that he was a foreigner. Thank God it was all over.

  ‘There’s been a telex,’ Miss Owen informed him in his office. ‘That place in Gibraltar.’

  In the breakfast-room Emily’s thoughts had spread out, from her dream of butterflies and the meeting there had been the night before. She saw images of women as they might have been, skulking in the woods near the village, two of them sitting on the stone seat beside the horse-trough on the green, another in a lane with ragwort in her hand. They were harmless women, as Golkorn had kept insisting. It was just that their faces were strange and their movements not properly articulated; nothing, of course, that they said made sense. ‘Anywhere but here,’ snapped the voice of Colin Rhodes, as vividly she recalled the meeting. ‘My God, you’ve got the world to choose from, Golkorn.’

  Golkorn had smiled. Their village was beautiful, he had irritatingly stated, as if in reply. Repeatedly it had been said at the meeting last night, and at previous meetings, that the village was special because it Was among the most beautiful in England. The Manor dated back to Saxon times, it had been said, and the cottages round the green were almost unique. But it was that very beauty, and the very peacefulness of the lanes and woods, that Golkorn had claimed would be a paradise for his afflicted women. It was why he had chosen Luffnell Lodge when it went up for sale. Luffnell Lodge was less impressive than the Manor, and certainly nothing like as old. It was larger and less convenient, colder and in worse repair, yet ideal apparently for Golkorn’s purpose. In her dream Emily had been walking with him in a field and he had pointed at what at first she’d taken to be flowers but had turned out to be butterflies. ‘You’ve never seen that before,’ he’d said. ‘Butterflies in mourning, Mrs Mansor.’ They flew away as he spoke, a whole swarm of them, busily flapping their black wings.

  She rose and cleared away the breakfast things. She carried them on a tray through the hall and into the kitchen. Her dog, an old Sealyham called. Spratts, wagged his tail without getting out of his basket. On the window-sill in front of the sink, hot with morning sunshine, a butterfly was poised and she thought at once that that was a coincidence. Its wings were tightly closed; it might have been dead but she knew it wasn’t, and when she touched it and the wings opened they were not sinister.

  Of course it had been for the best when the Allenbys had realized that to sell Luffnell Lodge to Golkorn would have caused havoc: dealing with the telex about the place in Gibraltar, Hugh found himself yet again thinking that. Golkorn was a frightful person; it was Golkorn’s presence rather than his sick women that one might reasonably object to. Luffnell Lodge would put the village on the map, Golkorn had confidently promised, once it was full of his patients: in medical terms he was making a breakthrough. And Hugh knew that what he had offered the Allenbys was more than they’d get otherwise. You couldn’t blame them, elderly and wanting to get rid of what they’d come to think of as a white elephant, for listening to Golkorn’s adroit arguments. The Allenbys had done nothing wrong and in the end had made the sacrifice. They’d sell the Lodge eventually, it stood to reason, even if they had to wait a bit. ‘You see, we don’t particularly want to wait,’ old Mr Allenby had said. ‘That’s just the trouble. We’ve waited two years as it is.’ The Allenbys had asked Hugh’s advice because they thought that being in the international property market he might know a little more than Musgrove and Carter, who after all were only country estate agents. ‘Dr Golkorn is offering you a most attractive proposition,’ he’d had to admit, no way around that. ‘It could be a while before anyone matched it.’ Mr Allenby had asked if he’d care to handle the sale, in conjunction with Musgrove and Carter, but Hugh had had to explain that property in England was outside his firm’s particular field. ‘Oh, dear, it’s all so difficult,’ Mrs Allenby had disconsolately murmured, clearly most unhappy at the prospect of having to hang on in the Lodge for another couple of years. Hugh had always liked the Allenbys. In many ways, as a friend and as an expert, he should have told them to accept immediately Golkorn’s offer. But he hadn’t and that was that; it was all now best forgotten.

  For Hugh that day passed as days did at the office. He dictated letters and received telephone calls. He lunched with a client in the Isola Bella, quite often he thought about his wife. Emily was unhappy because of everything that had happened. She felt, but had not said so, that he had let the Allenbys down. She felt that she herself had let the inmates of Golkorn’s home down. Hugh tried not to think about it; but in his mind’s eye he kept seeing her again, standing up at the meeting and saying that afflicted women have to live somewhere Like mongol children, she had said, stammering; or the blind. ‘That’s quite appreciated, Mrs Mansor,’ the Reverend Feare had murmured, and as if to come to her assistance Golkorn had asked if he might address the meeting. He had nodded his heavy razored head at Emily; he had repeated what she’d said, that afflicted women, like mongol children and the blin
d, have to go somewhere. He had smiled and spread his hands out, impatient with those who were protesting and yet oilily endeavouring to hide it. A woman present, he’d even suggested, might one day need the home he proposed for Luffnell Lodge. Hugh sighed, remembering it too clearly. He would take Emily out to dinner, to the Rowan House Hotel. He was about to pick up the telephone in order to ask to be put through to her when it rang. Odd, he thought as he picked up the receiver, that she had dreamed so strangely of butterflies.

  ‘It’s a Dr Golkorn,’ his secretary’s voice said. ‘On the other line, Mr Mansor.’

  He hesitated. There was no point in speaking to Golkorn; at half past ten last night Golkorn had lost his case; the matter was closed. Yet something – perhaps just politeness, he afterwards thought – made him pick up the other telephone. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘It’s Golkorn,’ Golkorn said. ‘Look, Mr Mansor, could we talk?’

  ‘About the Lodge? But that’s all over, Dr Golkorn. The Allenbys –’

  ‘Sir, they agreed beneath all this pressure not to let me have the house. But with respect, is that just, sir? At least agree to exchange another word or two with me, Mr Mansor.’

  ‘It would be useless, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Mr Mansor, do me a favour.’

  ‘I would willingly do you a favour if I thought –’

  ‘I ask you only for ten minutes. If I may come to see you for ten minutes, Mr Mansor, I would esteem it.’