Cheating at Canasta

by William Trevor

  ‘How lovely all that is!’ Teresa murmured.

  There was a party at which the engagement was announced—wine in the afternoon, and Mrs O’Daly’s egg sandwiches again, and Teresa’s sponge cakes and her brandy-snaps and meringues. The sun came out after what had been a showery morning, allowing the celebration to take place in the garden. Overgrown and wild in places, the garden’s neglect went back to the time of the death, although sometimes when she’d come to keep an eye on the children Teresa had done her best with the geranium beds, which had particularly been the task of Connie’s mother.

  She would do better now, Teresa promised herself, looking about among the guests as she had among the mourners, again half expecting to see the man who had left her, wanting him to be there, wanting him to know that she was loved again, that she had survived the indignity he had so casually subjected her to, that she was happy. But he wasn’t there, as naturally he wouldn’t be. All that was over, and the cousins from Mitchelstown with whom she had conversed on the afternoon of the funeral naturally weren’t there either.

  Robert was happy too—because Teresa was and because, all around him at the party, there were no signs of disapproval, only smiles of approbation.

  Because the wedding was not to take place until later in the summer, after Melissa’s return for the holidays, Connie and her father continued for a while to be alone together, managing, as he had said they would. Robert bought half a dozen Charollais calves, a breed he had never had on the farm before. He liked, every year, doing something new; and he liked the calves. Otherwise, his buying and selling were a pattern, his tasks a repetition. He repaired the fences, tightening the barbed wire where that was possible, renewing it when it wasn’t. He looked out for the many ailments that beset sheep. He lifted the first potatoes and noted every day the ripening of his barley.

  Teresa dragged clumps of scotch grass and treacherous little nettles out of the sanguineum and the sylvaticum, taking a trowel to the docks. She cut down the Johnson’s Blue, wary of letting it spread too wildly, but wouldn’t have known to leave the Kashmir Purple a little longer, or that pratense’s sturdy roots were a job to divide. A notebook left behind instructed her in all that.

  Miss Mortimer closed her small school for the summer and Connie was at home all day then. Sometimes Melissa’s brother was there, a small thin child called Nat, a name that according to Melissa couldn’t be more suitable, since he so closely resembled an insect.

  ‘You want to come with us?’ Teresa invited Connie when Melissa’s term had ended and Teresa was setting off to meet her at the railway station in Clonmel. Connie hesitated, then said she didn’t.

  That surprised Teresa. She had driven over specially from Fara Bridge, as she always did when Melissa came back for the holidays. It surprised her, but afterwards she realized she’d somehow sensed before she spoke that Connie was going to say no. She was puzzled, but didn’t let it show.

  ‘Come back here, shall we?’ she suggested, since this, too, was what always happened on Melissa’s first evening home.

  ‘If that’s what you’d like,’ Connie said.

  The train was twenty minutes late and when Teresa returned to the farm with Melissa and Nat, Connie wasn’t in the house, and when her father came in later she wasn’t with him either, as she sometimes was. ‘Connie!’ they all called in the yard, her father going into some of the sheds. Melissa and her brother went to the end of the avenue and a little way along the road in both directions. ‘Connie!’ they called out in the garden, although they could see she wasn’t there. ‘Connie!’ they called, going from room to room in the house. Her father was worried. He didn’t say he was but Melissa and her brother could tell. So could Teresa.

  ‘She can’t be far,’ she said. ‘Her bicycle’s here.’

  She drove Melissa to Fara Bridge to unpack her things, and Nat went with them. She telephoned the farm then. There wasn’t any answer and she guessed that Robert was still looking for his child.

  The telephone was ringing again when Connie came back. She came downstairs: she’d been on the roof, she said. You went up through the trapdoor at the top of the attic stairs. You could lie down on the warm lead and read a book. Her father shook his head, saying it wasn’t safe to climb about on the roof. He made her promise not to again.

  ‘What’s the matter, Connie?’ he asked her when he went to say goodnight. Connie said nothing was. Propped up in front of her was the book she’d been reading on the roof, The Citadel by A. J. Cronin.

  ‘Surely you don’t understand that, Connie?’ her father said, and she said she wouldn’t want to read a book she didn’t understand.

  Connie watched the furniture being unloaded. The men lifted it from the yellow removal van, each piece familiar to her from days spent in the bungalow at Fara Bridge. Space had been made, some of the existing furniture moved out, to be stored in one of the outhouses.

  Melissa wasn’t there. She was helping her mother to rearrange in the half-empty rooms at Fara Bridge the furniture that remained, which would have to be sold when the bungalow was because there wasn’t room for it at the farm. There had been a notice up all summer announcing the sale of the bungalow, but no one had made an offer yet. ‘Every penny’ll go into the farm,’ Connie had heard Teresa saying.

  Nat, whom Teresa had driven over earlier, watched with Connie in the hall. He was silent this morning, as he often was, his thin arms wrapped tightly around his body in a way that suggested he suffered from the cold, although the day was warm. Now and again he glanced at Connie, as if expecting her to say something about what was happening, but Connie didn’t.

  All morning it took. Mrs O’Daly brought the men tea and later, when they finished, Connie’s father gave them a drink in the kitchen: small glasses of whiskey, except for the man who was the driver, who was given what remained in the bottle to take away with him.

  ‘That’s a lovely piece of delft,’ Mrs O’Daly commented in the hall, referring to a blue-and-white soup tureen that the men had placed on the shelf of the hallstand. Having finished her morning’s work, she had gone from room to room, inspecting the furniture that had come, and the glass and china in the hall. ‘Isn’t that really lovely!’ she exclaimed again about the soup tureen.

  It was cracked, Connie saw, a long crack in the lid. It used to be on the sideboard of the dining-room in the bungalow. She’d never much noticed it then, but in the hall it seemed obtrusive.

  Melissa was pretty, tall and slender, with long fair hair and greenish eyes. She liked jokes, and was clever although she didn’t want to be and often pretended she wasn’t.

  ‘Time to measure the maggot,’ she said later that same day. Her contention was that her brother had ceased to grow and would grow no more. She and Connie regularly made him stand against the door jamb of Connie’s bedroom in the hope of finding an increase in his modest stature.

  But Connie shook her head when this was again suggested. She was reading London Belongs to Me and went on doing so. Nat, on his way upstairs already, for he enjoyed this ceremonial attention, looked disappointed.

  ‘Poor little maggot,’ Melissa said. ‘Poor little maggot, Connie. You’ve gone and upset it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call your brother a maggot.’

  ‘Hey!’ Outraged, Melissa stared disbelievingly at Connie’s calm features. ‘Hey, come on!’

  Connie turned down the corner of a page and began to walk away.

  ‘It’s only a blooming word,’ Melissa ran after her to protest. ‘He doesn’t mind.’

  ‘This isn’t your house,’ Connie said.

  The day Connie’s mother came back from the hospice Miss Mortimer had pinned up pictures of flowers. Miss Mortimer painted her pictures herself; before the flowers there’d been clowns. ‘Foxglove,’ Connie had said when Miss Mortimer asked.

  Going home on the river path, she’d been thinking of that, of the four new pictures on the schoolroom wall, of Miss Mortimer saying that soon there wouldn’t be a cowsli
p left anywhere. The schoolroom stayed on in her mind nearly always when she was going home, the writing on the blackboard, the tattered carpet, the boards showing all around it, the table they sat at, Miss Mortimer too. The rectory itself stayed in her mind, the two flights of stairs, the white hall door, three steps, the gravel.

  Her father didn’t wave when she saw him coming towards her. It was drizzling and she thought that was maybe why he was coming to meet her. But often in winter it rained and he didn’t; it was her mother who used to. ‘Hullo, Connie,’ he said, and she knew then that her mother had come back from the hospice, as she had said she would.

  He took her hand, not telling her because she knew. She didn’t cry. She wanted to ask in case it was different from what she guessed, but she didn’t because she didn’t want to hear if it was. ‘It’s all right,’ her father said. He went with her to the room that had become her mother’s, overlooking the garden. She touched her mother’s hand and he lifted her up so that she could kiss her cheek, as often he’d done before. Mr Crozier was standing by the windows in the drawing-room when they went downstairs again. She hadn’t known he was there. Then the O’Dalys came.

  ‘You stay here with me,’ Mrs O’Daly said in the kitchen. ‘I’ll hear you your reading.’ But it wasn’t reading on a Tuesday, another verse to learn instead, and six sentences to write. ‘You going to write them then?’ Mrs O’Daly asked. ‘You going to think them up?’

  She didn’t want to. She learned the verse and said it to her father when he came to sit beside her, but the next day she didn’t have to go to Miss Mortimer’s. People came in the morning. She could hear their footsteps in the hall and on the stairs; she couldn’t hear voices. It was in the afternoon that her mother died.

  ‘That’s not like Connie,’ Robert said.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  When Teresa had been told by her children what Connie had said to them she had guessed, with sudden, bitter intuition, that everything going well was over. And she had wondered where she and Robert had gone wrong. Robert was simply bewildered.

  The wedding—to be conducted by Mr Crozier as a purely family occasion—was less than three weeks off. No going away afterwards, no honeymoon because the time of year on the farm wasn’t right for that.

  ‘What else does Connie say?’

  Teresa shook her head. She didn’t know but suspected nothing else, and was right.

  ‘We want to be married,’ Robert said. ‘Nothing’s going to stop that now.’

  Teresa hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Nothing is,’ she said.

  ‘Children manage to get on. Even when they’re strangers to one another.’

  Teresa didn’t say that being strangers might make things easier. She didn’t say it because she didn’t know why that should be. But Melissa, who never wept, wept often now, affected as a stranger would not have been.

  The books Connie pretended to read were in the dining-room bookcases, on either side of the fireplace. They’d been her mother’s books, picked up at country-house auctions, some thrown away when the shelves became full, all of them old, belonging to another time. ‘The Man with Red Hair,’ her mother said, ‘you’ll love that.’ And Dr Bradley Remembers, and Random Harvest. Only Jamaica Inn retained its paper jacket, yellow, without a picture. ‘And The Stars Look Down,’ her mother had said. ‘You’ll love The Stars Look Down.’

  Connie took it to the roof, to the lead-covered gully she had found, wide enough to lie on between two slopes of slates. Every time she went there she wished she didn’t have to disobey her father and always took care not to spend too long there in case she was discovered. Sometimes she stood up, protected from sight by the bulk of a chimney and, far away, saw her father in the fields or Teresa among the geraniums. Sometimes Melissa and Nat were on the avenue, Nat on the carrier of Melissa’s bicycle, his small legs spread wide so that they wouldn’t catch in the spokes.

  Teresa felt she had never loved Robert more; and felt that she was loved, herself, more steadfastly even than before—as if, she thought, the trouble brought such closeness. Or was there panic? she wondered in other moments; was it in panic that the depths of trust were tapped? Was it in panic that the widowed and the rejected protected what they’d been unable to protect before? She did not know the answers to her questions. It only seemed all wrong that a child’s obduracy should mock what was so fairly due.

  ‘Connie.’

  Robert found her in the outhouse where the furniture was. She had folded aside a dust-sheet and was sitting in an armchair of which the springs had gone, which should have been thrown out years ago.

  ‘Connie,’ he interrupted her, for she had not heard him. Her book was Folly Bridge.

  She marked her place with a finger. She smiled at him. No one considered that recently she’d turned sulky; there was no sign of that. Even when she’d told Melissa and Nat that the house was not theirs, she had apparently simply said it.

  ‘You’re troubled because Teresa and I are to be married, Connie.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You didn’t seem to mind before.’

  The armchair had a high back with wings, its faded red velvet badly worn in places, an embroidery of flowers stitched into where an antimacassar might be.

  ‘It’s very good,’ Connie said, speaking about the book she held.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you read it?’

  ‘If you would like me to.’

  Connie nodded. And they could talk about it, she said. If he read it they could talk about it.

  ‘Yes, we could. You’ve always liked Teresa, Connie. You’ve always liked Melissa and Nat. It isn’t easy for us to understand.’

  ‘Couldn’t it stay here, the furniture you don’t want? Couldn’t we keep it here?’

  ‘Out here it’s a bit damp for furniture.’

  ‘Couldn’t we put it back then?’

  ‘Is that what’s worrying you, Connie? The furniture?’

  ‘When the books are thrown away I’ll know what every single one of them was about.’

  ‘But, for heaven’s sake, the books won’t be thrown away!’

  ‘I think they will be, really.’

  Robert went away. He didn’t look for Teresa to tell her about the conversation. Every year at this time he erected a corral where his ewes paddled through a trough of disinfectant. They crowded it now, while he remembered his half-hearted protestations and Connie’s unsatisfactory responses. ‘Oh, come on, come on! Get on with it!’ Impatient with his sheep, as he had not been with his daughter, he wondered if Connie hated him. He had felt she did, although nothing like it had showed, or had echoed in her voice.

  From the roof she saw a car she’d never seen before, and guessed why it had come. In one of the drawers of the rickety Welsh dresser she’d found a shopping list and thought she remembered its being lost. Ironing starch. Baking powder, she’d read.

  The car that had come was parked in the yard when she came down from the roof. A man was standing beside it. He referred to the furniture that was to be sold, as Connie had thought he might.

  ‘Anyone around?’ he asked her.

  He was a bigred-faced man in shirtsleeves. He’d thought he’d never find the house, he said. He asked her if he was expected, if this was the right place, and she wanted to say it wasn’t, but Teresa came out of the house then.

  ‘Go and get your father,’ she said, and Connie nodded and went to where she’d seen him from the roof.

  ‘Don’t sell the furniture,’ she begged instead of saying the man had come.

  One night, when the wedding was five days away, Teresa drove over to the farm. About to go to bed, she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep and wrote a note for Melissa, saying where she was going. It was after half past one and if there hadn’t been a sign of life at the farm she would have driven away again. But the lights were on in the big drawing-room and Robert heard the car. He’d been drinking, he confessed as he let Teresa in.

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bsp; ‘I don’t know how to make sense to her,’ he said when they’d embraced. Without asking, he poured her some whiskey. ‘I don’t know what to do, Teresa.’

  ‘I know you don’t.’

  ‘When she came to stand beside me while I was milking this afternoon, when she didn’t say anything but I could hear her pleading, I thought she was possessed. But later on we talked as if none of all this was happening. She laid the table. We ate the trout I’d fried. We washed the plates up. Dear Teresa, I can’t destroy the childhood that is left to her.’

  ‘I think you’re perhaps a little drunk.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He did not insist that there must be a way; and knowing what frightened him, Teresa knew there wasn’t. She was frightened herself while she was with him now, while wordlessly they shared the horrors of his alarm. Was some act, too terrible for a child, waiting in the desolation of despair to become a child’s? They did not speak of what imagination made of it, how it might be, nurtured in anger’s pain, in desperation and betrayal, the ways it might become unbearable.

  They walked on the avenue, close to one another in the refreshing air. The sky was lightening, dawn an hour away. The shadows of danger went with them, too treacherous to make chances with.

  ‘Our love still matters,’ Teresa whispered. ‘It always will.’

  A calf had been born and safely delivered. It had exhausted him: Connie could tell her father was tired. And rain that had begun a week ago had hardly ceased, washing his winter seeding into a mire.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be all right,’ he said.

  He knew what she was thinking, and he watched her being careful with the plates that were warming in the oven, careful with the coffee she made, letting it sit a moment. Coffee at suppertime was what he’d always liked. She heated milk and poured it from the saucepan.