Cheating at Canasta

by William Trevor

  Then, one winter, a letter from Miss Davally was less cheerful than her letters usually were. Withdrawn, she wrote, and they are concerned. What she declared, in detail after that, was confirmed when summer came: Anthony was different, and more different still in later summers, quieter, timid, seeming sometimes to be lost. It was a mystery when the dog’s gravestone disappeared from the garden.

  In the dark, the bright red dot of the television light still piercingly there, Wilby wonders, as so often he has, what influence there was when without incitement or persuasion, without words, they did what had been done. They were nine years old then, when secrets became deception.

  It was snowing the evening he and Anthony met again, both of them waiting in the chapel cloisters for their names, as new boys, to be called out. It was not a surprise that Anthony was there, passing on from the school that years ago had declared him clever; nor was it by chance that they were to be together for what remained of their education. ‘Nice for Anthony to have someone he knows,’ his father said on the telephone, and confirmed that Anthony was still as he had become.

  In the dim evening light the snow blew softly into the cloisters, and when the roll-call ended and a noisy dispersal began, the solitary figure remained, the same smooth black hair, a way of standing that hadn’t changed. ‘How are you?’ Wilby asked. His friend’s smile, once so readily there, came as a shadow and then was lost in awkwardness.

  Peculiar, Anthony was called at school, but wasn’t bullied, as though it had been realized that bullying would yield no satisfaction. He lacked skill at games, avoided all pursuits that were not compulsory, displayed immediate evidence of his cleverness, science and mathematical subjects his forte. Religious boys attempted to befriend him, believing that to be a duty; kindly masters sought to draw him out. ‘Well, yes, I knew him,’ Wilby admitted, lamely explaining his association with someone who was so very much not like the friends he made now. ‘A long time ago,’ he nearly always added.

  Passing by the windows of empty classrooms, he several times noticed Anthony, the only figure among the unoccupied desks. And often—on the drive that ended at the school gates, or often anywhere—there was the same lone figure in the distance. On the golf-course where senior boys were allowed to play, Anthony sometimes sat on a seat against a wall, watching the golfers as they approached, watching them as they walked on. He shied away when conversation threatened, creeping back into his shadowlands.

  One day he wasn’t there, his books left tidily in his desk, clothes hanging in his dormitory locker, his pyjamas under his pillow. He would be on his way home, since boys who kept themselves to themselves were often homesick. But he had not attempted to go home and was found still within the school grounds, having broken no rules except that he had ignored for a day the summoning of bells.

  Dawn comes darkly, and Wilby sleeps. But his sleep is brief, his dreams forgotten when he wakes. The burden of guilt that came when in silence they clambered over the shingle and the rocks, when they passed through the gorse field, was muddled by bewilderment, a child’s tormenting panic not yet constrained by suppression as later it would be. Long afterwards, when first he heard that Anthony was dead—and when he said it himself—the remnants of the shame guilt had become fell away.

  He shaves and washes, dresses slowly. In the hall the reception clerks have just come on duty. They nod at him, wish him good-day. No call this morning for an umbrella, one says.

  Outside it is not entirely day, or even day at all. The cleaning lorries are on the streets, water pouring in the gutters, but there’s no one about in rue du Bac, refuse sacks still waiting to be collected. A bar is open further on, men standing at the counter, disinclined for conversation with one another. A sleeping figure in a doorway has not been roused. What hovel, Wilby wonders as he passes, does a kitchen worker occupy?

  In rue Piques the brasserie is shuttered, no lights showing anywhere. Cardboard boxes are stacked close to the glass of three upstairs windows, others are uncurtained; none suggests the domesticity of a dwelling. Le Père Jothy the place is called.

  Wilby roams the nearby streets. A few more cafés are opening and in one coffee is brought to him. He sips it, breaking a croissant. There’s no one else, except the barman.

  He knows he should go away. He should take the train to Passy, to the salerooms he has planned to visit there; he should not ever return to rue Piques. He has lived easily with an aberration, then shaken it off: what happened was almost nothing.

  Other men come in, a woman on her own, her face bruised on one side, no effort made to conceal the darkening weals. Her voice is low when she explains this injury to the barman, her fingers now and again touching it. Soundlessly, she weeps when she has taken her cognac to a table.

  Oh, this is silly! his unspoken comment was when Miss Davally’s letter came, its implications apparent only to him. For heaven’s sake! he crossly muttered, the words kept to himself when he greeted Anthony in the cloisters, and again every time he caught sight of him on the golf-course. The old dog’s life had been all but over. And Wilby remembers now—as harshly as he has in the night—the bitterness of his resentment when a friendship he delighted in was destroyed, when Anthony’s world—the garden, the house, his mother, his father, Miss Davally—was no longer there.

  ‘He has no use for us,’ his father said. ‘No use for anyone, we think.’

  Turning into rue Piques, Anthony notices at once the figure waiting outside the ribbon shop. It is November the twenty-fourth, the last Thursday of the month. This day won’t come again.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he says.

  ‘How are you, Anthony?’

  And Anthony says that Monday is the closed day. Not that Sunday isn’t too. If someone waited outside the ribbon shop on a Monday or a Sunday it wouldn’t be much good. Not that many people wait there.

  Wind blows a scrap of paper about, close to where they stand. In the window of the ribbon shop coils of ribbon are in all widths and colours, and there are swatches of trimming for other purposes, lace and velvet, and plain white edging, and a display of button cards. Anthony often looks to see if there has been a change, but there never has been.

  ‘How are you, Anthony?’

  It is a fragment of a white paper bag that is blown about and Anthony identifies it from the remains of the redscript that advertises the boulangerie in rue Dupin. When it is blown closer to him he catches it under his shoe.

  ‘People have wondered where you are, Anthony.’

  ‘I went away from Ireland.’

  Anthony bends and picks up the litter he has trapped. He says he has the ovens to do today. A Thursday, and he works in the morning.

  ‘Miss Davally still writes, wondering if there is news of you.’

  Half past eight is his time on Thursdays. Anthony says that, and adds that there’s never a complaint in the kitchen. One speck on the prong of a fork could lead to a complaint, a shred of fish skin could, a cabbage leaf. But there’s never a complaint.

  ‘People thought you were dead, Anthony.’

  Wilby says he sold the wineshop. He described it once, when they were children: the shelves of bottles, the different shapes, their contents red or white, pink if people wanted that. He tasted wine a few times, he remembers saying.

  ‘Your father has died himself, Anthony. Your mother has. Miss Davally was left the house because there was no one else. She lives there now.’

  No response comes; Wilby has not expected one. He has become a philatelist, he says.

  Anthony nods, waiting to cross the street. He knows his father died, his mother too. He has guessed Miss Davally inherited the house. The deaths were in the Irish Times, which he always read, cover to cover, all the years he was the night porter at the Cliff Castle Hotel in Dalkey.

  He doesn’t mention the Cliff Castle Hotel. He doesn’t say he misses the Irish Times, the familiar names, the political news, the photographs of places, the change there is in Ireland now. Le Monde is more staid, more
circumspect, more serious. Anthony doesn’t say that either because he doubts that it’s of interest to a visitor to Paris.

  A gap comes in the stream of cars that has begun to go by; but not trusting this opportunity, Anthony still waits. He is careful on the streets, even though he knows them well.

  ‘I haven’t died,’ he says.

  Perfectly together, they shared an act that was too shameful to commit alone, taking a chance on a sunny morning in order to discover if an old dog’s cleverness would see to his survival.

  For a moment, while Anthony loses another opportunity to cross the street, Wilby gathers into sentences how he might attempt a denial that this was how it was, how best to put it differently. An accident, a misfortune beyond anticipation, the unexpected: with gentleness, for gentleness is due, he is about to plead. But Anthony crosses the street then, and opens with a key the side door of the brasserie. He makes no gesture of farewell, he does not look back.

  Walking by the river on his way to the salerooms at Passy, Wilby wishes he’d said he was glad his friend was not dead. It is his only thought. The pleasure-boats slip by on the water beside him, hardly anyone on them. A child waves. Raised too late in response, Wilby’s own hand drops to his side. The wind that blew the litter about in rue Piques has freshened. It snatches at the remaining leaves on the black-trunked trees that are an orderly line, following the river’s course.

  The salerooms are on the other bank, near the radio building and the apartment block that change the river’s character. Several times he has visited this vast display in which the world’s stamps are exhibited behind glass if they are notably valuable, on the tables, country by country, when they are not. That busy image has always excited Wilby’s imagination and as he climbs the steps to the bridge he is near he attempts to anticipate it now, but does not entirely succeed.

  It is not in punishment that the ovens are cleaned on another Thursday morning. It is not in expiation that soon the first leavings of the day will be scraped from the lunchtime plates. There is no bothering with redemption. Looking down from the bridge at the sluggish flow of water, Wilby confidently asserts that. A morning murkiness, like dusk, has brought some lights on in the apartment block. Traffic crawls on distant streets.

  For Anthony, the betrayal matters, the folly, the carelessness that would have been forgiven, the cruelty. It mattered in the silence—while they watched, while they clambered over the shingle and the rocks, while they passed through the gorse field. It matters now. The haunted sea is all the truth there is for Anthony, what he honours because it matters still.

  The buyers move among the tables and Wilby knows that for him, in this safe, second-hand world of postage stamps, tranquillity will return. He knows where he is with all this; he knows what he’s about, as he does in other aspects of his tidy life. And yet this morning he likes himself less than he likes his friend.