Authors: William Trevor
‘Please let me sleep,’ he said.
Angrily I shouted at him then, all gentleness gone, not caring if I woke the household. I could feel the warmth of a flush beginning in my neck, and creeping slowly into my face.
‘You’re a man who always sleeps,’ I snapped at him. ‘You’ll sleep your way to the grave, Mr Riversmith.’
I gulped at what remained of my drink and poured some more. His glass was still where he had placed it on the bedside table. I picked it up and forced it into his hand. A little of the liquid spilt on to his pyjama front. I didn’t care.
‘Hell is where men like you wake up, Mr Riversmith, with flames curling round their naked legs.’
He said nothing. He feared my wrath, as other men have. I calmed, and wiped the spilt drink from his pyjamas.
‘You’re extremely drunk,’ he said.
It’s always easy to maintain a person’s drunk. It’s an easy way for a man to turn his back. While I looked down at him in his bed a memory of the car-girls of 1950 came into my mind, I don’t know why. A drizzle was falling as they sheltered in doorways, their faces yellow in the headlights of the cars. I didn’t mention them because I couldn’t see that they were relevant. I prayed instead that at last he would understand. ‘Please, God,’ I said in my mind.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned in toward him, determined that he should visualize the picture I painted: the evening fireflies just beginning beyond the terrace, the General in a linen suit, Otmar among the shrubs of the garden, Aimée smiling. Survivors belonged together, no matter how eccentric it seemed. Normality had ceased for them: why should she not grow fond, and come to understand the bitterness there’d been? Why should she not?
‘Don’t come closer to me,’ he warned unpleasantly. ‘I’ve never given you this kind of encouragement.’
My Indian dressing-gown had accidentally parted. Hastily he looked away. I prayed that a blink of light would enter his expressionless eyes, but while I begged with mine his remained the same. I said:
‘Among the few possessions that remained to Otmar after the incident I found a photograph of his mother.’
A newspaper item that told of her death was pasted to the back of it. If the pillow-talk of the Austrian ivory cutter had not always been in German I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a word. But I stumbled through it, and learnt to my astonishment that Otmar’s mother had hanged herself from the electric light, exactly as in my dream.
But when I told him Mr Riversmith wasn’t in the least astonished. He stared blankly back at me, even though I repeated what I’d said twice to ensure that the order of events had clearly registered. Speaking carefully and slowly, I described the scene: how I had stood among Otmar’s last few belongings with the photograph in my right hand, how I had taken nearly ten minutes to comprehend the German, how I had entered the
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fifteen minutes later and found Otmar and the child playing their game with torn-up pieces of paper. My dream had been a month earlier, I said.
The eyes of Thomas Riversmith didn’t alter. I did not speak again.
If someone had had a camera there would be a record of the General with his hand held out and Mr Riversmith about to shake it. There would be an image of Signora Bardini still holding the sandwiches she had made for their journey, and Rosa Crevelli saying something to Quinty, and Aimée smiling up at Otmar. There would be one of me too, in a pale loose dress and sunglasses, still standing where Mr Riversmith had turned his back on me when I endeavoured to say goodbye.
I wish a photograph had been taken because just for a moment everything was of a piece and everyone was there. Ten figures stood on the gravel in front of my house, each shadowed by other people, although the camera would not have caught that subtlety. Francine was there, and Celeste Adele, and Phyl and her husband and Aimée’s brother. The General’s daughter, his son-in-law and his wife were there, and Madeleine, and the girl whom Quinty had wronged. All sorts were there with me.
‘Mr Riversmith.’ Quinty beckoned, and Mr Riversmith walked towards the car. Aimée carried the hen that was my gift to her.
The dust thrown up by the car wheels settled, and rose
again when the machines that were to make the garden came. I watched them arrive, and watched while earth was turned, in preparation for the planting in the autumn. Letters from strangers also came that morning.
I thought Oberon would never ask her. What a joyful outcome that was in the end!
Mrs Edith Lumm of Basingstoke wrote that she and her husband, staying with her husband’s sister in Shropshire, had visited Mara Hall, although it was not called by that name any more. Her husband and his sister had pooh-poohed the idea that it was the house which featured in my story, but she herself was certain because of details she’d noticed, the maze for a start. Trimleigh Castle it was called now, being an hotel.
That day just happened, time ordinarily passed. It didn’t require much of an effort to know that in the car Quinty chatted while Mr Riversmith considered the validity of a rule structure, and said to himself that Pilsfer had got that wrong also. On the plane the child slept, and a few notes were scrawled in the blue notebook, important thoughts put down: hierarchism was almost certainly the governing factor.
My friend wonders if Derek ever turned up again, and wonders how Rose fares in later life. My friend – Miss Jaci Rakes – believes Rose’s love for Rick may not be constant
. All through the afternoon the engines clanked and rattled, moving stone and earth, roughly laying out paths and flowerbeds. No one said there was something wrong because the child had gone, not Otmar certainly, not the old man.
Time was gained as it passed, hours added to Aimée’s life. That evening in Virginsville the untended skin of Francine’s cheek was rough to the touch in Aimée’s first embrace. ‘How about scrambled eggs?’ Francine suggested as they drove through rain to the house. ‘Will you help me make scrambled eggs, Aimée, the first thing in your new home?’ The child was silent, staring at the rain on the windshield, the wipers swishing back and forth.
‘You would like something?’ Quinty said, coming to my private room, not knocking, for he never does. He didn’t in the Café Rose and the habit stuck.
‘No, I’m all right, Quinty.’
He changed my ashtray. He placed a little ice-box we have on my desk, with a lemon he had sliced. He left me a fresh glass.
‘I’m all right,’ I said again.
Darkness came in Pennsylvania. The Riversmiths lay beneath a sheet, his pyjamas bundled away and Francine’s lean body naked also. Strength passed from one to the other, now that they were together again. Nutty as a fruitcake that child was, but they’d manage somehow. They’d think of something, being in the thinking business, both of them.
14
By now that summer belongs to the shadows of the past.
I watch the videos of old Westerns with the outside shutters of the
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drawn against the afternoon light. I smoke, and sip a little tonic water livened with just a taste of spirits. The stagecoach horses neigh and judder when they’re pulled up with a jerk. Masked men twitch their guns, indicating how they want the passengers to hand over their valuables. One of the men is nervous, which makes it worse. He spews out chewed tobacco. Far away and unaware, the sheriff puts his feet up.
The old man died.
Two autumns later, when Dr Innocenti visited my house for the last time it was to tell us that in Virginsville they decided that expert care was no more than the child’s due. Better for her own sake to be looked after by people who were skilled, in a place that contained others of her kind.
One day I looked down into the garden and saw that Otmar had gone, into whatever oblivion he had chosen.
Except to write about that summer I have never since sat down at my black Olympia, and never shall again. I haven’t learned much, only that love is different among survivors. The caravan passed by because we hesitated, but that is how things are.
The tourists come again now. They talk of Lake Trasimeno and the attractions of the hill-towns, the cafés in the sun. They visit Siena and write their postcards, they play their bridge. In my house I am the presence you are familiar with, as you can see me now. I am as women of my professional past often are, made practical through bedroom dealings, made sentimental through fear. I know all that, I do not deny it. I do not care much for the woman I am, but there you are. None of us has a choice in that.
In my garden the shrubs are parched because Quinty’s search for someone to tend them is half-hearted due to his desire to save money, even though the money’s mine. The tourists upbraid me and sometimes become angry, a withered petal rubbed between finger and thumb, the shreds accusingly held out. The Germans shake their heads in disapproval, the French say it’s typical, the English get the hose going and water the azalea urns. I explain to them that all this, too, is how things are. They politely listen, but afterwards they frown and mutter.
Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not. Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it. When the season’s over I walk among the shrubs myself, making the most of the colours while they last and the fountain while it flows.
Table of Contents
Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria
Reading Turgenev
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30
My House in Umbria
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