After Rain (27 page)
Authors: William Trevor
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General
Had he come to us this time with a purpose? Claire asked when she ceased to weep. Did he intend our daughter to earn his living for him, to tend him in the place of his childhood, cosseting his old man’s frailties? Had his future lit up suddenly on a London street, the years ahead radiant as a jewel in his imagination? ‘I’ll tell them,’ had our daughter said already, planning to sit us down, to pour out drinks in celebration? She would break the news that was not news, and we’d embrace her, not pointing out that Damian couldn’t help destroying his achievements. And she would hurry to him when he next appeared and they would stand together as lovers do. We could not foretell the details after that, and quite suddenly the form the relationship might take in time hardly seemed to matter any more: enough of it was there already. ‘Are we being punished?’ Claire asked, and I didn’t know if we were or not, or why we should be punished, or what our sin was.
We didn’t want that night to end. We didn’t want to feel, again, the excitement that had crept into our house, that passed us by and was not ours. It was not in Damian’s nature to halt an adventure that was already under way, not in his nature to acquire from nowhere the decency that would forbid it to proceed. His bedroom would not be empty when morning came, the small suitcase gone, a note left on his bedside table. ‘Remember the others?’ Claire whispered in the dark, and I knew whom she meant without having to think - the daughter of the Bishop of Killaloe, the widow from upstate New York, the Englishwoman in Venice, and other nameless women mentioned by our friend in passing.
Ill-suited, we said, when we learned that the first of his marriages had fallen apart, and were too busy in those busy days to be more than sorry. We had hardly wondered about the fate of the bishop’s daughter, and not at all about the American widow, except to say to one another that it was typical of Damian to make the same mistake twice. And when the Englishwoman left him it was a joke. Old reprobate, we said. Incorrigible.
The first streaks of dawn came flickering in, the birds began. We lay there silent, not trusting ourselves to comment on this past that the present had thrown up. The bishop’s daughter - younger than Joanna was now - smiled in her wedding dress, and I felt again the warm touch of her cheek when I kissed it, and heard her reply to my good wishes, her shy voice saying she was happier than she deserved to be. And a face from a photograph we’d once been shown was the oval face of the American, dark hair, dark eyes, lips slightly parted. And the face of the Englishwoman was just a guess, a face contorted in a quarrel, made bitter with cold tears. The shadows of other men’s wives, of lovely women, girls charmed, clamoured for attention, breaking from their shadows, taking form. Old reprobate.
‘I think I’ll go and talk to her.’ Claire’s voice was hushed in the twilight, but she didn’t move, and I knew that already she had changed her mind; talking would make everything worse. Eighty-one, Claire said: he would be eighty-one when Joanna was forty-eight.
I didn’t calculate. It didn’t matter. I thought we might quarrel, that tiredness might bring something like that on, but we didn’t. We didn’t round on each other, blaming in order to shed guilt, bickering as we might have once, when upsets engendered edginess. We didn’t because ours are the dog days of marriage and there aren’t enough left to waste: dangerous ground has long ago been charted and is avoided now. There was no point in saying, either, that the damage we already sensed would become entertainment for other people, as damage had for us.
‘I’ll make tea,’ I said, and descended the stairs softly as I always do at this early hour so as not to wake our daughter. Some time today Damian and I might again call in at Traynor’s; I might, in sickening humility, ask for mercy. I heard my own voice doing so, but the sound was false, wrong in all sorts of ways; I knew I wouldn’t say a thing. To ensure that our daughter had a roof over her head I would lend whatever was necessary. A bungalow would replace the fallen house at Doul.
The
Irish Times
was half pushed through the letter-box; I slipped it out. I brought the tray back to our bedroom, with gingersnap biscuits on a plate because we like them in the early morning. We read the paper. We didn’t say much else.
Later that morning Joanna hurried through cornflakes and a slice of toast. Her car started, reversed, then dashed away. Damian appeared and we sat outside in the September sunshine; Claire made fresh coffee. It was too late to hate him. It was too late to deny that we’d been grateful when our stay-at-home smugness had been enlivened by the tales of his adventures, or to ask him if he knew how life had turned out for the women who had loved him. Instead we conversed inconsequentially.
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19/12/2008
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