Collected Stories by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor [Trevor, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing

He suggested it to Marie in the Drummer Boy. He led up to it slowly, describing the interior of the Great Western Royal Hotel and how he had wandered about it because he hadn’t wanted to go home. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I ended up in a bathroom.’

‘You mean the toilet, dear? Taken short –’

‘No, not the toilet. A bathroom on the second floor. Done out in marble, as a matter of fact.’

She replied that honestly he was a one, to go into a bathroom like that when he wasn’t even staying in the place! He said:

‘What I mean, Marie, it’s somewhere we could go.’

‘Go, dear?’

‘It’s empty half the time. Nearly all the time it must be. I mean, we could be there now. This minute if we wanted to.’

‘But we’re having our lunch, Norman.’

‘That’s what I mean. We could even be having it there.’

From the saloon bar’s juke-box a lugubrious voice pleaded for a hand to be held. Take my hand, sang Elvis Presley, take my whole life too. The advertising executives from Dalton, Dure and Higgins were loudly talking about their hopes of gaining the Canadian Pacific account. Less noisily the architects from Frine and Knight complained about local planning regulations.

‘In a bathroom, Norman? But we couldn’t just go into a bathroom.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, we couldn’t. I mean, we couldn’t.’

‘What I’m saying is we could.’

‘I want to marry you, Norman. I want us to be together. I don’t want just going to a bathroom in some hotel.’

‘I know; I want to marry you too. But we’ve got to work it out. You know we’ve got to work it out, Marie – getting married.’

‘Yes, I know.’

It was a familiar topic of conversation between them. They took it for granted that one day, somehow, they would be married. They had talked about Hilda. He’d described Hilda to her, he’d drawn a picture in Marie’s mind of Hilda bent over her jewellery-making in a Putney flat, or going out to drink V.P. with the Fowlers or at the Club. He hadn’t presented a flattering picture of his wife, and when Marie had quite timidly said that she didn’t much care for the sound of her he had agreed that naturally she wouldn’t. The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it. He didn’t mention it because he guessed it might be upsetting.

What they had to work out where Hilda was concerned were the economics of the matter. He would never, at Travel-Wide or anywhere else, earn a great deal of money. Familiar with Hilda’s nature, he knew that as soon as a divorce was mooted she’d set out to claim as much alimony as she possibly could, which by law he would have to pay. She would state that she only made jewellery for pin-money and increasingly found it difficult to do so due to a developing tendency towards chilblains or arthritis, anything she could think of. She would hate him for rejecting her, for depriving her of a tame companion.

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