The Boarding-House by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

13

It was a dreaming season in London, that long warm summer. In a magistrates’ court a man who had been charged with the theft of spoons from Woolworth’s claimed to have been guided towards the action in a dream; he said the dream had left him with the compulsion, that for days he had gone in fear of death – for death, he said, was his destined lot unless he stole the spoons.

On the night that Mrs Trine called at The Boarding-House two old men in Wimbledon dreamed of their schooldays and discussed the scenes that had happened over breakfast; for they, too, lived side by side in a boarding-house, though one that was vastly different from the one that had been Mr Bird’s. They talked far into the day, comparing notes and marking the coincidence; and though they did not say it, they hoped that that night too it might be given to them to dream again of their schooldays.

Not far from where the old men dreamed in Wimbledon, Janice Rush, who had been Janice Brownlow, dreamed of Studdy. She saw his face swollen to monstrous size from the blow her friend had struck him. She saw him conveyed along hospital corridors to an operating theatre that was peopled with characters from a television serial. ‘His heart will not take it,’ said one of these, and cast a grim order at a nurse. The man will die, thought Janice Rush, waking up confused. And then it came to her that this was most unlikely. She switched the light on and slipped from bed, noting the form of her slumbering husband and feeling no emotion at the sight of it. In her kitchen she smoked a cigarette and thought about her marriage day, pretending it was not the slumbering husband she had married but someone else, someone she did not know and could not ever meet. She felt the solitude that would have excited Mr Bird, and sighed at the feeling; for she, who in her day had been the belle of flannel dances, who had been beautiful and dearly loved, had never come to terms with her loneliness and never would now. She hadn’t grown to see it and accept it, as his people of The Boarding-House had, or would in time.

Studdy dreamed that he had entered local politics and was asked to become Mayor of SW17. ‘Together again,’ cried Nurse Clock, sitting beside him in the Mayor’s parlour, for somehow she was Mayor as well. In his dream he greeted her and touched her shoulder, and planned a terrible vengeance.

Mr Scribbin dreamed that once he had been a wild man, bare-footed in the street. He, whose night in a way this one had been, since he had made himself felt over the matter of his clothes, dreamed, too, that he was at the controls of the double-chimneyed Lord Faringdon. Beside him stood Mrs Trine, pulling at his overalls, asking for his tie. ‘We are late,’ he cried. ‘We are late, we are late, Mrs Trine.

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