The Collected Stories by William Trevor

Author:William Trevor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141925707
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2008-10-28T10:00:00+00:00

After that they had lunch together every day, always in the Drummer Boy. People saw them, Ron Stocks and Mr Blackstaffe from Travel-Wide, Mr Fineman, the pharmacist from Green’s the Chemist’s. Other people from the travel agency and from the chemist’s saw them walking about the streets, usually hand in hand. They would look together into the shop windows of Edgware Road, drawn particularly to an antique shop full of brass. In the evenings he would walk with her to Paddington Station and have a drink in one of the bars. They’d embrace on the platform, as other people did.

Mavis continued to disapprove; Marie’s mother and Mrs Druk remained ignorant of the affair. The holiday on the Costa Brava that May was not a success because all the time Marie kept wishing Norman Britt was with her. Occasionally, while Mavis read magazines on the beach, Marie wept and Mavis pretended not to notice. She was furious because Marie’s low spirits meant that it was impossible for them to get to know fellas. For months they’d been looking forward to the holiday and now, just because of a clerk in a travel agency, it was a flop. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ Marie kept saying, trying to smile; but when they returned to London the friendship declined. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ Mavis pronounced harshly, ‘and it’s dead boring having to hear about it.’ After that they ceased to travel together in the mornings.

The affair remained unconsummated. In the hour and a quarter allotted to each of them for lunch there was nowhere they might have gone to let their passion for one another run its course. Everywhere was public: Travel-Wide and the chemist’s shop, the Drummer Boy, the streets they walked. Neither could easily spend a night away from home. Her mother and Mrs Druk would guess that something untoward was in the air; Hilda, deprived of her bedroom mating, would no longer be nonchalant in front of the TV. It would all come out if they were rash, and they sensed some danger in that.

‘Oh, darling,’ she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. It was foggy and cold. The fog was in her pale hair, tiny droplets that only he, being close to her, could see. People hurried through the lit-up station, weary faces anxious to be home.

‘I know,’ he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.

‘I lie awake and think of you,’ she whispered.

‘You’ve made me live,’ he whispered back.

‘And you me. Oh, God, and you me.’ She was gone before she finished speaking, swinging into the train as it moved away, her bulky red handbag the last thing he saw. It would be eighteen hours before they’d meet again.

He turned his back on her train and slowly made his way through the crowds, his reluctance to start the journey back to the flat in Putney seeming physical, like a pain, inside him. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ a woman cried angrily

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