Death in Summer
William Trevor
1
After the funeral the hiatus that tragedy brought takes a different form. The suddenness of the death has gone, irrelevant now. Thaddeus has stood and knelt in the church of St. Nicholas, has heard his wife called good, the word he himself gave to a clergyman he has known all his life. People were present in the church who were strangers to him, who afterwards, in the house, introduced themselves as a few of Letitia’s friends from the time before he knew her. ‘And where is Letitia now?’ an undertaker a week ago inquired, confusing Thaddeus, who for a moment wondered if the man knew why he had been summoned. ‘It’s Letitia who has died,’ he said, and answered, when the man explained, that Letitia was in the mortuary, where she’d been taken.
All that is over now, and yet is coldly there in the first moment of waking every day: the coffin, the flowers laid out, the bright white surplice of the clergyman, dust to dust, and that seeming an insensitive expression at the time. There is Letitia’s mother in the graveyard, and some cousin, and a chubby woman whose bed was next but one to Letitia’s in a school dormitory more than twenty years ago. And there are all the others: local people, and colleagues from the music library, the postman who retired two years ago and was particularly fond of Letitia, the twins who come to clean the windows. There are the tears on Zenobia’s plump cheeks, and Maidment gaunt and appalled. The day the heatwave began it was, that funeral afternoon, the empty blue of the sky touched upon in the clergyman’s brief eulogy. For as long as he lives, Thaddeus Davenant believes those funeral images will be there in the first moment of his waking.
He is a spare, handsome man in his mid-forties, with pale brown eyes beneath hair that almost matches them. Inheritor of a property set in the flatlands of Essex, he has been solitary even in marriage, this the legacy of an unusual childhood, compounded by his choosing to eke out a livelihood selling the produce of his garden rather than seeking to discover a vocation or otherwise claiming a profession.
Quincunx House, once more remote than it is now, was built by a tallow merchant, John Percival Davenant, in 1896, its name deriving from the five wild cherry trees he ordered to be planted, one at each corner of his high-walled garden, one at its centre. Many years later this garden became Thaddeus’s greatest pleasure. In it, he still saves his own seeds, and cultivates hellebores people would come to see if they knew about them. He has replaced decaying heathers with growth from their own new shoots. He has teased a vine back to life in his conservatory. He has been successful with blue poppies and the most difficult penstemons.
Among the memories that linger after the funeral there is Letitia learning the secrets of the garden — how to prune the wistaria, when to trim the yew, cosseting the ceanothus when frost threatened. There is Letitia resting beneath the catalpa tree, pregnant with the child she has left behind. Six years ago Thaddeus brought her here, Letitia Iveson, a person of almost wayward generosity, although she never saw herself in such a light: plainness was what Letitia had seen and sighed over since adolescence and before. Thaddeus did not so harshly judge, finding in her features a tranquillity that challenged beauty with a distinction of its own: a Piero della Francesca face, he insisted with only a little exaggeration.
Before becoming a wife Letitia had lived with her mother in the spacious flat near Regent’s Park where she had passed her childhood, the relationship between the two bonded to some degree by the perpetual confinement of Mr. Iveson in medical care. At his decree, while he still retained his senses, the Iveson family means had been divided into three: equal shares for the two women and for his nursing home. Twice a year, wife and daughter took a train to Bath, where this home — St. Bee’s — spread through two houses in a crescent. Five times a week Letitia walked to the music library in Marylebone, her services at the disposal of musicologists and biographers, the reading-room her particular province. An ageing virgin, she considered herself then, and did not think much about marriage, since there had never been a reason to until Thaddeus came into her life.
In fact, though certainly ageing, Letitia became a younger wife. Her wealth restored the derelict state of Quincunx House, allowed the employment of a couple as cook and houseman, and dispensed with the necessity for Thaddeus to sell the garden’s fruit and vegetables. With difficulty, and after several disappointments, a daughter, Georgina, was born.
It had been Letitia’s wish, not Thaddeus’s, that there should be a child but, while wondering at the time what it was going to be like to have a baby about the place, he did not demur, and soon after Georgina’s birth was surprised to find his feelings quite startlingly transformed. Marriage had changed everything in Letitia’s life. The birth of Georgina changed, in part, Thaddeus. Wizened and blotched, as tiny as a doll, she was Letitia’s object: Thaddeus imagined that would always be so and did not expect otherwise. But within a fortnight he found himself claiming his daughter, possessed by an affection he had been unable to feel for anyone since his own infancy.
All that is memory, too: images and moments that join the details of the funeral occasion, the lowered tones of the clergyman, a silence asked for. But most of all- remembered also by the household’s couple — is the last afternoon of Letitia’s life. Because of her disposition and Thaddeus’s practice in his marriage of saying too little rather than too much — her natural inclination to amity, his to mild prevarication — there was not often a disagreement between the two. But a drizzling Thursday in June had been affected since early morning by unusual inquietude: in passing a letter across the breakfast table, Thaddeus had blundered. Better, he later realized, to have slipped it into a pocket, as occasionally he did with awkward correspondence at breakfast-time. That morning he was careless, allowing himself to sigh over Mrs. Ferry’s missive, and Letitia had smiled in sympathy and asked him what it was. He should have shaken his head and been evasive. Instead, he thought he might as well confess this continuing nuisance. ‘Haven’t I mentioned Mrs. Ferry before?’ he asked, knowing he hadn’t but feeling that such an introduction was necessary. Letitia’s denial allowed him a description, which he lightly gave while the letter’s contents were read. But he knew when the single sheet of violet-coloured writing-paper was handed back across the table that he’d been foolish.
He knew it even more certainly when the matter was raised again in the afternoon. At breakfast, about to crumple the letter into a ball, muddling it with the junk mail that had come, he changed his mind. He returned Mrs. Ferry’s communication to its envelope and placed it beside him on the tablecloth, the gesture implying that he intended to sit down and compose a reply, and to send what Mrs. Ferry was after, which was a cheque for fifty pounds.
‘You’ve done it?’ Letitia pressed in the afternoon.
‘This evening. I promise.’
The french windows of the drawing-room were misted with tiny droplets that did not merge to run down the glass: Thaddeus remembers that afterwards. He remembers the agitation in Letitia’s voice, and a pale tinge coming into the flesh of her round face — not brought about by jealousy of Mrs. Ferry, for that would be ridiculous, but by her concern for a woman she did not know, who clearly had been on her mind all day, a woman he himself hadn’t laid eyes on for all of seventeen years.
‘Please, Thaddeus. She’s far from well.’
‘I doubt it’s true, you know, much of what she says about not being well.’
‘Why shouldn’t it be true? Poor creature, why shouldn’t she be alone and ill?’
In the dining-room, registering the exchanges through the door that is common to both rooms, Maidment learnt that Mrs. Ferry’s plea for assistance was also a reminder that she had repeatedly written before and not once received an answer. The poor woman was wretched
with stomach ulcers and related suffering, came a further rebuke through the door panels. She called herself a charity case: afterwards Maidment particularly remembers that being said.
‘But, Letty, she would call herself anything to get money.’
‘And you have given her none? In all the years she mentions?’
‘I could not give Mrs. Ferry your money, which is what it would amount to. I could not do that, and I had none to spare before.’
‘Please give her something now.’
‘If you would like me to I shall.’
‘Please.’
In the dining-room Maidment nodded to himself. His perusal of Mrs. Ferry’s previous letters had not been confessed to his wife, whose disapproval could be biting when she put it into words. Eavesdropping Zenobia accepted, as conversation unavoidably overheard; the investigation of private correspondence, and poking about in drawers, she preferred to believe did not occur. So Maidment had kept to himself what he had long ago pieced together: that the woman who wrote the begging letters was guilty of the sin of profitable nostalgia; of resurrecting one or two good moments so that, in the circumstances as they were now, the past might be honoured with a cheque. The woman’s handwriting sprawled wildly, decorated with exclamation marks and underlining, Maidment recalled, listening again to the voices in the drawing-room.
‘Don’t laugh at her, Thaddeus.’
Although the keyhole of the connecting door contained no key, Maidment did not stoop to a more intimate witnessing of the scene. He did not see Thaddeus — in pale corduroy trousers, tweed jacket and tie — standing in front of the empty fire-place, nor observe the holding back of Letitia’s tears. The deep blue of her dress reflecting the dots of sapphire in her earrings, her fair hair plaited in a coil, she stood also, pressed into the corner by the door, as though her sympathy for Mrs. Ferry consigned her there. Her dog — a retriever she had found as a puppy, drowning in a ditch — was stretched out between the two sets of french windows, half an eye on the misty garden outside.
‘I’ll do whatever you say, Letty. This is too little a thing to disagree about.’
Maidment carried that plea to the kitchen. ‘If there’s going to be quarrelling between them,’ he gloomily predicted, ‘it’ll be the end of us.’
In retrospect, a few hours later, there is a harshness in the statement that passed unnoticed at the time. Phlegmatic and an optimist, Zenobia simply retorted that if he was talking about separation or divorce he was being altogether too pessimistic. Married couples disagreed, as they had observed both in a personal way and in their experience of other households. The infant born four and a half months ago in this one will become a child with characteristics and a nature of her own, an influence for stability and for good should such an influence be needed, which Zenobia doubted. Colouring her argument, she touched upon the occasion of the birth: cherry brandy poured in the kitchen at a quarter past eleven at night, she herself clapping her hands, then clasping them to give thanks, Mrs. Iveson in the house as the prospective grandmother, the midwife brisk and self-important, the January night damply mild. After the gloom of miscarrying in the past it had been the happiest of events and most certainly boded well.
‘Added to which they do not row at all, those two.’
When first they came to the house, before Maidment made his way through past and present correspondence, and listened in on the kitchen telephone when Zenobia’s back was turned, the Maidments’ impression was that Thaddeus Davenant’s wife had done well for herself. They had not known the house gone to rack and ruin, and did not then realize the circumstances of its rescue. Now they knew everything.
‘I’m only saying,’ Maidment defended himself. ‘I’m only telling what’s said.’
‘They’re suited. We both know that.’
Favouring black in clothes worn tightly, accentuating plumpness, Zenobia has soft hazel eyes in a soft face, her cheeks streaked like two good apples, her hair flecked with the grey her forty-nine years demand. In contrast, her husband is a hawk-faced man, dark-jowled and lankly made, his servant’s wear — black also — completing the priestly look he cultivates. Second to his servant’s curiosity, Maidment’s interest is the turf.
‘Their natures complement one another,’ Zenobia’s insistence firmly went on. ‘That is important.’
Leaving the kitchen with cloths and a tin of Mansion polish, Maidment did not pause to comment on that. Strengths and weaknesses were distributed to the marriage’s advantage, Zenobia’s view was, and neither party trespassed on ground that was already claimed: alone again in her particular domain she reflected on that, and saw the future bright.
‘Please go to her,’ Maidment heard, his cloths on the dining-room table, the lid taken from the polish tin. A hole-in-corner thing, he concluded, a long-ago affair his employer could hardly be blamed for not wishing to pick over.
‘Go to her? She doesn’t actually ask-’
‘Darling, she asks for reassurance and a little money. A dying woman who is alone, Thaddeus.’
‘She doesn’t actually say she’s dying.’
Heard by Maidment but not seen, the dog, called Rosie, yawned, then pushed herself on to her feet, slipping about on the polished boards with a scrabble of paws. She settled herself again and, while the two familiar voices continued, slept.
Thaddeus was patient and conciliatory. Quarrels were pointless; they did no good; nothing was ever gained. He had been careless, he was to blame. But even so this need not become more tiresome than it was already, and visiting Mrs. Ferry would certainly be as tiresome as anything he could imagine.
‘I’ll write, Letty. It’s all she wants. It was nineteen seventy-nine when I knew her. It would be awfully difficult, meeting again.’
Dot she’d been in 1979, not Mrs. Ferry, as somehow in Thaddeus’s thoughts she had since become. Receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel — two AA stars — she had married Ferry, who was its manager, sharing his duties when they returned from honeymooning. A little later she’d been unfaithful to him in Room Twenty. Airless and poky, with windows opening on to the hotel’s well, Room Twenty had been suitable for surreptitious afternoon love, being tucked away and quiet. ‘Two of a kind, dear,’ the husky voice came back to Thaddeus, the fleshy limbs, hair dyed a shade of henna. ‘Bad hats, bad news,’ Mrs. Ferry liked to whisper in Room Twenty, an older woman who’d been around, who had renamed the cocktail bar the Pink Lady and the dining-room The Chandeliers. She folded underclothes on to the one chair the room supplied and afterwards, putting them on again, often spoke about her husband, her voice gone slack, touched with disdain. ‘Tried going without it, dear, but it doesn’t work.’ His sandy moustache was what he tried to go without; he had a gammy leg as well. A likeable enough man in Thaddeus’s memory, who would presumably have left her years ago.
‘Please, Thaddeus.’
‘If you really want me to, of course I’ll go to see her.’ He smiled although he did not feel like smiling. It wasn’t necessary to visit the woman and he did not intend to. He wondered if the nature of the relationship had crossed Letitia’s mind, if even for a passing moment it had occurred to her that the woman she wished to see assisted had been his associate in passionate intimacy, that they had deceived a decent man, carelessly gratifying desire. Even after six years of marriage he didn’t know his wife well enough. She could have suspected everything or nothing: her tone gave no clue when next she spoke, only a freshness in it marking the end of the contretemps.
‘This summer will be an idyll,’ she said, and he knew she meant because it was Georgina’s first. A quality in Letitia often anticipated happiness, and for a moment Thaddeus regretted his own shortcomings in this respect.
‘I have the pullet chicks to collect this afternoon.’ She smiled and crossed the room to kiss him. ‘Thanks for doing the box.’
That morning he had attached a wooden box to the carrier of her bicycle, large enough to contain the six chicks she had arranged to fetch. Since she
did not drive, Letitia cycled about the lanes — to collect honey from a bee-keeper she had got to know, or tomatoes because Thaddeus didn’t grow them any more, or to call in to see old Mrs. Parch or Abbie Mates. Even when it was cold, or raining quite hard, she preferred cycling to walking or being driven. She had made the lanes her own, local people approvingly remarked to Thaddeus, and he agreed that his wife knew the lanes well by now.
‘I’ll settle Georgina in the garden before I go. The sun is trying to come out at last.’
Thaddeus opened the french windows, Rosie lunged to her feet. Why Letitia should wish to keep chickens would once have been bewildering, as would her concern for a woman she had never laid eyes on. She didn’t know about chickens. She won’t know whether the half-dozen shown to her are good of their kind or not. Nor will she know if the man selling them is telling the truth about their being disease-free or about whatever other hazards there may be. She will believe the man, every single word he utters, and somehow her purchases will survive disease and lay the eggs expected of them: when Letitia trusted to luck she was more often than not rewarded. This irrational trust, and Letitia’s goodness, the practical steeliness of her resolve, were entangled in a nature that was disarmingly humble. It was his considerable loss, Thaddeus was every day aware, that he did not love his wife.
‘Yes, it’s going to be sunny,’ he agreed.
That morning, too, he had constructed a coop, eight posts driven into an out-of-the-way patch of ground, chicken-wire stapled into place, a crude door, mostly of chicken-wire also. The pullets will spend only their nights in it, safe from the jaws of foxes. By day, they’ll scratch about among the silver birches.
‘I don’t think I should be long,’ Letitia predicted. ‘An hour maybe.’
‘I’ll cut the grass.’
‘You’ll keep an eye on Georgina?’
‘Yes, of course.’
In the dining-room Maidment gathered up his cloths and polish tin. In the kitchen Zenobia beat up eggs for a sponge cake, saying to herself that one of these Sundays they must drive over to see the Scarrow Man, a wonder cut from the turf of Scarrow Hill. Georgina was wheeled into the garden, and settled beneath the big catalpa tree in case the sun became bright.