Free After Rain by William Trevor

house of the marriage. She claimed that suicidal tendencies had developed in her, aggravated by the familiar surroundings: she would suffer the loss of her child for her child’s sake. ‘She’s trying all this on,’ the other woman insisted, but in the end it appeared she wasn’t, and so the arrangement was made.
        On a warm Wednesday afternoon, the day Quest for Fame won the Derby, Gerard’s mother married Rebecca’s father. Afterwards all four of them stood, eyes tightened against strong sunlight, while someone took a photograph. The two children were of an age, Gerard ten, Rebecca nine. Gerard was dark-haired, quite noticeably thin, with glasses. Rebecca’s reddish hair curved roundly about her rounded cheeks. Her eyes were bright, a deep shade of blue. Gerard’s, brown, were solemn.
        They were neutrally disposed to one another, with neither fondness nor distaste on either side: they did not know one another well. Gerard was an intruder in the house that had been Rebecca’s, but this was far less to bear than the departure from it of her mother.
        ‘They’ll settle,’ Rebecca’s father murmured in a teashop after the wedding.
        Watching the two children, silent beside one another, his new wife said she hoped so.
        
        They did settle. Thrown together as helpless parties in the stipulations of the peace, they became companions. They missed the past; resentment and deprivation drew them close. They talked about the two people whom they visited on Sundays, and how those two, once at the centre of things, were now defeated and displaced.
        At the top of the house, attic space had been reclaimed to form a single, low-roofed room with windows to the ground and a new parquet floor that seemed to stretch for ever. The walls were a shade of washed-out primrose, and shafts of sunlight made the pale ash of the parquet seem almost white. There was no furniture. Two bare electric light-bulbs hung from the long, slanted ceiling. This no-man’s-land was where Gerard and Rebecca played their game of marriage and divorce. It became a secret game, words fading on their lips if someone entered, politeness disguising their deceit.
        Rebecca recalled her mother weeping at lunch, a sudden collapse into ugly distress while she was spooning peas on to Rebecca’s plate. ‘Whatever’s up?’ Rebecca asked, watching as her mother hurried from the table. Her father did not answer, but instead left the dining-room himself, and a few moments later there were the sounds of a quarrel. ‘You’ve made me hate you,’ Rebecca’s mother kept screaming so shrilly that Rebecca thought the people in the house next door would hear. ‘How could you have made me hate you?’
        Gerard entered a room and found his mother nursing the side of her face. His father stood at the window, looking out. Behind his back one hand gripped the other as if in restraint. Gerard was frightened and went away, his brief presence unnoticed.
        ‘Think of that child,’ Rebecca’s mother pleaded in another mood. ‘Stay with us if only for that child.’
        ‘You vicious bitch!’ This furious accusation stuttered out of Gerard’s father, his voice peculiar, his lips trembling in a grimace he could not control.
        Such scenes, seeming like the end of everything that mattered, were later surveyed from the unemotional safety of the new companionship. Regret was exorcized, sore places healed; harshness was the saviour. From information supplied by television a world of sin and romance was put together in the empty attic room. ‘Think of that child!’ Rebecca mimicked, and Gerard adopted his father’s grimace the time he called his mother a vicious bitch. It was fun because the erring couple were so virtuous now.
        ‘I can’t think how it happened.’ Gerard’s version of the guilty husband’s voice was not convincing, but it passed whatever muster was required. ‘I