Free Death in Summer by William Trevor Page B

outside she takes his arm.
    ‘That’s never your car, dear!’ she exclaims, eyeing Thaddeus’s battered old Saab and Rosie in it. ‘Well, I never!’
    ‘Are you far? Is it worth driving?’
    ‘A minute’s walk. You have a dog, dear.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Remember the Sealyham at the hotel?’
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    ‘He died, of course. We buried him at the back. Remember Oscar? The daytime porter?’
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    ‘He went a fortnight later, poor old Oscar.’
    She opens a door beside a shop window full of jars of sweets, Rolo and Kit-Kat and Mars bars advertised, Easter eggs reduced. The hall they pass through to reach uncarpeted stairs is stacked with cartons of similar confectionery, and strewn with junk mail. People listen in the Tea Cosy, Mrs Ferry explains, they listen and they watch, he probably noticed. In the room she lives in she pours out gin, not offering it first. Both glasses have lipstick on them.
    ‘I haven’t changed my tipple.’ Mrs Ferry winks, adding the Martini. There should be lemon, she apologizes, there should be ice. But lemons are a price these days, and ice she can never manage, the fridge she has. A fluffy teddybear, in blue with one eye gone, is on the bed.
    ‘Cheers, dear.’
    ‘I must be careful. I have to drive.’
    ‘Poor Oscar went in the hall. He carried in a couple’s bags, the next thing was we were loosening the poor chap’s collar. “I’ll sit down just a minute,” he said. Well, truth to tell, that was the end.’
    Thaddeus nods, remembering Oscar, old even in 1979, burly and genial. He always suspected that Oscar knew.
    ‘Your mother wasn’t long gone in our day, dear. You used to mention your mother the odd time.’
    ‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’
    ‘Oh, definitely. On the strange side, I considered, but of course I never said. One’s nervous, young. A foreign lady, wasn’t she?’
    ‘My mother was Polish.’
    ‘Romantic, it sounded. Not that you’d ever say much.’
    He never had; he never did. His childhood in that threadbare past is one of shame: his unwanted presence, his garden friendship with the ghosts of pets, footsteps that passed by when he lay awake, whispers on the stairs.
    ‘Close you were, dear. Oh, very close.’
    ‘I suppose I was.’
    He takes two twenty-pound notes and a ten from his wallet and places them on a bamboo table. He can see her counting them from a distance. He tells her how much is there.
    ‘Butter side up you’ve landed, dear. I haven’t done so well myself. What’s she like?’
    ‘I don’t really want to talk about Letitia.’
    ‘I know, dear, I know. I always thought you’d end up with a smasher, I bet she’s that. An eye for the ladies, Chef used to say when you hawked your produce in the Trees.’
    He smiles, but it isn’t enough. He knows what Mrs Ferry is thinking because it’s there in her eyes. It was there in the teashop, it was there when she embraced him: she was his fancy woman, and now he’s gone stuffy on her. ‘He can be so blooming stuffy,’ she used to say, referring to her husband. ‘He gets my goat sometimes.’
    ‘Palpitations is what I suffer mainly,’ she’s saying now. ‘A warning, they give it as, and then there’s the digestive thing.I’ve had more barium meals than a cat’s had mice, and still it’s a bewilderment to the medics.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Dot.’
    ‘You were romantic yourself, you know, left alone in your big old house. I’d think of you, and long to be there with you. Oh, others did too, I don’t delude myself. What was she called, that girl you had before you and I had our naughtiness? Beatrice? Beryl?’
    ‘Bertranda.’
    ‘Funny, that, I always thought. You’re still seeing Bertranda, dear?’
    ‘I haven’t seen Bertranda since 1977.’
    ‘Well, there you go. Not that I ever knew the girl, but everything’s of interest as you get older. You find that, Thad?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘You spent a night at the Trees. When his Cheltenham uncle died.