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Authors: William Trevor
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lost.
‘You’re tired.’
‘Not really.’
‘I keep not hearing what you’re saying.’
‘I said I wasn’t tired.’
Mallory didn’t believe she hadn’t been heard: her husband was closer to her than he was and he’d heard the ‘Not really’ himself. The scratchy irritation nurtured malevolence unpredictably in both of them, making her not say why she had cried and causing him to lie. My God, Mallory thought, what they are wasting!
‘No one’s blaming you for being tired. No one can help being tired.’
She didn’t take that up and there was silence while, again, the surface held and Mallory finished his Caesar salad. He was the only diner on his own in the upstairs restaurant, where for a moment on his arrival he had been faintly disappointed not to be recognized. He had recognized, himself, the features of the waiter who had led him to his table; there had later been that familiarity about the younger one; nor could he help remembering, from four years ago, the easy warmth of the welcome that had suggested stirrings of recognition then. But he hadn’t been a man on his own four years ago, and naturally it was difficult for restaurant waiters when they were presented with only part of what there’d been before. And perhaps he was a little more crumpled than before; and four years was a longer lapse of time than there ever was in the past.
‘My sister married Geoffrey,’ the girl at the table behind him was saying.
‘Yes, she did. And all I’m trying to say—’
‘I know what you’re saying.’
‘It’s just I wonder if you do.’
‘You’re saying I thought it would be like Geoffrey and Ellen. That I was looking forward to what isn’t there.’
‘It’s hard to understand why anyone married Geoffrey.’
Tonight it didn’t matter what they said. Dreary Geoffrey, who rose early to read his emails or scrutinize his bank statements, who liked to lead an ordered life, was enough tonight to nourish their need to punish one another. That her sister’s marriage wasn’t much was something to throw into their exchanges, to comment on tonight because it hadn’t, perhaps, been touched upon before. ‘Now, we don’t know one single bit of that,’ Julia in her occasionally stern way might have said, and seemed to say it now. ‘Talk to me instead.’
He smiled. And across the restaurant a woman in the jolly birthday party waved at him—as if she thought he’d smiled at her, or imagined she must know him and couldn’t place him, or just felt sorry for him, alone like that in such convivial surroundings. He nodded, not letting his smile go, then looked away. For all her moments of sternness, how often on their travels had Julia speculated as wildly as he ever had himself about people they didn’t know! Lovers embracing in the Fauchon tea-rooms, the Japanese at the Uffizi, Germans in the Lido sun, or café-table chatterers anywhere. And they’d been listened to themselves, that stood to reason—he taken for a country doctor, Julia had maintained, and she an almoner or something like it. English both of them, of course, for anyone could tell, their voices confirmed as upper class when there’d been curiosity as to that.
‘ Va bene ?’ the waiter who’d been the primo piatto boy enquired, lifting away the Caesar-salad plate. ‘Was fine?’
‘ Va bene. Va bene .’
‘ Grazie, signore .’
San Giovanni in Bragora was where the Cima Baptism they liked was: elusive on the train that morning and ever since, the name of the church came back. Sometimes when you looked it seemed that Christ was still in the shallow water, but looking again it wasn’t so: the almost naked figure stood on dry land at the water’s edge. The church of the Frari had Bellini’s triptych; the saints he’d painted when he was over eighty were in San Giovanni Crisostomo. How could it make a difference, not going again, alone, to admire them? Or standing or not standing before the Vivarini Annunciation in San
‘You’re tired.’
‘Not really.’
‘I keep not hearing what you’re saying.’
‘I said I wasn’t tired.’
Mallory didn’t believe she hadn’t been heard: her husband was closer to her than he was and he’d heard the ‘Not really’ himself. The scratchy irritation nurtured malevolence unpredictably in both of them, making her not say why she had cried and causing him to lie. My God, Mallory thought, what they are wasting!
‘No one’s blaming you for being tired. No one can help being tired.’
She didn’t take that up and there was silence while, again, the surface held and Mallory finished his Caesar salad. He was the only diner on his own in the upstairs restaurant, where for a moment on his arrival he had been faintly disappointed not to be recognized. He had recognized, himself, the features of the waiter who had led him to his table; there had later been that familiarity about the younger one; nor could he help remembering, from four years ago, the easy warmth of the welcome that had suggested stirrings of recognition then. But he hadn’t been a man on his own four years ago, and naturally it was difficult for restaurant waiters when they were presented with only part of what there’d been before. And perhaps he was a little more crumpled than before; and four years was a longer lapse of time than there ever was in the past.
‘My sister married Geoffrey,’ the girl at the table behind him was saying.
‘Yes, she did. And all I’m trying to say—’
‘I know what you’re saying.’
‘It’s just I wonder if you do.’
‘You’re saying I thought it would be like Geoffrey and Ellen. That I was looking forward to what isn’t there.’
‘It’s hard to understand why anyone married Geoffrey.’
Tonight it didn’t matter what they said. Dreary Geoffrey, who rose early to read his emails or scrutinize his bank statements, who liked to lead an ordered life, was enough tonight to nourish their need to punish one another. That her sister’s marriage wasn’t much was something to throw into their exchanges, to comment on tonight because it hadn’t, perhaps, been touched upon before. ‘Now, we don’t know one single bit of that,’ Julia in her occasionally stern way might have said, and seemed to say it now. ‘Talk to me instead.’
He smiled. And across the restaurant a woman in the jolly birthday party waved at him—as if she thought he’d smiled at her, or imagined she must know him and couldn’t place him, or just felt sorry for him, alone like that in such convivial surroundings. He nodded, not letting his smile go, then looked away. For all her moments of sternness, how often on their travels had Julia speculated as wildly as he ever had himself about people they didn’t know! Lovers embracing in the Fauchon tea-rooms, the Japanese at the Uffizi, Germans in the Lido sun, or café-table chatterers anywhere. And they’d been listened to themselves, that stood to reason—he taken for a country doctor, Julia had maintained, and she an almoner or something like it. English both of them, of course, for anyone could tell, their voices confirmed as upper class when there’d been curiosity as to that.
‘ Va bene ?’ the waiter who’d been the primo piatto boy enquired, lifting away the Caesar-salad plate. ‘Was fine?’
‘ Va bene. Va bene .’
‘ Grazie, signore .’
San Giovanni in Bragora was where the Cima Baptism they liked was: elusive on the train that morning and ever since, the name of the church came back. Sometimes when you looked it seemed that Christ was still in the shallow water, but looking again it wasn’t so: the almost naked figure stood on dry land at the water’s edge. The church of the Frari had Bellini’s triptych; the saints he’d painted when he was over eighty were in San Giovanni Crisostomo. How could it make a difference, not going again, alone, to admire them? Or standing or not standing before the Vivarini Annunciation in San
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