Read Online Death in Summer by William Trevor - Free Book Online Page B

tired of, odds and ends she might dispose of – he’d give her a good price, old or new, it didn’t matter. She went with him to his house and spread out on a table what she had just acquired. He didn’t pay much in spite of what he’d said about a good price, and never has on any of the occasions she has visited him since. He makes an offer, take it or leave it; the best he can do, times are hard. Bearded, with glasses, he has never revealed his name. His house is stuffy, the windows always tightly closed. The money he pays her comes from odd jobs, she tells Albert, who always wants to know where money comes from. Cleaning, she says. Working a price-gun.
    ‘No, man. No more.’ The last of the black man’s crumbs have been scattered, but the pigeons still crowd his legs.Two weeks he has gone without a drink, he assures the pigeons and the companion who is not present. ‘Honey, that is for you. Honey, I suffer.’
    People wait outside the cinemas, drab against the glamour of the posters and the familiar faces of the stars. Georgina Belle could be a star’s name, and Pettie wonders how it came into her thoughts. ‘A total waste that was,’ a cross voice complains, and a couple walk away.
    The grandmother said they’d only minutes ago decided on another arrangement. She would be coming to live in the house herself, to take her daughter’s place as best she could until the baby was older. It was sensible in the circumstances, but Pettie didn’t listen to why that was. The clock in the panelling struck, five o’clock it would have been. The grandmother said something about the heatwave when she held the front door open, then gave her the ten-pound note.
    In a Wimpy Bar Pettie squirts tomato ketchup on to chips and grey minced meat.
When out to dinner
, Miss Rapp’s column laid down,
refrain from recounting the details of a hospital operation while other folk are eating
. You’d get into the way of things in a house like that one. You’d leave something for Miss Manners, you’d get your grammar right. Blush pink on your fingernails, nothing objectionable, nothing the woman holding the stepladder could sniff at. Magic Touch on any skin defects.
    Her Coca-Cola comes. She sips a little, then slowly begins to eat, not registering the taste, nor where she is. She lights her remaining cigarette and crumples up the empty packet. ‘Come downstairs for a sherry,’ he invites, his quiet baby asleep, a rag doll on the pillow. The sherry glasses havelong stems, two glasses on a red and gold tray. ‘It suits you, Nanny,’ he says, about the uniform they have given her. Two shades of blue, with only touches of white, the stockings black. A widower is lonely: that’s there between them. He doesn’t say it; he doesn’t have to; the old woman couldn’t manage it is what he says, too much for her. It’s dark outside, a winter’s evening and the fire is lit.

4
    Six days go by and then Thaddeus does what he feels he has to, having put it off, but now wanting to get it over. He has been given a time and a place, four o’clock in the Tea Cosy. He brings with him fifty pounds in notes.
    The teashop is in the town where Mrs Ferry was once the receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel. The Beech Trees has gone, and with it Mrs Ferry’s onetime husband, whom she would settle for now. She lives alone, in a room above a confectioner’s. The Tea Cosy is in a busier street, five minutes away.
    ‘Bad Hat!’ Mrs Ferry exclaims from where she sits when Thaddeus enters, lowering his head beneath the beam with a sign on it to warn him.
Bad Hat!
her Valentine message ran seventeen years ago, among others in a local paper.
But good for his ever-loving Dot!
    She has ordered tea, and a plate of cakes, which she was always partial to and used to say she shouldn’t be. She bulges out of a spotted yellow dress, a hat reminiscent of a turban hiding much of her henna hair, her lipstick a splash of crimson. Coloured beads lollop over double