eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
'So is Sylvie Clapper, with false teeth and bleached hair, young witless, cheery. She lives with a slippery Irishman: no children yet and now no chance. Likewise confined, devout Miss Samson with the raw blackberry birthmark worries about her boarding-house, for believers only, and the discovery that her Christian mentor died in disbelief. And Lily Drucker, after repeated abortions, is in for childbirth, while her clawed mother-in-law tries to bait back her son with sausage rolls and Lincoln Creams... And there is William Trevor, taking relays from flies on a hundred walls, snipping, linking, shaping his material with delicate understanding, respect and a sparing trickle - just enough - of humour... A finely observed, gently sensitive comedy, delightful to read, like lived experience to remember' - Daily Telegraph
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504058148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 271 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Devon, EnglandDate of Birth:
May 24, 1928Place of Birth:
Mitchelstown, County Cork, IrelandEducation:
Trinity College, Dublin, 1950Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
At forty-one, Elizabeth Aidallbery had a way of dwelling on her past, and when memories were doubtful there were photographs to help her. At two she was anonymous on a tartan rug. At five she was freckled, thin-legged and laughing in a striped dress. At ten she was sunburnt beneath a tree, her pale hair in plaits, standing with Henry in the garden where her own children played now. There was a wedding photograph, an image that revealed the faded blueness of her eyes because it was in colour.
At forty-one, when she examined herself in the mahogany-framed looking-glass in her bedroom, the faded blueness had not altered and there was a beauty still in the thin, fragile-seeming face. The lines that gathered at the edges of her mouth were hardly noticeable in certain lights, the strands of grey that invaded her pale hair appeared to do so with discretion. There was a nervy look about the eyes, the lips were almost always slightly parted: a twitchy kind of face, she considered it herself. Smooth hair enclosed it like a helmet, calming it down.
The past she examined at forty-one was full of other people. There was her mother first of all, and her father, who had died. There were friends: Henry who once had been her greatest friend, and at school Di Troughton and Evie Faste, and Isabel Everest and Jean Friar and Tricia Hatchett and Betty Kemp. There were other friends later on, at Mr Feuchtwanger's art school, and later still, when she'd become a wife and mother. There was her husband, and Daphne's husband. There was Daphne, whom she'd caused to have a nervous breakdown.
The past was full of changes and moods, of regrets that were still regrets, and resolutions. At seven, aware that her parents were not content in marriage, she had determined to marry happily herself. She had even then visualized a husband, who increased in elegance and charm as the years went on. Looking back at forty-one, she established that as the beginning of her romantic nature. At twelve, she had been unable to weep at her father's funeral and unable, also, to prevent herself from thinking that the house would be nicer now. Looking back, she established that as the beginning of the guilt which had since coloured her life.
Yet she'd felt guilt in her father's lifetime, too. He'd shuffled about the house, a grey, pernickety figure, exuding disapproval. He spread it like a fog about him, damply cold. He had grown like that, her mother said; he'd once been different. Grey clothes, Elizabeth remembered now, grey hair, spectacles hanging on a grey ribbon, a grey untidy tie. She remembered him in armchairs, and coming out of the room he called his study. She remembered him cleaning his shoes, polishing dark brown leather with brushes and a cloth. He blew his nose in a particular way, he pursed his lips, he watched her eating food. Wearily, he closed his eyes over school reports from Miss Henderson's and Miss Gamble's Kindergarten. 'Obstreperous,' he slowly said. 'It says here you're obstreperous, Elizabeth.'
She remembered entering the room he called his study. There was an index finger that pointed at her knuckles and asked her what they were called, and then asked her what they were for. She left the room and stood outside the door she'd closed. She knocked on a panel with the knuckles he'd drawn her attention to, and he told her to come in, saying that was better. She remembered making him a birthday cake, seed-cake because it was the cake he liked.
Dwelling now on her past, with its friends and incidents and the beginnings of this and that, Elizabeth could make little sense of her life as so far it had been. She saw mistakes mainly, made by herself. She saw her life as something that was scattered untidily about, without a pattern, without rhyme or reason. She often wondered if other people, examining their lives in middle age, would have preferred, as she did, to see something tidier and with more purpose. At school Miss Middlesmith had said she had a talent for drawing flowers, and later Mr Feuchtwanger had said that her talent was developing nicely. Petals and pedicels, anther and filament, Sedum album. Primula veris: she hadn't drawn a flower for twelve years.
'Aidallbery,' her mother had said. 'What an odd name!' In Fiesole, in the Pensione Bencista, he was in the hall one night, tall and handsomely dressed, in a brown checked suit. He sat alone at dinner. 'What glorious weather!' he said some other time. He had a face like an eagle's face. He had a beautiful voice. 'What luck to meet you, Mrs Orpen!' he said, addressing her mother.
Her mother chatted, talking about books and episodes in books, and real people. He liked listening to her mother, it showed in his face. Years afterwards he said you could be in a room for hour after hour with her mother and not be bored. Yet her mother had been against the marriage. 'Yes, I did see through that charm,' her mother casually said.
She was nineteen, he was thirteen years older, but in the Pensione Bencista he seemed ageless, and age didn't matter. In London, while still at school, she and Di Troughton and Evie Faste had gone out with a boy called Eric Cross and another called Neville Trim. They'd gone to the pictures, and Eric Cross or Neville Trim had slipped an arm along the seat she was sitting in. Eric Cross had spots on his neck and his chin, Neville Trim had an impediment in his speech. There were other boys, without spots or impediments, who didn't know what to say. There were older ones, working in estate agents' or architects' offices, or qualified already as accountants. There were students at Mr Feuchtwanger's art school, one called Bishop who was rather nice, another called Adamson, who'd said he'd like to marry her. There was Henry, whom she'd lost touch with but who'd then appeared again, outside the Gas Showrooms in Putney High Street one Thursday afternoon. He'd asked her if she'd like to go to the cinema, but she hadn't been able to because she was doing something else. 'Just thought I'd look in,' Henry said another time, arriving at the house one evening. They went for a walk and he put his arm around her and asked her to marry him. 'Dear Henry,' she said. 'No.'
In the Pensione Bencista they sat after dinner, over coffee, in the larger sitting-room. He wasn't at all like Henry, or Eric Cross or Neville Trim. He talked about Egypt and Persia and Peru, and tribes he'd studied, and genealogy and psychiatry. 'The Achaemenians,' he said, 'extended this empire of theirs from what was called the Sind Valley to beyond the Nile. And from the Oxus to the Danube.' He showed her what he meant by drawing a map on a page of a slim, leather-bound note-book.
In London he took her to Dido and Aeneas, and to Wimbledon to see Louise Brough playing. He played tennis with her himself and taught her a thing or two. He was always hailing taxis and sitting in them beside her, faintly smiling, staring straight ahead of him. Timidly she took his arm when they walked along streets, and he said he was proud to be seen with her. He brought her to tea in Gunter's because she was curious about it. He brought her to tea in the Ritz because she was curious about that, too. 'The older man,' Di Troughton said. Evie Faste giggled. It all seemed a joke, a lovely confection of a joke, she and an older man playing tennis and drinking chilled white wine afterwards. Then it all became real, more serious and even better, because she knew he was going to marry her, because he'd asked her and she hadn't for a split second hesitated.
Yet when the moment arrived she didn't like sharing a bed with him. This came as a shock to her and caused her painfully to assume that she wouldn't have liked sharing a bed with any man. Some women were like that, you read about them in newspapers: they didn't like what the divorce courts called the physical side of marriage. On their honeymoon — among ancient ruins in Crete — she didn't tell him, thinking it would be unfair to do so. She was upset by the fact, and somehow ashamed. She didn't tell him, in fact, for nineteen years.
It was sensible that her husband should come and live in her mother's house. He took over the garden and worked quite happily there, cutting the grass in summer, and growing raspberries, and camellias and dahlias, her mother's favourite flowers. In the household he took quite naturally her father's place. In time, even, their eldest daughter's untidiness enraged him, as Elizabeth's untidiness had enraged her father. The noise of his two younger daughters displeased him also. He couldn't work, he complained in unemotional fury, coming out of the room that her father had called his study: no man in the world could work with noise like that going on.
She felt again a feeling of disapproval, and in the flat they'd made for her at the top of the house her mother was soothing, as she'd been in the past. It was incredible, but it did seem true, that beneath the elegant exterior this man was very like her father. A psychiatrist from whom she secretly sought help suggested that through her choice of husband she had sought to exorcize her feelings of guilt about her father. She didn't believe it and said so, causing the psychiatrist patiently to smile. 'In that case, Mrs Aidallbery,' he suggested in his calm voice, 'would you consider it possible that you are attempting to punish your father by punishing the man you married?' The psychiatrist, whose name was Mr Apple, had been recommended by Di Troughton, now Mrs Acheson. Elizabeth didn't understand him and wondered if Di Troughton, given to playing jokes as a child, was playing another one. She was her mother's daughter, she said to Mr Apple: love was cruel to women like her mother and herself. But Mr Apple replied that that was rubbish. She paid him and did not return. It seemed too easy an answer that a psychiatrist should attempt to sort a marriage out with talk of guilt and punishment.
What troubled Elizabeth most was that she felt her husband had developed a disappointed way of looking at her. And when the subject of the children's noise or untidiness came up she felt he considered that she, more than the children, was responsible for the children's shortcomings. In retrospect, it seemed to her that becoming a husband had changed him a little, and becoming a father had changed him greatly. Often she felt that he regarded her as a fourth child in the house, a feeling accentuated by the fact that there were many activities which she engaged in with the children and which he did not. Understandably, he seemed too clever for all that; he was far cleverer than she was, his mind worked at twice the speed. Once she borrowed his car-keys without asking him, and accidentally dropped them down a drain in the road. The incident depressed him and caused him repeatedly to sigh. 'But how could you drop them down a drain?' he asked, shaking his head in disbelief. 'How could you possibly manage to?'
He'd suggested that she should read books about the Achaemenians and reports on the integration of the central African tribes that interested him. Dutifully she did so, but when she once suggested that he might like to glance through Wives and Daughters, which he'd never read, he said he didn't think it would much involve him. This was a disappointment for Elizabeth. Her mother had a way of speaking about fictional characters as if they were real: Mr Dubbley, Daisy Mutlar, Perugia Gaukrodger, Mr Edgeworth, General Conyers, Miss Keene, Major Ending, Lady Glenmire, Mr Woodhouse, and quite a few others. Elizabeth had become used to this kind of chatter, which had been there ever since the days she and Di Troughton had first come across the girls of the Chalet School and the girls of the Abbey School, and Angela Brazil's girls with their slim black legs, and Wendy and Jinx, and not-so-simple Sophie, and Lettice Leaf the greenest girl in school. Later on, she and her mother and Di Troughton used to talk endlessly about the slow wits of Captain Hastings and Henry Holt's Murder in Mayfair, and The Crimson Circle by Edgar Wallace, and Inspector Alleyn and Albert Campion and Arsene Lupin. Di Troughton used to lie on the floor, laughing and laughing over The Lunatic at Large and The Lunatic Still at Large. 'Lunatic?' he'd said when she told him that. 'No, I don't think I recall books about a lunatic'
In the early days of her marriage Elizabeth had come to recognize the virtues of reports on African tribal integration, but now, at forty-one, she felt all that had been a pretence on her part. Everything had been a pretence, lying in bed with him, the endless coming up to scratch, the listening to a voice she'd once thought beautiful and then no longer did, the bearing of children because it was the thing to do, apologizing for noise and untidiness, apologizing when keys fell down the drain.
'You're desiccated,' she'd shouted at him, weeping when she said she wanted a divorce. He was fifty-One then, tall and upright, still with his eagle's face, not taking her out to tea any more. He stood quite still when she told him that she wanted a divorce, then he turned his back and looked through the french windows into the garden. 'I just want a divorce,' she said, knowing as she said it that it was more than that. It was more than loving someone else and wanting to have another marriage: she resented with a bitter passion the years she'd wasted with a man who'd married her because she was beautiful and young, so that she might listen and he could feel proud. The years were like useless leaves, dead now, yielding no memories that she wanted. There should be more than three children to show for nineteen years of a marriage, she cried with violence in her voice. And when he interrupted her, icily pointing out that she was endeavouring to justify her dirty weekends with grand but meaningless talk, she shouted at him again that he was desiccated. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Yet you haven't done badly out of me.'
He should have married a studious, tweeded woman who was older, actually, than he was, who wore studious glasses and did not often smile, who wore hats and brown coats and could talk about the Elamite script. He'd have been happy with such a woman, travelling importantly to examine Pasargadae. In a cold university somewhere he'd have been happy with her, with terracotta figures of a dead civilization for children, pieces of pots, bricks with signs on them. She couldn't help her bitterness and, looking back, she only blamed herself. Of her own free will she had once rejoiced in him. Of her own free will she had rejoiced when each of her three children had been born, delighting in them more than she'd ever delighted in drawing petals and pedicels. But after nineteen years of marriage she was now divorced, and her eldest daughter, over whose birth she had rejoiced most of all, appeared to regard her as a person not worth having a conversation with.
In Elizabeth's less cheery moments the disappointments and the untidiness of her life, and the guilt that had begun the day of her father's funeral, had a way of combining and of lowering her spirits further. Increasingly in middle age she found that combination hard to bear and felt, because of it, alone. She knew it was a silly feeling, because she wasn't in the least alone. She had friends. Her mother was still alive. She had, in Mrs Orvitski, a devoted daily help, and in her childhood companion, Henry, a devoted admirer. She had children, even if one of them now rarely spoke to her. It was absurd to feel alone when other people really were alone: people in bed-sitting-rooms, the elderly and the unhappy, people you read about, who had nowhere to go on Christmas Day. Her life wasn't in the least like that.
When Dr Love told Elizabeth that in his opinion she should undergo a hysterectomy, and when his recommendation was confirmed by Mr Alstrop-Smith, Elizabeth did not regard the news as momentous. She did not consider that this operation was, or would become, a landmark in her life, like her father's death, or her marriage, or her divorce. Her womb, at forty-one, might well not be up to its purpose, she considered instead: its removal was probably neither here nor there. But as the day of this operation approached, Elizabeth found herself more intensely involved with her past, as though she privately regretted this final surrender to middle age, or as though in some subconscious way she was more apprehensive about the operation than she admitted to herself. Whatever it was, the past that she had come so much to dwell upon seemed now to possess her. The guilt that flavoured it mocked her, and her errors of judgement took on larger dimensions. The damage she believed she'd inflicted on other people hurt her more, the patternless quality of the whole oppressed her. She would have listened to any comforting voice or to any explanation, but at the time there happened to be neither.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Elizabeth Alone"
by .
Copyright © 1973 Estate of William Trevor.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
