The Women by William Trevor

July 30, 2021

The Women

by William Trevor

Growing up in the listless nineteen-eighties, Cecilia Normanton knew her father well, her mother not at all. Mr. Normanton was handsome and tall, with steely gray hair brushed carefully every day so that it was as he wished it to be. His shirts and suits gave the impression of being part of him, as his house in Buckingham Street did, and the family business that bore his name. Only Mr. Normanton’s profound melancholy was entirely his own. It was said by people who knew him well that melancholy had not always been his governing possession, that once upon a time he had been carefree and a little wild, that the loss of his wife—not to the cruelty of an early death but to her preference for another man—had left him wounded in a way that was irreparable.

Remembered by those who had known it, the marriage was said to have echoed with laughter, there’d been parties and the pleasure of spending money, the Normantons had appeared to delight in one another. Yet less than two years after the marriage began it was over; and in the Buckingham Street house Cecilia heard nothing that was different. “Your mother wasn’t here anymore,” her father said, and Cecilia didn’t know if this was his way of telling her that her mother had died and she didn’t feel she could ask. She lived with the uncertainty, but increasingly believed there had been a death from which her father had never recovered and could not speak of. In a pocket-sized yellow folder at the back of a drawer there were photographs of a smiling girl, petite and beautiful, on a seashore and in a garden, and waving from a train. Cecilia’s father, smiling, too, was sometimes there, and Cecilia imagined their happiness, their escapades, their pleasure in being together. She pitied her father as he was now, his memories darkened by his loss.

Dark-haired and tall for her age, her slim legs elegant in schoolgirl black, Cecilia was taken to be older than she was. Eighteen or nineteen was the guess of the youths and men who could not resist a second glance at her prettiness on the street: she was fourteen. She didn’t know why she was looked at on the street, for an awareness of being pretty was not yet part of her. It wasn’t something that was mentioned by her father or by Mr. Grace, the retired schoolmaster whom her father had engaged as her tutor in preference to sending her to one of the nearby schools. It wasn’t mentioned by the Maltraverses, who daily came to the house also, to cook and clean.

Among these adult people Cecilia was lonely, and friendless, too, in Buckingham Street. At weekends her father did his best, making an effort to be interesting on their strolls about the deserted City streets—the Strand and Ludgate Hill, Cheapside and Poultry, Threadneedle, Cornhill. He pointed out the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange: he said that London’s City was a village in its way. Sometimes, as a change, he booked two rooms at a small hotel in Suffolk, usually at Hintlesham or Orford.

Cecilia enjoyed these weekend excursions, but the weekdays continued to pass slowly, for Mr. Grace came only in the mornings and the Maltraverses were not given to conversation. In the afternoons, when she had completed the work she’d been set, she had the spacious rooms of the house to herself and poked about in drawers, watched television, or opened the yellow folder to look again at the photographs of her mother. When she had money she went out to buy licorice allsorts or Kit-Kat.

She was fortunate, she knew. No one was unkind to her, no one was angry. She imagined nothing would change, that Mr. Grace would always come, the Maltraverses always be too busy for conversation, that always there’d be the silent afternoon house, the drawers, and being alone. But her father, sensitive to the pressure of duty where his child was concerned, did not demur when he was advised that the time had come to send her away to boarding school, to be a girl among other girls.

“You shall have a flowerbed,” Miss Watson said.

Smart as a mannequin, she was delicately attractive in different ways. Her voice was, her slimness, the gentleness in her eyes. A softly woven scarf—a galaxy of reds and rust against the gray of her dress—was loosely draped and almost reached the ground.

“We are happy people here,” she assured Cecilia. “You shall be, too.”

Amhurst the school was called, and Miss Watson, who was its headmistress, explained how the name had come about, told how the school had been the seat of a landed family, how outbuildings had been transformed into music rooms and laboratories, art rooms and the weaving room, only the classroom blocks being a new addition. She took Cecilia to a small brick-walled garden, which was, and always had been, the headmistress’s. She opened an ornamental iron gate in an archway, then latched it again as if shutting away everything of the school itself. She pointed at a flowerbed with nothing growing in it and said it would be Cecilia’s own, where she could cultivate the flowers she liked best. Old Trigol was the school gardener, she said, a dear person when you got to know him.

Cecilia disliked the place intensely, felt lonelier and more on her own than she ever had in Buckingham Street. She wrote to her father, begging him to come and take her away. She was the only new girl that term, and no one bothered with her except a senior girl whom Miss Watson had ordered to. “You pray?” this older girl asked her and suggested that they might pray together. “Every meal’s inedible,” Mr. Normanton read. “A girl was sick after pilchards.”

But as time went on Cecilia’s letters became less wretched. She discovered Mozart, Le Douanier Rousseau, and—recommended by the religious girl—St. Teresa of Lisieux. She found “The Moon and Sixpence” and “The Constant Nymph” among the well-used books in the school library. Two girls, Daisy and Amanda, became her friends. The religious girl reported to Miss Watson that settling in had begun.

Mr. Normanton came often during that first term. He took Cecilia out on weekend jaunts—lunch at the Castletower Hotel, tea in the tearooms on the river. He met Daisy and Amanda, and before the term ended took them out, too. He was glad he had listened to the advice he’d been given, had realized what he hadn’t on his own: that his child would benefit and be happy as a girl among other girls.

Cecilia grew lilies of the valley in her flowerbed, having decided it was her favorite flower. She picked the first bunch on her fifteenth birthday and offered it to Miss Watson.

“You are a person we take pride in, Cecilia,” Miss Watson said.

The two women who were watching the hockey were on the other touchline, directly opposite where Cecilia, with Daisy and Amanda, was watching it, too, since attendance at home matches was compulsory. Cecilia remembered the women being on the touchline before, because when the hockey ended they’d passed close to where she and Daisy and Amanda were looking for Amanda’s watch, which had slipped from her wrist without her noticing. “Someone’ll stand on it!” Amanda was wailing and the two women had hesitated as if about to look for the watch, too. Daisy found it, undamaged, on the grass, and the women went on. But when they hesitated they’d stared at Cecilia in a way that was quite disconcerting.

There was sudden cheering and clapping: Amhurst had scored. St. Hilda’s—in their unbecoming brown jerseys a glum contrast to Amhurst’s jolly red-and-blue—looked defeated already and probably would be, for Amhurst never lost. It would have been Elizabeth Statham who’d scored, Cecilia imagined, and hoped it wasn’t or it would mean a lot of showing off later on. But Amanda said it was. “Bloody Statham,” Daisy muttered.

They wanted St. Hilda’s to win. Favoring the other side eased their indignation at having to stand in the cold for an hour and a half on a winter afternoon. They hated watching hockey almost more than anything.

“I tried to read ‘Virginibus Puerisque,’ ” Amanda said. “Ghastly.” Daisy agreed, and recommended “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?”

Cecilia wondered who the women were who’d come back again only a few weeks after she’d seen them before. They wouldn’t be Old Girls because Old Girls always hung around Miss Watson or Miss Smith and they weren’t doing that. They wouldn’t be supporters of St. Hilda’s because the visiting team hadn’t been St. Hilda’s the other time. She wondered if for some reason they enjoyed watching hockey matches, the way Colonel Forbes enjoyed watching cricket on Saturday after Saturday, in the summer term. Or like Trigol, who was allowed to take the afternoon off from the garden for Sports Day because he’d once been a high-jump champion, which wasn’t easy to imagine, Trigol being in his seventies now.

When the two women stared at Cecilia the smaller one had smiled. Cecilia had smiled back, since it would have been rude not to, but Daisy and Amanda hadn’t seen that any more than they’d seen the staring, and afterward Cecilia hadn’t said anything because it was embarrassing, and silly to go on about.

Miss Chalmers blew the final whistle and there were three cheers for St. Hilda’s and then for Amhurst, followed by clapping when the two teams walked off the pitch. The people who’d been watching followed, groups breaking up and new ones forming as they made their way back to the school buildings. The two women became lost in the crowd and Cecilia was aware of feeling relieved. But they were there again, by the cattle grid, where cars were parked on match days. The St. Hilda’s bus was there, too, the driver folding away the newspaper he’d been reading. The two women didn’t get into a car and drive off, as Cecilia thought they would. They stood about as if they had a reason to, and Cecilia avoided looking in their direction.

They had taken the path through the trees and, emerging from what had become a small wood, they marvelled at the open land, as that morning they had marvelled at sunshine in February, misty though it was. Nothing as tiresome as rain had spoiled their walk from the railway station or their returning to it now.

“I would have travelled a million miles for this afternoon,” Miss Keble summed up their outing as they approached the first of the bungalows on the town’s outskirts.

Miss Cotell—less given to exaggeration than her friend—said nothing, but in her reticence there was no denial that the afternoon had been a pleasure. How could it not have been, she thought, their presence for the second time unquestioned, and the feeling as well that they had been right to return? How could all that not have been a treat?

Miss Keble, sensing these thoughts, kept the subject going, marvelling that so little achieved should seem so much a triumph, yet understanding that it should be. She would not easily forget the faces of the girls, their voices, too, and how politely they stood back, respecting strangers. All of it was impossible to forget.

Miss Cotell again was silent but still no less impressed and then, quite suddenly, affected in a different way, an urge to weep restrained. On the homeward train her tears, permitted now, were not of sorrowing or distress but came because her friend understood so much so well, because agreement between them, never faltering, had been today more than it had ever been before.

Guessing all this, Miss Keble watched Miss Cotell recovering her composure. For some minutes they both gazed out at the landscape and the image of a prehistoric animal cut into the limestone of a distant hill.

“I’m sorry,” Miss Cotell apologized. “Stupid.”

“Of course it wasn’t.”

Miss Keble went in search of tea, but there wasn’t any to be found. Miss Cotell fell asleep.

The two—of an age, at fifty-five—had retired early from a government department. They had met there thirty-odd years ago, and their friendship had flourished on the mores of office life ever since, Miss Keble remaining in Benefits (Family), Miss Cotell making a brief foray into Pensions and then returning to Benefits. They had been together since, as close in retirement as they were before it.

The landscape Miss Cotell was unaware of, while she dreamed instantly forgotten dreams, faded into winter dusk. Miss Keble failed to interest herself in a newspaper someone had left behind and instead thought about the house they were returning to, and the rooms in which their two lives had become entangled over the years, for which furniture, piece by piece, had been chosen together, where childhood memories had been exchanged. Miss Keble, as she sometimes did when she was away from the house for longer than usual, saw as if in a vision the reminders it held of foreign places where there’d been holidays: the Costa del Sol; the beach at Rimini; Vernon, where they’d stayed when they visited Monet’s garden; and the unidentified setting where an obliging stranger had operated Miss Cotell’s Kodak, allowing them to pose together. The house, the rooms, these images of themselves in places visited meant everything to Miss Keble, as equally they did to Miss Cotell.

The house, in a terrace, was small, without a garden. At the back, the feature of a concrete yard was a row of potted plants arranged against a cream-distempered wall. Curtains of fine net protected the two downstairs front windows from the glances of passing pedestrians; at night, flowery chintz was drawn across; upstairs there were blinds. Everything—and in the yard, too—had been made as Miss Cotell and Miss Keble wanted it, an understanding that became another element in their relationship. Nothing had been undertaken, no changes made, without agreement.

This house, in darkness, became theirs again when the train journey ended. It was cold and they switched on electric fires. They discussed what food should be cooked, or not cooked, if tonight they should open a tin of salmon or manage on sandwiches and tea. Both settled for a poached egg on toast.

“It was good of you, Keble,” Miss Cotell said when, snug in their heated kitchen, they sat down to eat. “I have to thank you.”

Their calling one another by surname only was a habit left behind by office life, for although they did not regret their early retirement office life clung on. They had wondered about other clerkly work, but it wasn’t easy—and in the end impossible—to find anything suitable, especially since they stipulated that they should not be separated.

“Both times I wanted to come with you,” Miss Keble said. “And I will again.”

Tidily, Miss Cotell drew her knife and fork together on her empty plate. “I wonder, though,” she said, “if I have the heart for going there again.”

“Oh, what a thing, Cotell! Of course you have!”

“What more can come of it?” And whispering as if she spoke privately, although there was no privacy between them, Miss Cotell softly repeated, “What more?”

Miss Keble knew and did not say. Warm and pleasant, the euphoria brought about by the day still possessed her. She wished Miss Cotell no ill will, wished her all the peace in the world, but still could not help welcoming in a way that was natural to her the exhilaration she experienced. She did not press or urge: they were neither of them like that. Resisting the flicker of satisfaction that threatened to disturb her features, she gathered up the cups and saucers.

Miss Cotell folded the tablecloth and put away the salt and pepper. “How difficult,” she murmured, “to know what’s right.”

“Of course,” Miss Keble said.

It wasn’t until the following term that Cecilia again saw the two women. Summer had come, the long, light evenings, the smell of grass just cut, the flowerbeds of Miss Watson’s brick-walled garden bright with crocosmia and sweet pea, with echium and geranium sanguineum. When she was younger, Cecilia had preferred the coziness of winter, but no longer did. She loved the sunshine and its warmth, her too pale skin lightly browned, freckles on her arms.

She saw the women when she was returning from taking the afternoon letters to the postbox, a fourth-form duty that routinely came once a fortnight. She had called into Ridley’s when the letters were posted—honeycomb chocolate for Daisy, Mademoiselle’s bonbons. The women were on the path through the trees, coming toward her.

They must live near by, Cecilia thought. Probably they went for walks and had found their way to the hockey pitch. But hockey was over now until September.

Sunlight came through the trees in shafts, new beech leaves making dappled shadows on the women’s clothes. How drab those clothes were! Cecilia thought. How ugly the taller woman’s features were, the hollow cheeks, her crooked teeth, one with a corner gone. Her friend was dumpy.

They had stopped, and Cecilia felt she should also, although she didn’t want to.

“What weather at last!” the dumpy woman said.

They asked her her name and said that was a lovely name when she told them. Violets were held out to her to smell. They said where they’d picked them. A dell they called the place, near the fingerpost. They could have picked an armful.

“We hoped we’d see you,” the taller woman said. “For you, my dear.”

Again the violets were held out, this time for Cecilia to take.

“We’re not meant to pick the flowers.”

Both smiled at once. “You didn’t pick them, you might explain. A gift.”

“Look this way, Cecilia,” the dumpy woman begged.

She had a camera, but the distant chiming of the afternoon roll-call bell had already begun and Cecilia said she had to go.

“Just quickly, dear.” They both spoke at once, saying they mustn’t keep her, and when she hurried away Cecilia heard the voices continuing, a monotone kept low, hardly changing from one voice to the other. She could tell she was being watched, that the women were standing there instead of going on.

Miss Keble, who had not experienced this aspect of life, was aware without resentment that she lived at second hand. Her friend had done things: their reminiscences, so often exchanged, allowed no doubt about that. Yet Miss Cotell, while seeming to lead the way, did not. Miss Keble, through listening and knowing what should be done, had years ago taken charge. “How little I would be, alone!” Miss Cotell had a way of saying and Miss Keble loved to hear it. Accepting her lesser role, she knew that it was she, in the end, who ordered their lives and wielded power.

She turned the pages of an old book she had never thrown away and knew almost by heart, “Dr Bradley Remembers.” But her thoughts did not connect with the people it again presented to her. What innocence there was in the girl’s eyes! She closed her own and saw the unspoiled features still a child’s, the dark, dark hair, the blue-and-red blazer, the pleated gray skirt. Vividly, recollection refreshed for Miss Keble all that the day had offered, and the joy that should have been her friend’s became her own.

Miss Cotell dreamed. When she answered the doorbell Father Humphrey was standing there, his back to her at first. “All done,” he said, his voice stern, his handshake firm. “Thank you,” he said, not opening the envelope she gave him.

Because Cecilia was to be Thisbe, Mr. Normanton was given a seat in the front row. His daughter’s ambition, he knew, was one day to be an actress, a secret shared only with him. There had been such intimacies since Cecilia had gone away to Amhurst, as if each separation and each pleasurable reunion had influenced a closeness that had not been evident or felt before. He understood Cecilia’s reluctance to reveal to her friends the presumption of a talent, to keep from them her English teacher’s prediction that she would in time play Ophelia, and one day Lady Macbeth. It delighted Mr. Normanton that all this had come about, that his solitary child had been drawn out in ways he had not been able to find himself, that in spite of his awkwardness as a father she had turned to him with her confidences.

Miss Watson took her place beside him, whispering something he couldn’t hear. The houselights dimmed, all chatter ceased.

Afterward, Miss Cotell and Miss Keble talked about the evening, tickets for which Miss Keble had discovered could be purchased by the public when the requirements of friends and parents had been satisfied. They’d been at the back and more than a little cramped but hadn’t minded. They had noticed the honoring of Mr. Normanton, placed next to the headmistress, and when someone asked Miss Keble who he was she was able to say he was the father of the girl who had been enthusiastically applauded as Thisbe.

It was almost midnight now, and in their bed-and-breakfast lodgings their beds were close enough to allow conversation that would not disturb if their voices were kept low. Tonight had felt like the height of what they could hope for, Miss Cotell reflected, the end at last of what had been a beginning, when, alone, she had visited what Father Humphrey called the priest house on a cold April afternoon a long time ago. “He’ll come to you when he’s ready,” a slatternly woman with a bucket and mop curtly informed her, and didn’t answer when Miss Cotell remarked on the weather. “Well, now?” Father Humphrey greeted her, when he came, a big, tall man who asked her how she had heard of him and she explained that another girl in Pensions had mentioned him.

Awake, Miss Keble also was drawn back to the memory of that afternoon, to the slovenly woman, to the priests who’d passed silently through the room where Miss Cotell waited. Both had thought it likely that tonight they would talk again about that time, but found they didn’t. A lorry clattered by on the street outside, somewhere a dog ceased to bark.

Miss Cotell and Miss Keble slept then. Period costumes colored their unconscious, and the rhythms of period music were faintly there again; and Mr. Normanton’s dark-blue suit was, his polka-dotted tie, the hat he carried with his coat.

“I cannot leave,” Miss Cotell confessed at breakfast. “I cannot without saying how all of it was wonderful. I cannot, Keble.”

They bought two gifts, Miss Cotell’s brooch a circle of colored stones set in silvered plate, Miss Keble’s a selection of chocolates she was assured were special. They had become familiar with the bells of the school, the one that ended classes, the lunchtime summons, the roll-call bell at half-past four, the hurry-up one five minutes later. They knew a clearing in the woods and brought the sandwiches they’d made there. They could see the path, but no one appeared on it all day.

It had to be said, Miss Keble, impatient, told herself while they waited. It had to be, and Cotell was not the one to say it, for it was not her way. Cotell did not ever press herself, never had, never would. Too easily she went timid. But even so, and more than ever, Miss Keble could see in her friend’s eyes the longing that had so often been there since they’d first begun to come here. She could sense it today, in gestures and intimations, in tears blinked back.

At twenty past four they walked to the school.

Cecilia caught a single glimpse of the two women and looked away and didn’t look again. Whoever was on afternoon duty would surely ask them what they wanted, why they were here in Founder’s Quad, where visitors never were without a reason. She heard a prefect asking who they were, and someone saying she didn’t know. It was a relief at least that Elizabeth Statham was excused this roll call because every afternoon now she had to train for Sports Day.

“We wanted just to say how much we enjoyed last night,” the taller of the women said, and the dumpy one added that wild horses wouldn’t have stopped them from coming back to say it.

“These are for you,” the tall one said.

They held out packages in different-colored wrapping paper, and Cecilia remembered the flowers they’d pressed on her, which she’d had to throw away. It was Miss Smith on duty, but she appeared to be unconcerned by the women’s presence, even acknowledging it with a hospitable nod in their direction as if she remembered them from last night. They murmured to one another, their voices low when the roll was called and while Miss Smith read out two brief announcements.

“Cecilia, if you visited us, you would like our house,” the dumpy woman said then. “We’re not that far away.” She said that the packages, which Cecilia had not accepted, were gifts, that the address of their house was included with them, the phone number, too.

No one was near enough to hear, and the curiosity about the two women had dissipated. Already girls were moving away.

“They are for you,” the tall woman repeated.

Cecilia took the packages, then changed her mind and put them on a nearby bench. “I don’t know you. It’s kind of you to give me presents, but I don’t know why you want to.”

“Cecilia,” the dumpy woman said, “you’ll have heard of Father Humphrey?”

“I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

The tall woman shook her head. She had looked startled when the name was mentioned, had held a hand out as if protesting that it shouldn’t be, anxiety in her eyes.

“Father Humphrey died,” she nonetheless went on. “Miss Cotell heard. And when she went back to the priest house she asked me to be with her for support. The same cleaning woman was there and I said that any papers left behind might concern Miss Cotell. The woman had her objections, but she let us peruse the papers for five minutes only and, truth to tell, five minutes were enough. Father Humphrey was a man who wrote everything down.”

Cecilia wondered if the women were unbalanced, if they had found a way of wandering from a home for the deranged. For a moment she felt sorry for them, but then the smaller one began to talk about their house, about a cat called Raggles, and flowers in pots, and after a hesitation the tall one joined in. They didn’t sound then as Cecilia imagined the mad would sound, and the moment of pity passed. The cat had strayed into their back yard as a kitten. Their house was called Sans Souci. If she came she could spend a night, they said. They spoke as if they were suggesting she should come often and described the bedroom she would have, which they had wallpapered themselves.

“How much we’d like it if you came!” Through the anxiety that had not gone away, the tall woman smiled as she spoke, her chipped tooth, crooked and discolored, sticking out more than the others.

“My dear, Miss Cotell is your mother,” Miss Keble said.

Cecilia went away, leaving the two packages on the bench, but she had gone only a few yards when she heard the women’s voices, raised and angry as she never had heard them before. She looked back once and only for a moment.

They were not as she had left them. They confronted one another, trying to keep their voices down but not succeeding. “I gave my sworn word,” the woman who had been called her mother was bitterly exclaiming.

The voices clashed in accusation and denial, contempt and scorn; and there was the sobbing then of the woman who felt herself deprived. She had wanted only to be near her child, all she deserved. “No more than that.” Cecilia heard the words choked out. “And in your awful jealousy how well you have destroyed the little I might have had.”

Cecilia hurried then. “We cannot come back,” she heard, but only just. “Not once again. Not ever now.”

There was a protest furiously snapped out, and nothing after that was comprehensible. Cecilia kept trying again to think of the women as unbalanced, and then she tried not to think of them at all. Afterward she told no one what had been said, not even Daisy and Amanda, who naturally would have been interested.

That summer Mr. Normanton took his daughter to the Île de Porquerolles. In previous summers he had taken her to Cap Ferrat, to Venice and Bologna, to Switzerland, making time on each journey for a stay in Paris. It was on these excursions that Cecilia first came to know her father better. More of his life was revealed, more of a past that he’d thought would not interest her. His childhood added a dimension to his lonely father’s role; his young man’s world did, too. Every time Cecilia returned from school to Buckingham Street she was aware that melancholy disturbed him less than it had. On their holidays together it was hardly there at all.

Miss Watson took her place beside him, whispering something he couldn’t hear. The houselights dimmed, all chatter ceased.

“I cannot leave,” Miss Cotell confessed at breakfast. “I cannot without saying how all of it was wonderful. I cannot, Keble.”

At twenty past four they walked to the school.

“We wanted just to say how much we enjoyed last night,” the taller of the women said, and the dumpy one added that wild horses wouldn’t have stopped them from coming back to say it.

“These are for you,” the tall one said.

No one was near enough to hear, and the curiosity about the two women had dissipated. Already girls were moving away.

“They are for you,” the tall woman repeated.

Cecilia took the packages, then changed her mind and put them on a nearby bench. “I don’t know you. It’s kind of you to give me presents, but I don’t know why you want to.”

“Cecilia,” the dumpy woman said, “you’ll have heard of Father Humphrey?”

“I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

The tall woman shook her head. She had looked startled when the name was mentioned, had held a hand out as if protesting that it shouldn’t be, anxiety in her eyes.

“My dear, Miss Cotell is your mother,” Miss Keble said.

Cecilia hurried then. “We cannot come back,” she heard, but only just. “Not once again. Not ever now.”

At Porquerolles, while every bay of the island’s coast, every creek, every place to swim was visited, Cecilia felt her company relished; and her father’s quiet presence was a pleasure, which it had not always been. Silences, a straining after words to keep a conversation going, uncertainty and doubt too often once had become the edgy feeling that nothing was quite right.

It was hot in August, but a breeze made walking comfortable and they walked a lot. They talked a lot, too, Cecilia especially—about her friends at school, the books she had read during the term that had just ended, the subtle bullying of Elizabeth Statham. She hadn’t meant to say anything about the women who’d been a nuisance and when something slipped out she regretted it at once.

“They wanted money?” her father asked, stopping for a moment in their walk along the cliffs to look for a way down to the rocky shore below, and going on when there was none.

“No, not at all,” Cecilia said. “They were just peculiar women.”

“Sometimes people who approach you like that want money.”

He was dressed as he never was in London, casually, without a jacket, in white summer trousers, a colored scarf at his throat which she had given him, his shirt collar open. Cecilia, who particularly noticed clothes, liked all this much better than the formality of his suits. She said so now. The women were not mentioned again.

But that evening when his whiskey had been brought to him on the terrace of the hotel he said, “Tell me more about your women.”

Cecilia bit into an olive, cross with herself again. He was curious, and of course bewildered, because she’d left out so much—the women being there at the hockey matches and then appearing on the way through the woods, and how she’d thought they might suffer from a mental affliction. Now she described their clothes and the way they had of speaking at the same time, each often saying something different, how they related in detail the features of their house and spoke of their cat. Her father listened, nodding and smiling occasionally. She didn’t tell him everything.

Shreds of the day’s warmth were gaudy in the evening sky as the terrace slowly filled and new conversations began. A dog obediently lay down beneath a chair and was no trouble even when the couple with him finished their drinks and went off to the restaurant without him. A Frenchman, relating an experience he had recently had, brought it to an end and was rewarded with quiet laughter. Cecilia, puzzled by jeu blanc, overheard several times, missed the point.

“I played a lot of tennis once,” her father remarked when they were being led to their table in the restaurant. “I doubt I ever told you that.”

“Were you good?”

“No, not at all. But I liked playing tennis. Jeu blanc’s a love game.”

On their last morning, walking to the harbor, as every day they had during their stay, Cecilia talked about becoming an actress and heard more than she had before about her father’s work and his office colleagues, about the house in Buckingham Street when first he knew it, about his being married there. Passing the farm that was the beginning of the village, he said, “The marriage fell to pieces. When we tried to put it together again we couldn’t. I let you believe as you did because it was the easier thing and sometimes, even, I pretended to myself that it was true. I was ashamed of being rejected.”

Bougainvillea hung over garden walls. Across the street from the crowded fruit stall the café they liked best hadn’t come to life yet, their usual table not taken, as often it was. Their coffee was brought before they ordered it.

“I thought that perhaps you guessed,” her father said. “About the marriage.”

Old men played dominoes in a corner, the waiters stood about. A woman and a child came hurrying in. The girl who worked the coffee machine pointed at a door.

“During all your life as I have known it,” Cecilia’s father said, “you have made up for what went wrong in mine.”

On the quays they watched the slow approach of the ferry. There was a stirring in the crowd waiting to embark, luggage gathered up, haversacks swung into place. A ragged line formed when two ticket collectors arrived. The newcomers who came off the ferry trundled their suitcases to where the gray minibus from the hotel was parked.

“We should call in at the Tourist Information,” Cecilia’s father said, but when they did they found they didn’t have to because the times of the early-morning boats to the mainland—on one of which they hoped to be tomorrow—were listed in the window.

They bought a baguette and thinly sliced ham in the village, and peaches and a newspaper. They had another cup of coffee in the café.

“I’m sorry,” her father said. “For hating the truth so much, and for so long.”

On the walk back to the hotel Cecilia didn’t say what she might have said, or ask what she might have asked. She didn’t want to know.

They rested in the shade, beneath dry dusty trees. People on bicycles cycled by and smiled at them and waved. Faintly in the distance they could hear the rattle of the minibus returning to the harbor.

“Shall we go on?” her father suggested, his hands held out to her.

She drew the curtains in her room, darkening the lit-up brightness of the afternoon. She thought she might weep when she lay down, and spread a towel over her pillow in case she did. Fragments made a whole: the photographs that were lies, the marriage that fell apart. No child was born, they’d hoped one would be. As best they could they had made up for that, but what had been was over. Suitcases instead were in the hall, coats and dresses trailing from hangers piled together. A taxi drove away. He watched it go, alone but for a child who, by chance belonging nowhere, now belonged to him.

Maids came to turn the bed down. Cecilia said to leave it and thanked them for the chocolate they had put out for her on her bedside table. She called out, apologizing when her father knocked softly on the door. She had a headache, she would not come down tonight. He didn’t fuss. He never did. His footsteps went away.

The night didn’t hurry when it came. She did not want it to. Tomorrow he would finish what he had begun: she had no thoughts except that now. “I have to tell you this as well,” gently he would say, and ask to be forgiven when he did. She didn’t blame him for what he had withheld. She understood; he had explained. But still he would complete what wasn’t yet complete because he felt he should.

They were early at Toulon for their train to Paris and took it in turns to walk about the streets so that their luggage wouldn’t be left unattended. Morosely, Cecilia gazed into the shop windows, hardly seeing their contents. Again the women hovered, as in reality they had. Their voices did, their clothes, the clergyman they talked about, their house, their cat. Her father’s silence would not hold; he did not want it to. He would tell her on the train.

Or even now, Cecilia thought when they waited together on the platform. In a strange place, among hurrying people, there’d be a moment that seemed right and he would choose his words. He would say again her presence in his house made up for his unhappiness there, and tell her what she had to know.

But when next her father spoke it was to praise the train they were waiting for. “The best trains in the world,” he said. “And we can have a croque for lunch.”

They had it standing at the counter of the bar and their talk was about the island and how they would always want to return to the little bays, the clear deep water, their daily explorations, the café they had liked. Cecilia’s panic receded a little and then a little more, her father’s politeness was measured and firm, as if he’d been aware of her brooding and understood it. He drew the conversation out and kept it going. She could read in his face that he had changed his mind.

Afterward, in an almost empty carriage, where their seats faced one another, they were on their own, and quiet. Her father read “Bleak House,” a book he liked to go back to, and she didn’t feel neglected by his absorption in it as on other journeys. His occasional smile of pleasure, his delicate fingers turning the pages, his summer clothes uncreased in spite of travel reflected the ease with himself that had been slow in becoming what it was. He had borne his bitterness well. Somewhere, today and every day, the wife he had not ceased to love enjoyed the contentment he had been unable to give her. With cruel fortitude he might have allowed himself to dwell on her life without him, but he preferred an emptiness, and made of it something better than the truth. Cecilia knew it; and emulating his skill in living with distress, abandoned stern reality for what imagination more kindly offered. Might it not be that the women in their lonely lives nurtured a fantasy that dressed things up a bit, befriending girls without a mother in order themselves to be befriended? Had they, together, discovered the excitement of a shadowland and kept it alive in the bluster of daring and pretense?

Shakily challenging the apparent, the almost certain, this flimsy exercise in supposition was tenuous and vague. But Cecilia knew it would not go away and reached out for its whisper of consoling doubt.

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