The Hill Bachelors - Couverture souple

Chapter One

Three People

On the steps of the Scheles' house, stained glass on either side of the brown front door, Sidney shakes the rain from his plastic mackintosh, taking it off to do so. He lets himself into the small porch, pauses for a moment to wipe the rain from his face with a handkerchief, then rings the bell of the inner door. It is how they like it, his admission with a key to the porch, then this declaration of his presence. They'll know who it is: no one else rings that inner bell.

`Good afternoon, Sidney,' Vera greets him when the bolts are drawn back and the key turned in the deadlock. `Is still raining, Sidney?'

`Yes. Getting heavy now.'

`We did not look out.'

The light is on in the hall, as it always is except in high summer.

Sidney waits while the bolts are shot into place again, the key in the deadlock turned. Then he hangs his colourless plastic coat on the hall-stand pegs.

`Well, there the bathroom is,' Vera says. `All ready.'

`Your father -'

`Oh, he's well, Sidney. Father is resting now. You know: the afternoon.'

`I'd hoped to come this morning.'

`He hoped you would, Sidney. At eleven maybe.'

`The morning was difficult today.'

`Oh, I don't mind, myself.'

In the bathroom the paint tins and brushes and a roller have been laid out, the bath and washbasin covered with old curtains. There is Polyfilla and white spirit, which last week Sidney said he'd need. He should have said Polyclens, he realizes now, instead of the white spirit; better for washing out the brushes.
`You'd like some tea now, Sidney?' Vera offers. `You'd like a cup before you begin?'

Vera has sharp cheek-bones and hair dyed black because it's greying. The leanness in her face is everywhere else too; a navy-blue skirt is tight on bony hips, her plain red jumper is as skimpy as a child's, clinging to breasts that hardly show. Her large brown eyes and sensuous lips are what you notice, the eyes expressionless, the lips perhaps a trick of nature, for in other ways Vera does not seem sensuous in the least.

`Tea later.' Sidney hesitates, glancing at Vera, as if fearing to offend her.
`If that's all right?'

And Vera smiles and says of course it's all right. There is a Danish pastry, she says, an apricot Danish pastry, bought yesterday so she'll heat it up.

`Thanks, Vera.'

`There's Father, waking now.'

Lace Cap is the colour chosen. Sidney pours it into the roller dish and rolls it on to the ceiling, beginning at the centre, which a paint-shop man advised him once was the best way to go about it. The colour seems white but he knows it isn't. It will dry out a shade darker. A satin finish, suitable for a bathroom.

`The tiling,' Mr Schele says in the doorway when Sidney has already begun on the walls. `Maybe the tiling.'

Clearing away his things - his toothbrush and his razor - Mr Schele noticed the tiling around the washbasin and the bath. In places the tiling is not good, he says. In places the tiles are perhaps a little loose, and a few are cracked. You hardly notice, but they are cracked when you look slowly, taking time to look. And the rubber filler around the bath is discoloured. Grubby, Mr Schele says.

`Yes, I'll do all that.'

`Not the tiling before the paint, heh? Not finish the tiling first maybe?'

Sidney knows the old man is right. The tile replacement and the rubber should be done first because of the mess. That is the usual way. Not that Sidney is an expert, not that he decorates many bathrooms, but it stands to reason.

`It'll be all right, Mr Schele. The tiling's not much, two or three to put in.'

While the undercoat on the woodwork is drying he'll slip the new tiles in. He'll cut away the rubber and squeeze in more of it, a tricky business, which he doesn't like. He has done it only once before, behind the sink in the kitchen. While it's settling he'll gloss the woodwork.

`You're a good man, Sidney.'

He works all afternoon. When Vera brings the Danish pastry and tea, and two different kinds of biscuits, she doesn't linger because he's busy. Sidney isn't paid for what he does, as he is for all his other work - the club, delivering the leaflets or handing them out on the street, depending on what's required. He manages on what he gets; he doesn't need much because there is no rent to pay. Just enough for food, and the gas he cooks it on. The electricity he doesn't have to pay for; clothes come from the charity shop.

They let him live above the club because there's a room. At night he takes the ticket money, protected in his kiosk by Alfie and Harry at the door; in the daytime he cleans up after the night before and takes the phone messages. All the club's facilities are his to make use of, which he appreciates. Sidney is thirty-four now, thirty-four and one week and two days. He had just turned twenty when he first helped Vera.

In Mr Schele's house they do not ever mention that. They do not talk about a time that was distressing for Vera, and for Mr Schele too. But when Sidney's not in the house, when he's private and on his own, in his room above the club, he talks to himself about it. `Shining armour,' he repeats because it said that in the paper; still says it if he wants to look. Knight in Shining Armour, all across the page. Sometimes, when he's trying to get to sleep, he lies there polishing the armour, laying all the pieces out, unfolding cloths, setting out the Duraglit and the Goddard's.

`Sidney, you stay with us for supper tonight?' There is enough, Vera assures him. Another cup of rice will make it enough, and she recites this Saturday's menu: chicken cooked her way and her good salad, strudel and just a little cream. Then Casualty on the TV, five past eight.

It is a plea, occasionally made when Sidney is in the house as late as this. Vera begs for company with her invitation, Sidney finds himself reflecting; for another presence besides her elderly father. Vera would have been glad when he didn't come in the morning because he'd have finished earlier, too long before supper, and staying to lunch is never the same.

`I should be getting on.'

`Oh, do stay with us.'

And Sidney does. He sits with Mr Schele in the sitting-room and there's an appetizer, salty little pretzels Vera has bought. No drink accompanies these. Mr Schele talks about his childhood.

`The big rosebush has blown down,' Sidney interrupts, standing by the window now. `This wind has taken it.'

Mr Schele comes to look and sorrowfully shakes his head. `Maybe the roots are holding,' he suggests. `Maybe a little can be done.'

Sidney goes through the kitchen to the garden. `No,' he says when they all three sit down to eat: the roots have snapped in the fall. The news upsets Mr Schele, who remembers the rose being planted, when Vera was a child. He'll not see another rose grown to that size in the garden, he predicts. He blames himself, but Vera says no and Sidney points out that even roses come to an end.

A strudel enriched with sultanas follows the chicken cooked Vera's way and her good salad, and then they stand in the bathroom doorway, surveying Sidney's work. The bathroom is as new, Mr Schele says, greatly cheered by the sight of it. It is the bathroom as it was the day the house was built. Everything except the linoleum on the floor, which has been there since 1951, Mr Schele calculates.

`A nice new vinyl,' Mr Schele suggests, and Vera adds that not much is necessary. Two metres and three-quarters, a metre wide: she measured it this morning. `You lay it down, Sidney?' Mr Schele enquires. `You lay it for us?'

They know he will. If Vera chooses what she wants and brings the piece back to the house he'll lay it. There is adhesive left over from the time he laid the surround in Mr Schele's small bedroom. In windy weather draughts came up through the cracks between the floorboards, the bedroom being on the ground floor. There's been no trouble since Sidney cut out the vinyl surround and stuck it down, except that Mr Schele still can't get used to the colour, shades of marbled orange.

`For a bathroom,' he states his preference now, `we keep to pale, heh?'

To go with the Lace Cap, Vera agrees. Maybe even white, to go with the bath and washbasin and the tiles. A flush of pink has crept into Vera's hollow cheeks, and Sidney - knowing Vera well - knows it is there in anticipation of the treat that lies ahead: choosing the floor material, the right weight for bathroom use, a shade to match the paint or the porcelain.

`You can wait another minute, Sidney?' Vera says, and briefly goes away, returning with a piece of card she has torn from a cornflakes packet. `You brush the paint on that for me, Sidney?' she requests, and Sidney does so and washes out the brush again. His Stanley knife slipped when he was cutting the orange vinyl for the bedroom; he had to have three stitches and a tetanus injection.

`Time for the hospital programme,' Mr Schele reminds Vera, who's disappointed when Sidney shakes his head. Not this Saturday, he explains, because he's on early turn at the club.

`You're good to come, Sidney,' Vera says in the porch, whispering as she always does when she says that. She's older than Sidney, forty-one; she was twenty-seven when he first helped her, the time of her distress.

`It's nothing,' he says before he leaves, his unchanging valediction.

The Hill Bachelors - a remarkable collection of stories from the master storyteller William Trevor 'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' The Wall Street Journal The Hill Bachelors is a stunning meditation on men and women and the heartbreak of missed opportunities: three people are frozen in a conspiracy of silence that prevents love's consummation; a nine-year-old dreams that a movie part will heal her fragmented family life; a brother and sister forge a new life amid the terrible beauty of Ireland after the Rebellion; and in the title story, a young man chooses between his longtime love and a life of solitude on the family farm. These twelve beautifully rendered tales reveal Trevor's unrivalled compassion for the human condition. 'His tight, perfected short stories - each an astonishing performance in which melodramatic situations are turned, by acute psychological insight, into classic drama - make him the greatest living writer in English' Weekly Standard Readers of The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer will adore The Hill Bachelors. It will also be cherished by readers of Colm Toibin and William Boyd. William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. His books in Penguin are: After Rain; A Bit on the Side; Bodily Secrets; Cheating at Canasta; The Children of Dynmouth; The Collected Stories (Volumes One and Two); Death in Summer; Felicia's Journey; Fools of Fortune; The Hill Bachelors; Love and Summer; The Mark-2 Wife; Selected Stories; The Story of Lucy Gault and Two Lives.