The Woman of the House By William Trevor

The Woman of the House 

by William Trevor

“Well, there’s that if you’d want it,” the crippled man said. “It’s a long time waiting for attention. You’d need tend the mortar.”

The two men who had come to the farmhouse consulted one another, not saying anything, only nodding and gesturing. Then they gave a price for painting the outside walls of the house and the crippled man said it was too much. He quoted a lesser figure, saying that had been the cost the last time. The men who had come looking for work said nothing. The tall one hitched up his trousers.

“We’ll split the difference if that’s the way of it,” the crippled man said.

Still not speaking, the two men shook their heads.

“Be off with you in that case,” the crippled man said.

They didn’t go, as if they hadn’t understood. It was a ploy of theirs to pretend not to understand, to frown and simulate confusion because, in any conversation, it was convenient sometimes to appear to be at a loss.

“Two coats we’re talking about?” the crippled man inquired.

The tall man said they were. He was older than his companion, gray coming into his hair, but that was premature: both were still young, in their twenties.

“Will we split the difference?” the crippled man suggested again. “Two coats and we’ll split it?”

The younger of the men, who had a round, moon face and wire-rimmed glasses, offered another figure. He stared down at the gray, badly cracked flags of the kitchen floor, waiting for a response. The tall man, whose arms hung loosely and were lanky, like his body, sucked at his teeth, which was a way he had. If it was nineteen years since the house had been painted, he said, the price would have been less than would be worthwhile for them now. Nineteen years was what they had been told.

“Are ye Polish?” the crippled man asked.

They said they were. Sometimes they said that, sometimes they didn’t, depending on what they had previously ascertained about the presence of other Polish people in a locality. They were brothers, although they didn’t look like brothers. They were not Polish.

A black cat crept about the kitchen, looking for insects or mice. Occasionally it would pounce on a piece of bark that had fallen off the firewood, or a shadow. Fourteen days the painting would take, the young man said, and they’d work on a Sunday; then the cost of the work surfaced again. A price was agreed.

“Notes,” the tall man said, rubbing a thumb and forefinger together. “Cash.”

And that was agreed also.

Martina drove slowly, as she always did driving back from Carragh. More than once on this journey, the old Dodge had stopped and she had had to walk to Kirpatrick’s Garage to get assistance. Each time the same mechanic told her the car belonged to the antique brigade and should have been off the road for the last thirty years at the very least. But the ancient Dodge was part of Martina’s circumstances, to be tolerated because it was necessary. And, driven slowly, more often than not it got you there.

Costigan had slipped in a couple of streaky instead of back rashers, making up the half pound, he’d said, although he’d charged for back. She hadn’t said anything; she never did with Costigan. “Come out to the shed till we’ll see,” he used to say, and she’d go with him to pick out a frozen pork steak or drumsticks she liked the look of in the shed where the deep freeze was, his hands all over her. He no longer invited her to accompany him to the deep freeze, but the days when he used to were always there between them and she never ate pork steak or chicken legs without being reminded of how afterward he used to push the money back to her when she paid and how in the farmhouse she hid it in the Gold Flake tin.

She drove past the tinkers at the Cross, the children in their rags running about, feet bare, heads cropped. The woman whom the noise of the Dodge always brought out stared stonily, continuing to stand there when the car went on, a still image in the rearview mirror. “We’d do it for four and a half,” the man in Finnally’s had offered when she’d asked the price of the electric cooker that was still in the window. Not a chance, she’d thought.

About to be fifty and putting on more weight than pleased her, Martina had once known what she wanted, but she wasn’t so sure about that anymore. Earlier in her life, a careless marriage had fallen apart, leaving her homeless. There had been no children, although she had wanted them, and often since had thought that in spite of having to support them she might have done better if children had been there to make a center for her life.

She drove through the turf bogs, a Bord na Móna machine drawn up at the cuttings, an uncoupled trailer clamped so that it would stay where it was. Nothing was going on, nothing had changed at the cuttings for maybe as long as nine months. The lack of activity was lowering, she considered every time she saw, yet again, the place as it had been the last time.

She turned at Laughil, the road darkened by the trees that overhung it. She couldn’t remember when it was that she’d last met another car on this journey. She didn’t try to. It didn’t matter.

The two men drove away, pleased that they’d found work, talking about the man who’d called out and said come in when they’d knocked on the door. All the time they were there he had remained in his chair by the fire of the range, and when the price was agreed he’d said go to the scullery and get the whiskey bottle. He had gestured impatiently when they didn’t understand, lifting his fist to his mouth, tossing back his head, the fist going with it, until they knew he meant drinking. He was convivial then; and they were quick, he said, to see the glasses on the dresser and put three on the table. They were uncertain only for a moment, then unscrewed the cap on the bottle.

“We know about Poland,” he’d said. “A Catholic people, like ourselves. We’ll drink to the work, will we?”

They poured more whiskey for him when he held out the glass. They had more themselves before they left.

“Who was here?”

She put the groceries on the table as she spoke. The whiskey bottle was there, out of his reach, two empty glasses beside it, his own, empty now also, in his hand. He held it out, his way of asking her to pour him more. He wouldn’t stop now, she thought; he’d go on until that bottle was empty and then he’d ask if there was one unopened, and she’d say no, although there was.

“A blue van,” she said, giving him more drink, since there was no point in not.

“I wouldn’t know what color it was.”

“A blue van was in the boreen.”

“Did you get the listful?”

“I did.”

He’d had visitors, he said as if this subject were a new one. “Good boys, Martina.”

“Who?” she asked again.

He wanted the list back, and the receipt. With his stub of a pencil, kept specially for the purpose, he crossed off the items she took from the bags they were in. In the days when Costigan was more lively she had enjoyed these moments of deception, the exact change put down on the table, what she had saved still secreted in her clothes until she could get upstairs to the Gold Flake tin.

“Polish lads,” he said. “They’ll paint the outside for us.” Two coats, he said, a fortnight it would take.

“Are you mad?”

“Good Catholic boys. We had a drink.”

She asked where the money was coming from and he asked, in turn, what money was she talking about. That was a way he had, and a way of hers to question the money’s source, although she knew there was enough; the subject, once raised, had a tendency to linger.

“What’d they take off you?”

With feigned patience, he explained he’d paid for the materials only. If the work was satisfactory he would pay what was owing when the job was finished. Martina didn’t comment on that. Angrily, she pulled open one of the dresser’s two drawers, felt at the back of it, and brought out a bundle of euro notes, fives and tens in separate rubber bands, twenties, fifties, a single hundred. She knew at once how much he had paid. She knew he would have had to ask the painters to reach in for the money, since he couldn’t himself. She knew they would have seen the amount that was left there.

“Why would they paint a house when all they have to do is walk in and help themselves?”

He shook his head. He said again the painters were fine Catholic boys. With patience still emphatic in his tone, he repeated that the work would be completed within a fortnight. It was the talk of the country, he said, the skills young Polish boys brought to Ireland. An act of God, he said. She wouldn’t notice them about the place.

They bought the paint in Carragh, asking what would be best for the walls of a house.

“Masonry,” the man said, pointing at the word on a tin. “Outside work, go for the Masonry.”

They understood. They explained that they’d been given money in advance for materials and they paid the sum that was written down for them.

“Polish, are you?” the man asked.

Their history was unusual. Born into a community of stateless survivors in the mountains of what had once been Carinthia, their natural language a dialect enlivened by words from a dozen others, they were regarded often now as Gypsies. They remembered a wandering childhood of nameless places, an existence in tents and silent nighttime crossing of borders, the unceasing search for somewhere better. They had separated from their family without regret when they were, they thought, thirteen and fourteen. Since then their lives were what they had become: knowing what to do, how best to do it, acquiring what had to be acquired, managing. Wherever they were, they circumvented what they did not call the system, for it was not a word they knew; but they knew what it meant and knew that straying into it, or their acceptance of it, however temporarily, would deprive them of their freedom. Survival as they were was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

They bought brushes as well as the paint, and white spirit because the man said they’d need it, and a filler because they’d been told the mortar required attention: they had never painted a house before, they didn’t know what mortar was.

Their van was battered, the blue patched up a bit with a darker shade, without tax or insurance although there was the usual evidence of both on the windscreen. They slept in it, among contents that they kept tidy, knowing that they must: tools of one kind or another they had come by, their mugs, their plates, a basin, saucepan, frying pan, food.

In the dialect that was their language the older brother asked if they would spare the petrol to go to the ruins where they were engaged in making themselves a dwelling. The younger brother, driving, nodded and they went there.

In her bedroom Martina closed the lid of the Gold Flake tin and secured it with its rubber band. She stood back from the wardrobe looking glass and critically surveyed herself, ashamed of how she’d let herself go, her bulk not quite obese but almost now, her pale-blue eyes—once her most telling feature—half lost in folds of flesh. She had been still in her thirties when she’d come to the farmhouse, still particular about how she looked and dressed. She wiped away the lipstick that had been smudged by Costigan’s rough embracing when for a few minutes they had been alone in the shop. She settled her underclothes where he had disturbed them. The smell of the shop—a medley of rashers and fly spray and the chickens Costigan roasted on a spit—had passed from his clothes to hers, as it always did. “Oh, just the shop,” she used to say when she was asked about it in the kitchen, but she wasn’t anymore.

They were distantly related, had been together in the farmhouse since his mother died, twelve years ago, and his father the following winter. Another distant relative had suggested the union, since Martina was on her own and only occasionally employed. Her cousin—for they had agreed that they were cousins of a kind—would have otherwise had to be taken into a home; and she herself had little to lose by coming to the farm. The grazing was parcelled out, rent received annually and now and again another field sold. Her crippled cousin, who since birth had been confined as he was now, had for Martina the attraction of a legal stipulation: in time she would inherit what was left.

Often people assumed that he had died, never saying a word, but you could tell. In Carragh they did, and people from round about who never came to the farmhouse did; talking to them, you could feel it. She didn’t mention him herself except when the subject was brought up: there was nothing to say because there was nothing that was different, nothing she could remark on.

He was asleep after the whiskey when she went downstairs and he slept until he was roused by the clatter of dishes and the frying of their six-o’clock meal. She liked to keep to time, to do what it told her to do. She kept the alarm clock on the dresser wound, and accurate to the minute by the wireless morning and evening. She collected, first thing every morning, what eggs had been laid in the night. She got him to the kitchen from the back room as soon as she’d set the breakfast table. She made the two beds when he had his breakfast in him and she had washed up the dishes. On a day she went to Carragh she left the house at a quarter past two; she’d got into the way of that. Usually he was asleep by the range then, as most of the time he was unless he’d begun to argue. If he had, that could go on all day.

“They’ll be a nuisance about the place.” She had to raise her voice because the liver on the pan was spitting. The slightest sound—of dishes or cooking, the lid of the kettle rattling—and he said he couldn’t hear her when she spoke. But she knew he could.

He said he couldn’t now and she ignored him. He said he’d have another drink and she ignored that, too.

“They’re never a nuisance,” he said. “Lads like that.”

He said they were clean, you’d look at them and know. He said they’d be company for her.

“One month to the next you hardly see another face, Martina. Sure, I’m aware of that, girl. Don’t I know it the whole time.”

She cracked the first egg into the pool of fat she made by tilting the pan. She could crack open an egg and empty it with one hand. Two each they had.

“It needs the paint,” he said.

She didn’t comment on that. She didn’t say he couldn’t know; how could he, since she didn’t manage to get him out to the yard anymore? She hadn’t managed to for years.

“It does me good,” he said. “The old drop of whiskey.”

She turned the wireless on and there was old-time music playing.

“That’s terrible stuff,” he said.

Martina didn’t comment on that, either. When the slices of liver were black she scooped them off the pan and put them on their plates with the eggs. She got him to the table. He’d had whiskey enough, she said when he asked for more, and nothing further was said in the kitchen.

They bought brushes as well as the paint, and white spirit because the man said they’d need it, and a filler because they’d been told the mortar required attention: they had never painted a house before, they didn’t know what mortar was.

Their van was battered, the blue patched up a bit with a darker shade, without tax or insurance although there was the usual evidence of both on the windscreen. They slept in it, among contents that they kept tidy, knowing that they must: tools of one kind or another they had come by, their mugs, their plates, a basin, saucepan, frying pan, food.

In the dialect that was their language the older brother asked if they would spare the petrol to go to the ruins where they were engaged in making themselves a dwelling. The younger brother, driving, nodded and they went there.

In her bedroom Martina closed the lid of the Gold Flake tin and secured it with its rubber band. She stood back from the wardrobe looking glass and critically surveyed herself, ashamed of how she’d let herself go, her bulk not quite obese but almost now, her pale-blue eyes—once her most telling feature—half lost in folds of flesh. She had been still in her thirties when she’d come to the farmhouse, still particular about how she looked and dressed. She wiped away the lipstick that had been smudged by Costigan’s rough embracing when for a few minutes they had been alone in the shop. She settled her underclothes where he had disturbed them. The smell of the shop—a medley of rashers and fly spray and the chickens Costigan roasted on a spit—had passed from his clothes to hers, as it always did. “Oh, just the shop,” she used to say when she was asked about it in the kitchen, but she wasn’t anymore.

They were distantly related, had been together in the farmhouse since his mother died, twelve years ago, and his father the following winter. Another distant relative had suggested the union, since Martina was on her own and only occasionally employed. Her cousin—for they had agreed that they were cousins of a kind—would have otherwise had to be taken into a home; and she herself had little to lose by coming to the farm. The grazing was parcelled out, rent received annually and now and again another field sold. Her crippled cousin, who since birth had been confined as he was now, had for Martina the attraction of a legal stipulation: in time she would inherit what was left.

Often people assumed that he had died, never saying a word, but you could tell. In Carragh they did, and people from round about who never came to the farmhouse did; talking to them, you could feel it. She didn’t mention him herself except when the subject was brought up: there was nothing to say because there was nothing that was different, nothing she could remark on.

He was asleep after the whiskey when she went downstairs and he slept until he was roused by the clatter of dishes and the frying of their six-o’clock meal. She liked to keep to time, to do what it told her to do. She kept the alarm clock on the dresser wound, and accurate to the minute by the wireless morning and evening. She collected, first thing every morning, what eggs had been laid in the night. She got him to the kitchen from the back room as soon as she’d set the breakfast table. She made the two beds when he had his breakfast in him and she had washed up the dishes. On a day she went to Carragh she left the house at a quarter past two; she’d got into the way of that. Usually he was asleep by the range then, as most of the time he was unless he’d begun to argue. If he had, that could go on all day.

“They’ll be a nuisance about the place.” She had to raise her voice because the liver on the pan was spitting. The slightest sound—of dishes or cooking, the lid of the kettle rattling—and he said he couldn’t hear her when she spoke. But she knew he could.

He said he couldn’t now and she ignored him. He said he’d have another drink and she ignored that, too.

“They’re never a nuisance,” he said. “Lads like that.”

He said they were clean, you’d look at them and know. He said they’d be company for her.

“One month to the next you hardly see another face, Martina. Sure, I’m aware of that, girl. Don’t I know it the whole time.”

She cracked the first egg into the pool of fat she made by tilting the pan. She could crack open an egg and empty it with one hand. Two each they had.

“It needs the paint,” he said.

She didn’t comment on that. She didn’t say he couldn’t know; how could he, since she didn’t manage to get him out to the yard anymore? She hadn’t managed to for years.

“It does me good,” he said. “The old drop of whiskey.”

She turned the wireless on and there was old-time music playing.

“That’s terrible stuff,” he said.

Martina didn’t comment on that, either. When the slices of liver were black she scooped them off the pan and put them on their plates with the eggs. She got him to the table. He’d had whiskey enough, she said when he asked for more, and nothing further was said in the kitchen.

Martina didn’t comment on that, either. When the slices of liver were black she scooped them off the pan and put them on their plates with the eggs. She got him to the table. He’d had whiskey enough, she said when he asked for more, and nothing further was said in the kitchen.When they had eaten she got him to his bed, but an hour later he was shouting and she went to him. She thought it was a dream, but he said it was his legs. She gave him aspirins, and whiskey, because when he had both the pains would go. “Come in and keep me warm,” he whispered, and she said no. She often wondered if the pains had maddened him, if his brain had been attacked, as so much else in his body was.

“Why’d they call you Martina?” he asked, still whispering. A man’s name, he said; why would they?

“I told you.”

“You’d tell me many a thing.”

“Go to sleep now.”

“Are the grass rents in?”

“Go back to sleep.”

The painting commenced on a Tuesday because on the Monday there was ceaseless rain. The Tuesday was fine, full of sunshine, with a soft, drying breeze. The painters hired two ladders in Carragh and spent that day filling in the stucco surface where it had broken away.

The woman of the house, whom they assumed to be the crippled man’s wife, brought out soda scones and tea in the middle of the morning, and when she asked them what time was best for this—morning and afternoon—they pointed at eleven o’clock and half past three on the older brother’s watch. She brought them biscuits with the tea at exactly half past three. She stayed talking to them, telling them where they could buy what they wanted in Carragh, asking them about themselves. Her smile was tired but she was patient with them when they didn’t understand. She watched them while they worked and when they asked her what she thought she said they were as good as anyone. By the evening the repairs to the stucco had been completed.

Heavy rain was forecast for the Wednesday, and it came in the middle of the afternoon, blown in from the west by an intimidating storm. The work could not be continued, and the painters sat in their van, hoping for an improvement. Earlier, while they were working, there had been raised voices in the house, an altercation that occasionally gave way to silence before beginning again. The older painter, whose English was better than his brother’s, reported that it had to do with money and the condition of the land. “The pension is what I’m good for,” the crippled man repeatedly insisted. “Amn’t I here for the few bob I bring in?” The pension became the heart of what was so crossly talked about, how it was spent in ways it shouldn’t be, how the crippled man didn’t have it for himself. The painters lost interest, but the voices went on and could still be heard when one or other of them left the van to look at the sky.

Late in the afternoon they gave up waiting and drove into Carragh. They asked in the paint shop how long the bad weather would last and were advised that the outlook for several days was not good. They returned the ladders, reluctant to pay for their hire while they were unable to make use of them. It was a setback, but they were used to setbacks and, inquiring again in the paint shop, they learned that a builder who’d been let down was taking on replacement labor at the conversion of a disused mill—an indoor site a few miles away. He agreed to employ them on a day-to-day basis.

The rain affected him. When it rained he wouldn’t stop, since she was confined herself, and when they had worn out the subject of the pension he would begin again about the saint she was named after. “Tell me,” he would repeat his most regular request and if it was the evening and he was fuddled with drink she wouldn’t answer, but in the daytime he would wheedle and every minute would drag more sluggishly than minutes had before.

He did so on the morning the painters took down their ladders and went away. She was shaking the clinker out of the range so that the fire would glow. She was kneeling down in front of him and she could feel him examining her the way he often did. You’d be the better for it, he said, when she’d tell about her saint, you’d feel the consolation of a holiness. “Tell me,” he said.

She took the ash pan out to the yard, not saying anything before she went. The rain soaked her shoulders and dribbled over her face and neck, drenched the gray-black material of her dress, her arms, ran down between her breasts. When she returned to the kitchen she did as he wished, telling him what he knew: that holy milk, not blood, had flowed in the body of St. Martina of Rome, that Pope Urban had built a church in her honor and had composed the hymns used in her office in the Roman Breviary, that she perished by the sword.

He complimented her when she finished speaking, while she still stood behind him, not wanting to look at him. The rain she had brought in with her dripped through her clothes onto the broken flags of the floor.

The painters worked at the mill conversion for longer than they might have, even though the finer weather had come. The money was better and there was talk of more employment in the future: in all, nine days passed before they returned to the farmhouse.

They arrived early, keeping their voices down and working quickly to make up for lost time, nervous in case there was a complaint about their not returning sooner. By eight o’clock the undercoat was on most of the front wall.

The place was quiet and remained so, but wisps of smoke were coming from one of the chimneys, which the painters remembered from the day and a half they’d spent here before. The car was there, its length too much for the shed it was in, its rear protruding, and they remembered that, too. Still working at the front of the house, they listened for footsteps in the yard, expecting the tea that had come before in the morning, but no tea came. In the afternoon, when the older brother went to the van for a change of brushes, the tea tray was on the bonnet and he carried it to where the ladders were.

In the days that followed this became a pattern. The stillness the place had acquired was not broken by the sound of a radio playing or voices. The tea came without additions and at varying times, as if the arrangement about eleven o’clock and half past three had been forgotten. When the ladders were moved into the yard the tray was left on the step of a door at the side of the house.

Sometimes, not often, glancing into the house, the painters caught a glimpse of the woman whom they assumed to be the wife of the crippled man they had drunk whiskey with, who had shaken hands with both of them when the agreement about the painting was made. At first they wondered if the woman they saw was someone else, even though she was similarly dressed. They talked about that, bewildered by the strangeness they had returned to, wondering if in this country so abrupt a transformation was ordinary and usual and was often to be found.

Once, through the grimy panes of an upstairs window, the younger brother, from his ladder, saw the woman crouched over a dressing table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept. She looked up while he still watched, his curiosity beyond restraint, and her eyes stared back at him, but she did not avert her gaze.

That same day, just before the painters finished for the day, while they were scraping the last of the old paint from the kitchen window frames, they saw that the crippled man was not in his chair by the range and realized that since they had returned after the rain they had not heard his voice.

She washed up their two cups and saucers, teaspoons with a residue of sugar on them because they’d been dipped into the bowl when they were wet with tea. She wiped the tray and dried it, and hung the damp tea towel on the line in the scullery. She didn’t want to think, even to know that they were there, that they had come. She didn’t want to see them, as all day yesterday she had managed not to. She hung the cups up and put the saucers with the others, the sugar bowl in the cupboard under the sink.

The ladders clattered in the yard, pulled out of sight for the night in case they’d be a temptation for the tinkers. She couldn’t hear talking and doubted that there was any. A few evenings ago when they were leaving they had knocked on the back door and she hadn’t answered.

She listened for footsteps coming to the door again but none came. She heard the van being driven off. She heard the geese flying over, coming from the water at Dole: this was their time. Once the van had returned when something had been left behind, and she’d been collecting the evening eggs and had gone into the fields until it was driven off again. In the kitchen she waited for another quarter of an hour, watching the hands of the dresser clock. Then she let the air into the house, the front door and the back door open, the kitchen windows.

The dwelling they had made for themselves at the ruins was complete. They had used the fallen stones and the few timber beams that were in good condition, a doorframe that had survived. They’d bought sheets of old galvanized iron for the roof, and found girders on a tip. It wasn’t bad, they said to one another; in other places they’d known worse.

In the dark of the evening they talked about the crippled man, concerned—and worried as their conversation advanced—since the understanding about payment for the painting had been made with him and it could easily be that when the work was finished the woman would say she knew nothing about what had been agreed, that the sum they claimed as due to them was excessive. They wondered if the crippled man had been taken from the house, if he was in a home. They wondered why the woman still wasn’t as she’d been at first.

She backed the Dodge into the middle of the yard, opened the right-hand back door, and left the engine running while she carried out the egg trays from the house and settled them one on top of another on the floor, all this as it always was on a Thursday. Hurrying because she wanted to leave before the men came, she locked the house and banged the car door she’d left open. But the engine, idling nicely, stopped before she got into the driver’s seat. And then the blue van was there.

They came toward her at once, the one with glasses making gestures she didn’t understand at first and then saw what he was on about. A rear tire had lost some air; he appeared to be saying he would pump it up for her. She knew, she said; it would be all right. She dreaded what would happen now: the Dodge would let her down. But when she turned off the ignition and turned it on again, and tried the starter with the choke out, the engine fired at once.

“Good morning.” The older man had to bend at the car window, being so tall. “Good morning,” he said again when she wound the window down although she hadn’t wanted to. She could hear the ladders going up. “Excuse me,” the man who was delaying her said, and she let the car creep on, even though he was leaning on it.

“He’s in another room,” she said. “A room that’s better for him.”

She didn’t say she had eggs to deliver because they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t say when you got this old car going you didn’t take chances with it because they wouldn’t understand that, either.

“He’s quiet there,” she said.

She drove slowly out of the yard and stalled the engine again.

The painters waited until they could no longer hear the car. Then they moved the ladders, from one upstairs window to the next, until they’d gone all the way round the house. They didn’t speak, only glancing at one another now and again, conversing in that way. When they had finished they lit cigarettes. Almost three-quarters of the work was done: they talked about that, and calculated how much paint was left unused and how much they would receive back on it. They did no work yet.

The younger brother left the yard, passing through a gateway in which a gate was propped open by its own weight where a hinge had given way. The older man remained, looking about, opening shed doors and closing them again, listening in case the Dodge returned. He leaned against one of the ladders, finishing his cigarette.

Cloudy to begin with, the sky had cleared. Bright sunlight caught the younger brother’s spectacles as he came round the side of the house, causing him to take them off and wipe them clean as he passed back through the gateway. His reconnoitre had led him, through a vegetable patch given up to weeds, into what had been a garden, its single remaining flower bed marked with seed packets that told what its several rows contained. Returning to the yard, he had kept as close to the walls of the house as he could, pressing himself against the stucco surface each time he came to a window, more cautious than he guessed he had to be. The downstairs rooms revealed no more than those above them had and when he listened he heard nothing. No dogs were kept. Cats watched him without interest.

In the yard he shook his head, dismissing his fruitless efforts. There was a paddock with sun on it, he said, and they sat there munching their stale sandwiches and drinking a tin of Pepsi-Cola each.

“The crippled man is dead.” The older brother spoke softly and in English, nodding an affirmation of each word, as if to make his meaning clear in case it was not.

“The woman is frightened.” He nodded that into place also.

These conjectures were neither contradicted nor commented upon. In silence the two remained in the sun and then they walked through the fields that neglect had impoverished, and in the garden. They looked down at the solitary flower bed, at the bright-colored seed packets marking the empty rows, each packet pierced with a stick. They did not say this was a grave, or remark on how the rank grass, in a wide straight path from the gate, had been crushed and had recovered. They did not draw a finger through the earth in search of seeds where seeds should be, where flowers were promised.

“She wears no ring.” The older brother shrugged away that detail, depriving it of any interest it might have had, irrelevant now.

Again they listened for the chug of the car’s unreliable engine but it did not come. Since the painting had made it necessary for the windows to be eased in their sashes, the house could now be entered. But when the woman returned she would see it had been in safe hands while she’d been away, its rooms as she had left them, the money untouched. The painting began again and, undisturbed, the men worked until the light went. “She will be here tomorrow,” the older brother said. “She will have found the courage, and know we are no threat.”

In the van on the way back to their dwelling they talked again about the woman who was not as she had been, and the man who was not there. They guessed and wondered, supposed, surmised. They cooked their food and ate it in uncomfortable confinement, the shreds and crumbs of unreality giving the evening shape. At last impatient, anger had not allowed a woman who had waited too long to wait, again, until she was alone: they sensed enough of truth in that. They smoked slow cigarettes, instinct directing thought. The woman’s history was not theirs to know, even though they now were part of it themselves. Their circumstances made them that, as hers made her what she’d become. She would see to it that still the pension came. No one would miss the crippled man, no one went to a lonely place. Tomorrow she would pay for the painting of the house. Tomorrow they would travel on.