Mrs. Crasthorpe by William Trevor

Mrs. Crasthorpe

by William Trevor

On the short walk from the churchyard to her car, Mrs. Crasthorpe was aware of a profound humiliation. A lone mourner at her husband’s funeral, she had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he had called his obsequies. A woman cleric unknown to Mrs. Crasthorpe had conducted a bleak service, had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs. Crasthorpe, and then had scuttled off without so much as a glance in Mrs. Crasthorpe’s direction. Two men were waiting, leaning on their shovels in the nearby graveyard, and within minutes had returned the clay to where they had dug it from, making a little mound, the coffin gone forever and with it Arthur, all of it a mockery. She was wrong, Mrs. Crasthorpe knew, to blame Arthur for the arrangements he’d put in hand before he went, but she’d become used to blaming him in his lifetime and couldn’t help doing so still.

She was a woman of fifty-nine who declared herself to be forty-five because forty-five was what she felt. She had married a considerably older man, who had died in his seventy-second year. She had married him for his money, but, in spite of the comfort and convenience this had brought, Mrs. Crasthorpe believed that in marriage she had failed to blossom. Always a rosebud was how, privately, she thought of herself; and there was, in Mrs. Crasthorpe, a lot of privacy, there always had been. She knew she would tell no one, not ever, that Arthur had been buried without a decent sendoff, just as she’d told no one that she was the mother of a son or that there had been, in the late years of her marriage, Tommy Kildare and Donald.

“I shall relish my widowhood,” she asserted, aloud and firmly, in her car. “I shall make something of it.”

A light rain became heavier as she drove, the windscreen wipers slushing it away, a sound she particularly disliked. In the driving mirror, which she glanced at now and then, her blonded hair, her gray-blue eyes, the curve of her generously full lips pleased Mrs. Crasthorpe. She liked the look of herself, and always had.

She turned on the radio to suppress the windscreen-wiper noise, wondering as she did so why Arthur had chosen to be buried in such an obscure place, wondering what it was she hadn’t listened to when she’d been told. Faintly, on some foreign station, popular music passed from tune to tune, each one known to Mrs. Crasthorpe, since they were of her time.

Etheridge let himself in quietly, not releasing the catch of the lock until he’d pulled it to and could open the door soundlessly. With luck, Janet would have slept and would be sleeping still. Sleep was everything to her now, the kindest friend, the tenderest lover. She didn’t allow it to be induced, the drugs she was offered invariably declined.

He looked down at the sleeping face that illness was taking from him, a little more each day. For a moment he saw in the wan, tired features the shadows of Juliet, the wisdom of Portia, Estella’s thoughtless pride. “I’ll go,” the carer whispered from the doorway.

“Dear Janet,” he whispered himself, wondering how her day had been.

When he had made tea, Etheridge carried the tray back to the bedside and the rattle of the cup and saucer woke his wife, as every day it did. It was what Janet wanted, what she liked: that she should always be awake when he was here.

“Hello again,” she said.

He bent to embrace her, and held her for a moment in his arms, then plumped her pillows up and straightened the turndown of her top sheet. She said, when he asked, that she was feeling better. But she didn’t eat any of the cake he had brought, or the biscuits, and didn’t look as well as she had that morning.

“Oh, nothing to write home about,” he responded to a query as to how the day had been for him. She’d finished “A Fine Balance,” she said. She’d heard a program about silverware on the radio. “Well, no,” she said. “Not interesting at all.” 

“Some soup later, darling? Cream cracker?”

“Soup would be lovely. No cream cracker.”

“We landed the contract. I thought we wouldn’t.”

“I knew you would.”

She was an actress. He had been settled for years in the offices of Forrester and Bright, a firm of specialist printers that had made a corner for itself by taking on complicated assignments that other printers couldn’t be bothered with. In their early forties now, they’d been married since they were both twenty-three.

“It’s awful for you,” Janet said, gloomy as she sometimes was when she’d just woken up.

“Of course it isn’t.” Without an effort, the familiar reassurance came.

They smiled at each other. They knew it was awful.

“ ‘University Challenge’ tonight,” Janet said.

“You’ll behave yourself,” the warder said.

“I always do.”

“She’s here. You see you do.”

Derek wished she wouldn’t come. It was silly from both their points of view. She knew it was, it wasn’t as if she didn’t, but still she came. She’d tell him the latest about the old boy and he’d try not to hear. She’d tell him because there was nothing else to tell him. She’d sit there in her finery, ashamed of him and ashamed of being ashamed. She had called it “naughty” once, the way he was. She didn’t call it anything now.

He heard the click of her heels, a sprightly sound, different from the thump of boots. The warder respected her, knowing her from her visits; he was a nice man, she said. She liked people being nice.

“Now, you behave, lad.” The warder again rebuked Derek in advance, a white splotch on the shiny peak of his cap his only untidiness.

“You see that?” Derek said when she came. “A bird done its business on Mr. Fane.”

He teased her with bad grammar and she winced when he did, although she pretended she didn’t mind. She was on about something new: the old boy had died and no one had come to the funeral. Derek hadn’t known him, there had never been a reason that they should have known each other, but even so she talked about him.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Oh, great,” he said.

And that was all; Mrs. Crasthorpe accepted without protest that their brief exchanges were over. “You’re good, the way you come,” the warder said when she began to go. She left a pot of damson jam, which was a favorite.

She hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to Pasmore’s. She had phoned, as she always did, to make sure there’d be a table for her, and there it was, in the corner she had come to regard as hers. They didn’t gush in Pasmore’s; you could feel the dignity of their being above it. They spoke almost in whispers, but you could hear every word, because they wanted you to. She always had tea in Pasmore’s after visiting Derek.

As she ordered from the waitress, who had come at once to her, her thoughts picked up from where she’d left them, no different from the thoughts she always had in Pasmore’s. He couldn’t help himself; he didn’t try. He wasn’t the kind to try, he had explained: he liked being a persistent offender. Yet even so it couldn’t be less than horrid for him. That it must be horrid had many times haunted Mrs. Crasthorpe at this same table, and she pressed it away from her now, glancing about for a face she recognized among the teatime people. But, as always, there wasn’t one.

“How nice!” She smiled away her dejection when her sultana scones came and her tea was poured for her, which they always did for one at Pasmore’s.

When Janet died, painlessly in her sleep, Etheridge moved from the flat in Barnes to a smaller one in Weymouth Street. No practicality or economic necessity inspired the change. It was just that Barnes, shadowed now by death, was not as once it had been. Its spaciousness, its quiet streets, stared back at Etheridge morosely, the jazz pub that had been theirs seeming ordinary, the river unappealing. The same flowers blooming again in the window boxes should have been a memory and a solace, but were not. Moving in at Weymouth Street, Etheridge thought of leaving Forrester and Bright, of leaving London, too, but when a few weeks had gone by Weymouth Street seemed far enough. It had no past; it tugged at nothing. He settled there.

Mrs. Crasthorpe set about making something special of her widowhood with a will. She spent a week in Eastbourne, clarifying her thoughts, for the town’s modest opulence, its unhurried peace and sense of other times had had a calming effect before. Nothing had changed: the Parades, the Grand Hotel, the well-dressed people on the streets, the unfearful sea all drew once more from Mrs. Crasthorpe an admiration that went back to her girlhood. It was in Eastbourne that she first had felt the better for being alive. She could think more productively in the briny air; she got things right. Funeral weeds had had their day, solemn rites were dead and gone: in the dining room of the Grand Hotel, she sensed that she was forgiven for her unshed tears, the grief she could not manage. Shambling through his days, Arthur hadn’t wanted to know about Tommy Kildare or Donald. “We’re chalk and cheese,” he’d said vaguely. He’d left her everything.

She walked about in Eastbourne, going nowhere, wondering if she would meet a chum, and when she didn’t it seemed better that she shouldn’t, that privately and on her own she should dwell on how life should be now. In this, she did not banish fantasy: Her chums would give her a party, for they were party people. In twos and threes, they would stand about and see in her another woman, and Derek would come with presents, as he never had before, and Tommy Kildare would be as once he’d been. So young she seemed, he’d say, she could be seventeen. And Donald would kiss her fingers and call himself a Regency buck.

When he’d first moved to Weymouth Street, Etheridge hadn’t hung up the print of Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon,” but then he did, because it was a shame not to. Framed and wrapped, it had been waiting for him one September 12th, probably his fortieth, he thought. The sum of the accumulated I.O.U.s, each one dated April 4th, hadn’t become enough for Janet’s earrings; it would have if there’d been one more year. Sometimes, even in Weymouth Street, such lesser shadows flitted about, but Etheridge dismissed this interference as a trick of the light or of his own imagination. Work was a help, and when he had been in Weymouth Street for almost six months he ceased to lie sleepless in the lonely early hours. Recollections were less distinct; bits of remembered conversation were somehow lost; the last of the clothes were given away. At a cookery class, he learned to make risotto and eggs Benedict. He played the piano more skillfully than before, had a drink every evening in the Cock and Lion, read Mauriac in French, and was promoted at Forrester and Bright.

Mrs. Crasthorpe had earlier noticed somewhere the man who was coming toward her in Beaumont Street. His tie bore the colors of a regiment or a public school. His hands were delicate: gentle hands, Mrs. Crasthorpe surmised, the fingernails well kept. He had looks and, she imagined, charm; she liked the way he dressed. She liked his serious expression as he walked, how he seemed to dwell on serious matters, unravelling confusion, clever. He wasn’t in a hurry. She liked that, too.

“Enford Crescent,” she said to herself, wondering how long it had been since Enford Crescent was plucked out of nowhere by Tups or Primmie, she couldn’t remember which. You asked the way to Enford Crescent when a boy you liked the look of came along. He wouldn’t know, he couldn’t know: there was no Enford Crescent. For an hour once, Primmie and a nameless boy had trailed about, searching for what they would never find, falling in love, so Primmie had said. And Tups, another time, searching also, was taken to the Palm Grove and was bought a Peach Surprise.

“Ithink it’s probably quite near,” Etheridge said when he was asked for directions to somewhere he thought he’d once noticed on a street sign. “Excuse me,” he called out to a couple with a dog on a lead. “This lady’s looking for Enford Crescent.”

The couple had been engaged in an argumentative conversation, which had abruptly ceased. They were middle-aged and tired-looking, a note of impatience in both their voices. The dog was a black-and-white smooth-haired fox terrier, snappish because it disliked its lead.

“Enford?” the man who restrained it repeated. “Not round here, I shouldn’t think.” His companion nodded her agreement.

The woman who’d asked for directions was smiling rather helplessly now, Etheridge thought. “Never mind,” she said.

The couple and the dog went on. “You’ve been most kind,” the woman in search of Enford Crescent said.

“Well, hardly that.”

“Oh, yes. Indeed.”

“I’m sorry I misled you.”

“No, no.”

“Someone will know when you ask again.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Crasthorpe watched the man she had spoken to walking away from her, and when he passed out of sight she missed him as if she knew him. He had a cultivated voice and was polite without being like an icicle. She’d always been attracted by fair-haired men.

Still gazing into the empty distance, she felt the weight of her age. She’d been impulsive once upon a time, hasty and not caring that she was. Tups had called her a spur-of-the-moment girl. Primmie had, too. They’d liked the impulsiveness in her; she’d liked it herself. He would have done, the fair-haired man, she’d known he would. She would have told him. He would have listened and understood. She knew that, too, and yet she’d let him go.

For no particular reason, when Janet was ill, Etheridge had begun to fill the remaining pages of a half-used ledger book with autobiographical jottings. He did not intend this to be a diary, simply a record of early childhood, his own and Janet’s, some later memories collected, too. It established time and place, what had been shared and what had not, the marriage, and people known and houses lived in. While he was homesick at a Gloucestershire boarding school, Janet was being taught at home by a Miss Francis, school being considered a risk for a delicate child. Her first theatrical appearance, unnamed, unnoticed, was in the pantomime chorus of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Short-skirted, glamorous, she was seventeen, while Etheridge, not then known to her, was waiting for a vocation to offer itself. They met when Janet came to London.

Alone thirty years later, Etheridge could not forgive her death and imagined he never would. He sensed that his feelings were unreasonable and he struggled to dismiss them, disliking himself for what seemed to be a selfishness. But, still, resentment hung about. Why should she not have what mostly people did have? Why was she now mere dust?

The autumn that came was an Indian summer, and every weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday, Etheridge walked in Regent’s Park. He learned from a book the names of flowers he didn’t know; he fed the birds. But mainly, while time passed more slowly than on weekdays, he watched from a pavement table of a café the people who came and went. He envied them, and he envied himself as he had been.

When, years ago and halfway through her marriage, Mrs. Crasthorpe had discovered this same part of London, she had liked it at once. She had visited it to inspect, and take her pick of, an elderly woman’s jewelry, the woman once well-to-do but no longer. Mrs. Crasthorpe had bought three rings and a bracelet, and when, a month or so later, the same advertisement appeared again she made a second journey and on her return persuaded her husband to sell their house and buy one she had seen in Coppice Mews. She liked the mews, she liked the streets, and so did he; he hadn’t at first but with time she’d persuaded him that he did. He died in Coppice Mews, apologizing for having to leave her on her own and for wanting to be buried in a small country churchyard she considered unsuitable for the urban man he’d been. She honored his wishes nonetheless, and was already on familiar terms with the people of the shops, had the mews house painted in the colors she had previously wanted. All of which, for Mrs. Crasthorpe, increased the pleasure of widowhood.

Afaintly familiar face was what Etheridge was aware of, without knowing where or when he’d seen it before. Then he remembered and nodded at the woman who was turning the pages of a newspaper at the next table.

She stared at him when he did so, as if her thoughts had been similar to his. “Good Lord!” a moment later she exclaimed. Her scent was as pungent as it had been when she had asked for directions. Her clothes were different. She held out a hand that was just within Etheridge’s reach. “I rather think we’ve met before,” she said.

“Well, yes, we have.”

“What weather!”

“It’s lovely.”

“A day for the races!”

She used to go racing often, she said. The Oaks, the Derby, Cheltenham. Wimbledon for the tennis, Henley. “Oh, such a lot,” she said, but things were quieter now. Inevitable, of course, as the years pile up.

She was handsome in her fleshy way, Etheridge supposed. Careful, experienced. You couldn’t call her gross, and there was something in her lavish, well-used smile that was almost delicate. Her teeth were very white. Her breasts were firm, her knees trim. She fiddled with a brooch she wore, a loop of tiny stones, chips of sapphire and washed-out ruby they might have been, the only decoration on a pale-cream dress. Sometimes a languid look came into her features and, for a moment, then they were tranquil.

“What a troublesome country Cambodia is!” she chattily remarked, folding away her newspaper as she spoke. “You’d think they’d have more sense.”

She was the worst in the world about names, she confided, seeming to imply that Etheridge had told her his on their previous encounter, which he hadn’t. His coffee came, too hot to be drunk in a couple of gulps, allowing him to go away.

It was extraordinary, Mrs. Crasthorpe marvelled, that he should again be here, this attractive stranger who had continued to float about in her consciousness and whom she’d made herself love a little. What lengths she went to, she reflected, how determinedly she guarded herself from the cruelty that was more than Tommy Kildare’s treachery or Donald deciding that he was homosexual, more than the haunting years of Arthur’s dreary world, more than tediousness and boredom. How good the everyday was, the ordinary, with its lesser tribulations and simple pleasures. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

Unable to find the white lies that were always there for him, Etheridge muttered incomprehensibly. He wondered if this talkative woman was drunk, but the flow of information about herself had come in an orderly manner, suggesting that she was not.

“How attractive your name is,” she said. “Crasthorpe is appalling, don’t you think?”

She had been Georgina Gilmour once, she said, the same Gilmours who had carried their name all over the English-speaking world. The Crasthorpes had never been much and were, of course, unrelated to her.

“How much I enjoy conversation with strangers,” in passing she revealed.

She spoke about the Gilmours at some length, their place in Scotland for the shooting, the child among them in the past who’d been a musical genius, and Nanny Fortescue, to whom three generations had been devoted, and old Wyse Gilmour, who’d raced at Silverstone and lived to be a hundred and two.

“Well, there you are,” she said, without finality. She scribbled on the edge of her newspaper and handed him the scrap of paper she tore off: she’d written down her address.

“We clearly are not birds of a feather,” pensively she concluded. “But if you should ever think we might know one another better I’m nearly always at home in the afternoon.”

He nodded vaguely. Abrupt and dogmatic, her manner might have seemed rude, but she managed to make it an unawareness, as probably it was.

“Your wife,” she said. “You mentioned your wife.”

He shook his head.

“I thought you said your wife . . .”

“No.”

“I thought . . .”

“My wife died.”

Afterward, Etheridge avoided having coffee at that particular café, but several times he caught a glimpse of Mrs. Crasthorpe, once coming out of the Cock and Lion. It had surprised him when she’d said that they weren’t birds of a feather: he had imagined that that was what she’d thought they were. He avoided the Cock and Lion, too, and frequented instead the Admiral’s Rest, which was farther away and rougher. Once, he heard his name called out in Vincent Street and walked more quickly on. Mrs. Crasthorpe did not interest or concern him, and it was hard to believe that this pushy, over-lively woman might possess qualities more appealing than her manner. Crowded out by his continuing anger at the careless greed of death, her attentions were hardly noticed. Mrs. Crasthorpe would fade away to nothing, which was what she had been before she asked him for directions.

But, having lunch at Le Paon one day with the two men from the office he regularly had lunch with, he thought he saw Mrs. Crasthorpe on the street. The plate-glass terrace doors of the restaurant had not been folded back, as in high summer they invariably were: Le Paon in early autumn echoed only with its own murmur of voices, enlivened with occasional laughter. All three men had ordered chops; a glass of house wine had been brought to each. Their conversation while they waited was devoted to the difficulties that had arisen because a typeface was neither available nor obtainable. “I’ll try Thompson’s this afternoon,” one of Etheridge’s colleagues said, and the other mentioned J. Sinclair’s in Edinburgh. Etheridge said nothing.

Mrs. Crasthorpe wasn’t wearing her pale-cream dress but, instead, a flowery one he had also become familiar with. She was standing still, in conversation with a figure in a long black overcoat that looked, at least from a distance, to be much too heavy for the time of year. Its wearer—his back to the restaurant’s façade and to Etheridge—gestured repeatedly, as if in persuasion. Mrs. Crasthorpe did not seem happy. From time to time, she attempted to move away, only to be drawn back by her companion’s insistence that their encounter should continue.

“Your chops, sir,” a waiter said, and there were roast potatoes and parsnips mashed and rich brown gravy.

“Or possibly Langford’s.” Etheridge at last contributed something to what was being discussed, feeling that he should.

When the meal ended, he noticed that while he hadn’t been looking the conversation on the street appeared to have become a fracas. Mrs. Crasthorpe and the man in the black coat were now at the center of a small crowd, the man still gesturing, Mrs. Crasthorpe more agitated than before. Etheridge could hear the voices of several bystanders raised in angry abuse that was clearly directed at the blackly clad figure. Two elderly women pushed to get closer to him; a bearded man was restrained from striking him; a younger woman was shouting into a mobile telephone. Then the gesticulating ceased, and the man in the black coat shrugged, his arms raised in despair, his comic stance suggesting that something he considered to be a source of humor had been misunderstood. Etheridge didn’t feel the incident was worth drawing to his colleagues’ attention, and by the time he reached the street himself the crowd had disappeared and Mrs. Crasthorpe had, too. The man in the black coat was laughing, his wrists held out to the two policemen who had taken charge of him.

Unnatural little bastard, the warder’s unspoken thought was when he heard that this arrest had taken place. His own mother, the thought went on, who brought him jam and did her best. His own mother, and in broad daylight.

“Only teasing,” Derek said the next time she came. “I thought you’d be amused.”

She wept where no one could see her. She never had where anyone could, not ever in all the days and nights, all the waking up to another incident and Arthur knowing nothing. She hadn’t wept when Tommy Kildare had had enough of her or when Donald needed something different. But she wept her private tears whenever she imagined the coat unbuttoned, the sudden twitch as it opened wide, the torch’s flash. She wept because she loved him as she did no other human being. She always had. She always would.

In time, Etheridge married again, a relationship that strengthened as the years passed, his contentment in it similar to the contentment he had discovered in marriage before. It seemed natural in the circumstances to move away from Weymouth Street and he did so; natural, too, to buy a house in quiet Petersham, rescuing it from years of neglect and subsequent decay. A child was born there, and then another.

To his second wife, Etheridge talked about his first, which caused neither offense nor irritation, and even the bitter chagrin of his mourning was understood. He considered himself fortunate in almost every aspect of his life as it now was, in his wife and his children, in the position he held at Forrester and Bright, in the open sward of Petersham, its city buses plying daily, its city sounds a whisper in a quieter London.

Another winter passed, another spring, and most of summer. August became September, and it was then, as the days were shortening, that the name Crasthorpe occurred again. The name was unusual, and it caught Etheridge’s eye in a newspaper item concerning a woman who in the night had fallen down in the street and had lain there until she was discovered by refuse collectors when the dusk of another early morning came. She had died while being conveyed to hospital in the refuse men’s enormous vehicle, a reek of whiskey emanating from her sodden clothes. Cold print reported a scene that moved him: a shrunken body gently placed on a bed of waste, the refuse men standing awkwardly then, saying nothing. The woman was thought to be a vagrant, but Etheridge saw blonded hair bedraggled and stockinged knees, an easy smile and clothes he remembered. Chatter he’d been unable to escape from he remembered, too: childhood friends recalled, and going to the races, and conversations with strangers. He’d thrown away the scrap of paper that had been pressed upon him, its sprawl of handwriting unread. In Vincent Street, he had hurried on.

But the curiosity that Mrs. Crasthorpe had failed to inspire in her lifetime came now. Why had she lain all night where she had fallen? Why were her clothes saturated with whiskey, she who had been so conventional and respectable? What did her wordless epitaph say?

Lost somewhere in the crowded tangle bound by Mare Street, Morning Lane, and Urswick Road is unmarked Falter Way, the sign that once identified it claimed by vandals long ago. It is a narrow passage, not greatly used because it terminates abruptly and leads nowhere. No street lights burn at night in Falter Way, no brass plate or printed notice proclaims the practice of commerce or a profession. There are no shops in Falter Way, no bars, no breakfast cafés. No enterprising business girls hang about in doorways.

“Crasthorpe.” A uniformed policeman repeated the name and shrugged away his dismay.

“Poor bloody woman,” his colleague said, and closed his notebook.

There was nothing untoward to report, nothing to add or alter. What had happened here was evident and apparent, without a trace of anything that needed to be looked at more carefully.

In turn, the two men telephoned, then went away.

Derek wondered why his mother didn’t come and hoped it was because at last she’d realized that all of it was ridiculous. When the old boy died she’d said, “Come to the house,” and he hadn’t understood that she meant to live there. She could pass him off as a houseboy, her idea was; she couldn’t see the snags. Once, she would have said that snags didn’t matter. Once, she’d liked being teased. Funny how she was.

Etheridge found it hard to forget Mrs. Crasthorpe, although he wanted to. It shamed him that he had thought so little of her, a woman not really known to him, and then only because she’d been embarrassing and even a nuisance. He had read about Falter Way in the newspaper report of her death and had wondered why she had gone there. On an impulse, when months afterward he was near it himself, he asked about Mrs. Crasthorpe, and although she was remembered, no one had known her name. In nearby Dring Street and the shoddy bars of Breck Hill, he imagined her, a different woman, drinking heavily. She went with men, a barman said, she liked a man.

Etheridge guessed his way through the mystery of Mrs. Crasthorpe, but too much was missing and he resisted further speculation. He sensed his own pity, not knowing why it was there. He honored a tiresome woman’s secret and saw it kept.