A Bit on the Side by William Trevor Page A

it’s cooler so we walk about the streets. We buy things in a market, presents to bring home, rings and brooches and jars of Egyptian peaches, and Egyptian chocolate and Egyptian rugs for the floor. Then I go back to the kitchen.
    Charles has gone out for ice. ‘You going to keep me company?’ Mrs Upsilla says, still busy with her cooking. ‘You’ll trip on those laces,’ she says, allowing the electric mixer to operate on its own for a moment. A nasty accident there could be, and she ties my laces. Always double-tie a shoelace, she says, and I go away.
    In the drawing-room the bowls of olives and tit-bits are laid out; the fire is blazing, the wire net of the fire-guard drawn down. I watch the raindrops sliding on the window-panes. I watch the people in the square, hurrying through the rain, a woman holding an umbrella over her dog, Charles returning with the ice. The cars go slowly, the street lights have come on.
    I sit in the armchair by the fire, looking at the pictures in the books, the old woman who kept children in a cage, the giants, the dwarfs, the Queen’s reflection in the looking-glass. I look out into the square again: my mother’s friend is the first to come. He waits for a car to pass before he crosses the square, and then there is the doorbell and his footsteps on the stairs.
    ‘Have one of these,’ he says in the drawing-room: cheese straws that Mrs Upsilla has made. ‘Time for your dancing lesson,’ and he puts the music on. He shows me the same steps again because I never try, because I don’t want to try. ‘How are they?’ he asks and I know he means Davie and Abigail; ever since my mother mentioned them to him he asks about them. I might have told him they were there that afternoon, but instead I just say they’re all right. Then other people come and he talks to them. I hate him so much I wish he could be dead.
    I listen from one of the window-seats, half behind the curtain. A man is telling about a motor race he has taken part in. One of these days he’ll win, a woman says. In his white jacket, Charles offers the drinks.
    Other people come. ‘Well, goodness me!’ Mr Fairlie smiles down at me, and then he sits beside me. Old and tired, he says, not up to this gallivanting. He asks me what I did today and I tell him about the dolls’ museum. He manages on his own, Mrs Upsilla told me, since his wife died. My mother went to the funeral, but he doesn’t talk about that now. ‘Poor old boy,’ Charles said.
    You can hardly hear the music because so many people are talking. Every time Charles passes by with another tray he waves to me with a finger and Mr Fairlie says that’s clever. ‘Well, look at you two!’ a woman says and she kisses Mr Fairlie and kisses me, and then my father comes. ‘Who’s sleepy?’ he says and he takes me from the party.
    It will be ages before he goes away again: he promises that before he turns the light out, but in the dark it’s like it was in the dream. He’ll go away and he won’t come back, not ever wanting to. There’ll never be the picture gallery again, our favourite picture the picnic on the beach. There’ll never be the café again, there’ll never be the dolls’ museum. He’ll never say, ‘Who’s sleepy?’
    In the dark I don’t cry although I want to. I make myself think of something else, of the day there was an accident in the square, of the day a man came to the door, thinking someone else lived in our house. And then I think about Mr Fairlie on his own. I see him as dearly as I did when he was beside me on the window-seat, the big freckles on his forehead, his wisps of white hair, his eyes that don’t look old at all. ‘A surgeon in his day,’ Mrs Upsilla told Charles the morning my mother went to the funeral. I see Mr Fairlie in his house although I’ve never been there. I see him cooking for himself as best he can, and with a Hoover on the stairs. ‘Who’d mind being cut up by Mr Fairlie?’ Charles said once.
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