Death in Summer by William Trevor Page B

door quickly.
    She opens it cautiously, an inch or two, when she arrives, even though she has made friends with the dog. She can hear a movement in the undergrowth, not far from where she is. In a moment, paws scratch and the dog’s nose is pressed through the crack. She can see its tail wagging and she reaches in and pats its head. It goes away then, as it did the other time.
    ‘They called it the October house,’ she hears after another long wait, his voice reaching her easily.
    Sixteen-sided, the summer-house was built to catch the autumn sun, he is telling the old grandmother, who’s dressed all in white. It was positioned with that in mind, he says, its windows angled for that purpose. The dog is with them, panting in the warmth.
    ‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ the grandmother says, and Pettie can tell that this is what she has been dreading, that this old woman has come to take her place.
    ‘The Victorians experimented more than people know.’
    Some of what is said next is lost, but then they’re nearer and he’s talking about the trees, pointing at them. He refers to the grass of the lawns, saying he remembers a time when it was two feet high. Nettles grew through the heather-beds on the slopes, he says, and thistles in the rose-beds. The grandmother says something about a diary that went on and on, year after year, and he says oh yes, Amelia Davenant’s journal, before his time.
    ‘Letitia talked about it,’ she says.
    ‘Letitia liked it.’
    It seems it’s history now, this diary, written during somewoman’s sleepless nights, yonks ago – entries about a chimney being swept and milk going sour and marmalade made, an Indian selling carpets at the door. A punnet of raspberries, picked and left down somewhere, could not be found. A cousin got engaged. The well didn’t fill, a duchess was murdered in some foreign place. He’s making conversation with all that; doing his best, you can tell from his voice. He doesn’t want what has happened. He doesn’t want this old woman in his house.
    ‘At parties they used to dance outside. Waltzes lit from the downstairs windows and the front door. Music in the hall.’
    ‘Yes. Letitia said.’
    Some gardener or other came back from the trenches in a shocking state. ‘He showed his wound to the children. Here, among his vegetable-beds. Among them was my father.’
    Hinchley the gardener was called. His scar stretched from wrist to elbow because while an enemy soldier was inflicting it he was shot and fell forward, bringing this Hinchley to the ground with the bayonet trapped in his arm. After he’d shown the children his wound Hinchley always had a smoke apparently, a small, charred pipe for which he pared tobacco from a plug.
    ‘Stories hang about old family houses like ghosts.’ It was his mother who told him all that about the gardener; his father didn’t tell stories much.
    ‘Letitia kept a diary when she was little,’ the grandmother gets her say in.
    ‘Yes, I know.’
    ‘It’s interesting about the summer-house.’
    You can tell she isn’t interested in the least, even though she has said she is twice. She has wangled her way into the house, pulling the wool over his eyes with her talk. He was referring to that other diary and she has to bring Letitia into it, harping on the name when he’s trying to forget it in his grieving.
    She’s on about a shoe now, a heel coming off when Letitia was little and Letitia not minding when she had to walk in her bare feet on a street. There’s something about how Letitia went in for music, how she always had music going apparently, how she couldn’t be without it. He makes some comment on that, but his voice is too low to carry.
    ‘Well, I must go and see if my charge has woken up,’ the old woman says.
    Dismally, Pettie watches while he pats the dog’s big brown head, the way he’s always doing. A blackened tennis-ball falls by his feet, a paw prods his trousers. There’s foam on the dog’s