Two Lives by William Trevor

her cousin said.
    ‘Yes.’
    The crooked smile expanded and straightened. He was watching her: all the time he was talking she could feel him watching her.
    ‘I don’t think I’d have been much good at anything noisier.’
    She smiled in turn, not knowing whether to deny that, deciding not to. He said:
    ‘I used to want to be an auctioneer when I was at Miss Mullover’s. I fancied myself shouting the odds. Can you believe it? I really did.’
    ‘I can’t see you an auctioneer, Robert.’
    ‘Useless I’d have been.’
    ‘I wanted to work in Dodd’s. It seemed like paradise.’
    ‘You got the next best thing.’
    ‘I thought of Quarry’s too.’
    ‘And is it paradise, Mary Louise?’
    ‘Oh, all that was just a childish thing.’
    He laughed, still watching her. His eyes were brown, but very dark, nearly black when they lost their luminosity. His glasses, tortoiseshell-rimmed, perfectly round, suited him.
    ‘Come and look at another childish thing,’ he said.
    He pushed himself out of his armchair and led her to the table in the window where the soldiers were displayed. It was the double battle of the Aisne and Champagne, he said.
    ‘General Nivelle’s plan was to break through the German line between Vailly and Reims. This cluster of German armies was under the command of the Crown Prince himself.’
    He pointed to where the German line had held, between Vendresse and La Ville aux Bois. Elsewhere it had been pushed firmly back. Mary Louise wondered which war was being fought, and for what purpose.
    ‘The Germans mustered a good counter-attack, but even so the French pressed on, breaking through the Chemin des Dames.’
    Arrows with neatly printed names indicated all that. Some of the soldiers were lying down. These were the dead, he said.
    She plucked up courage. ‘Which war was this?’
    ‘The one before last. The double battle took place in the spring of 1917.’
    She followed him back to the fire. She began to say again that she must go, but already he was explaining that if the Russians hadn’t been preoccupied with their revolution it would have been a different story. She wanted to tell him that in Miss Mullover’s history lessons she’d been fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc. Shyness held her back again.
    ‘In the end it was the Germans who emerged victorious from the Aisne and Champagne encounter. I’m sorry: this is boring.’
    ‘No. No, it isn’t.’
    ‘I was explaining how I spend the day because you asked. I play with soldiers. And read. I read a very great deal.’
    Mary Louise was not much of a one for reading herself. As well as Picturegoer , Letty bought Model Housekeeping, and there used to be the Girl’s Friend years ago, when she and Letty were younger. In the farmhouse there was a bookcase on the landing. Mary Louise had read The Garden of Allah and Greenery Street; at school they’d read Lorna Doone . She had never even looked at the titles of the books in the attics of the Quarrys’ house.
    ‘When it isn’t winter,’ her cousin said, ‘I do things in the vegetable beds. Sometimes I wander down to the stream. There’s a heron on that stream.’
    ‘I’ve never seen a heron.’
    ‘You could see one here, Mary Louise.’
    He smiled again, and all of a sudden she wanted him to know that once she’d thought herself to be in love with him. She didn’t know why she had that urge, and of course it couldn’t be realized. But she thought it would be nice if he knew that being an invalid didn’t make him pathetic. He probably did know, she thought then: he seemed extraordinarily happy with the limited life he led.
    ‘It’s been nice seeing you again,’ was what she said, and before she left the room she promised to return.
    ‘It would be good of you,’ his mother said in the kitchen. ‘You’ve no idea how much your visit delighted him.’
    Mary Louise wanted it to be a secret. She didn’t want it known at Culleen, and certainly not in the Quarrys’ house, that she had