When Violet married him, the piano tuner was still a young man. When Bell married him, he was already old.
Not only that, you must know that when choosing Violet as his wife, the piano tuner had already rejected Bell, and when the second wedding was announced, everyone remembered it. "Hey, anyway, she got the remnants of him." A farmer in the neighborhood made this comment, which was unfounded, but merely stated his opinion. Others have a similar view, although most of them will say otherwise.
The piano tuner had gray hair, and as the wet winter passed, the arthritis in one of his knees worsened. The once gentle manners are now gone, and he is even more blind than on the day he married Violet, a Thursday on June 7, 1951. Compared with the time of 951, the shadows in his life are now more blurred and thin.
"I do." In the small Protestant church of St. Coleman, he replied that he was standing almost exactly where he had stood that afternoon many years earlier. Fifty-nine-year-old Bell, like her former rival, stood at the same altar and repeated what Violet had said. This void is spaced just right; The people in the church remembered that Violet did not have no reverence, nor did they fail to mourn her death. “...... and give to you all my worldly possessions. The piano tuner said his new wife was thinking that she would rather stand beside him in white gauze than this proper burgundy. She did not attend that first wedding, although she was invited. She kept herself busy that day, painting the chicken shed, but even so, she cried. Whether she cried or not, she was more beautiful—almost five years younger than the bride who occupied her mind so clearly that she fought with jealousy. However, he chose Violet—or the prospect that his house would one day go to her—and Bell stood in the chicken shed and told himself bitterly that there was still a little bit of money that could be a breather for a blind man's life. Later, whenever she saw Violet leading him on a walk, whenever she thought of Violet taking care of everything for him and giving him life, she felt that all this was understandable. Hey, she can do it too.
When people left the church, someone was playing Bach's music on the organ, which was usually his job. People flocked in groups in the small church cemetery, scattered around the small gray building, where the parents of the piano tuner and several generations of ancestors on his father's side were buried. Wedding guests who were willing to go to their homes two miles away would be served refreshments, but some offered their blessings to the couple and took their leave. The piano tuner held these familiar hands, imagining the faces that his first wife had described to him. It was the height of summer, as in '951, that the sun was shining hot on his forehead and cheeks, and shining on him through the heavy wedding dress. He had known the cemetery all his life, and as a child, he fumbled with the letters on the stones and spelled out the names of his father's family to his mother. He and Violet don't have children, and they would love it if they did. There was a saying that he was her child, and whenever Bell heard it, it was a stimulus. She could have given him a baby, and she was sure of that.
"I'm going to visit you next month." The elderly groom reminded a woman still holding his hand that she had a Steinway piano, the only one he had tuned. She played it perfectly. He asked when he came to tune and repeatedly said that listening to her play was enough to pay for it. But she was never short of his honorarium.
"Third Monday, I think."
"Yes, Julia."
Call her Mr. Dromgould: he has his style and doesn't like to be intimate with people. People often refer to him as a piano tuner, and hints of his profession show respect for a talented man. His full name is Owen Francis Dromgould.
"Oh, the weather is so nice, scheduled for today," said the new young priest of the parish, "the weather forecast says there may be showers, but they must have been mistaken." ”
"Sky—"
"Oh, Cloudless, Mr. Dromgould, Cloudless."
"Well, that's nice. Would you like to come to the Hansha, I think? ”
"He'll definitely come, of course." Bell urged, hurrying through the crowd in the cemetery and repeatedly inviting everyone that she must have a party.
After a while, when this new marriage entered everyday life, people wondered if the piano tuner had plans to retire. One knee was bad, he couldn't see, he was old again, and when he used his talents, the people in private houses, monasteries, and schools were tolerant of him. He couldn't sit idle, the years passed, and he didn't get much luck. However, occasionally when rappers or inquirers put this question in front of him, he denies that he has such thoughts, and he does not think that only the call of death will put an end to it all. The truth is that if he doesn't work, doesn't wander around, and for a long time he doesn't have to go to small towns every six months or so to serve people, he will be overwhelmed. No, it won't, he promised, and they'll see the white Vauxhall turn into the gate of some farm, or stop for half an hour in the courtyard of some monastery, or stop on the side of the road, while he munches on his lunch sandwich and drinks the tea his wife has packed in a thermos.
This business was mainly developed by Violet. When they got married, he was still living with his mother in the gatehouse of the Barnagam mansion. He had already begun tuning the piano — two at the Barnagam mansion, one in the town of Barnagam, and one in a farmer's house, and he had to walk four miles. At that time, people pity him for being blind, so he was called from time to time to repair the seaweed cushion of the toilet or chair, which he also learned, or play the violin his mother bought for him as a child on an important occasion. After marriage, Violet changed his life. She lived in the concierge, and she didn't always get along well with his mother, but she survived. She has a car, which means that if she finds a long-neglected piano somewhere, she can drive him there. She drove to their homes, as far as forty miles away. She calculated the car's fuel consumption and wear and tear and determined his charges. She kept an address book and wrote down the date of each house's next tuning in her diary, which worked very well. She recorded a considerable increase in income and found that by far the most lucrative thing was playing the violin: playing at evenings of country and western music in lonely taverns, and playing balls on the stage at the crossroads in the summer—an activity that had not completely disappeared in 1951. Owen Dromgould loves the violin and is willing to play it anywhere, with or without money, but Violet is interested in money.
So this first marriage developed so busily, and later, Violet inherited her father's house and took her husband to live with her. It used to be a farm, but because the family had been addicted to alcohol for generations, they drank all the farm's land. Fortunately, though, Violet wasn't infected with the vice that plagued her family.
"Okay, tell me what's there." In the early years when her husband often asked this question, Violet told him about the house she had brought others to live in, at the foot of a remote mountain, which sometimes looked blue, and a little further back from an alley. She described the corners of the house, and he could hear her pulling and latching the wooden shutters as the air from the wind from the east affected the fire in the room that used to be called the living room. She described the pattern of the carpet that covered the only flight of stairs in the house, the blue and white porcelain handles on the kitchen cupboards, and the front door that never opened. He listened with relish. His mother, who had never accommodated her son's troubles, had such patience at the beginning. His father used to work as a horseman at Barnagam Mansion, fell and died, and he knew nothing about his father. "Skinny as a hunting dog." Violet described a photograph left by his father.
She remembered the spacious, cold halls of Barnagam Mansion. "On the way up the stairs we walked around a table with a peacock on it. It is a large silver bird with small pieces of stained glass between its open tail wings, representing its colorful feathers. Green and blue. When he asked about the color, she said, oh, and she was sure it was just made of glass, not jewelry, because someone had told her once when he was trying his best to deal with the broken grand piano in the living room. The stairs were curved, and he knew it because he often ran up and down to repair the Charbelle piano in the nursery. The staircase hallway on the first floor was as dark as a tunnel, Violet said, with two sofas, one at each end, and rows of smiling portraits hanging on the walls.
"We're passing by the Ducey gas station," Violet would say, "and Father Fili is refueling at the pump." ”
The Dussie gas station sold Esso gasoline, and he knew how to write the word because he had asked someone. The logo is in two colors; The figure was compared to the shape he felt. With Violet's eyes, he saw the desolate façade of McCody's mansion on the outskirts of Oghill. He saw the bloodless face of the stationer. He saw his mother close her eyes forever and cross her hands over her chest. He saw the mountains, sometimes blue, sometimes the fog cleared and turned gray. "The primrose is not so bright," Violet says, "more like the color of straw or rustic yellow sleeves, with a little color in the middle." He nodded and got it. Light blue, like smoke, she described the mountains, the middle one is not red, more like orange. He didn't know more about smoke than she told him, but he could tell the sounds. He insisted that he knew what red was because he could hear it and knew orange because he could taste it. He could see the red on the Esso sign, and the orange in the primrose. He understood by saying "straw" and "country butter," and Violet said that Mr. Whitten had an eccentric temper. There was a dean aunt who looked very serious. Anna Craigie loves whimsy. Thomas from the sawmill is a scruffy guy. Bart Conlon's forehead looks like the Merrick Hound, and every time he sees the Merrick Browood, he touches it.
During the period when his ex-wife died and the strings had not yet been renewed, the piano tuner came alone, and those who had pianos had to drive to pick him up, and they also needed help with shopping and housework. He felt like a burden to others, knowing that this was not what Violet wanted. Nor would she want the business she had built for him to be ruined by her departure. He made her proud to play the organ in St. Coleman's Church. "Never give up." She whispered these words before whispering a few words on her deathbed, and he went to church alone. On a Sunday almost two years later, he renewed with Bale.
After Bell was rejected, she could not get rid of her jealousy, she was angry that Violet was not as good as herself, and to her pain, it seemed to her that the punishment of blindness seemed to be imposed on her. Apart from punishment, what else can you call a black smear in front of you? What else could put darkness above her beauty besides punishment? However, there was no sin to punish, and they were supposed to be a good couple, she and Owen Dromguld, she gave beauty to a man who did not know it, that should be a virtue.
Because misfortune tormented her endlessly, Bell remained unmarried. She helped her father first and then her brother look at the family's shop, writing labels on clocks left in the store waiting to be repaired and recording the words to be engraved on sports trophies. She serves customers behind the store's only counter, where she is busiest during Christmas, with glassware and weather indicators being the most popular wedding gifts, and lighters and cheap jewelry bought by fewer people. Sometimes clocks and watches just need to be equipped with a battery, so the business of gifts expands. However, as time passed, there was never a man in town who could match the man who was taken away from her.
Bell didn't have the shop when she was born, and she still lived there when the house and shop were owned by her brother. After her brother had children, she still had a place to live in the house, and her place in the shop was not usurped. She has a flock of chickens behind the house, which she has been raising since her tenth birthday: and this continues to this day. She lives with loss, and this has become a part of her a long time ago, and this is how she looks in the eyes of her nephews and nieces. Some people noticed that the sorrow in her eyes made her more charming. When she renewed her relationship with the person who had rejected her, both brothers and sisters-in-law thought she was making a fool, but they didn't say anything, just smiled and asked her if she planned to take the chickens with her.
That Sunday, when several parishioners left, they stood in the church cemetery and talked. "Come, I'll show you those tombs." As he spoke, he walked ahead, knowing exactly where he was going, and stepped onto the grass and touched the first tombstone with his finger. This was his grandmother, he said, his father's mother, and for a moment, Bell really wanted to feel the letters engraved on it with his own hands, rather than looking at them. They walked among the tombstones, and both knew that the parishioners who had gone home knew everything about the pair that had fallen behind. After Violet's death, he traveled between his home and the cemetery every Sunday, unless it rained. If it really rains, the man who drove Old Lady Petil to church would take him home. "Would you like a walk, Bell?" After introducing the family tombstone, he asked. She said she wanted to.
Bell did not bring her chickens with him when he got married. She said there were enough chickens. Later, she regretted it a little, because in the house that belonged to Violet, no matter what she did, she felt that Violet had done it in the past. As she cut the meat to make the stew, she stood there, the sun shining on Violet's used cutting board, props, and he felt like an imitator. She diced the carrots, and I believe Violet had cut them too. She bought new wooden spoons, because Violet's ones were not good. She painted the vertical railing of the handrail of the stairs, and she painted the inside of the front door, which never opened. She disposed of the pile of women's magazines she had found upstairs in a small closet, for years. She threw a deep fryer because she didn't think it was clean. She ordered new plastic floor coverings for the kitchen. She regularly hoeed the flower beds behind the house, lest anyone come to her door and say that she had made the place lifeless.
Things have always been divided into two: what to keep and what to change. When she takes care of the flower bed, is she giving way to Violet? When she throws away a deep fryer and three wooden spoons, is she giving in to trifles? No matter what he did, Bell would always doubt himself afterwards. Violet was short and stocky, with gray hair just like when he was dying, and his bulging face squeezed his eyes small, as if to give angry orders. And the blind husband they shared, who played the violin softly either here or in that room, knew that his first wife was ugly dressed, out of shape, scruffy and dirty cooking. It was Bell who was alive, who enjoyed all the love of a man, who possessed the property of a woman before him, lived in her room, drove her car, and that was not enough. That's how it should be, but as time goes by, it doesn't seem like anything to Bell. He remained unchanged for nearly forty years of marriage, and by himself, the sacrosanctity of the inviolability: always so.
One day at lunchtime a year after marriage, Bell drove the car to the passage of a field, and the couple sat in the car, and he said:
"Tell me, can't you stand it anymore?"
Can't stand what, Owen? ”
"Running around there in a car. Send me and pick me up. Helplessly sat and listened to my nagging. ”
"There's nothing you can't stand it."
"You're really good."
"I don't think I'm good at all."
"I knew you were in church that Sunday, and I could smell your perfume. I can smell it even when sitting on the organ. ”
"I'll never forget that Sunday."
"I fell in love with you when you allowed me to introduce you to those tombstones, and I loved you before that."
"I don't want you to be too tired and wander around after tuning those pianos." I can give up, you know. ”
He was willing to do that for her, he said it when she thought. He was nothing to a woman, he had said this in the past: he was just a blind man with few days to come. He confessed that he had not spoken to her for more than two months when he thought about marrying her, because he knew better than she what she would pay if she said yes. "How does that Bell look lately?" When he asked Violet a few years ago, Violet didn't say anything at first, and then she seemed to say, "Bell still looks like a girl." ”
"I don't want you not to work, never, Owen."
"You are my heart, my dear. Don't say you're bad. ”
"It also allows me to walk around, you know. Much more than where I've been in the past. Driving on the avenue leading to the homes of those strangers. Go to towns I've never been to. Meet people I never knew. How small my circle of life used to be. ”
The word narrow is unintentional, but it is nothing. He didn't respond that he understood that narrowness because it wasn't his style to say so. They had gotten acquainted since Sunday at church, and he said he often remembered how she packed things she bought for customers at her brother's jewelry store, and one year she had bagged the watch he bought for Violet's birthday. He also imagined her putting down the window grille at night, locking the shop door, and going upstairs to sit with her brother's family. After marriage, she told him many things: how she had lived most of her life, only the flock of chickens belonged to her. "Dressed beautifully." When it came to the fact that the woman he rejected was still like a girl, Violet added.
There was no honeymoon, but after a few months, he wondered if it was too tiring for her to run around like this, so he took her to a seaside resort where he and Violet had been there many times for a week. They stayed in the same family hotel, Sang Susie, and wandered the long, empty promenade, the alleys where larks roamed among the upside-down admiralty, and the cliffs. They drank in the tavern of Mare . They lie on the dunes in the autumn sun.
"You're so nice, you still want this." Bell smiled at him, happy because he wanted her to be happy
"Recharge your batteries for this winter, Bell."
She understood that it would not be easy for him. They came here because he didn't recognize the place, and before he set off he knew he would have a mood swing when he got here. She could already see it on his face, it was for her kind of stoicism. Privately, he is touched by the smell of the sea and seagrass, carrying the guilt of betrayal. The noises in the family hotel were something Violet had heard too. For Violet, the scent of azaleas also extends into October. It was Violet who was the first to speak of bathing—a week of autumn sunshine would keep them recharged for the winter: this could be seen on his face in the moment he uttered it.
"I'm going to tell you our plans," he said, "and I'm going to buy you a TV when I get back, Bell." ”
"Oh, but you—"
"You'll tell me anyway."
As they said this, they were walking near the lighthouse on the headland. He should have told Violet to buy her a TV, but Violet was probably saying she didn't want it. It would never be opened, she probably justified it as such; Either way, that stuff just makes you stupid.
"You're so nice to me." This is what Bell said.
"Ah no, no."
As they approached the lighthouse, he called and a man answered from the window. "Wait a minute." The man said that when he opened the door, he must have guessed that the wife he knew had died. They entered the house, and when it came to the old man and the remarriage, he suggested, "How about a drink?" When the host poured whiskey and the three glasses were raised in greeting, Bell felt it was a tribute to her, although no one said so. It started raining on the way back to the family hotel and it was the last night of the holiday.
"Winter is right," he said the next day as she drove in the rain, and the rain didn't stop. ”
The television was bought and placed in the small room next to the kitchen that used to be called the living room. They sit here most of the time, and the radio is here. Two weeks after the TV was bought, Bell got a tiny black shepherd dog that the farmer didn't want anymore because he was afraid of sheep. The dog became hers and has always been called "hers." She feeds it, takes care of it. She put it in the car and took it everywhere. She also gave it a new name, "Maggie," and would say yes when she called it.
Even with the dog and the television, the addition of the house also threw some things, and the husband loved her so sincerely and told her that she was fine, and for Bell, everything was still the same. The woman who held her husband's arm for so long, the woman who took him from house to house, let him carefully fiddle with the piano, and brought the piano back to life, still proclaimed her existence. She is not like a nasty ghost who makes the relentless hallucination seem to be nothing, but attaches a part of her to the man she loves.
Owen Dromgould is sensitive to something that no one else has, and he still senses the discomfort of his second wife. She knew he could feel it. That's why he offered to stop working, why he took her to the seaside where Violet had also been, enduring the guilt of betrayal, why there is now a television and a shepherd dog. He had already guessed why she had repainted the kitchen door. With pride, along with a man who knew Violet, he raised his glass high to her. With pride, he sat with her in the family hotel restaurant and in the Mare tavern.
Bell told himself to remember it all. She told herself to think back to the bottle of John Jameson she had taken out of the kitchen in the lighthouse and the noise in the family hotel. He knew that he had done everything in his power to comfort her; His love is meticulous. However, Violet would tell him which leaves were changing color. Violet would report to him whether the tide had risen or receded, and Bell realized it was too late. Violet is the eyes of her blind husband. Violet left her no room to breathe.
One day, they were driving away from one of the furthest homes they had ever visited, and Bell was visiting it for the first time, and he said:
"Have you ever seen a gloomy room like that? Is it a relationship with icons? ”
Bell reversed the car, drove straight away, and slowly passed the gate, which had not been widened in thirty years.
"Gloomy?" She drove the car onto a narrow road that looked like a riverbed, trying to detour around the potholes in the road as much as possible.
"We used to wonder if it was because they didn't want to use something as colorful as wallpaper, so as not to lose respect for those icons."
Bell didn't say a word. She drove the Vauxhall safely onto the asphalt and drove silently through a large muddy pond. The icons in the room where Mrs. Grenahan kept the piano seemed to be remembered: the Virgin and the Son, Saint Catherine of the Sacred Heart and her lily, the Virgin alone, Jesus with a halo on his head. They hang on indescribably brown walls; On the mantelpiece and a bookshelf in the corner are sculptures. Mrs. Grenahan brought tea and snacks into the melancholy hut, her voice muffled as if the saints had asked her
"What's like?" Bell asked without looking back, although she could turn her head because there were neither other vehicles nor mud ponds ahead.
"Are those paintings hanging there anymore? Isn't that room full of icons? ”
"They must have taken it down."
"So what's hanging there now?"
Bell increased the speed slightly.
She said that a fox came out of nowhere and ran across the road to the left.
Still standing there, she said, foxes are like that.
"Do you want to stop and see, Bell?"
"No, no, it's running now.
Was that piano played by Mrs. Grenahhan's daughter before? ”
"Oh yes.
She hadn't seen her daughter in years.
In the past, we said that the icons scared her away.
What does the wall look like now? ”
"Striped wallpaper.
Bell added, "There's a picture of her daughter on the mantelpiece." ”
A few days later, one day he spoke of a nun in Mina's convent, with red cheeks like ripe apples, but Bell said that recently the nun had turned as white as chalk, and her face was sick, and she was sunken.
"So, she's sick." He said.
Suddenly, Bell became emboldened, and regardless of what others might think, he plucked out the plants that Viollet had special in the flower bed behind the house and planted all the grass. She told her husband about the change in the gas station in Ducey: Texaco had replaced Esso. She described the Texaco logo, the big red star and how the letters that make up the word were arranged. She avoided stopping at the Ducey gas station to avoid chatting and saving him from asking Ducey if he was losing money by selling Esso gas, or something else. "Oh no, actually, I don't think it's silver," Bell said of the peacock in the hall of Barnagom Mansion, "and if they wiped it clean, I dare say it was copper." "The two sofas at the ends of the upstairs have been loosely covered with new hoods, and on them are bouquets of colorful chrysanthemums." Oh no, not skinny, I don't think he's thin," Bell said, holding a picture of her husband's father, "a strong face, I want to say." "That tooth was once described as a windy school teacher, but now it is almost a denture, and it laughs solemnly. The bright white façade of McCody's house has been weathered and frosted, and it can almost be said to be gray. "It's forget-me-not blue," Bell said of the color of the mountains one day, and the weather lined the mountains blue, "you can't believe it." Since then, the piano tuner's home no longer cares about the blue of the mountain, which is called a light blue like smoke.
Owen Dromgould's fingers skimmed quickly across the bark. He could distinguish the leaves of different shapes; He could tell the thorns of a wattle bean from a blackberry. He can tell birds by their chirping, dogs by barking, and cats by the touch between their legs. He knew the words on the tombstone, the stops on the organ, and the strings on his violin. He knows what red is and knows berries on holly and chestnut trees. He also smelled lavender and thyme.
This can't be taken away from him.
If the red paint on the kitchen doorknob falls off overnight, it doesn't matter.
If there was the sound of a porcelain lampshade shattering in the kitchen that he hadn't heard before, it didn't matter, it didn't matter, it didn't matter, something as fragile as a dream was hurt.
The first wife he chose was scruffy: from the silence and changing tones—not just from between words—he now knew. Her gray hair was scattered messily on her shoulders, and her back was a little hunched. He poked and walked little by little, and this old couple immersed in eternal happiness looked older than they really were. She can't even hit a fly, she is not the kind of person who will make people jealous, of course, she can't get rid of the shadow of happiness in the past, she always has to compete with the simplicity of the past, and it is really torture for a new wife. He gave himself to two women; He has not yet withdrawn from the first and has not left from the second .
Everyone who has a piano is very different from the past. Mrs. Petier's pearl necklace was opal, and Keilus's pale skin was covered with freckles. Are those two rows of oaks on Mount Okie really beech? "Of course, of course," agreed Owen Dromgould, because he was only fair to do so. Bell cannot be blamed for making his claims, which would not have been made if they had not been hurt and destroyed. Bell wins the ending because the living always win. And it seemed fair, as Violet won the start and had better years.
William Trevor is a giant of contemporary Irish literature and has been called "the greatest short story writer in the contemporary English-speaking world" by The New Yorker magazine. Born in 1928 to a middle-class Protestant family in Mitchellstown, County Cork, Ireland, he spent his childhood in the provinces before studying history at Trinity College, University College Dublin. He has worked as a sculptor, teacher, and copywriter for advertising agencies. From 1954, he and his wife moved to England. Since publishing his first novel, The Standard of Conduct, in 1958, William Trevor has written nearly twenty novellas, hundreds of short stories, and several drama screenplays, children's books, and collections of essays. He has won the Whitbulled Book Prize three times and was a finalist for the Booker Prize five times. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him a knighthood. In 2008, he received the Irish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.