William Trevor Stories (3)

Please see  https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/ for my reviews of other William Trevor Stories...

MISS SMITH

“...until they arrived at the horror, until the horror was complete.”

Miss Smith was a teacher and she despised little James, made him feel small or less than he was. She left teaching and had a baby of her own. Her husband despaired at  her seemingly unforced mistakes in the care of child-rearing. One incident was with gas. 

But who gaslit HER? 

A remarkable creepy story that should be published in books that are made for those who enjoy creepy stories.

TIMOTHY’S BIRTHDAY

“: all they wore was old.”

Just like Dirk Bogarde’s Servant film that I watched when it first came out in the cinema, this meticulous story has a stoical Pinteresqueness, with Eddie, 19, as unpolished messenger to the 60-something endemic couple,  past Ruby, giving them a sickie message from their son excusing his non-attendance at their birthday treat for him, yes, that message being from their 30-something son Timothy who had inherited from a now dead older  man to whom HE, Timothy, had been servant, with whatever innuendo you wish to make, but what valve did Eddie mend in the couple’s toilet, what ornament (intertwined Tench?)  did he steal from them, after imbibing their gin! 

“Instant gave you cancer, Timothy maintained.”

BROKEN HOMES

“She’d had a dream a week ago, a particularly vivid dream in which the Prime Minister had stated on television that the Germans had been invited to invade England since England couldn’t manage to look after herself any more.”

And there was a ‘polish factory’ down the road from where the old woman lived. Judging by the references in this story, this takes place and was probably written in the 1960s, and the awful children in it grew up to vote for Brexit in the second decade of the 21st century. This is the story of a then 87 year old woman who has her kitchen invaded by a ‘hideous yellow’, as she is persuaded to allow children, two of whom have sex in her bed, to redecorate her house as a community work therapy for them. You need to help those from broken homes, she is persuaded. And she is so scared of being considered as senile, she sells out to what is needed of her. With probably death following on fast. A sad and shocking story. One that should have stuck in the communal mind but has now probably vanished, bar this review of it today pointing to its existence.

CHEATING AT CANASTA

“He cheated at Canasta and she won.”

A moving, densely observed story of a man whose wife Julia has dementia or senility and he still goes places, at her request, where she can’t now go, for her vicarious experiencing such places again. Like Harry’s Bar in Venice, where he overhears a married couple bickering, the wife very young and beautiful, and Julia’s own ‘spoken’ observations on the situation are spoken as factored into his thoughts — unless he cheats at doing that, too? To please her!? Canasta, Can Ask Her? Or not.

“; and four years was a longer lapse of time than there ever was in the past.”

THE HOTEL OF THE IDLE MOON

“The storm had brought the apples down.”

How has this classic horror story not become the classic it should be? A blend of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Apple Tree with Robert Aickman’s The Hospice, yet essentially what is now fast-becoming for me William Trevor’s dark and puckish genius. Involving a confidence tricking couple and a fast-becoming senile one. And an idle blood moon above the orchard.

“Lady Marston laughed quite gaily, ‘Few things have meaning, Cronin. It is rather much to expect a meaning for everything.’”

THE MOURNING

“He gave a racing tip, Cassandra’s Friend at Newton Abbot, the first race.”

An intriguing and thoughtful tale of naivety and grace, Liam Pat goes to London from his downbeat labouring job in Ireland, to a similar job found for him by those ‘kind’ Irishmen who had other ideas for him in IRA days when conductors collected fares on the top deck of buses. His courage to mourn the one he’d’ve otherwise  become, had he been brave enough to do what he had been naively inculcated to do — or, then, I wondered if this was a parallel universe story after he couldn’t light a match for a girl on the bus... 

“, it could have been he had a dream of being on a bus, and he tried to remember waking up the next morning, but he couldn’t.”

AN EVENING OUT

“He spoke of manhole covers and shadows thrown by television dishes, and rain on slated roofs.”

A dating agency meeting of a man and woman in a theatre bar between the play starting and the interval rush. Guess why such a venue was chosen.
The man a creative photographer of London – hence the reference to manhole covers and roofs – intent on a romance with a car-owning woman as that would be useful in transporting his photographic equipment around. But she’d just sold her car…
Backstories and eventual last gasp extension of their meeting in restaurant, where she saw some people she knew across the room. Talk of his toothache and how the theatre bar loo had let him down for painkillers.
A low key ignition to nothing as they left on separate trains. I felt I was there, too, witnessing, but not really noticing, like the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I like taking photos, too.

“You put it all together and it made a life; you lived in its aftermath, but that, too, was best kept back.”

THE GRASS WIDOWS

A generally funny account of a hotel in Galway that changed hands before summer regulars - a headmaster and his wife - arrived for the umpteenth time to see that the manager had died and his son had halved the size of all the rooms with partitions. And other disimprovements. And on the other side of the partition is the headmaster’s once favourite head boy who happens to be on honeymoon with his new wife! Imagine the carry on!
The two wives get together, while the men go fishing...
With a final  ‘dying fall’ of acceptance that seems to typify something or other about them all.

NICE DAY AT SCHOOL

“He crushed her mother because he’d been crushed himself.”

That was 13 year old Eleanor’s father, once wrestler, celebrity-knowing boaster,  making wrestling noises when being ‘obliged’ by - or ‘obliging’ - her mother. A strikingly shocking story of schoolchildren’s  chat about sex, and actual sex, with each other in working class sixties, while the French  teacher, with stray hair on her chin and upper lip, kept clean and solitary in Esher... with most parents AT it, too.

I know whom I envy most. 

This is a remarkable story where an era of time in a sixties English city is exposed as it has never been exposed before. Pity nobody ever reads this today. “‘Sall right...”

ON THE ZATTERE

“...she wondered where waiters go between meals.”

There is so much pregnant in this story, expect pregnancy itself. Women have love affairs. And waiters in posh restaurants sometimes looked then  like Fred Astaire.

A father spends his time cleaning his glasses meticulously, his daughter, having abandoned her own shallow love affair, now living with this her father, as his companion. His wife - her mother - now dead - was his companion, too. Their long term holidays in Venice now replicated with his daughter, finding out things about her father like his lusting after the prettier of the foreign  tourists. Except it was not really lust, never lust with such people, just mannered needy encounters, just a means to extend his slightly predatory behaviour as a male in a male world, and an aesthetic sense of the pretty woman. Disappointment all round, except Venice itself is depicted very prettily and undisappointingly here. But what of his little lies and his cheapskating over cups of coffee in fashionable areas of Venice, the odd vaporetto trip and, even if unmentioned here, another death like Dirk’s, I wonder? His daughter might spread her wings again, if so, and  make good her mistake. Have an affair with someone like Fred Astaire?

CHILD’S PLAY

“Gerard wasn’t certain what a miscarriage was, and Rebecca, who had been uncertain also, explained that the baby came out too soon, a lot of mush apparently.”

Gerard and Rebecca become tantamount to brother and sister as the father of one and the mother of the other marry. When alone the two children rôle-play the behaviour of their previous respective pairs of parents in adultery and dirty weekends in hotels. Your mind may boggle, and indeed the staged behaviour of repeated dialogue and situations between them is complicated by various Venn diagrams of naively and/ or precociously extrapolated relationships … and you become ultimately sad. This is what fiction is all about, the slanted projection of truths by witnesses of what constituted such truths. Only by slanting truths can one put a roof on them, and then settle down underneath, if morosely, for when the bad human weather comes, like plagues and viruses?

WIDOWS

“Bottled Smithwick’s was his drink.”

Dual situations — (1) two marriages ended by the husbands’ deaths and (2) two sisters in those marriages — in Venn overlap, Catherine’s widowhood by trustworthy Matthew, now faced with the dilemma of a bill that apparently Matthew hadn’t paid in cash to a possibly untrustworthy odd job man, no proof of receipt whilst Catherine had got the cash from the Nationwide and given to Matthew to give to the odd job man, and Margaret’s sister Alicia, also widowed, but by a less trustworthy husband who could well have failed to pay a debt like this.
Think of this overlap, and might you write the same story as this? Well, you might, but it would not be a William Trevor story. Two sisters who had duly done their husbandry, for good or ill. Now living together in the blue house opposite the convent where they both went to school.

THE ORIGINAL SINS OF EDWARD TRIPP

“Death has danced through Dunfarnham Avenue and I have seen it, a man without socks or shirt, a man who shall fry in the deep fat of hell.”

The fat of carved ham, the fat of a chop that a blown fuse had stopped frying, this is another one of those William Trevor stories that gently takes you by the scruff of the neck and strangles you. A man and his sister in the same house where they have lived all their lives, she taller, in black, he “a shrimpish creature, fond of the corners of rooms”. She entices him to visit others in Dunfarnham Avenue; today it is an 82 year old woman to whom he has not spoken but watches as she feeds the birds. There is something so utterly sinister and demented in this story, And I might tell you all about it, rather than skirting around it, but really “I am too old, you see, to take on new subjects.”

BRAVADO 

“That’s fennel for you, Aisling murmured, half asleep already, and columbines,…”

Three blokes and two girls coming out of a night club, one of them a convent girl called Aisling – in the area, too, an Indian grocer who stayed open late, but manages to push away trouble – names of streets given to give context of ambiance, if you should know the place already – and, showing off in front of Aisling, one bloke fisticuffs another bloke pissing in some woman’s garden as revenge for what he had done to another bloke’s sister, but that pissing bloke has a weak heart, not that they know till seeing the papers next day…
The aftermath is itself like a Shakespearean tragedy, I guess. A quiet reflective one, if possible. Soul-searching.
Bravado should have been a character in The Tempest, I guess. Along with those other drunken blokes with Trinculo….

LOVERS OF THEIR TIME

“The only aspect of Hilda he didn’t touch upon was her bedroom appetite, night starvation as he privately dubbed it.”

His plain wife Hilda needing her feeding of sex by her husband Norman — Norman on a hard working travel agent counter, and suffers her desires, but meets a voluptuous naive lady called Marie working in nearby chemist, and I will touch upon the beautifully or grotesquely large bathroom, left mostly untenanted on the second floor of a grand London hotel, a bathroom surreptitiously resorted to in the Great Western Royal Hotel, for want of other nooks where Norman and Marie can make their love. This indeed is both humorous and sad, seedy and hopeful with innocent hope and children to have once his marital coast is clear, often grotesque as the decade of the nineteen sixties itself, a bathroom to die for, even a bathroom in a Beatles song at the end of the innocently decadent decade, I guess. Never were there such pent up appetites let loose as from the ill-fitting corsets of time and hopeless hope. But hope, nevertheless. Hilda perhaps had it right, all along.

THE FORTY-SEVENTH SATURDAY

“When he went to the trouble of inventing stomach trouble, you’d think she’d take the trouble to remember it.”

A sad tale of simple pleasures, well, at least Mavie is simple, and he conniving, and married with kids, in his fifties, buys a huge bottle of rosé  for 14/7d. She, Mavie, in her late twenties, thinks she loves him, cooks him mackerel on this their 47th Saturday-window of sexual opportunity. So many seedy touches in this story. She imagines and dreads imagining him at home with his wife. And when he’s finished with Mavie he does not go straight home but watches a Movie in a cinema.

“It’s just that I don’t wish to soil the hour.”

GRAILLIS’S LEGACY

“She found Elizabeth Bowen for herself.”

...as I did. The only author one needs to discover for oneself, rather than be told about by others. This story FEELS like a masterpiece. A librarian called Graillis who we infer had a sort of affair with a woman by sharing fiction literature with her. As I do with you all by means of my reviews towards a gestalt of human love and fiction love. Making both more real. Meanwhile, I relished Graillis turning down, via a solicitor,  this woman’s financial legacy towards him from her will. His own wife (whom he may have betrayed) was already  dead, anyway. Such a legacy would have polluted the gestalt, I sense. Be careful  what memories and venues one may revisit or else one may destroy everything, I say. 

DEATH IN JERUSALEM 

“‘Her death got in the way,’ he said.”

Two brothers, one, Paul, a priest called Father, the other, Francis, not the current Pope, but a humble shopkeeper, devoted, in a lace-curtained room, to the two brothers’ mother, the mother devoted to the shopkeeper brother who is also tolerant of the two brothers’ sister and her dud of a husband. The priest himself more of a hedonist cigarette-ashy drinker, I felt: also a priest — for the sake of the trip’s gestalt with Galilee — who blocks a telegram’s news of their mother’s sudden death when both brothers are on this trip in the Holy Land, neither brother, though, interested in any advert there for “writhing nakedness.” Did Christ writhe, and was he naked? The story does not answer this question – nor did it ask it for that matter…
A touching story about Francis and his mother. Mann had his Death in Venice, Trevor this Death in Jerusalem, but not even one Tadzio in sight, to grow old and then to drop from a future’s last balcony. But who knows?

A HAPPY FAMILY

“Bits of conversations float to the surface without much of a continuing pattern and without any significance that I can see. I suppose we were a happy family:”

A touching story of dementia that comes to his wife, or does it? I somehow sense that a Mr Higgs who rung her regularly about things about her past that any stranger like him could not know was more a retrocausal particle of time like Higgs boson. Yet that would take this 1962 story itself out of time? Or was Higgs just another Mambi? And you will not understand that question until it spoils this story for you when you read it. Just as Mr Higgs spoilt the life of this happy family, the mother and a father and three children, who went to suburban woods in a car that not all families would have had in 1962, I guess. Or perhaps it was someone else ringing up, a spam call from the future, someone like me who had, by now, read this story and already knew It secrets? 

A BIT OF BUSINESS

“It made him miss her more, sitting there with the same programmes coming on, her voice not commenting any more. They would certainly have watched the whole of the ceremony today, but naturally they wouldn’t have attended it in person, being Protestants.”

An old man, recently widowed, as that quote suggests, watches the Pope (on TV) in Phoenix Park upon a visit to Ireland. He is flat-sitting for Catholics who had gone in person to see the Pope. Burglars, you see, were at work on days like that. Taking advantage of all the absences from home. We are indeed introduced to two louts and their subsequent flirtations with girls after they had ended up almost strangling the old man, but leaving him still alive to identify them…something they regretted.
Yet, no matter, it is old geezers like me whom they are offering up today to the great God plague, so there you go. Even the story itself seems more interested in spending time with the young burgling louts (one of them called Mangan) than with the old man.

‘Why’d they be bothered with an old geezer like that?’ Mangan said, and they felt better still.

GOING HOME

“The waiter said that you were mad. Am I crazy too? Can people go mad like that, for a little while on a train? Out of loneliness and locked-up love? Or desperation?”

Probably the most remarkable William Trevor story I have yet read! A boy called Carruthers who is 13 and the aged 38 undermatron from the boarding school he attends happening to use the same train home after the term finishes. He talks wildly and salaciously to the train-buffet waiter of his mother and about his school — with the undermatron sitting at the same dinner table on the train. This seems to be a customary event, except it is a different waiter this time. She later tells the boy about her own backstory and her parents in a seaside bungalow like mine, That quote above hints at the poignant undercurrents involved but there is far more to this story than meets the eye. I even wondered whether they were all role-playing different parts to those of their real selves, or vice versa. A story that needs to be read with urgency. How have I left it so late in my life to do so?
Going home, as we all eventually do.

Please see  https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/ for my reviews of other William Trevor Stories...