A TRINITY
“He chose for them a package holiday at a very reasonable price: an air flight from Gatwick airport,….”
Ironic that today of all days Gatwick Airport has been closed because of Covid-19! If you accidentally boarded another type of plane in the triangulated coordinates of alternate worlds, you might have escaped this dire Corona of attrition around me. And if you thought the previous story above was attritional, well, this one is even more so! The story of Keith and Dawne, a marital synergy that was so accident-prone that they even foolishly triangulated motives with an elderly ‘uncle’ with whom they lived in a flat above his newsagency which a Mrs Withers managed. The ‘uncle’ chose holidays for this childless couple, Keith who was stature-challenged and his wife Dawne, and the holidays they spent were intended for the ‘uncle’s’ side of their triangulated motives, i.e. for his own vicarious pleasure. And the main part of the plot involves the couple accidentally arriving in Switzerland instead of Venice, a fact for which they would never be forgiven by the ‘uncle’. It is a sort of pathetic ‘carry on’ film as expressed by a fine stylist like Trevor. And I expect it’s still carrying on now! Can a trinity be triangulated or a meringue Williams be mentioned so many times without the reader wanting one?
ROSE WEPT
Gooseberry fools, or not, this is another story (randomly following the previous one above) where the accident-prone are touchingly portrayed, with a touch of absurdism, too, and Mr Bouverie has been tutoring borderline pupils in his home for ages, and Rose was the final one before he retired. Rose, herself so typically and sadly borderline, a destiny of being crucified upon life’s betrayal. And she knew (by something she once witnessed) that, while Mr B tutored her in one room, a male visitor came surreptitiously into the house with his own latch-key, either to service Mrs B, at best an illicit love affair, one day a week, while her husband tutored Rose below. Now no more, no doubt. Luckily for Rose this secret scandal or gossip had made her more popular when chatting with her girl friends in the cafe about it – and we have these friends named for us and there should be a different story about each of them, I reckon. (All this revealed to us during the story’s plot of a sad meal given by Rose’s parents for Mr B to thank him for being responsible for the success that borderline Rose now rose slightly above borderline – a meal for which, even more sadly, Mrs B was said to be too unwell to attend.)
A COMPLICATED NATURE
“He disliked all Jewish people, he wanted to say, because of his ex-wife and her lack of understanding.”
Attridge is coldly prim and proper, once spurned by a wife while on honeymoon in Siena, now an ex-wife, yet he is more complex than what is reported about him here, as Attridge himself, if not the author, tries to prove to the readers, against the grain of his portrayal here, all of this during a suspenseful and cringingly amusing story about a visit of a woman from the flat above who seems to have had a regular sexual assignment with a man just like the regular assignment (coincidentally (as so far I have been reading some of these stories randomly!)!) in the previous story above! And that man has apparently just abruptly died while eating a post-coital meal ‘without a stitch on’. The feelings of emotion she tugs at and induces in Attridge’s seemingly cold soul, for him to help her (Attridge, a man who enjoys art like Wagner and Velasquez), these feelings you will have to read about for yourself. Sometimes I don’t know how a clever Trevor story ticks, but it works however you factor various complicated factors into it! Like the smell of sexual intercourse à la Hemingway. And the paintings of Negroes in the woman’s flat.
“‘I could kill you,’ his ex-wife had shouted at him. ‘I’d kill you if you weren’t dead already.’”
LE VISITEUR
“Alone at her table when her boorish husband left her to fend for herself, she had been disturbed by a stranger’s gaze and had not rejected it.”
We learn about young Guy, his regular visits to the island, the older couple he visits, a set piece, his mother back home and the woman in this couple non persona grata to each other, but why? Guy and the couple always go to this restaurant. Almost a choreography of interaction in this genius loci. Except, Guy, with glances across the restaurant, falls in love with the very thin woman with the boorish drunk as a husband. He helps the waiter take the drunk to the bedroom, where he choreographically, as it were, makes love with the thin wife in contiguity with the sleeping boor … and in quite random and approximate tune with the previous two stories above (!), there is deadpan talk at least of an almost licit illicit sexual fling … as it were. A choreographically perfect story, with not even one predetermined dance of manners for fate to dance to. Just what is, is.
TERESA’S WEDDING
A short wry portrayal of an Irish wedding, the bride already pregnant, a wedding in the 20th century, with all manner of characters, their ideals and denials, pretence in future happiness or in drinking, comprising laddish talk, girl talk, too, and the mistakes made in previous marriages that happened in this lounge bar, one husband outside in the car the whole time reading comics to his children. There is also mention of one *prospective* husband, a vet called Des Foley whose car stinks of disinfectant and probably a bit too old for her, but he is the least important character of all, so why mention him in my review? Perhaps, though, he is the most important - since sex is acting like animals in a field, I guess! Nothing to write home about, this story. Nothing happening here. Move on. That fact perhaps, though, makes this story what it is. Like the previous story above, just what is, is.
TERESA’S WEDDING
A short wry portrayal of an Irish wedding, the bride already pregnant, a wedding in the 20th century, with all manner of characters, their ideals and denials, pretence in future happiness or in drinking, comprising laddish talk, girl talk, too, and the mistakes made in previous marriages that happened in this lounge bar, one husband outside in the car the whole time reading comics to his children. There is also mention of one *prospective* husband, a vet called Des Foley whose car stinks of disinfectant and probably a bit too old for her, but he is the least important character of all, so why mention him in my review? Perhaps, though, he is the most important - since sex is acting like animals in a field, I guess! Nothing to write home about, this story. Nothing happening here. Move on. That fact perhaps, though, makes this story what it is. Like the previous story above, just what is, is.
A PERFECT RELATIONSHIP
“The reticence they shared was natural to them, but they knew – each as certainly as the other – what was not put into words.”
An older man latches up with Chloë after teaching her languages at night school, an easy relationship to fall into and even easier for her at least gratuitously to fall out of. Until she comes back, equally gratuitously, with its key.
In the meantime, he visits her parents in Winchelsea who never really approved of the relationship. To find out something they cannot provide. Goes to the pub with the Dad. Then he goes to a wine bar and imagines a man reading certain books of literature for show in the bar, or was it one book? Imagines him as his rival for Chloë. Scrambled eggs notwithstanding, this is a perfect story, but not one about a perfect relationship. Yet, some endless irony of story-telling paradoxically makes both pretty perfect.
In the meantime, he visits her parents in Winchelsea who never really approved of the relationship. To find out something they cannot provide. Goes to the pub with the Dad. Then he goes to a wine bar and imagines a man reading certain books of literature for show in the bar, or was it one book? Imagines him as his rival for Chloë. Scrambled eggs notwithstanding, this is a perfect story, but not one about a perfect relationship. Yet, some endless irony of story-telling paradoxically makes both pretty perfect.
“There was a photograph of her framed on the sitting-room mantelpiece, a bare-footed child of nine or ten in a bathing dress, laughing among sandcastles that had been dotted around her in a ring. She hated that photograph, she used to say.”
OFFICE ROMANCES
“She felt sorry for him because he had only one good eye.”
Well, Gordon Spelle, let me spell it out for you, is a better man than Mr Bellhatcher in this author’s Kinkies. Well, MUCH better. He wants to be a dance bandsman. But he still is an awful man as he, 38, I recall, and married, takes advantage of the new employee called Angela, single and 26 (a new secretary to Miss Ivydale) and Angela — with an ‘inferiority complex’ in this delightfully dated story — is taken advantage of after hours by Mr Spelle ….. but Miss Ivydale, at 50-something herself, is being taken advantage of by another married man in the office. I sense the story’s ending subtly indicates a future Sapphic affair between the two women! Anyone notice this before? Or was it simply too subtle? Spelling-out something obvious is an art form, perhaps.
THE POTATO-DEALER
“Ragweed and gorse grew in profusion, speckled rock-surfaces erupted. It was her favourite field, perhaps because she had always heard it cursed and as a child had felt sorry for it.”
Possibly one of the most stoically what-is-is piece of fiction in all literature. A girl has relations with a priest and bears his child; the shame felt by her guardian uncle and his sister (the girl’s widowed mother), the necessary shame at that time and in that community; the buying by the uncle of the grubbily down to earth middle man of a potato-dealer as a show husband to obviate that shame….well, the repercussions are adeptly revealed, giving a provokingly deadpan panoply of a living past, the girl (now woman) the only one — among all the story’s characters (seen and unseen characters) — who has principles that we can now admire, even though they were instinctive principles that really made no sense within the otherwise pitifully stoical jigsaw as a gestalt of settled life that everyone else had (equally instinctively) built up as a Godgiven necessity.
MR MCNAMARA
“That day I had a chocolate birthday cake, and sardine sandwiches, which were my favourite, and brown bread and greengage jam, a favourite also.”
One of those truly great stories, as almost all Trevor’s stories nearly or completely are, but this one completely IS!
The story narrated by the older version of a 13 year old boy living near Dublin during the second world war – alongside the various politics then and there involved, together with the relationship of Catholics and Protestants, all through the eyes of this Protestant boy, now grown up. His father had a small granary and mill and when he travelled to Dublin on business he always met a bar room friend called Mr McNamara whereby he heard secondhand about the idiosyncrasies of Mr M’s family, and about which the boy and his mother and his three sisters later heard thirdhand about this living eccentricity of a family in Dublin. Today is his 13th birthday and he gets a boxkite from his parents, a book, a goldfish and a kaleidoscope from his sisters, and a gold dragon from Mr M in Dublin, brought home for the boy by his father. The implications of these presents live on in your mind. As do the even more eccentric behaviour of teachers in the boarding school where the boy is sent posthumously by his suddenly deceased Dad, having died on the night after his 13th birthday. We can easily understand the need for the boy, now almost grown up, to go to the bar in Dublin to seek out Mr M, simply to meet him for the first time, that man whose life he used to live vicariously. I predicted the ending, but I wonder if the disappointed narrator was wrong about what conclusions he drew in hindsight, just as I was wrong, too, to predict such an ending. This story will live on forever in my mind. Along with Mr Dingle’s fantasies as a side dish! And Nipper Achen, too! But, of course, the narrator may have been wrong about these more minor characters, too!!? Filtered second or third hand to us?
The story narrated by the older version of a 13 year old boy living near Dublin during the second world war – alongside the various politics then and there involved, together with the relationship of Catholics and Protestants, all through the eyes of this Protestant boy, now grown up. His father had a small granary and mill and when he travelled to Dublin on business he always met a bar room friend called Mr McNamara whereby he heard secondhand about the idiosyncrasies of Mr M’s family, and about which the boy and his mother and his three sisters later heard thirdhand about this living eccentricity of a family in Dublin. Today is his 13th birthday and he gets a boxkite from his parents, a book, a goldfish and a kaleidoscope from his sisters, and a gold dragon from Mr M in Dublin, brought home for the boy by his father. The implications of these presents live on in your mind. As do the even more eccentric behaviour of teachers in the boarding school where the boy is sent posthumously by his suddenly deceased Dad, having died on the night after his 13th birthday. We can easily understand the need for the boy, now almost grown up, to go to the bar in Dublin to seek out Mr M, simply to meet him for the first time, that man whose life he used to live vicariously. I predicted the ending, but I wonder if the disappointed narrator was wrong about what conclusions he drew in hindsight, just as I was wrong, too, to predict such an ending. This story will live on forever in my mind. Along with Mr Dingle’s fantasies as a side dish! And Nipper Achen, too! But, of course, the narrator may have been wrong about these more minor characters, too!!? Filtered second or third hand to us?
BIG BUCKS
“But America lived for both of them on the screen high up above the bar of the half-and-half…”
It seems appropriate that John Michael and Fina fell in love with America, specially by means of that vicarious screen life in the thus-named pub where she worked – half and half not necessarily making one. Strangely, reading these stories in random order, and the previous one above I thought was the ultimate story about vicariousness, and here we now have this story. Even with Bat Quinn who had helped instil the American dream into them, his knowledge of America was secondhand, too. Young John Michael and Fina in Ireland incited to live the American dream, John Michael going out first to settle their place there and his phone calls and letters back home to her filled me a knowledge of human nature that I did not think I ever had. I will leave any new reader of this story to decide secondhand whether they know from what I’m saying in this review how the story of John Michael and Fina actually ends, before they read it! (Fina having ‘fin’ built in being accidental.)
LAST WISHES
“People wove fantasies around the house and its people; to those who were outside it, it touched on fantasy itself.”
Another Trevor story classic, I am almost reluctant to tell you, as he has had too many classics already in my book! About the resplendent house of Mrs Abercrombie since the 1940s, now 1974. And it reeks of those times, as deliciously as the food cooked in its kitchen. And the white raspberries. And the future ‘rare grasses’ specialists who might have lived in it. An insular community of servants, each of whom has a character we grow to know well. Their emotional quirks, backstories and interactions. The latter sometimes in a bed. When [SPOILER ALERT] Mrs A dies at 61 suddenly, they need to reconcile or even fantasise over their residual stay in such an idyllic heaven of their later life, judging by a solicitor’s letter found in the deceased’s room with her dying wishes, not yet, they think, fully legalised. The later scenes with persuading the doctor to bend some rules are a literary high point, and can not be missed. Nor can be missed his surprising clear-thinking about the virus of untruth the servants have set in train…
Yet..
“He’d had a touch of flu but was almost better; Dr Ripley had suggested his getting up in time for lunch. But by lunchtime he was dead,…”
That was an earlier sentence slipped in disarmingly about Mrs Abercrombie’s husband who died some years ago, with whom she was still in love at the time of her own death when she was still under the care of Dr Ripley… so I think I know better even than the author himself what the truth truly was about Dr Ripley’s competence. Truths to be factored into by his skid marks. (And what about the page of newspaper that once had a beetroot wrapped in it? And the concept of a woman as a paid gardener? And what on earth was that about Bert Fask?)
THE CHILDREN
“– Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered.”
Connie is 11 and following the expected death of her beloved mother, she returns to the house with her father, hoping to be “alone together” to methodise the death, but there is a small and quiet and ad hoc wake gathering. Her friend Melissa’s mother is divorced and eventually falls in love with Connie’s father. She being Protestant and he Catholic, and talk naturally ensues following such contravention of the religious mœurs of the time. And Connie resorts to a sullen behaviour, reads books on the roof. A subtle ending, in defence of the memory or even ghost of Connie’s mother, indicates reactions that at least delay the marriage, this being the story’s ending that the author makes even more subtle, even misunderstood! — as I feel he does with a few of his endings, ones that are complexly sermonised. Most of his endings are luminously subtle, however - if not this one. (I enjoyed the nature of Melissa’s brother called Nat, curled up like his name’s homophone.)
nullimmortalis April 15, 2020 at 3:47 pm Edit
Yet..
“He’d had a touch of flu but was almost better; Dr Ripley had suggested his getting up in time for lunch. But by lunchtime he was dead,…”
That was an earlier sentence slipped in disarmingly about Mrs Abercrombie’s husband who died some years ago, with whom she was still in love at the time of her own death when she was still under the care of Dr Ripley… so I think I know better even than the author himself what the truth truly was about Dr Ripley’s competence. Truths to be factored into by his skid marks. (And what about the page of newspaper that once had a beetroot wrapped in it? And the concept of a woman as a paid gardener? And what on earth was that about Bert Fask?)
THE CHILDREN
“– Connie and her father, while slowly coming to terms with the loss they had suffered, shared the awareness of a ghost that fleetingly demanded no more than to be remembered.”
Connie is 11 and following the expected death of her beloved mother, she returns to the house with her father, hoping to be “alone together” to methodise the death, but there is a small and quiet and ad hoc wake gathering. Her friend Melissa’s mother is divorced and eventually falls in love with Connie’s father. She being Protestant and he Catholic, and talk naturally ensues following such contravention of the religious mœurs of the time. And Connie resorts to a sullen behaviour, reads books on the roof. A subtle ending, in defence of the memory or even ghost of Connie’s mother, indicates reactions that at least delay the marriage, this being the story’s ending that the author makes even more subtle, even misunderstood! — as I feel he does with a few of his endings, ones that are complexly sermonised. Most of his endings are luminously subtle, however - if not this one. (I enjoyed the nature of Melissa’s brother called Nat, curled up like his name’s homophone.)
nullimmortalis April 15, 2020 at 3:47 pm Edit
MRS ACLAND’S GHOSTS
“People remarked on this ceiling and my husband used to explain that metal ceilings had once been very popular,…”
Imagine you are Mrs Acland in an institution for the mentally frail – during a much earlier English era but one within your own living memory – a Mrs Acland who is writing a long haunting letter about her backstory’s predicaments to a random stranger she has chosen from the telephone directory. And then imagine you are that very stranger, here named Mr Mockler, reading this letter about Mrs Acland’s ghosts, the ghosts that were so real to her, and about that Victor Sylvester tune on an old-fashioned wireless, the equally old-fashioned houses with attics and landings, one house with a fitted bathroom, the live-in housekeeping couple in what used to be servants’ quarters, Mrs Acland’s much older husband who ran a business in ‘aeroplane fasteners’, her earlier brothers and sisters who had died suddenly in an road accident, the particular pieces her family moved around the board in Monopoly games, and now about the various people surrounding her in the institution … and through these narrative layers, imagine you are asking yourself questions about who is and who was and who will be gaslighting whom, and then you wonder whether you yourself are being gaslit, too, as the ghosts seem so utterly real. Finally, imagine you are the reader reading about them, bringing them into existence again.
nullimmortalis April 16, 2020 at 2:29 pm Edit
nullimmortalis April 16, 2020 at 2:29 pm Edit
ON THE STREETS
This story certainly has a dull or, rather, dulled tone, as if the state of someone being “doo-lally”, as someone calls Mr Arthurs, is here aligned with what I see as toothache, a pain dulled by a disarming or deadpan accuracy of depicting a dislocated journey in this man’s mind, as also triangulated by the overt thoughts of a woman he once briefly lived with, and whom he now stalks. He is obsessive, especially with the era’s greater amount of hard copy tenures like shopping lists and separate telephones in public places instead of anything virtually handheld in our times, times beyond when (and what) this story was written about. About cafes. I remember cafes serving basic foods with waitresses who were usually 70 years old women. Whom he also stalks.
And then there is his own job, working as a waiter in a hotel, with his agonising again and again about a single moment of what he sees as bad behaviour. No wonder he was demoted to breakfasts. “Doo-lally” is an expression of meaning that is also dulled. It perhaps should be a stronger word…
And then there is his own job, working as a waiter in a hotel, with his agonising again and again about a single moment of what he sees as bad behaviour. No wonder he was demoted to breakfasts. “Doo-lally” is an expression of meaning that is also dulled. It perhaps should be a stronger word…
“The dullness Arthurs had mentioned in the café possessed him entirely now, an infection it almost felt like, gathering and clinging to him, an unhealthy tepidness about it.”
ANOTHER CHRISTMAS
“Quite often he said things she didn’t understand.”
Dermot, married to Norah, Catholic sweethearts in Ireland, middle aged now with growing and grown children, having migrated to London just before the IRA bombing…
Dermot was slow and methodical in his thoughts, too. More dependent on his religion than Norah was. And their landlord became a family friend particularly at Christmas, when this story takes place. This Christmas they don’t expect him because, last Christmas, Dermot had said something out of turn relating to the bombs, or Norah thought that was the case. Somehow soured the marriage, too, and doubled down on the hindsight mistake of coming to London in the first place. But one thing DOES lead to another. I, an atheist, agree with Dermot. And every story told is about things leading from one thing to another, proximate cause to proximate cause. Unless a reader, or a reviewer like me, puts in some sort of firewall, or breaks one down? Christmas Day would then duly unfold accordingly, I guess…
Dermot was slow and methodical in his thoughts, too. More dependent on his religion than Norah was. And their landlord became a family friend particularly at Christmas, when this story takes place. This Christmas they don’t expect him because, last Christmas, Dermot had said something out of turn relating to the bombs, or Norah thought that was the case. Somehow soured the marriage, too, and doubled down on the hindsight mistake of coming to London in the first place. But one thing DOES lead to another. I, an atheist, agree with Dermot. And every story told is about things leading from one thing to another, proximate cause to proximate cause. Unless a reader, or a reviewer like me, puts in some sort of firewall, or breaks one down? Christmas Day would then duly unfold accordingly, I guess…
LOST GROUND
“When she’d kissed him her lips hadn’t been moist like his mother’s. They’d been dry as a bone, the touch of them so light he had scarcely felt it.”
An amazing novelette about Milton, a youth 16 years old, part of a Protestant family in Armagh. His younger brother a “mongol”. His other siblings leading their own lives – yet their Protestantitis gradually grows inflamed in the reader’s mind, from its simple faith to its violent components – in the late 1980s? Just imagine the repercussions when Milton finally admits he had a vision of a woman in the family orchard who called herself St Rosa, a Catholic Saint. This story is so utterly like a lockdown itself, just as Milton is locked down with jigsaws and no sunshine. And the oblique references resonate cruelly and sometimes inspiringly by avoiding the meaning filter in your mind. The outcome is a wrench to its own inevitable outcome’s doppelgänger of justice….a poetry of mindless grappling with different forms of truth, and just as a few examples, viz.:-
“He liked the champ best when it was fried. You could warm it in the oven or in a saucepan, but it wasn’t the same. He liked crispness in his food – fingers of a soda farl fried, the spicy skin of a milk pudding, fried champ.”
“Milton had the distinct impression that the woman wasn’t alive.”
“The picnic was the reward for duty done, faith kept. Bottles appeared. There were sandwiches, chicken legs, sliced beef and ham, potato crisps and tomatoes. The men urinated in twos, against a hedge that never suffered from its annual acidic dousing – this, too, was said to be a sign.”
“Why should a saint of his Church appear to a Protestant boy in a neighbourhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, when there were so many Catholics to choose from?”
“the applause for a performer who balanced a woman on the end of his finger.”
“As usual, the day was fine; from his bedroom window he could see there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“She left him a pack of cards, with only the three of diamonds missing,…”
“Later Milton found the two back legs of an elephant and slipped the piece that contained them into place. He wondered if he would finish the jigsaw or if it would remain on the mildewed baize of the card-table with most of its middle part missing.”
‘Yet how would he know about a saint?’ her mother whispered. ‘Where’d he get the name from?’
“that that was that,”
MATILDA’S ENGLAND
1. The Tennis Court
“Between them, Dick and Betty and Mrs Ashburton had cast a wide net,…”
… as I do with my reviewing, dreamcatching oddments toward the Gestalt. A German word, that, I believe. Significantly so, in the light of this novella. The intensely time-and-place-evocative start of this very English fiction work, opening in May 1939, and onward, with dire echoes of the Kaiser’s War, and even direr retro-echoes from the imminent War, and old people like Mrs A, with her ‘cunning’ and her green hat-pins and her declining Manor House and her derelict tennis court and all of this, even herself, owned by Lloyd’s Bank. She invites the tenant farmer’s children to help clear the Court and use it to play tennis, her having a soft spot for Matilda (at the plot’s outset, aged 8), this Matilda as the narrator, plus Dick and Betty, slightly older, Dick already feeling grown-up with his Woodbine smoking… Their father getting annoyed with his fountain pen, memories of oil lamps being replaced by electricity, a dream of cows on Matilda’s bedroom wall, her view of Germans as people past and future, Mrs A’s view of Matilda’s as her lost child, but, above all, the eventual tennis party is full of hope as the children grow up and have budding romances as well as a darkly expectant poignancy of a future past looming… And by chance Spotify happened aptly to be playing Edmund Rubbra’s 4th Symphony in my music mix as I read this work today…… hmmmm
2. The Summer-House
“In Scripture lessons the Reverend Throataway used to explain to us that God was in the weeds and the insects, not just in butterflies and flowers.”
Each day as the war dragged on, Matilda remembers that each day has its special things about it. Thursday being the most fateful of days, quite often. That tennis party, for example. You can imagine what might have happened, for her, on Thursdays. What physically happened to children when they grew up together, friends and lovers. What happened to most of those grown-to-be men when they went to war, too? Her mother’s assignments with a man (a man said to be too sick to go to war) in the old manor’s summer-house to where her Mum resorted across the fields – and the things that were in there from the earlier tennis party and now from Matilda’s home brought there by her Mum. Then other things, ghosts and enemies of the state, and memories that resonate more with the dark magic of our English past, more even than modern day Poliakoffs continue to dream up such pasts for me. Matilda grapples with a fear and love of God, and His nature. Throataway, as a word if not a Reverend’s name, somehow also seems to summon up Matilda’s sense of the Germans and their different helmets as part of how many see our onset of virus today that will also drag on…
“I couldn’t help myself: I wanted it to be known that he was faking a disease in his lungs.”
3. The Drawing-room
“Nothing is like it was.”
There is a sitting-room in this last third of Matilda’s England, a room where she cannot remember anyone ever sitting! The eponymous drawing-room, though, that is part of once Mrs A’s Manor House, is where Matilda, I feel, draws cruelties out like bad teeth from gums. A strong prophecy of where Poliakoff dramas would later go, as Matilda almost BECOMES Mrs A in the manor that was so important to her past and the two wars’ cruelties. An England ethos that was later to lead to Brexit, when she sees a German actually invited to be in her drawing-room! And it is true that Brexit was voted in exactly when William Trevor died, and Mr A was buried the day before Matilda was born. So many unintended connections, but they all mean something. This whole work is a great piece of literature, possibly the greatest. As she marries someone who somehow taunts her with a Mr and Mrs Stritch nosing around in the Manor House and the Darlings at the beginning of sentences addressed to her … and his other irritations. These are actually FRIGHTENING things to the reader in the context. How is it done? I wish I knew. Perhaps I sound almost as demented as Matilda herself. “…the dancers of the distant past.” But due to what time has done to Matilda, all those different Thursdays, I rather admire her, indeed I feel fond of her. The moods that were passed like measles or other diseases, notwithstanding. Or like forced, unannounced house parties! The sharing of horror. And who made much money out or manufacturing guns during the second world war in his family motor component factory? Matilda’s stepfather did — and he would likely make surgical masks today!
“It was no longer a room you could be quiet in. Everything seemed garish, the red glitter of the wine bottles, the red candles, dish after dish of different food, the cheeses.”
DEATH OF A PROFESSOR
“‘Oh, just a – a jape, they say?’ little McMoran mutters, excusing cruelty with a word he has to search for.”
“, Vanessa again said to herself that she could not possibly commit this cruelty.”
Again, amazingly perhaps, we have a connection between Trevor stories read in random order, this story inheriting a match for Matilda’s “cruelties”…a story where a Professor due to attend a sherry do with other professors, has been given a premature obituary in the newspaper, squeezed between non-entities. His much younger wife Vanessa, a dumb blonde, tears it out of the newspaper before giving it to her husband. In those days newspapers were always made of paper! But they always had on-line cruelties and fake news in embryo. As did real-time life itself, as we reach poignant levels of sexual or professional jealousy and suspected past students’ hatred or just a plain gratuitous prank … enough to make any man drink! (He visits a pub for the first time in his life!)
Witty and cutting.
Witty and cutting.
‘It’s going too far, don’t you think, this? Why is it that everything must go too far these days?’
‘Newspapers have a way, these days, of being careless.’
“This city, not a human attribute, was what he’d thought of when he thought of beauty, the grey-brown columns and façades, carved figures in their niches, the lamplight coming on in winter.”
THE RAISING OF ELVIRA TREMLETT
“It walls and ceiling were a sooty white.”
Another Trevor classic haunting story. His canon is over-generous with such. The tale of the narrator but is it HIS tale? He is helped by the summoning of a young woman after, despite being a Catholic, visiting a Protestant church in the environs near Cork and discovering her grave. The young woman would be 89 today, if still alive. But she lives in this narration, by telling the story herself via the official narrator, a wrongly considered backward boy within a backward community, involving the brilliantly described seediness of a car repair garage run by his father and uncle. Our narrator is the child of all of them, and I think you will find the utter poignancy will haunt you forever should you decide to haunt this story with your own presence. His father and uncle: both vantablack sponges of human spirit… by dint of their caged lightbulb for working in the garage pit. His mother a victim, too. The narrator’s siblings escaped, thankfully, whether they deserved to do so or not. Pretty Kitty, one of the narrator’s sisters, as a child, is fondled by her father, his father, too. Or was it his uncle after all?
TO BE CONTINUED at part (6)
nullimmortalis April 12, 2020 at 7:53 pm Edit