William Trevor Stories (4)

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

THE MARK-2 WIFE

“‘Do you know those people I was talking to?’ she said to her partner, but with a portion of her hair still in his mouth he made no effort at reply.”

....her dancing partner that is, as Jerome K Jerome might also know. This is a party to which she has been invited and expected to meet her husband there, but, as a childless wife, she becomes convinced that he is so late because he is with his Mark-2 Wife. He is certainly IN it, I guess. Meanwhile, it is an astonishing Pinteresque portrait of paranoia that increasingly seems to be role-played by all the characters involved, almost with a tinge of Rosemary’s Baby — including the woman’s shrink Abbatt at the other end of a telephone. Alternatively, it is a mere social comedy of marital mœurs. I often get the wrong end of the stick!

Whatever the case, it is a pure gem of a story, if one with impure motives.


A masterpiece — beware spoilers...
 SOLITUDE

“I have been re-reading now the short stories of Somerset Maugham. Superior to his novels, I believe. In particular I like ‘The Kite’.”

I shall now make The Kite the next story that I shall read for the first time in my already on-going review of Somerset Maugham’s stories here. Meanwhile, SOLITUDE is the most valuable Trevor Trove of all, I suggest. A story of a small girl and her imaginary friends, one of whom returns when she is old and revisiting where her mother and father stayed in Italy, and she is allowed to open up in solitude about what happened all those years ago when she pushed her mother’s lover down the stairs for the sake of her father. A story of touching moments and perfect phrasing as that high social class is brought to life with such subtle hauntings, such turnings of blind eyes, such poignant attrition of a beautiful life that is drawn from childhood to age, beautiful if only inasmuch as it creates this masterpiece of literature. Perfection by airbrushing and nuance.

AN EVENING WITH JOHN JOE DEMPSEY

“Quigley was lucky being how he was.”

So is JJD being how he was, too, when in his sagging bed, at the end of the day, dreaming. And we learn of JJD (today his 15th birthday). And Q who was the simple-minded dwarf that JJD has always hung out with. Who is advising what to whom, though, as JJD is delayed and delayed on his Ulysses day (similar to the General’s Day above) on an errand to get his mother rashers of bacon from the pub, when his lessons then begin (JJD being fatherless) with his first bottle of stout, hearing from Mr Lynch in the pub about his wartime experiences related to Piccadilly Circus tarts, JJD then, in his mind, reliving dreams of local women in the area tempting him with divesting flirtations (wishful, real or dreamt), urges he wanted to assuage for them if his body was not so God-given as the church educators had decided it was. Q could do this without even a shrug. But was Lynch of the wartime tarts story after him, too, in a lateral way? Is Q after JJD’s body too? And what about the church educators themselves? But that would be a sacrilegious reading on my part of this story, my dreaming beyond the ability to touch it or delve into its secrets. His mother with the fountain pen gift for his birthday, and he writes down with new ink that ‘he is hot, and perhaps he should divest’? Or did I imagine that, too? Another genuine masterpiece, though. Yet another Trevor trove. With a refrain of rashers, and incantations of infatuation as a boy becomes a man – in his sagging bed. At the end of the salacious day.

THE PRINTMAKER

“Does it happen, she wonders in other people’s lives that a single event influences al subsequent time?”

An exquisite love story, even more exquisite in that the love was perfect yet unrequited. Or it WAS requited, after all,  simply by the sacrifices of each party, with the sense that it was meant to be thus, not crude, but restrained in its perfection of opportunity passed over. Charlotte spent an idyllic time in France at the age of 17, in a family of children she looked after and grew to know, as well as the other fallible members of the family, including  the other other half of that perfection in one fleeting afternoon. Later, in older age in England, that fleeting experience colours not only the rest of her life but also the artistic  prints relating to that time in France, prints she makes to sell for rooms where other perfect afternoons are spent by others  or even where a cheating requital transpires, but, whichever the case, her prints contribute to the POSSIBILITY of perfection, if not its certainty. 

A FRIEND IN THE TRADE

“They fell in love when A Whiter Shade of Pale played all summer.”

Later, after marriage, on to Brahms and Mahler. A long marriage, just like mine — so far.
But we did not, do not, have our Michingthorpe, a name, if only the name, that reminds me of Widmerpool. An undercurrented adjunct to this couple’s married life, an assumption, a taken-for-granted, a fixture and fitting that is not quite fixed or fitted, amid the business of publishing and seeking signed originals of literati. Michingthorpe, the Internet browser or roamer, fixing connections, fitting out gestalts, like I do in these reviews? The wife in the fictional-true marriage of this story has the hunch that M as bachelor loves her, without realising he loves her. The marriage is about to move to a Sussex oast house, and M is not a country man, and he has no car. He is a wide eyed innocent, so you can guess things happen instinctively as if in secret that he will move into an outhouse part of their new home? Well, another wonderful story that radiates out with our own readerly instincts about the story, but perhaps it also needs an asterisk to an important yet still unwritten footnote. William Trevor fiction in general feels it has always been part of my life, and I now hardly realise that it has, over the last month or two, really only just moved in with me. Sorry, with US. That’s where the two marriages differ. The unannounced love for this burgeoning fiction is mine alone. It will live in our log cabin in the back garden, no doubt. And, oh yes, in this story’s case, on the Internet where I ever roam.

Cross-referenced the above story with VS Pritchett’s THE SAINT: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/essential-stories-v-s-pritchett/#comment-18461

KINKIES

“She closed her eyes and felt herself moving upwards, floating in the room, with a kaleidoscope in each eyelid.”

I don’t know when this story was first published, but I am sure it could not be published today. A very disturbing appropriation of a woman by a co-working office boss, taken back to his flat upon the duty of sorting out some further work after hours. Both eventually drugged, we have a mix of a bad trip and the man’s prior incest with his mother.
On the other hand this is a very well written horror story, so well written it becomes a necessary blocking or airbrushing of itself. Hence, it is now as if it never existed at all. Tucked away between two stories that somehow hide it. Only Kinkies can now possibly read it into a state of words, I guess or almost believe.

RAYMOND BAMBER AND MRS FITCH

“She died in fact of pneumonia.”

Raymond’s old nanny, that is, a topic of conversation, her death, at the regular Autumn Cocktail party that he attends. A long term bachelor friend of the hosts, but is his presence endured or relished? I THINK I know. I had tried to accost him in small talk but he was co-opted by Mrs Fitch, a bit older than him, in her cups, with her incantatory refrain of ‘in vino veritas’, a veritable prehensile tactile predator of a woman, who also watches her husband flirting with a younger woman in the corner. But who do you believe – me or the author? Mrs F or her husband? Raymond who is the author’s point of view or something or someone quite else that is implicit as the deploying of incantatory obsessions about perverts and bores and small talk leitmotifs that seem trivial but are vastly important, yes, the obsessions deployed by this seemingly autonomous Pinteresque nightmare? Orderliness versus chaos, whereby “Obsessions are a disease…”

“Laughter was apparently the thing, a commodity that reflected the shallowness of minds too lazy to establish correctly the facts about people.”

AN AFTERNOON

‘You take trouble,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be the kind. I could tell you’d take trouble with yourself.’

Jasmin, is she 15, 16, 17, or just 12? Is she Angie, not Jasmin? Why the missing e at the end, if so? Stripped bark legs and flat chest, meets an older man – 29? – as an assignation arranged on an on-line chat room. Grab cranes in amusement arcade, he wins her a necklace. He works for the courts he says. Or does he appear in front of them!

“They passed the tumbler back and forth between them. She drank from where his lips had been; she wanted to do that. He saw her doing it and he smiled at her.”

“She waited, as she had waited then too, seeing again the little tortoises and the racing cars, hearing the Spice Girls.”

A poignant slice of modern life. Reminds me Trevor did not die till 2016. I wonder if he enjoyed the Spice Girls.

A CHOICE OF BUTCHERS

“I still couldn’t understand why the series of events was taking place. I tried to connect one occurrence with another, but I failed.”

…as I do or don’t in this moving, poignant work, this slice of a boy youth’s life, now an uncle, his sister married elsewhere when announcing a baby by letter, this boy youth seeing his butcher Dad kiss the Bridget maid at the bottom of the stairs, earlier this boy youth being florined by his Dad’s assistant, an assistant but a better butcher, a better would-be husband for his mother, a better Dad for the boy youth, better at neatly, economically cutting meat rather than stumping off his fingers like his ‘swaying’ Dad often had done in the past, the boy youth not wishing to butcher red meat for the whole of his future life, Almost force fed, as he is as today’s boy youth, with fatty bacon and sausages every morning.
The assistant was the unmarrying sort, according to his Dad, and is that why this assistant once perhaps innocently kissed the boy youth good night, but not in the same way as the boy youth’s own Dad had clumsily kissed Bridget? Something surely had to give, and someone had to leave.

O FAT WHITE WOMAN

“‘The boys are waiting for their tea,’ said Dympna. ‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, you’d better prick the sausages.’”

As Dympna and the other 15 year old maid - at the cramming boys’ boarding school - threaten to do, too!  A story of a statue with another statue marriage, Mrs D-H, gone to fat, and Mr D-H, once a stepping-ladder and vending machine salesman, now a headmaster here in a financially successful cramming institution, brutal with the boys but without bruises. The maids threaten a scandal, waxworks, face sacks, shame for the teaching culprits after one of the pain in the neck boys dies... sad, absurdist, so politically incorrect in today’s terms, the story sort of crawls off the page to leave a nasty taste behind it, and a squashed white slug.

AFTER RAIN

“Angular and thin, her dark hair cut short, her long face strikingly like the sharply chisel faces of Modigliani, a month ago she passed out of her twenties. She is alone in the Pensione Cesarina because a love affair is over.”

This the delicate Thomas-Mann or Proustian portrait of Harriet, come here on a self-searching holiday to Italy – where the geography of the tables in the dining area, and the spaces between them, is dwelt upon by the text – instead of going to Skyros with her ex who broke off their affair in a cinema foyer: another emotional geography of timing. As is her walk to the church where she shelters from the rain to look at the painting of the Virgin and the Annunciation. Apparently the Angel chose an emotional geography of timing, too, for his visit … After Rain. This is a story of gentle but momentous momentariness. To be read, too, just after rain. Something I learnt too late. (The Pensione Cesarina is where she visited with her parents in childhood. Her palimpsest of memories of this genius loci with today’s is another emotional geography: her parents having since amicably broken up. They were never properly married other than legally, it seems.)

LUNCH IN WINTER

“You couldn’t keep going on journeys down Memory Lane, and the more you did the more you realised that it was just an ugly black tunnel.”

A feisty songtitle-seasoned storyline from the point of view of Nancy, late middle aged woman of the performing stage always waiting for the next part, and her various men she married or fancied over the years, some just waiters in bars, including meeting again by chance a previous (now widowed) husband from the wartime, and seeing each other weekly, with perhaps a trial remarriage. I have just one image of Nancy in a photo with a sunflower, and why that should be so is only a small part of other things that can be turned into a nostalgic song, without it having been a song at all in the first place! Catch a Falling Star would have been a better choice?

THE DISTANT PAST

“When Miss Middleton had been ill with a form of pneumonia…”

An ageing brother and sister living together just south of the Irish border in an inherited dynasty of a distant past, that becomes a game… but I failed to understand it, I’m afraid.
I am not an expert on Irish history and a summary of this story is here: http://item1000.blogspot.com/2018/04/an-analysis-of-distant-past-by-william.html

LOW SUNDAY, 1950

“, and poor little Joe Paddy hadn’t been able to say anything in response, shivering from head to toe as if he had the flu.”

Strangely, and quite coincidentally, or preternaturally, the next Trevor story that came up in the bizarre system I have in dotting between the books, new and old stories, is another story majoring upon a brother and sister relationship, one in interface with Irish history, and yes, another rare story, the second in a row, that I do not fully understand!
I did love the siblings’ interface together, and the memories of their aunt and other characters.

“She pricked the sausages and laid them on the fat that had gone liquid in the pan.”

IN ISFAHAN

“…for months she’d had a nagging little cough, which usually came on in the evenings. It was always the same: whenever she returned to England she got a cough.”

The English man and woman, Normanton and Iris Smith, meet on an ill conducted tour bus (it is engaging to read about that bus tour in this genius loci of Isfahan in Persia), and, as part of a compelling and atmospheric narrative, they gradually approximate each other, but whether they fully come to approximate romantically beyond approximation itself by the end of the story you are never sure till you reach that end. Their respective backstories of still running marriages strike me as sad, but are they sufficiently sad to transcend expectations? Iris Smith straddles Bombay and Bournemouth, just as Normanton straddles decision and indecision. The adept art of this story is that you are never sure about your expectations for them till you ARE sure. But even then, other readers may have a a different class of expectations to your own, I guess. The cough, meanwhile, no doubt, continues.

SACRED STATUES

“, as so often she had seen the spread of angels’ wings emerging from roughly sawn wood.”

The man and his pregnant wife and their existing children are in desperate financial straits, despite his almost preternatural skill to carve holy statues for the church, a business originally under the sponsoring of a woman who has also fallen on hard times. A touching scene where the wife tries to sell her pregnancy to a barren couple for money — and I thought of his carvings as a sort of birth and unaccountably this thought became a palimpsest of sorrow for me. A metaphor for our times in 2020 where all human life is threatening or being threatened to return into vegetable matter. Or stone. A sort of reverse birth.

COFFEE WITH OLIVER

“He wanted to remind her that he had given her life.”

Oliver lives in Italy, made to live abroad after his divorce, and he suddenly spots his daughter, it being 17 years since he last saw her when she was five. Or did I get those ages wrong? He thought she had come out to find him; he did not then know that his wife, her mother, had died. And apparently it was a coincidence his daughter came to this area of Italy. I love coincidences in literature. My bread and butter when gestalt real-time reviewing. But how did he recognise her after all those years? Was he fed intermittent photos? I forget.
Sometimes coincidences have identities themselves, senses of familiarity that you cannot explain. They just are. His recognising her was coincident with his marriage’s backstory as a mistake, with the way his wife misjudged his treatment of his own mother when his mother was suffering from dementia, and, yes, again, the fact that his marriage to his daughter’s mother had been a mistake, a mistake that his daughter — whose separate point of view is somehow known to us, in alternating passages of narration — was told about by his wife, her mother. The wife who is now dead. The outcome of his daughter’s eventual surprise at meeting him here in Italy is what will make you read this story, because I am not going to tell you anything more about it. But the relevance of the price of the coffees they had together was possibly even more tempting for you to read this story. And, perhaps, who it was that mended his corrugated roof.

ANGELS AT THE RITZ

“He wasn’t entirely drunk, he said to himself, he hadn’t turned a certain corner, but the corner was the next thing there was.”

An ‘outer suburb’ party in the days when middle-class couples threw car-keys into a mêlée in the middle of the room, nobody had heard of LGBTQ, drink driving was commonplace, and, above all, social distancing was not even dreamt about! One married pair in a pair of such couples, old friends from their younger days at the Ritz – now, as part of this house party scenario, try to create a foregone conclusion from the mêlée, despite the slight worry that one of the couples has at there being a young replacement babysitter from Ireland back home. A palimpsest of the two couples’ past and present, with today’s subtly changing drink-induced motives and last gasps or just plain unadmitted despair. And plenty of close dancing. Hard to interpret or scry some of those subtle motives, dulled, as they are, by drink. Trevor is at his most clever when the reader feels that the work being read is written by a predominantly unscryable Aickman, Trevor being such an Aickman but without Aickman’s blatant weirdness.


nullimmortalis March 24, 2020 at 8:21 pm Edit

TORRIDGE
“His father had a button business was what he was saying: he’d probably be going into the button business himself.”
Torridge was that extra strange and gauche boy that often populated the all-boys’ grammar schools in the 50s and 60s of the UK. I was not called Torridge but Noddy in that era of such schools (see here), but I don’t think I was like Torridge at all. Nor did I notice too much the ‘romances’ between the boys as much as they seem to do in this hilarious story. But I did flourish like him as I got older, beyond those clumsy days. And the boys around Torridge who seemed so smart and big in those days have now diminished by comparison to him. A story that is more than just a bit politically incorrect in today’s terms, yes, but so utterly brilliantly written as a social comedy of those times.

AT OLIVEHILL

“She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business.”

“But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.”

A Catholic family with its landed business, the elderly married couple, James and Mollie, in their late 70s, when we first get to know them. The grown up children, two brothers now working this business, and a daughter who got away. The couple had standards (workers and helping maids named in the correct manner of manners), their rightful ways, their faith, but they may not have done it all right, the entropy of the years, possible mismanagement, and in later years the sons found they had to put it over to a golf course. Thankfully, James had died, after we got to know him…

“It was a good death: he called it that himself.”

He’d turn in his grave I guess and Mollie hears his memory talking regretfully about the golf course’s superseding of, say, the bluebell wood. She is stoical, regretful, too. Very subtle and complex reactions she shares with us, and according to each of our respective and respectful sophistications of understanding, we each share them back with her via a mutuality between each reader and her character in this fiction as inevitable truth, her own humble wisdom perhaps then transformed with whatever little bit of our own truth we can add to a fading understanding….

“In the drawing-room she closed imagination down, for it was treacherous and without her say-so would take her into the hostile territory.”


THE DEATH OF PEGGY MEEHAN

“I have a carnal desire for a shadow,...”

A disturbing story of a haunting told from the narrative point of view of the disturbed victim himself, brought up by his parents, older than most parents, and pious Catholics, the mother who fears fleas in sandy beaches and in the picture houses of the time. Picture houses running continuous film programmes where THE END often comes first. Every year the parents take him to stay at his aunt’s boarding house for priests, and one year a chain-smoking priest takes him to a picture house to see a film where there is much kissing, our narrator remembers. And our narrator blames coincidence and/or a curse when he thinks of a girl from school called Peggy in connection with the kissing, and then dreaming the same day that she died in a car accident. She actually haunts him into his middle age, because she actually died from catching diphtheria in its then epidemic, a death  coincident with and/or caused by his dream.
Following the instincts of my reading experiences in the last few years, I sometimes guiltily fear that my gestalt real-time reviewing’s  synergies and synchronicities cause things to happen in real life .... and vice versa.

GILBERT’S MOTHER

“Staring at the leg of a chair or at his own foot, he managed not to blink for minutes on end.”

The continual strobing of trusting acceptance with mistrusting suspicion, as a mother considers her grown-up son’s absences, in the light of his chequered history of mental health, and the crimes that are committed and the chances of his ability to have been there each time… I, for one, now mention her son’s autistic or obsessive chatting about photocopying, and then, I notice, his decrying a copy of a famous American film called THE BIG SLEEP in an English setting…
Either way, we learn much about both Gilbert and his mother. Could she have been created as the originator of each incriminating circumstance as a way to neutralise her misissued offspring’s misuse. Fiction weaponised.

MRS SILLY

“In fact, he did hint to the Reverend Green that he wasn’t certain about being quite ready for the occasion, but the Reverend Green told him not to be silly.”

Michael the young eight year old boy is split between his upstanding father now married to Gillian with twin daughters, and then sent by his father to the latter’s old boarding-school, and his mother (divorced from his father) who disarmingly self-styled herself as Mrs Silly. A simple-minded, voluble, affectionate woman. Michael loves his mother but is embarrassed when she visits the boarding school… I loved all the larger than life characters at the school, but, above all, I felt very sorry for Mrs Silly. It brought me nearer to tears than I think any story has previously brought me. Too much happened for me to tell you about it. And, oh yes, I unaccountably wanted to know more about Peggy Urch. Trevor should have written a whole story with her as the main character.
Incidentally. I read this story by random chance after the previous one about Gilbert and his mother – an interesting comparison and contrast!

RUNNING AWAY

“He does suggest that love abnormalizes—“

The attritional, with herb quite satisfying life’s interregnum in Italy after she separates from her husband Roy, story of Henrietta as married at home in England to the intensely ‘sprawling’ Roy, who unaccountably falls in love with one of his students…Sharon (!) Tamm in granny glasses, who once had a fling with the mystical Orange People cult. Her fling with Roy, too, ceases, and Henrietta seems obliged to leave Italy to fulfil her marital duties with now even more sprawling Roy! A slice of life that perhaps seemed more at home in the mid to late 20th century than it would now. The style is honed to perfection, though. A perfect style for life’s imperfections and abnormalities.

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

Uncertainties IV

Uncertainties IV

The Swan River Press MMXX
Edited by Timothy J. Jarvis
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/swan-river-press/ and of this editor as author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Timothy+Jarvis&submit=Search
Stories by Rebecca Lloyd, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Brian Evenson, Kristine Ong Muslim, Gary Budden, Anna Tambour, John Darnielle, Camilla Grudova, Marian Womack, Charles Wilkinson, Nadia Bulkin, Aliya Whiteley, D.P. Watt, Claire Dean.
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. YeatsIn "Catriona Lally"

THE SILENT GARDEN: A Journal of Esoteric FabulismIn "Angelos Koutsourakis"

Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume FiveIn "Adam-Troy Castro"

Tags: Aliya Whiteley, Anna Tambour, Brian Evenson, camilla grudova, Charles Wilkinson, Claire Dean, D.P. Watt, Gary Budden, John Darnielle, kristine ong muslim, Lucie McKnight Hardy, marian womack, nadia bulkin, Rebecca Lloyd, swan river press, the swan river press, timothy j jarvis, timothy jarvis, Uncertainties

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Writer and Publisher Weirdmonger, Nemonymous etc

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