Short Stories: A man and a woman arrange to meet in a theatre bar. The arrangement has been made through a dating agency. She is anxious, hopeful, desperate for companionship.
He wants someone who will drive him and his cameras about. "No emotion stirred in Jeffrey, neither sympathy nor pity, for he was not given to such feelings." He decides she will buy their expensive restaurant supper. Elsewhere, a woman recalls the moment when, as a child, she discovered her mother's "friend" was something far more serious.
A young girl intent on leaving Ireland for America with a village boy she has known all her life, realises she doesn't love him when he decides to return to Ireland and live with her on the family farm. "It was America they had loved, and loved too much. It was America that had enriched their delight in one another. He'd say that too if he came back when he'd made his money."
Disappointment, realisations, the betrayals and discoveries upon which a life turns. No one appears to have grasped those essential moments, the telling gesture or pause, quite as acutely as William Trevor. A Bit On the Side is his 10th collection of stories - he has also written 13 novels. Having left Ireland more than half a century ago, he continues to observe his country from a distance he sees as vital to his stories. His Ireland remains that of the small town and the dying Big House, yet it is also the now as well.
London and Italy provide other settings. This is a writer whose mind has remained on the move. He hasn't lost sight of the past, and keeps his eyes open to the present. A story can fast-forward 50 years on the strength of a passing reference, be it Bob Dylan's 60th birthday, a phrase of jarring slang or an obscenity on a tee shirt.
What remains to be said about his subtle insistent art? At what point does a review become a eulogy? This is his first collection since The Hill Bachelors (2000). That superb volume followed After Rain, possibly his finest book. These new stories are as familiar and as different as they invariably are. What are his motives? Urgency? Habit? Does he watch, or simply listen to his imagination?
Any mention of Trevor, whose most recent novel, the Man Booker shortlisted The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), was widely received as yet another masterpiece, invariably draws comparisons with Chekhov. Observant and unobtrusive, Trevor has created a specific universe, an Ireland that continues to superimpose images of a distant, never forgotten past upon a hollow, soulless present. There is also his London, a place in which the ageing, the lost and the lonely wander like survivors of a disaster no one noticed. It may be familiar territory, it may even appear vaguely romantic, but it is seldom comforting. The genius of Trevor's intelligent, detached craft rests in its subtle menace.
In the title story, a couple engaged in an affair, fuss over each other. He is there when she buys a pair of smart shoes. Each gesture is elaborate, weighted. After all, he is married and their time together is limited. "She reached out to flick a flake of croissant from his chin. It was the kind of thing they did, he turning up the collar of her coat when it was wrong, she straightening his tie . . . their way of possessing one another in the moments they made their own, not that they ever said."
They used to work together. She used to be married. But then she divorced her husband. The lover "had weathered the divorce, had admired - after the shock of hearing what so undramatically she had done - her calm resolve. He had let her brush away his nervousness, his alarm at first that this was a complication that, emotionally, might prove too much for both of them." But somehow, something changed. Their little rituals continue, lunch in the park together, meeting in the pub after work and finally she asks, "it's over, isn't it?"
There is no bickering, no recriminations. Once he began to say "I'm using up your life", it became obvious that a romance conducted on the fringes of his marriage would never be a future.
In 'Sacred Statues', a couple with three children and another on the way, need a miracle. They decide to approach the woman who was once their benefactor. It was she who had encouraged the man's talent as a stone mason and told him to leave his regular job at the joinery. It was she who had given them their little house.
When the young man arrives unannounced at her house, he notices changes; " . . . the room had been tidier then, Mrs Falloway had been brisker". This time he is offered far more modest refreshments. "The biscuit he took had gone soft." Outlining his needs, he presses his case for the loan he hopes she can provide, aware as he says of her previous help, "I'm sorry we didn't manage to pay anything back." Even after she says, "I'm hard up myself, as things are", he continues, finally realising nothing is forthcoming only when she says defeatedly, "I haven't any money, Corry." Meanwhile, his fertile wife, the optimist, is attempting to interest the local insurance broker's childless wife in a deal concerning a baby.
The politics of Northern Ireland is not addressed in these stories but the realities of the new Ireland is. Father Clohessy takes simple comfort in the presence of Justina, a young backward girl who tidies the church and enjoys receiving penance for the sins she has not committed. The priest is intent on helping the girl's sister protect her from a wayward pal in Dublin. But Father Clohessy has far larger problems. "The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been . . . he prayed for guidance but was not heard." Later in the pub he decides against mentioning "the slow collapse" of his Church to class mates of some 40 years standing.
'Sitting with the Dead' is a barbed account of what happens when two well-meaning local busy bodies come to sit with a widow as her husband lies in his coffin. Far from lamenting her loss, she informs them, with hilarious honesty, what her life was really like. Then there is the divorced working wife, "shabby in a maroon coat that once she'd been delighted to own and now disliked", hurrying home only to be met by the madman to whom she was briefly married.
The writing throughout the stories is characteristically quiet, efficient, neatly formal; the dialogue is clipped, at times blunt. Trevor's characters seldom make speeches. Yet among these determinedly contemporary narratives stands one period piece: 'The Dancing-Master's Music'.
A young girl begins working at the local Big House. Having never seen a piano, a musical evening proves a revelation for her. Years pass. " . . . the fortunes of the family declined. The trees were felled for timber. Slates blown from the roof were left where he lay. In forgotten rooms cobwebs gathered . . . with great sadness, Brigid witnessed the spread of this deterioration, the house gone quiet in its distress, the family broken. But as if nothing had happened . . . the dancing master's music did not cease . . . it danced over dust and decay in the hall and the passageways, on landing and stairs."
It is a story that showcases Trevor's ability to create atmosphere and evoke a powerful sense of time past, as well as time passing, the young girl now an old woman acknowledges that what had been "the marvel in her life" endures as the ghost of a larger world.
How to explain the marvel that is William Trevor? He has retained his abiding sense of wonder and a kindly, if all-seeing, curiosity in humankind, its hopes, sins and failures.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times.
