I have never been sure about what happens at the end of this story and I won’t speculate here, except to say that all the possibilities are disturbing.
The action takes place over a single evening. An Englishman, Alban, whose point of view prevails for much of the story, has been invited to a dinner party at a grand house, or ‘Castle’, owned by an Anglo-Irish heiress, Valeria Cuff. The exactness of the moment, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty but presumably before the Civil War, gives specific charge to the Gothic elements of the tale.
House and inhabitants are the ghosts and relics of the dying Protestant Ascendancy. Valeria’s avid sexual exuberance and disproportionate ambitions promise transgression. An English destroyer, moored in the estuary, intimates violence. And yet. The story’s tone and form are comic. The vain dinner guest quickly discovers that the lady of the house is more excited about the arrival of other visitors. Attempts at elegance founder, Alban sets down to play a damp piano. “He played badly, but they were unmusical.” In the strange, expectant atmosphere which Bowen creates with such delicate discipline, comic misunderstanding thrives but so do Gothic delusions and hallucinations. By the end of the story, the boundaries and differences between the two have become difficult for the reader to fathom.
First published as ‘A Conversation Piece’ in The Broadsheet Press, May 1930. Collected in Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 1999
A Personal Anthology 