‘Mrs Silly’ by William Trevor

William Trevor must have written at least a hundred short stories; every one I’ve read is excellent, and I can’t quite fathom how he managed it again and again. ‘Mrs Silly’ is one of my enduring favourites (apparently it’s also Elizabeth Strout’s favourite Trevor story, so I’m in good company). It’s about a boy, Michael, caught between his very different divorced parents. Michael’s mother is not well-off but she is sweet and kindly, cries easily, and is prone to chattering and oversharing when she’s nervous. His wealthy father sends him to boarding school, but this is a stiff, affluent world in which his mother can never be at ease. Eventually, of course, these two worlds do collide, and the collision is almost unbearable to witness: Michael’s dread that his mother will show herself up, his hot shame when she does, and the crushing guilt he then feels for having been ashamed of her.

Reading it is an intense experience, not only because the drama is so visceral, but because I identify equally, and painfully, with Michael and his mother (though I suppose I’m not alone in having both cringed at a loved one and having caused a loved one to cringe). In any case, I can’t think of a better story that sums up the messy sadness of love.

First published in Angels at the Ritz and other stories, Viking 1975, and in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1992

‘Three People by William Trevor

The three people of William Trevor’s title are an old man, his unmarried daughter and a younger man who comes to their house. Each of the trio has their own version of why these visits have been happening for years, but only two of them know what’s behind it all. “The darkness of their secrets lit, the love that came for both of them through their pitying of each other” is gradually revealed by the old master of the genre. Even before we learn the true story, or what passes for it, we want to turn away from it, so devastating it promises to be. Towards the end, we come to envy the old man, who will die unburdened by it. “The truth restored, but no one else knowing it.”

Collected in The Hill Bachelors, Viking, 2000

‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ by William Trevor

William Trevor’s considerable output is extraordinary: such controlled writing, such understanding of the form. By coincidence he went to the school I teach in (under his real name, Trevor Cox), and I wrote a piece about his relationship with that school, a place which often appears in his writing, though not in this masterpiece. ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’ has all Trevor’s greatest strengths: such tenderness for the characters and their frailties, such skill in ranging across so many years in so few pages. What elevates it to greatness is the moment near the end when the second wife realises what direction she can go in, and the piano tuner tacitly lets her do this, with understanding, grace and generosity. You can see the realisation dawn in the classroom.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in After Rain, Viking, 1996

‘After Rain’ by William Trevor

“In the dining-room of the Pensione Cesarina solitary diners are fitted in around the walls, where space does not permit a table large enough for two.”

Told in the present tense, ‘After Rain’ by William Trevor is a tender story about solitude. Harriet is on holiday in Italy, following the end of a love affair, and we meet her as she dines alone in a hotel restaurant.

Observing the other diners, Harriet wears an “unadorned” blue dress and “earrings that hardly show”. We’re told that a holiday to Skyros with her lover has recently been cancelled, giving her an “empty fortnight” to fill.

She chose the Cesarina because she’d stayed there in childhood, before her parents separated. Tinged with sadness and nostalgia, ‘After Rain’ explores how our upbringing shapes our own romantic encounters. But more than that, the story is a meditation on being alone.

In understated prose, Trevor shows us the quiet virtues of solitude, how it makes us more attentive to our surroundings and our inner lives. As Harriet wanders the Italian streets, she’s attuned to architecture, nature and changes in the weather. She visits the Santa Fabiola, a church with a version of The Annunciation by an unknown artist. Looking at the painting, she zones in on details – the Virgin’s feet, the angel’s wings, the sky and hills in the distance.

For Harriet, observing the world is a form of healing. She’s heartbroken yet she gives herself the space she needs. As the title suggests, ‘After Rain’ is a story about change. Harriet’s “private journey” isn’t grand or dramatic, it’s subtle and humane, and so beautifully told.

First published in The New Yorker, 1995. Collected in William Trevor: Selected Stories, Penguin Books, 2009. Read it online here

‘In Isfahan’ by William Trevor

An unusually exotic work from Ireland’s laureate of small-town disappointment, this story concerns the almost-romance of two tourists in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The tourist to whom Trevor’s camera predominantly cleaves is Mr Normanton. Middle-aged and greying, Normanton takes an immediate liking to the thick-lipped, “sensuous”, thirty-something Iris Smith when he first sees her in the office of a guided bus tours company. He likes her rather less when they begin to talk, for Iris is suppressing a “Cockney twang” and he is a snob.

Nevertheless, as two people alone in a foreign city (and alone in life, it is revealed), they continue to meet, and the rest of the narrative sees Normanton trying and failing to overcome his prejudices to make the connection he so desperately needs. He was never going to succeed, being a William Trevor character, but that futility is what makes the story so moving.

First published in the New Review, June 1975. Collected in Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories, The Bodley Head, 1976, and The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985

‘The Dressmaker’s Child’ by William Trevor

“She came out of the blue cottage and ran out at cars.”

The story (and collection) responsible for seducing me to the form, beguiled and astonished as I was by Trevor’s ellipses and obliquity, how less could be so much more (than the bloated novels I was growing weary of). A young Irish mechanic is hired to drive a pair of credulous Spanish tourists on a pilgrimage to a statue, the Virgin of Pouldearg, after they hear rumours – furnished by a man in a bar they buy drinks – of it miraculously weeping. The events that follow chart a forlorn yet poignant course, navigating guilt, self-delusion and penitence, the sheer serendipity of the trials that befall us. Life’s path in Trevor’s stories often alters in a heartbeat, a moment of recklessness, a quiet betrayal. And yet, as here, tragedy can also birth hope. The audacious arc of this piece still astonishes me.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2004, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Cheating at Canasta, Penguin Books, 2007

‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ by William Trevor

Trevor is for me one of the absolute masters of the short story form. His stories always leave me with the feeling of having entered into, or stayed a while staring at, a particular kind of realist painting: where it’s all laid out before you, but the emotions are held just barely, and very neatly in check. This story is absolutely succinct, and so much larger than itself.

First published in The New Yorker, and available to read online here; collected in Last Stories, Viking Penguin, 2018

‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ by William Trevor

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like a flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.

If Gogol’s artful rambling was part of the point, William Trevor was the master of the kind of writing in which every word earns its place, pays its taxes and volunteers for good causes on the side. Over 20-odd novels and a dozen story collections, there’s no shortage of broken lives to choose from. In the middle of the first page of ‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ we find the following paragraph:

Now in her early fifties, slender, softly spoken, with a quiet beauty continuing to distinguish her features, Miss Elizabeth Nightingale considered that she was fortunate in her life. She had inherited a house on the death of her father, and managed without skimping on what she earned as a piano teacher. She had known the passion of love.

How’s that for giving us the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of someone’s life? For telling us what she believes about the fullness of her life and what she lacks, and how both can be true at once. In less than sixty words.

Published in Last Stories, Penguin, 2019

‘A Bit On the Side’, by William Trevor

It was my mother, who was of Irish extraction, who first introduced me to William Trevor’s writing, and to Trevor himself: they both died at the end of last year.‘A Bit On the Side’ is typical downbeat WT, suffused with unshowy regret about chances not taken and lives not lived – the whole watched over with his all-seeing, all-compassionate eye. Two unprepossessing lovers in middle age resolve to part, but agonisingly find they cannot; she has recently divorced, he remains married. ‘She had never asked, she did not know, why he would not leave his marriage. His reason, she supposed, were all the reasons there usually were’. Unfailingly polite to and considerate of each other, there are no Grand Guignol turns here: instead, ‘they would grow old together while never being together’.

(From A Bit On the Side and Other Stories. Penguin, 2005)