After Rain Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Piano Tuner’s Wives

  A Friendship

  Timothy’s Birthday

  Child’s Play

  A Bit of Business

  After Rain

  Widows

  Gilbert’s Mother

  The Potato Dealer

  Lost Ground

  A Day

  Marrying Damian

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  Praise for After Rain

  “With his exquisite control of language and unsparing vision, Trevor serves up the pain of ordinary life with such precision that it feels like a physical ache to comprehend it.... What you have in this collection then, is something small and perfect”

  — The Washington Post Book World

  “A dazzling collection of short stories.”

  — Geordie Greig, The Sunday Times Pick of the Year (London)

  “Like the Old Masters, Trevor creates moments that are evocative and incandescent. His messages linger and hang in the air.”

  — People magazine

  “William Trevor is among the most accessible of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary writers. His prose is enviably simple and clear. He writes for the reader rather than for himself or his literary peers.... If you don’t know his work, After Rain would be a fine place to get acquainted.”

  — Providence Sunday Journal

  “William Trevor shows himself as a master of domestic horror.... Behind closed doors, people live lives of quiet happiness or despair, and within their own walls unspeakable horrors scuttle around.”

  — Clare Boylan, The Independent (London)

  “The stories here are among Trevor’s finest.”

  — John Banville, The New York Review of Books

  “A poet of prose fictions ... Whether he is writing about a boy who believes he has been kissed by the ghost of a female saint, or the two rival wives of a blind piano-tuner ... or a pair of petty thieves plying their trade in the suburbs of Dublin, the manner of these stories is specific and shocking and matter-of-fact.... Trevor at the top of his form.”

  — Robert Nye, The Times (London)

  “A wonderfully affecting new collection of twelve stories by the Anglo-Irish master.... Dependably brilliant work from one of Chekhov’s most accomplished disciples.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Few writers have so deftly crafted as important or widely praised a body of work that continually illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche as it grapples with despair and heartbreak.”

  — The Miami Herald

  “Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor’s view of the world is melancholy and unsparing.... But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love.”

  — Jane Shilling, Sundav Telegraph (London)

  “Trevor is that rare thing, a writer who can be serious without being ponderous, who can be somber without being depressing.... After Rain is the work of a master storyteller at the top of his form.”

  — The Raleigh News & Observer

  “There are two frequently expressed opinions about William Trevor. One is that he is the best writer in the world. The other, more modest claim, is that he is the best writer of short stories.... After reading one of his novels ... there is no resisting the temptation to simply call him the best and be done with it. But after reading his short stories ... the feeling is apt to take hold that the more modest claim of best writer of short stories is so demonstrable that there is no need to try to go further.’’

  — Newark Star Ledger

  “This collection of stories is archetypal Trevor-entertaining, uplifting, sobering.” — Penelope Lively, Spectator (London)

  “There are few contemporary writers who can match the quiet dignity with which Trevor imbues his writing, or his command of the short story form.... After Rain shows Trevor as a brilliant master of his craft.’’

  — Publishers Weekly

  “In a season crowded with accomplished short stories, Trevor’s are the best of the bunch, a dozen marvels of subtle brilliance by one of the century’s most underappreciated stylists.”

  — Time Out New York

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  AFTER RAIN

  William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, in 1928, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and, later, Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.

  Among his books are Two Lives (1991; comprising the novellas Reading Turgenev, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and My House in Umbria), which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year; The Collected Stories (1992), chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of the year; the bestselling Felicia’s journey (1994), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Sunday Express Prize; After Rain (1996), chosen as one of the Eight Best Books of the Year by the editors of The New York Times Book Review; Death in Summer (1998), which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and, most recently, The Hill Bachelors (2000). Many of his stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. He has also written plays for the stage, and for radio and television. In 1977 William Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in recognition of his services to literature.

  William Trevor lives in Devon, England.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Old Boys

  The Boarding-House

  The Love Department

  Mrs Eckdorf in 0’Neill’s Hotel

  Miss Gomez and the Brethren

  Elizabeth Alone

  The Children of Dynmouth

  Other People’s Worlds

  Fools of Fortune

  The Silence in the Garden

  Felicia’s Journey

  Death in Summer

  The Hill Bachelors

  NOVELLAS

  Nights at the Alexandra

  Two Lives

  SHORT STORIES

  The Day We Got Drunk on Cake

  The Ballroom of Romance

  Angels at the Ritz

  Lovers of Their Time

  Beyond the Pale

  The News from Ireland

  Family Sins

  The Collected Stories

  PLAY

  Scenes from an Album

  NON-FICTION

  Excursions in the Real World

  A Writer’s Ireland

  FOR CHILDREN

  Juliet’s Story

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1997

  Copyright © William Trevor, 1996

  All rights reserved

  “The Piano Tuner’s Wives,” “Timothy’s Birthday,” “After Rain,” “Widows,”

  “Lost Ground,” and “A Day” first appeared in The New Yorker; “Child’s Play”

  in The Oldie; “A Bit of Business” in Antaeus; “Gilbert’s Mother” in Harper’s;

  and “The Potato Dealer” in Spectator.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-0-140-25834-9

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  The Piano Tuner’s Wives

  Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.

  There was a little more to it than that, because in choosing Violet to be his wife the piano tuner had rejected Belle, which was something everyone remembered when the second wedding was announced. ‘Well, she got the ruins of him anyway,’ a farmer of the neighbourhood remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it. Others saw it similarly, though most of them would have put the matter differently.

  The piano tuner’s hair was white and one of his knees became more arthritic with each damp winter that passed. He had once been svelte but was no longer so, and he was blinder than on the day he married Violet — a Thursday in 1951, June 7th. The shadows he lived among now had less shape and less density than those of 1951.

  ‘I will,’ he responded in the small Protestant church of St Colman, standing almost exactly as he had stood on that other afternoon. And Belle, in her fifty-ninth year, repeated the words her one-time rival had spoken before this altar also. A decent interval had elapsed; no one in the church considered that the memory of Violet had not been honoured, that her passing had not been distressfully mourned. ‘... and with all my worldly goods I thee endow,’ the piano tuner stated, while his new wife thought she would like to be standing beside him in white instead of suitable wine-red. She had not attended the first wedding, although she had been invited. She’d kept herself occupied that day, whitewashing the chicken shed, but even so she’d wept. And tears or not, she was more beautiful — and younger by almost five years - than the bride who so vividly occupied her thoughts as she battled with her jealousy Yet he had preferred Violet — or the prospect of the house that would one day become hers, Belle told herself bitterly in the chicken shed, and the little bit of money there was, an easement in a blind man’s existence. How understandable, she was reminded later on, whenever she saw Violet guiding him as they walked, whenever she thought of Violet making everything work for him, giving him a life. Well, so could she have.

  As they left the church the music was by Bach, the organ played by someone else today, for usually it was his task. Groups formed in the small graveyard that was scattered around the small grey building, where the piano tuner’s father and mother were buried, with ancestors on his father’s side from previous generations. There would be tea and a few drinks for any of the wedding guests who cared to make the journey to the house, two miles away, but some said goodbye now, wishing the pair happiness. The piano tuner shook hands that were familiar to him, seeing in his mental eye faces that his first wife had described for him. It was the depth of summer, as in 1951, the sun warm on his forehead and his cheeks, and on his body through the heavy wedding clothes. All his life he had known this graveyard, had first felt the letters on the stones as a child, spelling out to his mother the names of his father’s family. He and Violet had not had children themselves, though they’d have liked them. He was her child, it had been said, a statement that was an irritation for Belle whenever she heard it. She would have given him children, of that she felt certain.

  ‘I’m due to visit you next month,’ the old bridegroom reminded a woman whose hand still lay in his, the owner of a Steinway, the only one among all the pianos he tuned. She played it beautifully He asked her to whenever he tuned it, assuring her that to hear was fee enough. But she always insisted on paying what was owing.

  ‘Monday the third I think it is.’

  ‘Yes, it is, Julia.’

  She called him Mr Dromgould : he had a way about him that did not encourage familiarity in others. Often when people spoke of him he was referred to as the piano tuner, this reminder of his profession reflecting the respect accorded to the possessor of a gift. Owen Francis Dromgould his full name was.

  ‘Well, we had a good day for it,’ the new young clergyman of the parish remarked. ‘They said maybe showers but sure they got it wrong.’

  ‘The sky -?’

  ‘Oh, cloudless, Mr Dromgould, cloudless.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice. And you’ll come on over to the house, I hope ?’

  ‘He must, of course,’ Belle pressed, then hurried through the gathering in the graveyard to reiterate the invitation, for she was determined to have a party

  Some time later, when the new marriage had settled into a routine, people wondered if the piano tuner would begin to think about retiring. With a bad knee, and being sightless in old age, he would readily have been forgiven in the houses and the convents and the school halls where he applied his skill. Leisure was his due, the good fortune of company as his years slipped by no more than he deserved. But when, occasionally, this was put to him by the loquacious or the inquisitive he denied that anything of the kind was in his thoughts, that he considered only the visitation of death as bringing any kind of end. The truth was, he would be lost without his work, without his travelling about, his arrival every six months or so in one of the small towns to which he had offered his services for so long. No, no, he promised, they’d still see the white Vauxhall turning in at a farm gate or parked for half an hour in a convent play-yard, or drawn up on a verge while he ate his lunchtime sandwiches, his tea poured out of a Thermos by his wife.

  It was Violet who had brought most of this activity about. When they married he was still living with his mother in the gate-lodge of Barnagorm House. He had begun to tune pianos — the two in Barnagorm House, another in the town of Barnagorm, and one in a farmhouse he walked to four miles away In those days he was a charity because he was blind, was now and again asked to repair the sea-grass seats of stools or chairs, which was an ability he had acquired, or to play at some function or other the violin his mother had bought him in his childhood. But when Violet married him she changed his life. She moved into the gate-lodge, she and his mother not always agreeing but managing to live together none the less. She possessed a car, which meant she could drive him to wherever she discovered a piano, usually long neglected. She drove to houses as far away as forty miles. She fixed his charges, taking the consumption of petrol and wear and tear to the car into account. Efficiently, she kept an address book and marked in a diary the date of each next tuning. She recorded a considerable improvement in earnings, and saw that there was more to be made from the playing of the violin than had hitherto been realized: Country-and-Western evenings in lonely public houses, the crossroads platform dances of summer — a practice that in 1951 had not entirely died out. Owen Dromgould delighted in his violin and would play it anywhere, for profit or not. But Violet was keen on the profit.

  So the first marriage busily progressed, and when eventually Violet inherited her father’s house she took her husband to live there. Once a farmhouse, it was no longer so, the possession of the land that gave it this title having long ago been lost through the fondness for strong drink that for generation
s had dogged the family but had not reached Violet herself.

  ‘Now, tell me what’s there,’ her husband requested often in their early years, and Violet told him about the house she had brought him to, remotely situated on the edge of the mountains that were blue in certain lights, standing back a bit from a bend in a lane. She described the nooks in the rooms, the wooden window shutters he could hear her pulling over and latching when wind from the east caused a draught that disturbed the fire in the room once called the parlour. She described the pattern of the carpet on the single flight of stairs, the blue-and-white porcelain knobs of the kitchen cupboards, the front door that was never opened. He loved to listen. His mother, who had never entirely come to terms with his affliction, had been impatient. His father, a stableman at Barnagorm House who’d died after a fall, he had never known. ‘Lean as a greyhound,’ Violet described his father from a photograph that remained.

  She conjured up the big, cold hall of Barnagorm House. ‘What we walk around on the way to the stairs is a table with a peacock on it. An enormous silvery bird with bits of coloured glass set in the splay of its wings to represent the splendour of the feathers. Greens and blues,’ she said when he asked the colour, and yes, she was certain it was only glass, not jewels, because once, when he was doing his best with the badly flawed grand in the drawing-room, she had been told that. The stairs were on a curve, he knew from going up and down them so often to the Chappell in the nursery The first landing was dark as a tunnel, Violet said, with two sofas, one at each end, and rows of unsmiling portraits half lost in the shadows of the walls.

  ‘We’re passing Doocey’s now,’ Violet would say. ‘Father Feely’s getting petrol at the pumps.’ Esso it was at Doocey’s, and he knew how the word was written because he’d asked and had been told. Two different colours were employed; the shape of the design had been compared with shapes he could feel. He saw, through Violet’s eyes, the gaunt façade of the McKirdys’ house on the outskirts of Oghill. He saw the pallid face of the stationer in Kiliath. He saw his mother’s eyes closed in death, her hands crossed on her breast. He saw the mountains, blue on some days, misted away to grey on others. ‘A primrose isn’t flamboyant,’ Violet said. ‘More like straw or country butter, with a spot of colour in the middle.’ And he would nod, and know. Soft blue like smoke, she said about the mountains; the spot in the middle more orange than red. He knew no more about smoke than what she had told him also, but he could tell those sounds. He knew what red was, he insisted, because of the sound; orange because you could taste it. He could see red in the Esso sign and the orange spot in the primrose. ‘Straw’ and ‘country butter’ helped him, and when Violet called Mr Whitten gnarled it was enough. A certain Mother Superior was austere. Anna Craigie was fanciful about the eyes. Thomas in the sawmills was a streel. Bat Conlon had the forehead of the Merricks’ retriever, which was stroked every time the Merricks’ Broadwood was attended to.