Selected Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  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

  Three People

  Of the Cloth

  Good News

  The Mourning

  A Friend in the Trade

  Low Sunday, 1950

  Le Visiteur

  The Virgin’s Gift

  Death of a Professor

  Against the Odds

  The Telephone Game

  The Hill Bachelors

  Sitting with the Dead

  Traditions

  Justina’s Priest

  An Evening Out

  Graillis’s Legacy

  Solitude

  Sacred Statues

  Rose Wept

  Big Bucks

  On the Streets

  The Dancing-Master’s Music

  A Bit on the Side

  The Dressmaker’s Child

  The Room

  Men of Ireland

  Cheating at Canasta

  Bravado

  An Afternoon

  At Olivehill

  A Perfect Relationship

  The Children

  Old Flame

  Faith

  Folie à Deux

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  The Old Boys

  The Boarding House

  The Love Department

  Mrs Eckdorf in O’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 Story of Lucy Gault

  Love and Summer

  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

  After Rain

  The Hill Bachelors

  A Bit on the Side

  Cheating at Canasta

  PLAY

  Scenes from an Album

  NON-FICTION

  A Writer’s Ireland

  Excursions in the Real World

  FOR CHILDREN

  Juliet’s Story

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © William Trevor, 2009 All rights reserved

  The stories in this collection appeared in the following books by William Trevor, all published by Viking Penguin:

  After Rain, copyright © William Trevor, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996

  The Hill Bachelors, copyright © William Trevor, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000

  A Bit on the Side, copyright © William Trevor, 1991, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004

  Cheating at Canasta, copyright © William Trevor, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007

  They were first published in the following publications: Antaeus; Glimmer Train; Harper’s; The Hudson Review; London Magazine; New Statesman; The New Yorker; The Oldie; The Sewanee Review; The Spectator; The Sunday Times (London); and The Tatler. “Le Visiteur” (as “The Summer Visitor”), “Death of a Professor,” and “The Telephone Game” were published in Great Britain in individual volumes by Travelman Publishing, Colophon Press, and Waterstone, respectively.

  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, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Trevor, William

  [Selected stories. Selections]

  Collected stories / William Trevor.

  v. cm.

  A new definitive collection of Trevor’s short stories in two volumes, including earlier stories from his Collected Stories (Viking, 1992).

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47652-9

  I. Title.

  PR6070.R4A6 2010

  823’.914—dc22

  2010019583

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  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 m
ourned. ‘. . . 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 generations 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 ab
out 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.

  Between one woman and the next, the piano tuner had managed without anyone, fetched by the possessors of pianos and driven to their houses, assisted in his shopping and his housekeeping. He felt he had become a nuisance to people, and knew that Violet would not have wanted that. Nor would she have wanted the business she built up for him to be neglected because she was no longer there. She was proud that he played the organ in St Colman’s Church. ‘Don’t ever stop doing that,’ she whispered some time before she whispered her last few words, and so he went alone to the church. It was on a Sunday, when two years almost had passed, that the romance with Belle began.

  Since the time of her rejection Belle had been unable to shake off her jealousy, resentful because she had looks and Violet hadn’t, bitter because it seemed to her that the punishment of blindness was a punishment for her too. For what else but a punishment could you call the dark the sightless lived in? And what else but a punishment was it that darkness should be thrown over her beauty? Yet there had been no sin to punish and they would have been a handsome couple, she and Owen Dromgould. An act of grace it would have been, her beauty given to a man who did not know that it was there.