WHEN a young girl's pregnancy is discovered, her family set about solving the problem, with predictable pragmatism. Her bachelor uncle decides to approach the local potato dealer, a middle aged man. "Mind you, I'm not saying Mulreavy'll bite," Ellie's uncle said. I'm not saying he'd take the thing on.'" Elsewhere in William Trevor's outstanding collection, After Rain (Viking, £16 in UK), two young thugs, under cover of the Papal visit, embark on a crime spree which culminates in an attack on an old man left minding a neighbour's home. Their dirty work done, they leave the ransacked house, and are soon sitting in a pub. "The people who had been robbed returned to their houses and counted the cost of the Pope's personal blessing."
Yet again, Trevor demonstrates, with characteristic ease, perception and humour, his gentle, often black, genius. Whether in rural Ireland, West London, or Italy, the stories range through the small agonies and disappointments of ordinary people. However far flung the setting or social world he writes about, Trevor is always observing people, and listening few Irish writers "hear" the ordinary, spoken language of Ireland as well as he does. And yet this is not acknowledged because it seems to have been decided that because he does not live in Ireland, Trevor no longer knows his native country. Do not be mistaken: William Trevor knows Ireland very well, perhaps almost as well as he knows human nature.
Nothing extreme happens in these stories, yet revelation is the central theme of AfterRain. A divorced mother suspects her son is guilty of murder. "I believe Gilbert has stolen a car, she had written to his father, who phoned as soon as he received the letter, listening without interrupting to everything she said. But he'd pointed out, quite gently, that she was merely guessing that, it was suspicion, nothing more.
In "Widows", Leary, the house painter/decorator, is described as "a small, wiry man with tight features and bloodshot eyes, his spareness occasionally reminding people of a hedgerow animal they could not readily name".
Following the sudden death of her husband, Catherine receives a visit from the shifty Leary, who is demanding payment for a bill which has already been settled. She knows her husband paid the workman in cash, but Leary persists: "A while back the wife noticed the way the bill was unpaid ... She'd have eaten the face off me if I'd bothered you in your trouble." Leary is prepared to haunt the widow for the money and she will pay him again "in case, somehow, the memory of her husband should be accidently tarnished".
The narrator of Marrying Damian" recalls a five year old girl's determined announcement that she is to marry a man by then already married. The child is the narrator's daughter, and the episode appears to be little more than a charming long distant memory. It suddenly acquires seriousness, though, when some 22 years later Damian, having collected three wives during the intervening time, stands in the narrator's garden and he and his wife are no longer amused by Damian's singularity. The man they have often provided with loans which were never paid back and to whose stories they had enjoyed listening, is now a threat to their daughter's happiness. "It was too late to hate him. It was too late to deny that we'd been grateful when our stay at home smugness had been enlivened by the tales of his adventures, or to ask him if he knew how life had turned out for the women who had loved him."
Trevor's characters always speak true to their world his ear for the subtle nuances of speech has always been exact. "Well, she got the ruins of him anyway, a farmer of the neighbourhood remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it." Belle then tries her best to erase the world that her husband had had with his first wife. Belle would win in the end because the living always do," Trevor concludes, shrewdly qualifying this victory: "And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years.
Mrs Lethwes in "A Day" is a chillingly sad portrayal of a protected, secret drinking wife confident that her own childless vulnerability will ensure that her husband will stay with her and continue keeping his lover in limbo. While waiting for her husband's return, Mrs Lethwes, in her Home Counties comfort, voyeuristically speculates about the relationship he thinks she knows nothing about "She knew she must never say she had discovered what she had" and decides she will win when the mistress has a child. "Local Ground" confronts the traditional hatreds between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland and the force with which they are activated when a young Protestant man believes himself to have been selected by a saint to do God's work, a mission which is brutally disputed by the man's own brother.
Shifting mood, setting, voice and emphasis, Trevor is extraordinarily versatile. Considering the first of his eleven novels, The Old Boys, was published as long ago as 1964, and that this new book is his ninth short story collection, one can but wonder at the sustained quality, imagination and craft of Trevor's work. Understated, calm, instinctive, he is the living Irish writer we most consistently take for granted. Somehow it has become too easy to forget about him by inaccurately dismissing him as a miniaturist, while overlooking the fact that the 20th century short story belongs to him as much as to John Cheever or John Updike or V.S. Pritchett. In fact, sometimes it seems that the genre is Trevor's exclusive territory After Rain, a marvellous collection, is yet further testament of his towering, humane presence.
