William Trevor: Selected Stories

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 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.