William Trevor - A Bit on the Side

PENGUIN BOOKS

A BIT ON THE SIDE

‘A better crafter of stories than Joyce, Chekhov or Updike’ Harpers & Queen

‘He simply never fails. With the subtlest shift of syntax, an expert change of hue, Trevor leads us through twelve little worlds which, taken together form the sensual, forgiving, sad and admiring universe in which he lives’ Herald

‘How to explain the marvel that is William Trevor? He has retained his abiding sense of wonder and a kindly, if all-seeing, curiosity in humankind, its hopes, sins and failures’ Irish Times

‘Trevor continues to be the great chronicler of tiny, painful nuances… to engage and draw the reader into the small human drama’ Economist

‘Original and allusive’ Spectator

‘Hypnotic and leavened with a quiet, dark humour… timeless’ Daily Express

‘Nourishing storytelling full of truth’ Metro

‘Beautiful and remarkable’ Scotsman

‘Characteristically assured and subtle. Spotlighting lives entangled in the past and characters who feel out of their element in today’s world, the stories – shrewd, poignant, ruefully funny – are masterpieces of firmly wrought delicacy, spot-on social observation and psychological and emotional truth’ Sunday Times

‘The master of the genre at the top of his game’ Financial Times

‘Excellent as always’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

He has written many novels, including The Old Boys, winner of the Hawthomden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth and Fools of Fortune, both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden, winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted Reading Turgenev; Felicia’s Journey, which won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer ; and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault, which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collection is The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize. Most of his books are published in Penguin, including his Collected Stories.

In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.

A Bit on the Side

WILLIAM TREVOR

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Published by Viking 2004

Published in Penguin 2005

5

Copyright © William Trevor, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

These stories were originally published in the New Yorker, the New Statesman, Tatler and the Spectator

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN:978-0-14-190433-7

Contents

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

Sitting with the Dead

His eyes had been closed and he opened them, saying he wanted to see the stable-yard.

Emily’s expression was empty of response. Her face, younger than his and yet not seeming so, was empty of everything except the tiredness she felt. ‘From the window?’ she said.

No, he’d go down, he said. ‘Will you get me the coat? And have the boots by the door.’

She turned away from the bed. He would manage on his own if she didn’t help him: she’d known him for twenty-eight years, been married to him for twenty-three. Whether or not she brought the coat up to him would make no difference, any more than it would if she protested.

‘It could kill you,’ she said.

‘The fresh air’d strengthen a man.’

Downstairs, she placed the boots ready for him at the back door. She brought his cap and muffler to him with his overcoat. A stitch was needed where the left sleeve met the shoulder, she noticed. She hadn’t before and knew he wouldn’t wait while she repaired it now.

‘What’re you going to do there?’ she asked, and he said nothing much. Tidy up a bit, he said.

*

He died eight days later, and Dr Ann explained that tidying the stable-yard with only a coat over his pyjamas wouldn’t have hastened anything. An hour after she left, the Geraghtys came to the house, not knowing that he was dead.

It was half past seven in the evening then. At the same time the next morning, Keane the undertaker was due. She said that to the Geraghtys, making sure they understood, not wanting them to think she was turning them away for some other reason. Although she knew that if her husband had been alive he wouldn’t have agreed to have the Geraghtys at his bedside. It was a relief that they had come too late.

The Geraghtys were two middle-aged women, sisters, the Misses Geraghty, who sat with the dying. Emily had heard of them, but did not know them, not even to see: they’d had to give their name when she opened the door to them. It had never occurred to her that the Geraghtys would attempt to bring their good works to the sick-room she had lived with herself for the last seven months. They were Legion of Mary women, famed for their charity, tireless in their support of the Society of St Vincent de Paul and their promulgation of the writings of Father Xavier O’Shea, a local priest who, at a young age in the 1880s, had contracted malaria in the mission fields of the East.

‘We only heard of your trouble Tuesday,’ the thinner and smaller of the two apologized. ‘It does happen the occasional time we wouldn’t hear.’

The other woman, more robust and older, allowed herself jewellery and make-up and took more care with her clothes. But it was her quiet, sharp-featured sister who took the lead.