These short stories by William Trevor are mostly sad, still and contemplative in tone, reminiscent even when the action is unfolding in the present. They involve a cast of characters mostly pressing anxiously into their golden years, seemingly hoping for nothing more than the healing hand of time to make all their past pains and sorrows remote and irrelevant. In “Cheating at Canasta”, a man visits an old Venetian haunt of his and his recently deceased wife, and hears newlyweds arguing about trivialities at the next table; in “At Olivehill”, grown siblings try to convince their aging mother to turn the family forest into a golf course; in “Old Flame”, an elderly woman surreptitiously reads a letter from her husband’s former mistress that the mistress’s companion of many years has died. Other stories concern crimes, many of which are concealed or ambiguous, and whether or not actual guilt matters when you know in your heart you are guilty. In “The Dressmaker’s Child”, a man runs over the child of a social outcast late at night; in “Men of Ireland”, a man visits his boyhood priest and successfully blackmails him by accusing him of molestation that never occurred; in “Bravado”, a young girl watches her boyfriend beat up and kill another boy, and seizes on a thinly offered possible explanation that makes the act seem somewhat less heinous.
If the characters in Cheating at Canasta are praying for time to pass in order to heal their wounds, it is possibly because those wounds fester far longer than they should. Trevor seems particularly interested in how long it takes varying people to get over pain, and the duty of other people to honor their loved ones’ mourning periods, to respect the time it takes. In “The Children”, a couple breaks their engagement when the man’s daughter feels her deceased mother is being forgotten; in “Folie a Deux”, a man runs into a childhood friend who had never recovered his equilibrium after the two carelessly drowned the family dog.
But the characters of Trevor’s stories also know that every wound, however deep and festering, can eventually result in greater strength and knowledge. As the protagonist of “Cheating at Canasta” thinks to himself: “Shame isn’t bad . . . Nor the humility that is its gift.”
