SOURCE: "William Trevor's Stories of Trouble," in Contemporary Irish Writing, edited by James D. Brophy and Raymond J. Porter, Iona College Press, 1983, pp. 95-114.

[In the essay below, Rhodes examines five of Trevor's short stories concerning the Irish troubles and finds that they share similar characters and themes.]

William Trevor was born Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928, spent his boyhood in provincial Ireland, and was educated at St. Columba's and Trinity College, Dublin. Since 1958—and mostly since 1964—he has been the author of nine novels, five collections of short stories, and a number of radio and television dramas as well as plays for the stage. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters and the recipient of an honorary C.B.E., an unusual distinction for a non-British writer—although he has lived in Devon for a number of years—he has garnered several literary awards, including the Hawthornden Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Allied Irish Banks Prize for Literature, and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. Brian Cleeve's 1967 Dictionary of Irish Writers observes that his works "have won Trevor a great critical reputation as well as popular success in America, Britain, and Europe"; and an August 1981 interview by Elgy Gillespie in The Irish Times notes that "These days he is a very famous writer indeed…."

In addition to the formal honors that have come his way, it is true that Trevor's novels and short story collections have consistently enjoyed favorable reviews, that a number of his books have been reprinted, and that he now appears with regularity in such periodicals as the New Yorker. But it is also apparently and surprisingly true, despite declarations by Cleeve and Gillespie and a growing reputation, that thus far Trevor has been the subject of only two moderate-length critical studies: Mark Mortimer's 1975 "William Trevor in Dublin" and Julian Gitzen's 1979 "The Truth-Tellers of William Trevor."

Given the size of his canon and his putative reputation, it seems only a matter of time before Trevor receives the kind of critical examination that will test the works against the reputation. For the time being, at least, most such attention is likely to focus on Trevor's "non-Irish" fiction—most of which has its scene in England—since only one of his nine novels and nineteen of the fifty-five or so of the readily available short stories are "Irish," which may explain why he is not even listed in such relatively recent compilations as A Bibliography of Modern Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and Anglo-Irish Literature; A Review of Research. Such omissions are perhaps reason to call attention to some aspects of Trevor's work that fall under the rubric "Irish."

Although Irish characters figure fairly prominently in Elizabeth Alone (1973) and Other People's Lives (1981), only Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969) among the novels takes Ireland—specifically Dublin—as its scene, and except in some fairly conventional ways it is difficult to think of this as an "Irish" novel. Of the short stories, four do not really qualify as "Irish." Of "Miss Smith," Trevor himself has said that it "might perhaps have come out of anywhere, but in fact is set in a town in Munster…." "The Forty-Seventh Saturday" is a rather comical story of the affair of two lovers with Irish names, but the scene is London and there is nothing to distinguish these lovers as "Irish" or, indeed, as different in nationality from many other pairs of lovers in Trevor's stories. The action of "The Grass Widows" takes place in Galway, but the story is about two English couples; and "Memories of Youghal" features a seedy private detective who recalls his Youghal boyhood, but the scene is a Mediterranean resort and the protagonist is really an elderly English schoolteacher.

The remaining fifteen Irish short stories form a moderate-sized but solid accomplishment, a body of work meriting the attention of ordinary discriminating readers and critics alike. Almost all of them deal with rural and small-town Irish life and reveal both knowledge of and sympathy with that life. It is not necessary, of course, to reduce the stories to categories, but it does seem that in them Trevor has played variations on a handful of themes that have unusual significance for those who would use the artist's insights to understand contemporary Irish life; repression, coming of age or failing to come of age, parent-child relationships, and love—usually thwarted.

Five of the readily available Irish stories that have appeared since 1975 show that Trevor has addressed himself to a subject that very few Irish writers have been able to avoid: the renewal of Ireland's ancient Troubles in Northern Ireland since the late 1960s and the impact of that violence on people in the North, in the Republic of Ireland, and in England. That Trevor's attention has been increasingly riveted by the Troubles is suggested by the fact that his first full-length stage play, Scenes from an Album, which opened in Dublin's Abbey Theatre in August 1981, clearly takes its motive from the history of the Troubles. Writing in The Irish Times, Elgy Gillespie notes of the play, "Once again … it will allow him to examine the interfaces between cultures, between Protestant and Catholic and English and Irish and Planter and Gael, toying [with] the ambiguities of their mingled lives," and she quotes Trevor as saying. "Because I do feel the countries are inextricably dependent on each other, and it's what I still want to write about." Add to these views Trevor's own Protestant background and his many years of writing about the English in England and he seems particularly suited to have written the five stories we will examine here: "The Distant Past," "Saints," "Attracta," "Autumn Sunshine," and "Another Christmas."

On the whole, the protagonists in these stories differ markedly from those in Trevor's other Irish stories, and differ in ways that are significant both for their own lives and for the insights Trevor offers through their dramas.

First, there is a significant age difference. In the other stories, protagonists range from age seven to age thirty-seven at the time of significant action, with most of them being under twenty, two in their early twenties, and two in their early thirties. On the other hand, all of the protagonists in the Troubles stories are clearly older and generally well set on their life courses. Only the couple in "Another Christmas"—who also differ in other ways from most of these protagonists—are identified only as "middle-aged," the rest ranging from sixty-one to sixty-nine and in one case perhaps to the early seventies.

Essentially well set on their life courses by their ages, they are further defined by their religious backgrounds. Almost all the protagonists of Trevor's other Irish stories come from often repressive Catholic backgrounds. To the contrary, only the protagonists of "Another Christmas" and important characters, though not protagonists, in "Attracta" and "Saints" are Catholic. The rest are clearly identified as Anglican or Anglo-Irish; indeed, one is a Church of Ireland rector, and protagonists in two other stories define much of their position in Irish society by their Protestantism. In words that to some degree apply to most of these protagonists. Trevor writes of the titular character in "Attracta": "Within the world of the town there was for Attracta a smaller, Protestant world. Behind green railings there was Mr. Ayrie's Protestant schoolroom. There was the Church of Ireland, with its dusty flags of another age, and Archdeacon Flower's prayers for the English royal family."

Furthermore, most of the protagonists of Trevor's other Irish stories belong to a socio-economic stratum somewhat lower than that of protagonists in stories about the Troubles, a condition that may be related to their Catholicism. With few exceptions and even these cannot be called unusually prosperous—the Catholic protagonists and their families are working class people: a farmer, a shop assistant, a butcher, a mechanic, for instance. Conversely, again with the exception of the protagonists of "Another Christmas," the protagonists come from at least moderately affluent backgrounds that confer certain social distinctions. If the elderly brother and sister of "The Distant Past" are only shabby genteel relics of the Ascendancy Big House tradition. The protagonist of "Saints" is a wealthy and cultivated inheritor of the same tradition; and the other protagonists are a respectable teacher in a Protestant school and a Church of Ireland rector.

In short, by age, religious persuasion or probable inclination, and socio-economic status, the protagonists of these stories are insulated from the imperatives that often drive their younger, poorer, Catholic neighbors: sexual desire, the search for identity, establishing places for themselves in their communities. Furthermore, though these are indeed stories of the Troubles and therefore of lingering animosities, latent danger, and explosive violence, these protagonists when we first meet them are neither obvious perpetrators nor immediately personal victims of violence. While there may sometimes be some mild disharmony, on the whole their relationships with their Catholic countrymen have been amiable and sometimes affectionate. Despite their distinct minority position, they are people who seem to have achieved some kind of equilibrium in the business of living. Essentially impregnable in ways the young are not, even as members of minority in a troubled place and time, they seem capable of emerging unscathed from their contact with the renewed British-Irish conflict of the present. Still, they are victims of the past as much as Irish Catholics.

While the youthful protagonists of Trevor's other Irish stories characteristically inhabit two worlds, the everyday world and the world of fantasy or imagination, and sometimes seek harmony between them, Trevor's older protagonists, at the outset, typically seem to have left a conflict between two worlds behind or at least to have resolved such a conflict satisfactorily. Very often, however, this is because they have put the past to rest. What shatters the illusion of safety and impregnability and forever alters their worlds is the renewal of outright violence in the late 1960s and the recollection of past violence and its relationship to present violence. Sometimes it is a personal past, too, but, if so, it is bound inextricably to the violent English-Irish past that eventually and inevitably merges with today's violence. In short, the past not only repeats itself but is a continuation of what for the Irish has been "the cause that never dies" and for the protagonists results in almost every case in increased loneliness and isolation.

The title of "The Distant Past," perhaps the earliest of Trevor's Troubles stories, signals what has become his continuing exploration of the ways in which apparently dead events of past conflicts obtrude on the present and shape the future. "The Distant Past" and "Saints," one of Trevor's most recent stories, have as protagonists survivors into the 1970s of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and, in particular, survivors of the burning of the Big Houses and the killing of their occupants during the 1920–1922 period.

The protagonists of "The Distant Past" are a brother and sister now, in the early 1970s, in their mid-sixties, the sole survivors of the Middletons of Carraveagh. Sixty miles south of the border separating the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland, the once splendid Carraveagh, built during the reign of George II, now barely shelters the Middletons as its roof suffers continued neglect and rust eats at its gutters, apt reminders of the straitened circumstances of brother and sister and of the dwindled importance of the tradition they represent and doggedly uphold. Reduced to a few acres, four cows, and some chickens, the Middletons believe the local story that their father had mortgaged the estate in order to maintain a Catholic Dublin woman, so that on his death in 1924 the two children inherited a vastly diminished estate. Consistent with their attitudes toward the new order in Ireland, "they blamed … the Catholic Dublin woman whom they'd never met and they blamed as well the new national regime, contriving in their eccentric way to relate the two. In the days of the Union Jack," they believe, "such women would have known their place: wasn't it all part and parcel?"

Following the middle course suggested by their name, brother and sister have achieved—on their own terms—a modus vivendi for holding onto their version of the British presence in Ireland and for living with their neighbors, who know they are anachronisms. They achieve a delicate balance by the rituals of their Fridays and Sundays. On Fridays, they visit the town to sell eggs and to deliberately cultivate social intercourse with tradespeople in their shops and with other townsfolk over drinks in the bar of Healy's hotel. On Sundays, they attend St. Patrick's Protestant Church and say prayers for the king. What is symbolized by their Sunday ritual is borne out by their quietly voiced loyalty to pre-Treaty Ireland; their rising when B.B.C. plays "God Save the King"; their display of the Union Jack in the rear window of their car when Elizabeth II is crowned; their declaration that the revolutionary regime won't last—green postal boxes and a language no one can understand, indeed!

So successful are the Middletons in establishing an equilibrium that the townsfolk cherish them and their eccentricities. Visitors to the town are impressed that the Middletons can keep the old loyalties and still win the town's respect and affection, so much so that they and town are pointed to as an example that old wounds can heal and that here at least people can disagree without resorting to guns. The one nagging reminder that the revolutionary past has brought irrevocable change to Ireland and has done so with blood is the joking reminder by Fat Driscoll, butcher, that he and two others had stood in the hall of Carraveagh in the days when they might have burned it and slaughtered its occupants and instead waited with shotguns ready to kill British soldiers.

This delicately balanced situation continues during the post-World War II prosperity in the town created by an influx of tourists, and starts to end only in 1967, when news comes that sub-post offices in Belfast have been blown up, news that leads Fat Driscoll to say, "A bad business. We don't want that old stuff all over again," and Miss Middleton lightly to remind him, "We didn't want it in the first place." As British soldiers arrive in the North and incidents in Fermanagh and Armagh and in Border towns and villages multiply and create fear in the hearts of tourists, despite assurances that the trouble in the North has nothing to do with the Republic, the town's prosperity begins to wane and with it tolerance of the Middletons. Now Fat Driscoll wishes that people would remember that he had stood in the Middletons' house fifty years earlier ready to kill British soldiers instead of knowing that he has given them meat for their dog, and brother and sister are pointedly cut by former friends, even the local Catholic priest.

The resurgence of violence in the present brings to the surface not only an awareness by all that the present violence is a renewal of past violence but a sharp reminder that the specific event at Carraveagh fifty years earlier took place in the home of those who, in Irish Catholic eyes, were responsible for violence in the first place. In mourning for the end of their modus vivendi rather than in fear of their lives, the Middletons remove from the walls of Carraveagh the icons of their distant past: a portrait of their father in the uniform of the Irish Guards, the family crest, and the Cross of St. George, and prepare "to face the silence that would sourly thicken as their own two deaths came closer and death increased in another part of their island…. Because of the distant past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds."

If there is something quixotic about the Middletons' version of the proper relationship between England and Ireland and their choice to remain in a town that thinks otherwise, inhabit the crumbling Carraveagh, and patch together a relationship with their neighbors, there is also something gallant about their efforts to stave off isolation and loneliness, and it is not difficult to think that their efforts to create and sustain friendship—even on an illusory basis—are more admirable than their neighbors' denial of friendship because of the cash nexus, loss of income from the tourist trade, and that they deserve better than exile at home.

Contrary to this, it is difficult at first to rouse much compassion for the nameless sixty-nine-year-old narrator of "Saints," inheritor of the Big House of Kilneagh, near Cork, and of enough revenues in Ireland to have been able to spend forty years in luxurious self-imposed exile in Italy in the Umbrian town of Sansepolcro. However muddled the Middletons may be about their national identity, they at least win our understanding and perhaps our compassion for seeking friendship, for dealing with the past as best they can in the home place, and for enduring a cheerless exile they neither choose nor deserve; whereas, this protagonist confesses without apparent regret that "In national terms. I've become a nothing person." Reluctant to visit Ireland, he has not returned to Cork for forty years, and when he does visit Ireland it is strictly on business and he is always glad to leave. Nor has Italy been a place of friendships or commitments to the living. Here, he confesses, he has indulged himself in drink, music, women, and the wonders of the Italian Renaissance, and we easily conjure up a cross between an old-time absentee landlord and a Roman sybarite, more a figure for contempt than compassion. But this is a story of how the Troubles reach from Ireland to Italy and from past to present to touch a life seemingly on a steady course.

And so the first impression is undercut at the very time it is being made because Trevor piques our curiosity about the reason for his protagonist's fierce rejection of Ireland, and he early on whets our curiosity further with at least three clues about the past. First and most obvious is his receipt from Cork of a telegram saying only "Josephine is dying. Hospital of St. Bernadette," and his reactions: pleasure that he has been sent for, determination to go to Ireland on a personal affair, and immediate departure. Second is his observation that he has been lost in the world of Ghirlandaio and Bellini, "preferring its calmness to the pain of life," and third is his reflection that at sixty-nine he still indulges himself as best he can, "continuing to redress a balance."

The truth as we come to discover it is that he and the devoutly Catholic Josephine—his family's domestic-of-all-work sixty and more years ago—are the sole survivors of the burning of Kilneagh and the murder of the protagonist's father, sisters, and three domestics by die-hard republicans in 1922, and of his mother's subsequent suicide by slashing her wrists with a razor ten years to the day after the events at Kilneagh, the despairing act which finally drove him to make financial provisions for Josephine and to leave Ireland for Italy.

With Trevor's characteristic method of revelation, we do not learn all of this at once; and neither we nor the protagonist learn until later that Josephine had endured her own forty-year exile as a result of the burning and deaths. Trevor so designs his story that the journey from Italy to Josephine's bedside in Cork, which takes fully half the story, must be made by bus, train, taxi, plane, train, and taxi, with temporal cross-cuttings between the present journey to places associated with the painful past and the story of why those places and that past are painful. It is as if the narrator were delicately peeling back layer after painful layer of still tender scar tissue to fully expose to himself—as well as to us—for the first time in many years the horror that drove him from Ireland. As he sits by Josephine's deathbed, he realizes that she, too, is remembering the experience:

Tears oozed from her eyes and I could tell from the contortion in her face that she was remembering not just my mother's suicide but my sisters and my father burnt alive and Mrs. Flynn [the cook] burnt also. The fire had started in the middle of the night and we were all trapped except O'Neill and John Paddy [the gardener and his son], who lived in the yard, though they always ate in the kitchen. They hauled us out the best they could, but only my mother and Josephine and myself survived. We had not been murdered when the men returned because we were not conscious, but O'Neill and John Paddy, faced by the men, were instantly shot. After my mother's burial, ten years later, Josephine said to me: "You and I are what's left of it now."

So completely has the narrator effaced his human Irish past that it is only now, after his forced recollection of that past, that he learns that he and Josephine have shared more than he knew—that in 1932, the year of his mother's suicide and the beginning of his exile from Ireland. Josephine began her own very different forty-year exile as an inmate of St. Fina's insane asylum, driven there by her memories of the burning and deaths. As Sister Power tells him what she knows of Josephine's years there, the starkest of contrasts with the narrator's exile emerges. Whereas he was driven to self-indulgence in a foreign land to redress, as he has put it earlier, a balance—the losses he had suffered in Ireland—Josephine has devoted her life to prayer for others and has come to be regarded as a saint by her fellow inmates, who attribute miracles to her. Unlike the protagonist, Josephine has neither forgotten nor tried to forget the massacre and suicide; indeed, in words that reveal Trevor's intention to underscore the continuity of the Irish Troubles into the present, Sister Power says, "She hardly ever ceased to pray. She was confused, of course. She confused the tragedy you spoke of and your mother's death with what is happening now: the other tragedies in the North. She prays that the survivors may be comforted in their mourning. She prays for God's word in Ireland."

After a brief visit to Kilneagh, "windowless and gaunt, a hideous place now", and Josephine's death and funeral, the narrator, glad as always to leave Ireland but in isolation and loneliness and trailing bitter introspection about his failures in human relations, rejects the claim of Josephine's sainthood and miracles on rational grounds. But irrationally and under the influence of considerable wine, he meditates on a long procession of saints and sees with certainty the story of Josephine taking its place with them in scene after scene in the work of Fra Angelico, Giotto, Lorenzo di Credi, and Ghirlandaio, a pageant culminating in

the miracle that crowned them all: how she had moved that embittered man to find pleasure in the wisp that remained of a human relationship. On her deathbed she prayed that Ireland's murders might be forgiven, that all survivors be granted consolation, and rescued from the damage wrought by horror. Josephine of the Survivors they called her, Ghirlandaio and all the others.

Before I fell asleep, I wept on the terrace, the first time since my mother's death. It was ridiculous to weep, so old and wrinkled like a crab, half drunk and even senile. And yet it wasn't in the least ridiculous: it was as right and fitting as the sainthood imparted by the inmates of St. Fina's. For a moment she stood in glory on my terrace and then she disappeared.

What are we to make of this conclusion, so close to sentimentality, skirting bathos with a narrator whose vision may be only alcohol-inspired? To put the worst construction on it, it is both sentimental and bathetic, an alcohol-induced and therefore unreal acceptance of the past. On the other hand, without this or a similar conclusion, the protagonist would remain essentially unchanged by his return to the past and the past's intrusion on his present and future, and Josephine's life of prayer and forgiveness would mean no more than the narrator's life of self-indulgence and denial of others—one survivor driven to nearly total isolation, the other to madness by the Irish Troubles. This grim possibility may be Trevor's intention. But to put the most hopeful construction on the ending, the conclusion, appropriately in a section of the story devoted to a litany of the saints, can also be read as an exemplum of the power of prayer and forgiveness, which may depart from the reality of the situation, but which softens the narrator's bitter self-reproaches, lessens his isolation, holds out some mild hope for regeneration, and in the larger context of the Troubles points beyond political and military solutions. That the story ends as it begins, in Sansepolcro—Holy Sepulcher—only adds to the ambiguity of Trevor's conclusion.

"Attracta" and "Autumn Sunshine" are recent stories dramatizing the themes of betrayal, violence, revenge, guilt, forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation in past and present. They are also stories in which the Anglican Protestantism of the protagonists figures more prominently than in any other of Trevor's Troubles stories, Attracta being the only teacher in the one-room Protestant school in a small town near Cork; Moran being the rector of St. Michael's Church of Ireland. Because of the authority derived from both their positions and long tenure in them, Attracta and Moran might have been but have chosen not to be aggressively Protestant in their work with their charges. Both are peaceable people who as adults have remained apart from religious and secular disputes and have no serious differences with their Catholic neighbors. But in the face of past violence renewing itself in the present, both depart from prepared teaching-preaching texts and counsel their small flocks to reconciliation in place of the revenge that has again become part of their human environment—a message their listeners find odd.

"Attracta" is Trevor's most complex examination of religious and sectarian allegiances. In present action that occurs in about 1975, Attracta, in her sixty-first year—after forty-some years of untroubled teaching and happiness—is haunted by a newspaper account of the death of a British army officer and the subsequent suicide in Belfast of his English wife of twenty-three, Penelope Vade. Attracta is strangely moved by these deaths, particularly Penelope's, for two reasons. First, this is a notably grisly tale of murder, vengeance, and suicide in contemporary Ulster:

It was Penelope Vade's desire to make some kind of gesture, a gesture of courage and perhaps anger, that caused her to leave her parents' home in Haslemere and go to Belfast. Her husband … had been murdered in Belfast; he'd been decapitated as well. His head, wrapped in cotton-wool to absorb the ooze of blood, secured within a plastic bag and packed in a biscuit-tin, had been posted to Penelope Vade. Layer by layer the parcel had been opened by her in Haslemere. She hadn't known he was dead before his dead eyes stared into hers.

Her gesture was her mourning of him. She went to Belfast to join the Women's Peace Movement, to make the point that somehow neither he nor she had been defeated. But her gesture, publicly reported, had incensed the men who'd gone to the trouble of killing him. One after another, seven of them had committed acts of rape on her. It was after that that she had killed herself

by swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Second, Attracta is haunted by this story because it both parallels and differs from her own story, one with its beginnings in the Black-and-Tan phase of the English-Irish conflict nearly sixty years earlier.

When Attracta was three, her parents, nonmilitant Irish Protestants, had been killed in an ambush meant for the Black-and-Tans, British military terrorists. That the architects of these deaths were an Irish Protestant guerrilla and his adulterous Catholic mistress, Devereux and Geraldine Carey, suggests the complexity of loyalties Trevor brings to this story.

Thus, for example, Devereux and Geraldine, who had not stopped at any violence in the Irish cause against the British, are guilt-stricken at these innocent deaths. They stop their guerrilla activity and devote much of their lives to seeking redemption. For Devereux, this means unusual devotion to the child Attracta—elaborate birthday presents, spending Ions hours with her, visiting her at her Aunt Emmeline's house, for example—until, ironically, when Attracta kisses him good night she imagines it is what having a father is like. For her part, Geraldine remains in Devereux's home as housekeeper and undergoes a sea change from violent revolutionary and adulteress to the quietest and most devout person Attracta has ever known:

Geraldine Carey was like a nun because of the dark clothes she wore, and she had a nun's piety. In the town it was said she couldn't go to mass often enough. "Why weren't you a nun, Geraldine?" Attracta asked her once…. But Geraldine Carey replied that she'd never heard God calling her. "Only the good are called," she said.

The story of her parents' death is not revealed to Attracta until she is eleven and the relationship with Devereux and Geraldine well established. Then the story is told to her by Purce, whose aggressive Protestantism and bigotry embarrass the town's few other Protestants. By telling Attracta and trying to sever her relationship with Devereux and Geraldine, Purce seeks revenge against Devereux, a Protestant who never goes to church and is thus a betrayer of his faith; a renegade for having fought against the British Black-and-Tans, for having been responsible for the deaths of two Protestants, and for endangering Attracta's Protestantism by allowing her contact with the formerly adulterous but now piously Catholic Geraldine Carey.

Because they have won redemption, Purce does not gain revenge against Devereux and Geraldine, which would have destroyed Attracta, too. Instead, she survives because of those she might have hated, develops an affection for the town and is happy there: "There'd been tragedy in her life but she considered that she had not suffered. People had been good to her."

Now, in 1975, Attracta, realizing that she has survived and been happy because of the goodness of those who had harmed her nearly sixty years earlier, realizes that Penelope Vade did not survive because of the continued violence of those who had killed her husband when she, instead of seeking revenge, sought reconciliation by joining the Women's Peace Movement. Realizing these things, she meditates on her life as a teacher, wondering if she has not taught the wrong things:

She was thinking that nothing she might ever have said in her schoolroom could have prevented the death of a girl in a city two hundred miles away. Yet in a way it seemed ridiculous that for so long she had been relating the details of Cromwell's desecration and the laws of Pythagoras, when she should have been talking about Devereux and Geraldine Carey. And it was Mr. Purce she should have recalled instead of the Battle of the Boyne.

In a mood of black guilt, she reflects that in a lifetime she has neither learned nor taught anything and, in atonement for not having taught her pupils the lesson from the past that had led to her own happiness, she reads to them the account of Penelope Vade and her husband and asks what they think of it. Faced with their puzzlement, she tells her own story, identifying in the telling with Penelope in detail after painful detail, and explaining further that Penelope was also like Devereux and Geraldine in offering peace and friendship. But because they have grown calloused by the horrors of the new Irish Troubles, the children only stare and wonder what on earth Penelope Vade has to do with anything, and think that Attracta does not "appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and feathered and left for dead, children no older than themselves were armed with guns."

At the last, then, Attracta, named for an Irish saint of the fifth or sixth century, succeeds only for herself but fails with others and so begs ironic contrast with Josephine of "Saints," who in bringing an otherwise bitter and lonely old man some consolation might be said to have some sort of success. They have both suffered grievous personal losses at about the same time in the past: but because she has never forgotten the past, Josephine brings it into the present and is able to console an old man; whereas, ironically, Attracta, who was able to forget the past because of the goodness of others, cannot bring the lessons of the past into the present for anyone but herself. Not only does she fail to teach the lesson to her pupils, but because they report her peculiar behavior to their parents she is eased into retirement—and thus loneliness and isolation—at the end of the term. Instead of defending her eccentric lesson, Attracta offers words that underscore the necessity of bringing the lessons of the past into the present: "Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town [i.e., that people can change for the better]. It matters that [Penelope Vade] died in despair, with no faith left in human life."

In "Autumn Sunshine," Canon Moran of St. Michael's Church of Ireland is probably the oldest and most parochial protagonist of this set of stories. At the time of present action—September 1978—he lives alone in an eighteenth-century rectory, standing alone and looking lonely, two miles from the village of Boharbawn and eight miles from the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Ministering to a small flock, a man abstemious and unambitious, he has for the most part been content, though the ordinary mild melancholy of the season is now deepened for him by the recent death of his wife of fifty years, Frances, and because his youngest and favorite daughter, Deirdre, has been in England for three years and did not return home or even write at her mother's death.

Not only is Moran rather isolated in his home, he has also always been insulated from even the mild conflicts of an Anglican pastor in a predominantly Catholic area. A man who has always disliked disorder, he had relied on Frances to resolve skirmishes with neighboring Catholics; for example, the ticklish situation of a girl in his parish made pregnant by a Catholic lad was settled when Frances had a chat with Father Hayes and the girl's mother.

Furthermore, Moran is largely at peace with his personal past. True, Frances's death is still difficult for him because it is not truly past and she has yet to become a ghost for him. True, too, he is troubled that Deirdre, always somewhat rebellious, had gone off to England without telling her parents, but she is too much the favorite to have alienated them by this. So on the whole Moran is not a man much troubled by his own past.

Nor does Trevor allow him to be very aware of the historical past of County Wexford, a past that perhaps should have engaged his attention more than it has; for, during the unsuccessful Irish rebellion of 1798 against the British, the Wexford rising was largely religious and animated by Catholic sentiments; Wexford held out against the British forces longer than any other section of Ireland; and Vinegar Hill, headquarters of the Wexford insurgents and scene of a famous Irish defeat, is only eight miles away in Enniscorthy. But the historical past is to be forced on Moran in a personal way and is to be the source of conflict, pain, and loss that are ultimately resolved only at the cost of denying to himself the truth of his own perceptions.

In this September, Deirdre returns, needing, she writes to her delighted father, to get back to Ireland for a while. She is soon followed by her English young man, Harold, too thin, wearing a black leather jacket; an electrician with dirty fingernails, bad manners, and a cockney accent. His face bears a birthmark, an affliction almost belligerent and that comes to symbolize his birth into England's lower orders and his rebellion against any establishment. It is Harold who forces the violent Irish past and an awareness of a violent Irish present into Moran's consciousness and compels him to connect the two.

For Harold is a radical who supports the Irish cause against England or any established social order. His pronouncements—he seldom converses, and in this and other ways Trevor has made him nearly a caricature—are largely cant: England has been "destroyed by class consciousness and the unjust distribution of wealth," "the struggle is worldwide," and "I'm not answerable to the bosses," for example, and his favorite catchcry, "the struggle of the Irish people." That Deirdre—named for the heroine of Irish legend's greatest love story, of whom it was prophesied at her birth that she would bring Ireland bloodshed and death—appears to be in love with him distresses Moran, and all the more when it seems possible that she is Harold's "Irish connection." that is, that he may have formed his liaison with her because she is Irish and possibly even because she is from Wexford.

If Moran is innocent of Irish history, Harold knows a great deal, including the story of Kinsella's Barn. There, in 1798, a Sergeant James, as an example to the countryside, burned in the barn twelve men and women accused of harboring insurgents; and Kinsella, innocent of either sheltering rebels or the executions, was murdered by his own farm workers. Returning from a visit to the site with Deirdre, Harold vents his hatred against James, a man who boasted that he had killed a thousand Irishmen and who had amassed great wealth at Irish expense, and further declares that Kinsella got what he deserved. When Moran protests gently that it was all two hundred years ago—implying that the past is past and best forgotten, certainly not to be dragged into the present—and that in any case Kinsella was innocent of any complicity, Harold automatically interjects that in two hundred years nothing has changed, that "The Irish people still share their bondage with the twelve in Kinsella's Barn," and that as for Kinsella, "if he was keeping a low profile in a ditch, it would have been by arrangement with the imperial forces."

So virulent is Harold's hatred and so determined is he to cast his lot with Ireland's new revolutionaries that Moran is forced to connect past and present in two ways. First, when he addresses his small flock the following morning he departs from his prepared text and. in a spirit not unlike Attracta's when speaking to her uncomprehending pupils, "tried to make the point that one horror should not fuel another, that passing time contained its own forgiveness" and that Kinsella was innocent of everything. He thinks:

Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted of an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up…. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humor and compassion, how people pretended to themselves. It was worse than Frances's death, he thought, as his voice continued in the church: it was worse that Deirdre should be part of wickedness.

He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn't blame them. He was confused, and considerably distressed. In the rectory Deirdre and Harold would be waiting for him. They would all sit down to Sunday lunch while plans for atrocities filled Harold's mind, while Deirdre loved him.

The kinship between past and present is yet more specific that evening when Deirdre and Harold announce their departure for Dublin the next day, but Harold, reading a book about Che Guevara, is evasive about their exact movements. Certain that Harold intends to meet others like himself in Dublin and that Deirdre has turned her back on the rectory to join a man who plans to commit atrocities, Moran thinks:

Harold was the same kind of man Sergeant James had been; it didn't matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James had maybe borne an affliction also—a humped back or a withered arm. He had ravaged a country for its spoils, and his most celebrated crime was neatly at hand, so that another Englishman could make matters worse by attempting to make amends. In Harold's view the trouble had always been that these acts of war and murder died beneath the weight of print in history books, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that Kinsella's Barn was an inspiration: Harold had journeyed to it as people make journeys to holy places.

Returning to the rectory the following morning from delivering Deirdre and Harold to the Dublin bus and deep in gloom because he believes Deirdre to be a befuddled girt under Harold's influence, Moran connects all that has happened with Frances, who had always resolved conflicts for him. Conjuring her up in the autumn sunshine, he hears her say, "Harold's just a talker. Not at all like Sergeant James," words that Moran clings to as truth because they take the curse off what he had clearly perceived to be so. In this mood of new hope, he hears Frances laugh,

and for the first time since her death seemed far away, as her life did too. In the rectory the visitors had blurred her fingerprints to nothing and had made her a ghost that could come back. The sunlight warmed him as he sat there; the garden was less melancholy than it had been.

On the one hand, the conclusion of "Autumn Sunshine" is similar to that of "Saints," with the spirit of a dead woman bringing comfort to a lonely old man who has been dispirited by an excursion into the past. On the other, while the protagonist of "Saints" appears, in one interpretation, to undergo a change that allows him to deal, perhaps ineptly and at a distance, with the reality of a violent Irish past, Moran's change is only to put the past firmly into the past once again and to determine not to accept and to deal with the reality he had earlier perceived: that Harold is really a contemporary Sergeant James. When he calls up Frances, it is for her to do what she has always done—resolve his problem for him, here by denying that Harold is like James. As Frances is now properly dead, so is his probably accurate discernment of Harold and Deirdre.

Although "Another Christmas" dramatizes similar themes and arrives at not dissimilar resolutions, it differs in several ways from other Trevor stories about the Troubles. The protagonists, Dermot and Norah, are a middle-aged Irish Catholic couple. They are working-class people, Dermot having been a gas company meter-reader for twenty-one years, during which time they have rented the same small terrace house from the same landlord, Mr. Joyce. What is most important for Trevor's purpose is that this middle-aged, working-class Irish Catholic couple have lived in London since the early days of their marriage in Waterford. Thus, Trevor here reverses a familiar pattern. Instead of giving us Anglo-Irish Protestants in a distinct minority position in predominantly Catholic Ireland, he gives us Irish Catholics in a distinct minority position in predominantly Protestant England, and wonders, perhaps, if they'll behave any differently from their counterparts when faced with the same violent past renewed in the present, in this instance, about 1976. On the whole, this is another story in which apparently firm human relations unravel under pressures from the renewed past.

Initially, at least, it appears that Dermot and Norah have achieved about the same modus vivendi in their community as that reached by the Middletons in "The Distant Past." Although there are several reminders in the opening pages that their background is Irish Catholic—two pictures of Waterford scenes and a picture of the Virgin and Child on the living-room walls, for instance—most of the opening pages are devoted to establishing that Dermot and Norah are at home here and doing what most English couples are doing at the same time: decorating the house for Christmas and drinking tea and talking about past Christmases, their five children, and the joy and peace of the present Christmas. On the other hand, as if showing that Dermot and Norah are simultaneously content and yet rather isolated, Trevor confines present action almost entirely to their living room. Later in the story, this suggestion of isolation becomes more sinister as Norah thinks of their entire situation in England as a trap,

the trap they'd made for themselves. Their children spoke with London accents. Patrick and Brendan worked for English firms and would make their homes in England. Patrick had married an English girl. They were Catholics and they had Irish names, yet home for them was not Waterford.

At the opening of the story, too, it appears that Dermot and Norah have achieved a personal modus vivendi that is not simply a reflection of the warmth of the Christmas season. They have not had a serious quarrel in all their married life. She recognizes that he is "considerate and thoughtful in what he did do, teetotal, clever, full of kindness for herself and the family they'd reared, full of respect for her also", and he knows how to compliment her for managing things so well. But there are also intimations in these early pages that their equanimity has cost Norah something. She is a plump, cheerful, easygoing woman whose Catholicism is relaxed and practical, and she has always deferred to Dermot, who is her opposite in mien and manner: "thin and seeming ascetic, with more than a hint of the priest in him …", a man who gives much time to pondering religious matters while on his meter-reading route; a slow and deliberate man who, having arrived at a position, will not change his mind. As Norah well knows, "it was his opinion that mattered."

The catalyst for a serious rift between them and their English neighbors is an issue that has developed between Dermot and their landlord, Mr. Joyce. Ironically, despite his name, Mr. Joyce is not Irish but thoroughly English. This fact has not mattered for over twenty years because Mr. Joyce, now a frail and bent old bachelor, has established his own warm and human relationship with the couple and their children, spending every Friday evening with them, kissing the children good night, joining them every year for Christmas, bringing presents for the children and small gifts for themselves. More than his tenants, Norah and Dermot are his friends; and to judge from the evidence of the story, he seems to be the sole valued long-time friend they have in England.

When the I.R.A. first started bombings that took civilian lives in England, Mr. Joyce did not stop his Friday evenings with Norah and Dermot, believing, perhaps, that their friendship was not based on religious or political considerations. However, perhaps assuming that for Dermot and Norah the friendship also transcended such lines, Mr. Joyce had not hesitated quietly to condemn the I.R.A. bombers, and they had not contradicted him until one Friday night in August when Dermot had shaken his head in agreement with Mr. Joyce over the latest outrage and

had added that they mustn't of course forget what the Catholics in the North had suffered. The bombs were a crime but it didn't do to forget that the crime would not be there if generations in the North had not been treated like animals. There'd been a silence then, a difficult kind of silence which she'd broken herself. All that was in the past, she'd said hastily, in a rush, nothing in the past or the present or anywhere could justify the killing of innocent people. Even so, Dermot had added, it didn't do to avoid the truth. Mr. Joyce had not said anything,

and he had stopped coming Friday evenings.

Now, in the midst of Christmas preparations, the issue of Mr. Joyce hangs unspoken between Norah and Dermot, and she delays until halfway through the story to say to Dermot that she is not counting on Mr. Joyce being with them for Christmas. Certain that he has been right in his condemnation of the treatment of the Catholics in the North and that Mr. Joyce would understand the justice of the I.R.A. bombings in England, Dermot insists that Mr. Joyce will come, that he has missed his Friday evenings because of illness, and that he wouldn't let the children down by not coming. Dermot refuses Norah's plea that he try to make it up with Mr. Joyce and instead says that he will pray that Mr. Joyce will come.

What emerges strongly in the second half of the story is what has been latent in the first. There is Dermot's deadly calm—he never displays emotion—and certitude that he is right; his conviction that they must keep faith with other Catholics; his belief that his position is God's position and that he has done his Catholic duty. Invoking the need for good will at the Christmas season, he repeats that one wrong leads to another wrong and that perhaps Mr. Joyce has seen this by now, failing on the one hand to see the bitter irony of his statements and on the other that Norah is tormented by the fact that seeming to condone what Mr. Joyce has condemned—the killing of innocent people—is to appear to condone the bombings.

For her part, Norah's conviction that Dermot is dead wrong and must be challenged is betrayed by manner and feelings never before associated with him: the increased impatience in her voice, her unusual edginess of manner, her raised voice, her feeling of wildness—as if she should rush into the streets to harangue passersby with her belief that the bombers are despicable and have earned hatred and death for themselves—and her impotent will to strength to pour out her rage at him:

She looked at him, pale and thin, with his priestly face. For the first time since he had asked her to marry him in the Tara Ballroom she did not love him. He was cleverer than she was, yet he seemed half blind. He was good, yet he seemed hard in his goodness, as though he'd be better without it. Up to the very last minute on Christmas Day there would be the pretense that their landlord might arrive, that God would answer a prayer because his truth had been honoured. She considered it hypocrisy, unable to help herself in that opinion.

At the end of the story we know that the relationship between Dermot and Norah has changed irrevocably. Seeing him guilty of a cruelty no one would have believed of him, she knows that he will be as kind as always to the children on Christmas Day but that Mr. Joyce's absence—the seal on the end of a cherished friendship—will be another victory for the bombers. And she thinks that "whenever she looked at him she would remember the Christmases of the past. She would feel ashamed of him, and of herself."

Despite differences in characters and setting, "Another Christinas" does not differ significantly from the other stories in its conflicts and resolutions, except, of course, to parcel out approval and condemnation to Irish Catholics, too. Except for their nominal tags, Norah shares much with the Middletons, Attracta, and Canon Moran; and Dermot is brother under the skin with Fat Driscoll, Purce, and Harold. In simpler terms, both Dermot and Norah understand how the past renews itself in the present; but where Dermot blindly perpetuates that past, Norah is willing to break the circle of violence begetting violence by forgiveness. In even simpler terms, he wants justice; she wants mercy.

As reported in The Irish Times, William Trevor's first full-length stage play, Scenes from an Album, takes photographs, so to speak, of a Tyrone Anglo Irish family from Jacobean times to the present, and takes their home from castle to the present "decaying heap in which the occupants find themselves caught between the Orange Order and the IRA." If this is not precisely the situation of the protagonists in most of Trevor's Troubles stories, it is near to the spirit of those stories, an approximation whose meaning deepens when Trevor says that this Tyrone family is "the kind of Anglo-Irish family that I would have great respect for, not being that kind of Anglo-Irish myself …," that is, more Irish than the Irish themselves rather than his "own kind of small-town Protestant bank manager's background…."

The Anglo-Irish protagonists of Trevor's stories, rather than being caricatures that might serve some propaganda, have his understanding and compassion, sentiments not withheld from the Irish Catholics of "Another Christmas," either, though, on the whole, their problems seem less provocative. This is because the situation of the Anglo-Irish, deep-rooted in Ireland but retaining at least traces of a different heritage and withal often more Irish than the Irish themselves, is so anomalous that their dilemmas generate greater and more complex and more subtle conflicts and thus more opportunities for insights than the situation of either Irish Catholic nationalist or British imperialist. The arena for conflict in Trevor's stories thus opens up more than most Troubles fiction has human issues that time has not solved and that cannot be solved by merely partisan positions. Upon reflection, Trevor's Troubles stories sometimes seem so open-ended that one must hesitate before pronouncing judgment on their collective "meaning"; but if there is one consistent view, it seems to be that the past cannot be forgotten but that with resolution and forgiveness it need not be perpetuated.