SOURCE: "William Trevor's 'A Meeting in Middle Age' and Romantic Irony," in Journal of the Short Story in English No. 16, Spring, 1991, pp. 19-28.

[In the following essay, Doherty determines the influence of James Joyce's "A Painful Case" on Trevor's "A Meeting in Middle Age."]

Many Irish writers have worked the theme of isolation, and William Trevor is one of the present masters. In his novel of 1965, The Boarding House (1968), he has his central character, Mr. Bird, the man who runs the boarding house (an analogue for the creative artist as he creates the boarding house as his own work and to suit himself), admit to a specialist's interest in loneliness:

Mr. Bird said he had studied the conditions of loneliness, looking at people who were solitary for one reason or another as though examining a thing or an insect beneath a microscope. The memory of Mr. Bird was bitter at that moment, and the words he spoke in her mind were unwelcome there, for they were cruel in their wisdom.

About the same time he published a story in Transatlantic Review in 1966, 'A Meeting in Middle Age', which was later published in The Day We Got Drunk On Cake in 1967 (and later still selected by Malcolm Bradbury for inclusion in The Penguin Book of British Short Stories, 1987, from which quotations will be taken). Here William Trevor seems to bring together his Irishness—in spite of the story's being set in England with English characters—his concern with isolation and a tribute to Joyce.

Close reading of the story shows how some of the effects of this little story come from the suggestions which carry the reader back to Joyce's story from Dubliners, 'A Painful Case'. That original story had made its own the use of romance and irony to create a saddened tale of the inability to love and the anguish of despair, as all readers are aware. The multiple ironies which surround and suffocate the central offending figure, Mr Duffy, are now, in turn, called on subtextually to enrich and deepen a later tale on the same theme.

A specialist in isolations, Trevor is able to use a variety of devices to persuade the reader of the ways in which an individual is locked into his or her world, aching often to escape but condemned to their loneliness. So, it is a little pleasure to watch the invasion of irony in the first paragraph of the story when the verbal forms used suggest, comically enough, that these two complete strangers are singularly united in attitude of mind and commonalty of purpose:

They did not speak as they marched purposefully: they were strangers to one another, and in the noise and bustle, examining the lighted windows of the carriages, there was little that might constructively be said.

Brought together by the common activity and united in the 'they', this makes them a pair or a couple paradoxically at one in their strangerliness and purposefulness as the sisters in the opening paragraph of, say D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love:

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightlycoloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

Here Lawrence succeeds in giving some sense of how the sisters share certain qualities in common and how close they are in their ability to be at ease and together in this shared 'they'. Trevor, on the other hand, establishes his pair as both parallel and somehow opposite, qualities symbolically represented in their hand luggage:

They carried each a small suitcase, Mrs da Tanka's of white leather or some material manufactured to resemble it, Mr Mileson's battered and black.

There is comic delight in making the luggage so eloquent, and the speaker's inability or reluctance to distinguish the pretence or factitious in Mrs da Tanka from what might be real is characteristically comic and at the time suggestive of the mystery, eventually unfathomable, in all our encounters with others. But, as in all love stories, there is a meeting of minds, of bodies, of expectations, fantasies, desires, and, taking our cue from the title, we should feel comfortable with verbs which showed us common or shared experiences, thoughts and attitudes. We might even say that we should be more prepared for the joint verbal union of 'they' at the end of the story where two strangers had been brought into a love affair than at the beginning of a non-love story which will turn out to be the enactment of a charade affair which is paid for, a technicality which can subsequently be invoked in divorce proceedings as 'adultery'. So, the fitting union of this couple in all the various ways employed by the first paragraph parodies what we expect of a love story.

The element of parody seems to be intensified when we relate this pair of middle-aged pseudo-lovers to what I take to be their originals, Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico of 'A Painful Case'. Both men are careful bachelors living in one room, both tidy and orderly men who are at the same time non-sexual and who have a fear of sex. Indeed, Joyce gives us one of the jottings which his hero had written in the 'sheaf of papers which lay in his desk':

One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must be no sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

Mr Mileson's condition is similar, but Trevor's handling of it is lighter, more jocular, with comic undertones:

In 1931 Mr Mileson had committed fornication with the maid in his parents' house. It was the only occasion, and he was glad that adultery was not expected of him with Mrs da Tanka. In it she would be more experienced than he, and he did not relish the implication. The grill-room was lush and vulgar. 'This seems your kind of place,' Mr Mileson repeated rudely.

The women in both stories are victims of their sexuality. Mrs Sinico is merely an appendage to her husband's life. She is someone in great need of affection, a lonely, sexually empty woman, yet someone whose sexuality is made plain to the reader (and Mr Duffy)—'her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness'—and yet a woman whom her husband has undramatically rejected.

He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her.

In a comic version of this, we hear how Mr da Tanka's back had often been turned on Mrs da Tanka (his 'broad back, so fat it might have been padded beneath the skin' had been 'often presented to her' 'he was that kind of man'), and we hear her alliterative account of how weeks passed 'without the exchange of a single significant sentence'. To the hearer, Mr Mileson, again with intended authorial irony, both of the lady's husbands merge into the same man, 'shadowy, silent fellows who over the years had shared this woman with the well-tended hands'.

Drink, too, is a common bond between the stories, tragic in Joyce, comic in Trevor. Mrs Sinico's taking to drink and dying, either by suicide or by accident, under the wheels of a train, is directly related to Mr Duffy's failure to show her any real affection (being a man who reduces intimate conversations which have real potentiality for progression to sexual intercourse to his 'last interview', how could he?). But drink is also part of the configuration of Mr Duffy himself; it is, first, part of his social context, and then, by turning to it after reading the account of the Inquest in the evening paper, it becomes his ironic and unacknowledged tie to Mrs Sinico. Not only is the view from his flat a view 'into the disused distillery', as we hear at the beginning of the story, but we are reminded, after he has read the report, that he gazed into the 'cheerless evening landscape' where 'the river lay quiet beside the empty distillery'. We are conscious of the intended pain in the Joycean parody of two lovers lying together in peaceful tranquillity, as the writer cashes in some of the ironic value which he has invested in placing in the location of Mr Duffy's flat in Chapelizod, 'the Chapel of Isolde', drawing attention, as this indirectly does, to the tragic loves of Tristan and Isolde. More than this, Mr Duffy takes to drink that evening (though genteelly taking two hot punches—which one might take for a cold, 'medicinally' perhaps—rather than 'huge pint tumblers' which the crude and spitting working-men drink). In the gloom of his reflections in the public-house on Chapelizod Bridge, no doubt affected by the alcohol acting as a depressant, he sympathizes for the first time with the loneliness of the dead woman only to absorb that sympathy instantly into his own self-pity in which he bathes:

He understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night, alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory—if anyone remembered him.

Mr Duffy's internalized self-pity is taken by Trevor and externalized in a comic version when Mrs da Tanka deflates Mr Mileson:

'You should write your memoirs, Mr Mileson. To have seen the changes in your time and never to know a thing about them! You are like an occasional table. Or a coat-rack in the hall of a boarding-house. Who shall mourn at your grave, Mr Mileson?'

Mrs da Tanka drinks, but much more openly, with much more verve and determination, not from desperation or to blot out reality as a substitute for suicide:

'Gin and lemon, gin and lemon,' said Mrs da Tanka, matching the words with action: striding to the bar.

The couple sit on 'while she drank many measures of the drink', and, as Mr Mileson's measures are not being counted, we presume that he makes do with his single glass of rum, a drink he chose, 'feeling it a more suitable drink though he could not think why'. Both ladies drink; both men are, in theory, non-drinkers.

It might be noted in all this that both authors keep to a formal system of naming their characters, never transgressing against the 'Mr' and 'Mrs' formula, the one shocking exception being when Mrs Sinico's Christian name, Emily, is given for the first and only time in the newspaper report of the Coroner's Inquest. In more substantial ways, however, the two stories come together at several crucial points in the story, one of them being the time spent together by each couple in the dark, a dark which promises sex but which can never accomplish it. For instance, in Joyce's story one of the powerful images which carries Mr Duffy's thoughts of death and destruction is the image of the 'good train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously'. This powerful image, which seems to catch up into itself so much of the story, is transposed downwards into a comic version in the later story. There it becomes the image of Mrs da Tanka's cigarette's tip glowing in the darkness which leads to panicstricken but comically treated reflections on death threatening to result from her carelessness with her cigarettes:

Sleep was impossible: one cannot sleep with the thought of waking up in a furnace, with the bells of fire brigades clanging a death knell.

Mrs da Tanka's mockery of Mr Mileson's sexual inexperience makes the bed heave 'with the raucous noise that was her laughter, and the bright spark of her cigarette bobbed about in the air', while Mr Duffy had heard the train's noise and had wound Mrs Sinico's name into it (a Joycean musical favourite of two dactyls, 'Emily Sinico', like 'Malachi Mulligan', itself modelled on Oliver Gogarty'), after he had registered the image of the 'fiery head' in the darkness.

It is in the darkness that both couples are at their most intimate and yet at their most separate, though separate for their different reasons. In Joyce's story the moments in the dark between the man and the woman are flooded with irony. What unites the couple is 'the music that still vibrated in their ears' as they sit quite alone in the dark in her little cottage outside Dublin when:

Many times she allowed the dark to fall upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them.

This, of course, is picked up and turned into self-punishing reflections by Mr Duffy at the end of the story, music being replaced by the 'laborious drone' of the engine, and so on. But, more immediately, Joyce uses ironic allusions to comment implicitly on Mr Duffy's reflections as he sits in these moments of intimacy in the dark with Mrs Sinico:

and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness.

This is too close to a primary Romantic text for chance, and too full of verbal echoes to be an accident. We seem to be close to Shelley's early poem, Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude, where the words which are limitated in Joyce are being used for a characteristically Shelleyan consummation of physical love in a dream, a combination of solitude in the dream-state and the ecstasy of sexual union with another. The Poet dreams:

  a veilèd maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought.

But this maid makes music which has a very different effect on the Poet:

wild numbers then
She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs
Subdued by its own pathos: her fair hands
Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp
Strange symphony, and in their branching veins
The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale.
The beating of her heart was heard to fill
The pauses of her music, and her breath
Tumultuously accorded with those fits
Of intermitted song.

She reveals herself to the poet who sees her 'glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil / Of woven wind' and so on, and:

He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom . . .

This is followed by sleep which 'Like a dark flood suspended in its course/Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain'. Joyce enfolds Mr Duffy in Shelley's ecstatic verse to ironize and judge the pusillanimity of his hero.

In his turn William Trevor uses his allusions to Joyce's story to deepen the pain within this ostensibly comic tale. Yet we cannot deny the comedy, nor the ironic devices by which the author remains at a decent remove from his characters. One of these devices is the language which he finds for his couple to speak, or rather to share. They communicate with one another in an idiom only this particular pair, you feel, could speak. It is as though they had spent a lifetime together to fall into the same idiolect, stylistically formal, a little stilted, certainly sounding contrived, and almost like a rehearsed script. There is no allowance for hesitation, evasion, none of the fractures of ordinary social discourse between almost total strangers. They become public and open in their assaults on one another though treating each other as strangers, and their tone is rather like that of long-married partners well-versed in hurting one another.

'How servile waiters are! How I hate servility, Mr Mileson! I could not marry that waiter, not for all the tea in China.'

'I did not imagine you could. The waiter does not seem your sort.'

'He is your sort. You like him, I think. Shall I leave you to converse with him?'

'Really! What would I say to him? I know nothing about the waiter except what he is in a professional sense. I do not wish to know. It is not my habit to go about consorting with waiters after they have waited on me.'

''I am not to know that. I am not to know what your sort is, or what your personal and private habits are. How could I know? We have only just met.'

'You are clouding the issue.'

'You are as pompous as da Tanka. Da Tanka would say issue and clouding.'

'What your husband would say is no concern of mine/

The reader is steadily made aware in many other ways of how this pair really belong together as complementarles, as so much folk-lore about relationships would have it. Only the reader will ever know this, and they will inevitably remain locked within their private worlds, unable ever beyond the confines of the story to recognize or receive one another. We see them as truly complementary, but we also see them as truly opposites and antagonistic, never one nor the other simply. So, for instance, they share a common past interest in the countryside, as we learn that he collected birds' eggs on the common when a boy, and she loved the countryside of Shropshire where she was brought up. Her love, however, was wordless, a love without a need for names, 'without knowing, or wishing to know, the names of flowers, plants or trees.' His was a codified knowledge, accurate and without emotion. They also have entirely different ways of dealing with the past: she 'had kept nothing. She cut off the past every so often, remembering it when she cared to, without the aid of physical evidence,' while he had a present dominated by the past. He had inherited a house which brought its own symbolic death with it (the termination of its lease), and his grasp on procreation and its denial seems happily symbolized in his collection of birds' eggs which he still possessed.

The author enjoys many ways of balancing the characters, so that not only is the single fornication weighed against a sexuality of which the lower limit is the two husbands, and whose higher limit we are never to learn, but he amusingly balances these two husbands against two unwashed plates:

She thought of da Tanka and Horace Spire, wondering where Spire was now. Opposite her, he thought about the ninety-nine-year lease and the two plates, one from last night's supper, the other from breakfast, that he had left unwashed in the room at Swiss Cottage.

But just before the story ends, at the most ironically inappropriate moment, we have the most surprising and moving coupling of the pair through the word 'cowparsley'. This word involves a disclosure of the interior of the individual, of that hidden and secret world which has been locked away since childhood, that world of pre-puberty, of the pre-self-consciousness. The trigger word slips out of him unbidden and almost unnoticed in response to her heavily sarcastic question about his possible preferences for flowers on his coffin.

'When you die, Mr Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs da Tanka.'

Mr Mileson's automatic response is 'cowparsley'. Against what the discourse seems to expect, the hidden and secret worlds of each of the speakers lie within reach, if only they knew the right key, and accidentally the keys have been pressed. Mr Mileson responds not to the 'flowers' part of the question but, characteristically for someone so against life, we feel, he responds to the image of himself in the coffin, 'an image he often saw and thought about'. 'Cowparsley' comes out unregistered by its speaker. Mrs da Tanka picks on the right key 'coffin' and gets rewarded by the trigger word 'cowparsley'. This in turn prompts an uncensored and defenceless set of her imagistic memories which flood back from Shropshire:

'Cowparsley?' said Mrs da Tanka. Why did the man say cowparsley? Why not roses or lilies or something in a pot? There had been cowparsley in Shropshire; cowparsley on the verges of dusty lanes; cowparsley in hot fields buzzing with bees; great white swards rolling down to the river. She had sat among it on a picnic with dolls. She had lain on it, laughing at the beautiful anaemic blue of the sky. She had walked through it by night, loving it.

Her memories are more powerful and involve evocatively sensuous imagery, including all the senses; and she can even recapture an image of herself almost like a photograph in the past.

She could smell it again: a smell that was almost nothing: fields and the heat of the sun on her face, laziness and summer. There was a red door somewhere, faded and blistered, and she sat against it, crouched on a warm step, a child dressed in the fashion of the time.

He, by contrast, had seen it only once (analogous to his unique sexual experience) 'on a rare family outing to the country', 'had seen it and remembered it', and 'he remembered, that day, asking the name of the white powdery growth'. Drily the author matches Mr Mileson's dryness:

He had picked some and carried it home; and had often since thought of it, though he had not come across a field of cowparsley for years.

So, this pair, balanced, complementary, matched, opposite, part, and the balanced relationship which has been comically and pathetically given to us in the story is shown in its ironic parting, 'moving in their particular directions' (almost a standing parody of Milton's famous ending for the fallen Adam and Eve who 'hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, / Through Eden took thir solitarie way.'):

She to her new flat where milk and mail, she hoped, awaited her. He to his room; to the two unwashed plates on the draining board and the forks with egg on the prongs; and the little fee propped up on the mantelpiece, a pink cheque for five pounds, peeping out from behind a china cat.

This comic ending is entirely appropriate to the story and its tone, but I believe that its tragic predecessor still operates in the body of the work to deepen the feelings at times and to allow the echoes to reverberate from Joyce, as he had let the echoes of Shelley reverberate in his story. William Trevor may not have been conscious of reworking 'A Painful Case', but it hardly matters. These things have a way of being triggered unconsciously.