Trevor's analysis of the evil permeating human history does not simply link adult suffering with childhood misfortunes or trace twentieth-century blight back through the ages to an original sin in a garden of Eden. Such commonplace chains of evil are transformed by the revelation that his characters participate in their own wounding, that the originator of sin is not one man only in the past but each person along the way. Childhood trauma is never merely something inflicted from without, something inherited, some physical or psychic mutilation in which the child is simply an innocent victim. The trauma often involves a game in which the child is a significant player.

A paradigm of this process is presented in the early story “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp,” which by its title suggests a comparison between the chief Judeo-Christian explanation of the origin of evil (Adam's Original Sin in the Garden of Eden) and the particular forms of evil manifest in this story, an analogy both chilling and comic. Adam and Edward could not be more unalike: the first man, a being of preternatural perfection, as father of humanity his decisions affecting billions of descendants; Edward, an eccentric nonentity, father of no one at all, taken up with trivialities. The Fall of Adam was presented by the author of Genesis as profoundly serious; Edward's fall is grimly comic.

Such parody of a significant myth is part of the humor of the story as a whole. Adam's and Edward's transgressions both occurred in gardens, but whereas Adam's expulsion was from Paradise, Edward's was from neighborhood society. Adam's punishment involved his being subject to death; Edward's, in being subject to fantasies. Adam's sin, according to some interpretations of the myth, awakened him to the complexities of sexuality with his daughter-sister-wife, Eve; Edward's sin doomed him to protracted celibacy with his sister, Emily. Adam's sin was a great fall; Edward's sin was a little trip.

Remembering his “original sins” as an adult, Edward begins with an event set in the family garden: “From her own private flower-bed he had pulled her pansies, roots and all, when he was five years old; and with a pair of scissors he had cut through the centre of the buds of her roses. ‘I have played a trick on you,’ he used to say, sidling close to her.”¹ Nasty this little boy may be, but tormenting his nine-year-old sister is not quite in a class with man's first disobedience; his are venial sins, not mortal ones. In the Catholic theological system Trevor often invokes even an infinite number of venial sins do not add up to one mortal sin, and yet in this story they do. Edward's little tricks become deadly precisely because he and his sister play a game that makes them so.

At the heart of this game lies a tenacious holding on to past wrongs: “Edward remembered the past and he knew that his sister was remembering it too. … Edward often felt strange in the house now, feeling the present dominated by the past, remembering everything” (70). He sees his “baby tricks” and “cruelties in their thousands” as having “fallen like a blight upon her nature, … embittering the whole” (71f), dominating the life they have led together into their forties. At first it seems to the reader that Emily is mad—she imagines murders everywhere in their neighborhood and sends Edward to cut down the women she thinks are hanged in adjacent houses—but such conventional spookiness is not Trevor's goal. He turns the story in a more startling and more revealing direction as Edward hysterically tries to explain the situation to an 82-year-old neighbor: “My sister is not unwell. My sister pretends, exacting her revenge. God has told me, Mrs Mayben, to play my part in her pretended fantasies. I owe her the right to punish me, I quite understand that. … It is all pretence and silence between my sister and myself. We play a game” (76). The words game, play, and acting are used several times by Edward, underscoring the deliberateness of what would otherwise seem like simple madness. And the deliberateness is the point of the story.

Edward's feeling “rotten with guilt” (76) and his sister's vengeful acting of madness seem disproportionate to the “little tricks” of childhood that precipitated it all. Her being marked forever and his atoning forever (72) are states they have knowingly chosen and fostered. This behavior constitutes a childhood game carried into adulthood, a way to prolong that childhood and avoid adulthood, avoid marriage and the making of a new home. Since their parents' death when they were adolescents, they have continued to live in the same house, eat the same food, and play the same game (“Only the toys have gone” [77]).

Under the “pretended fantasies” Edward and Emily symbiotically share lie the real fantasies that betray their arrested state. Edward has, of course, unsettled Mrs. Mayben with his crazy confession, and although she nervously managed to persuade him (and his ham knife) to leave her house, he daydreams about his visit quite differently: “She placed a hand on Edward's shoulder and said most softly that he had made her feel a mother again. He told her then, once more, of the pansies plucked from the flower-bed, and Mrs Mayben nodded and said he must not mind. … ‘Come when you wish,’ invited Mrs Mayben with tears in her eyes. ‘Cross the road for comfort. It's all you have to do’” (78). This sympathetic, comforting, forgiving woman may have been a mother to him in his dream, but in fact the actual Mrs. Mayben² dismissed him by saying she was “too old to take on new subjects” (78). After entertaining his idealizing dream during lunch, Edward then turns to another fantasy: “His eyes moved to his sister's face and then moved downwards to the table, towards the knife that lay now on the polished wood. He thought about this knife that he had carried into a neighbour's house, remembering its keen blade slicing through the flesh of a pig. He saw himself standing with the knife in his hand, and he heard a noise that might have been a cry from his sister's throat. ‘I have played a trick on you,’ his own voice said, tumbling back to him over the years” (78). Once again Trevor comes close to the edge of conventional storytelling, only to turn away from actual murder and to the nursed thought of murder. These two fantasies—the loving mother, the destroyed sibling—fuel the game Edward and Emily have chosen to play during the 40 years they have competed for the same territory.

That territory may be the flower bed, destroyed by malice; it may be the mother, lost to death; or it may, from another perspective, be Ireland itself. This is the only story in Trevor's first collected volume to seem to be set in Ireland. The repeated reference to “Dunfarnham Avenue” suggests an Irish town, just as the presence of large engravings “featuring the bridges of London” and the collected works of Kipling and Scott and The Life of a Bengal Lancer suggest a British orientation.³ The mutual attachment and hatred that control Edward's and Emily's lives have clear political analogues, just as their family struggle mirrors struggles between groups in the larger social unit that constitutes the nation of which Dunfarnham Avenue is one part.

Throughout his A Writer's Ireland Trevor stresses the mix of peoples that make up Ireland, emphasizing the various waves of invasion to clarify that no one group is the “real” Irish, underscoring and defending diversity. He dismisses as “glib” the view that writers like “Somerville and Ross and Elizabeth Bowen were somehow not quite Irish, not properly or dedicatedly so.”⁴ He refers to the “double colonialism” of Ulster, reminding his readers that Ireland colonized Scotland before the loan was returned “with interest” in the seventeenth century (171). He stresses that there were English as well as Irish Catholics needing Daniel O'Connell's emancipation bill (73). And he quotes with approval David Marcus's analogy concerning the genesis of the Irish short story as a “mixed marriage”: “Ireland's most renowned expert on the modern short story, David Marcus, agrees that [George] Moore was indeed its father. He offers Somerville and Ross as the mother. No literary union, he argues, ‘could have been more fruitful of promise, for father and mother emerged from the two widely-opposed cultures (Catholic and Native/Protestant or Anglo, and settler) which had become the constituents of the Irish family’” (143f).

The Tripp family of “Number Seventeen Dunfarnham Avenue” is also an Irish family made up of strongly opposed members, a brother and a sister whose present, like Ireland's, is dominated by the past and who consequently spend all the time and energy of their life locked in a deadly game. That they are not victims of outside forces is indicated by the fact that their enterprise is indeed a game, a play in which they themselves are the principal actors. But if not victims, neither are they victors, nor “fruitful of promise,” nor anything else positive. Like the Ulster Trevor explores in a later story, “Beyond the Pale,” and like the Munster of “The Distant Past,” this Dunfarnham Avenue household turns its violence against itself.

When in “The Distant Past” the elderly Middletons discuss recent bombings in Belfast with the butcher, Driscoll (who as a boy 50 years earlier had attempted to shoot British soldiers in their house in Munster), he remarks that it is “a bad business”; “We don't want that old stuff all over again.”⁵ Miss Middleton's quip that “We didn't want it in the first place” makes the butcher, her brother, and herself laugh: “Yes, it was a game, she thought: how could any of it be as real or as important as the afflictions and problems of the old butcher himself, his rheumatism and his reluctance to retire?” This relegating of the Anglo-Irish War to “a game,” making national independence of lesser importance than individual aches and pains, is not simply the apolitical view of an aged Protestant spinster puzzled by her lowered status in the Republic of Ireland. The word game also connects the issues of this story with those of “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp.” In both stories activities that damage participants and their society (whether family or nation) are seen as games, structures of pretense that control behavior and allow destructive acts that would otherwise be abhorrent.

That the players are themselves responsible for the game is as clear in “The Distant Past” as it is in “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp.” The hostility that prompted Fat Driscoll and two farmers to lock the Middleton family in an upstairs room and wait downstairs to massacre some expected British soldiers (who never arrived) continues to be fueled, despite the fact that Driscoll and the Middletons share a drink and joke about the past 50 years later. The aged Middletons protest in their Protestant church when prayers are no longer said for the Royal Family; they stand up when “God Save the King” is played on the BBC; “and on the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II they drove into the town with a small Union Jack propped up in the back window of their Ford Anglia” (63). Although their Church of Ireland rector considers them an anachronism and the townspeople are amused by them (“‘Bedad, you're a holy terror, Mr. Middleton!’ Fat Driscoll laughingly exclaimed, noticing the flag as he lifted a tray of pork-steaks from his display shelf” [63]), their public gestures of loyalty to the crown constitute their moves in the old game, however innocently those moves are made. Visitors to the now prosperous tourist town are impressed by the fact that “old wounds could heal so completely, that the Middletons continued in their loyalty to the past and that in spite of it, they were respected in the town” (65f). But “healing of old wounds” is the wrong metaphor: “time-out” is more exact, because the game resumes on both sides in 1967.

The Middletons grew up on an inherited rural estate, Carraveagh, a once prosperous and important establishment now in extreme decay: “They blamed for their ill-fortune the Catholic Dublin woman [for whose favors their father had mortgaged his property] and they blamed as well the new national régime, contriving in their eccentric way to relate the two. In the days of the Union Jack such women would have known their place: wasn't it all part and parcel?” (61f). Although this merging of the public and the private—new government and old mistress—does not stand up to logical scrutiny, it works well as a game rule: the government and the mistress are both Catholic, both “illegitimate,” both ruinous to the old estates, and both therefore deserving of resistance. Yet the Middletons are aware that the game they play is hurtful and deliberate: “Alone in their beds at night they now and again wondered why they hadn't just sold Carraveagh forty-eight years ago when their father had died: why had the tie been so strong and why had they in perversity encouraged it?” (66). They may soften the Anglo-Irish War by calling it just a game, they may think of their “worship of the distant past” as “no more than a game,” but those words perversity and encouraged betray their own culpability in all that happens.

When the Troubles begin in Belfast and Derry, the Middletons once again become “the enemy”: “Slowly the change crept about, all around them in the town, until Fat Driscoll didn't wish it to be remembered that he had ever given them mince for their dog. He had stood with a gun in the enemy's house, waiting for soldiers so that soldiers might be killed: it was better that people should remember that” (68f). This resumption of hostilities infects even the Catholic priest, who had often befriended the Middletons but now turns his back when they drive into town. Thus both sets of opponents in the peaceful, independent south take up their old positions to play out a game from the past.

Trevor ends his story on this melancholy note: “Because of the distant past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds” (70). He might have added “childless” to “friendless,” since the Middletons have seemed to love “the remains of Carraveagh more than they could ever have loved a husband or a wife” (61) and, like Edward and Emily, have remained celibate and without issue. These two early stories suggest that childlessness is an apt metaphor for the results of personal cruelty and colonial exploitation, a concept developed at length in the later novel The Silence in the Garden, where another childhood game played out in a garden allows appalling behavior, and where the evil that begins in childhood becomes mortal for a whole family because of their deliberate participation in it.

These brothers and sisters doomed to sterility, these old families that thus come to an end, and the childish games that direct and appear to excuse damaging behavior (“They did not realise. Children often don't” [184] is the rationalization of one character in The Silence in the Garden)—all these examples of evil are only segments of a much longer chain. But tracing the links that form a chain of relationships is not the same as accounting for its existence in the first place. What is the origin of evil? Although this question has exercised philosophers from the beginning, no ontological or ethical system seems to provide a thoroughly persuasive answer. In the Catholic system that provides the context for Trevor's thought, theories repeatedly stumble against the problem of accounting for both God's goodness and his omnipotence and omniscience. As Archibald MacLeish jauntily put it in his play J.B., “If God is God He is not good, / If God is good He is not God.”⁶ The power of the Book of Job lies precisely in its probing of the inexplicable mystery reconciling suffering and evil with goodness and justice. The same inexplicable mystery empowers the secular myth of King Lear, where both fathers are saved from despair by salutary falsity (the contrived miracle of Gloucester's “fall” and the blessed error of Cordelia's “breath”: perhaps, after all, the gods do not kill us for their sport and perhaps, after all, all sorrows are redeemed [5.3.266-68]). Shakespeare's oxymoron describing Gloucester's death—his heart “burst smilingly” (5.3.200)—is as apt a paradigm as any for the contradictions inherent in attempts to reconcile good and evil.

But if there is no satisfactory account of the origin of evil, there are nonetheless multiple ways of responding to and dealing with the evil itself. Edgar's heroic efforts to save Gloucester from despair invoke a blessedness beyond present suffering, a blessedness independent of “facts” (there is no cliff, there is no fall, and yet the old man believes he has been saved miraculously—and so is saved). Neither Edgar nor anyone else in the play questions the value of salvation based on deception.

Trevor's fictional characters grappling with the problem of evil are no more successful in finding an answer than are the real philosophers and writers who preceded them (and some, most notably Miss Gomez and Mrs. Eckdorf, like Lear and Gloucester, find their comfort in untruths). One of the most vehement expressions of outrage against God for allowing evil to afflict man in the first place is voiced by Miss Samson in the novel Elizabeth Alone. Although badly disfigured, Miss Samson has been deeply religious all her life, positive in her attitude toward God, her fellow man, and her own plight. But after discovering in the diary of her religious mentor that he lost his faith just before dying, after brooding on this information while hospitalized herself, she finds her own faith destroyed and cries out to Elizabeth, “It isn't fair! … Why does He make it so hard for people? Why create His silly world in the first place? What kind of a thing is He?” She then goes on to catalog evils suggesting that God is either not benevolent or not omniscient-omnipotent: “He plays that ugly little trick on us. He gives us human cruelty. And people throwing bombs about. Your friend drinking whiskey and gassing himself. Little Mrs Drucker abandoned as an infant to a home. Miss Clapper's parents not caring a fig about her. Your own father, Mrs Aidallbery, whom you didn't like. And Arthur born backward and multiple sclerosis.”⁷ Her harangue is both grotesquely comic and painfully serious. The spray of saliva on Elizabeth's face as Miss Samson shrieks, the jumble of items (mixing “whom you didn't like” with “gassing himself”), the trivializing idioms (“not caring a fig,” “throwing bombs about”), the quick little puns (“fig” and “clap”), the awkward lack of parallelism (“born backward and multiple sclerosis”)—all these are grotesquely, painfully comic. And yet Miss Samson's grief is real, the items she lists constitute terrible suffering for the individuals involved, the indictment is a serious one. And the central question remains, “Why does He make it so hard for people?” This is not merely the hysterical outburst of a disfigured and disillusioned woman; it is, phrased variously and perhaps more impersonally, one of the major questions of all philosophical systems.

Elements in Miss Samson's harangue are consistent with passages elsewhere in Trevor's work probing the nature and genealogy of evil. God's “little trick” is the cosmic equivalent of Edward's little tricks. The trivializing language—little, trick, and plays—suggests that God is no more “grown up” than a malicious little boy, with no more vision or care than young Edward Tripp had. Indicating that the gift of “human cruelty” is the ugly little trick God plays on mankind emphasizes the subsequent role people have in propagating their own suffering. Furthermore, in Miss Samson's view “floods and earthquakes” and “marriages … in which everything goes wrong” are on a par, equally personalized forms of evil because “He permits all that” (279). Whatever “thing” He is, He is not a just referee in the game Edward and Emily Tripp, the Middletons, or the Rollestons play.

Miss Samson is only one character in the novel, however, and certainly not to be taken as Trevor's spokesperson. But she does belong to a number of characters throughout Trevor's work who lose their faith in either God or goodness: Mrs. Eckdorf, Miss Gomez, Penelope Vade, Cynthia Strafe (and later Julia Ferndale). In these earlier novels and stories this loss tends to be expressed explicitly; in later works the losses and disillusionments center on human relationships, rather than religious or philosophical considerations of God or the good, and are not usually stated outright by given characters but instead manifest in their choices and fates (Willie in Fools of Fortune cannot allow himself to enjoy family life after his act of revenge; the governess in “The News from Ireland” errs in thinking she can live an ordinary married life after the famine; Tom in The Silence in the Garden lives solitary).

Solitariness, either imposed or chosen, is an important element in Trevor's renditions of mundane evil. The novel in which Miss Samson's outburst occurs is essentially a study in being alone, as both its title, Elizabeth Alone, and its last line, “She was happy enough alone, she said” (288), suggest. The plot in this novel is quite simple: four women of different ages and from different backgrounds share the same London hospital ward; become intimate during that time, confiding in and caring about one another; and then return to their separate worlds and particular sufferings or losses when they are discharged. Their reasons for being hospitalized are thematically significant: three have hysterectomies and one needs care during a difficult pregnancy. (In Trevor's world, where both children and sterility are such important topics, these medical needs take on special meaning, pointing as they do to either the impossibility or the danger of fruitful intimacy.) Of the three women hospitalized for operations, Miss Samson is the oldest, unmarried and childless; Elizabeth Aidallbery is 41, divorced and the mother of three daughters; and Sylvie Clapper is probably in her twenties, has a current boyfriend, and needs the hysterectomy because of past sexual activities and an incompetently performed abortion. The three each have their own form of aloneness and ways of coping with it. Miss Samson feels keenly that because of her terrible disfigurement no man will ever love her, but she was content managing a boardinghouse for people from her church, who made up a kind of family among themselves, until her subsequent loss of faith alienated her from them. Elizabeth is beginning to feel bereft of the people she loves (two of her children are “rowdily growing up,” the third has “gone off with a Jesus freak,” and her mother is “packed away in a Sunset Home” [260]); because she had “never been much good at being alone” (260) she probably would have married her devoted childhood friend, Henry, despite not loving him, had he not gassed himself while drunk. Sylvie, emotionally abandoned by her parents, needs a lover and so blinds herself to her lover's infidelity and dishonesty in order to stay with him, and even goes through the motions of becoming a Catholic so that they can marry.

All three women have made compromises or entertained falsities to shield themselves from loneliness, with varied results: Miss Samson's failed faith has dropped her into a hell of suffering; Elizabeth's frustrated willingness to marry a man she did not love has left her alone though possibly “happy enough”; and Sylvie's multiple self-deceptions have gained her a jolly but unreliable Irish husband in Liverpool. During the course of the novel all three women have experienced loneliness as their own special affliction of evil. Their fourth companion in the hospital ward is a young woman who has had many miscarriages (induced partly by systematic persecution from her mother-in-law); this time she manages to deliver the baby safely but must live forever with the alienation occasioned by her husband's admission of early sexual practices that humiliate him and shock her. It is significant in this novel that the sterility-to-fertility rate is 3:1, and that the successful birth is only reported, the child and its parents never subsequently shown. Instead, the final and therefore conclusive scenes of the novel focus on the physically and emotionally marred Miss Samson, with her bitter protest against God, and on Elizabeth herself, “happy enough” but alone.

As with Trevor's other fiction from this period, Elizabeth Alone is both comic and tragic. Serious events, such as Henry's failed life and muddled death and even Miss Samson's anguish, are portrayed with hilarious details. Like The Boarding-House, The Love Department, Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel, and Miss Gomez and the Brethren, this novel shows lonely and eccentric people managing to cope with the evils that plague them while simultaneously contributing to those evils and perpetrating further evil on others. The Dickensian quality of many characters keeps the overall effect amusing, even when situations are grim.

This paradigm so prevalent in the early novels also helps shape The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Other People's Worlds (1980), though both of those novels are darker and more dreadful than their predecessors. Just as Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel and Miss Gomez and the Brethren seem like companion pieces, so too do Elizabeth Alone and Other People's Worlds. Like Elizabeth, Julia Ferndale is an attractive cultured woman in her forties, with daughters by a marriage that ended several years previously (though in Julia's case through sudden widowhood, not divorce). And like Elizabeth, Julia is brought painfully to face the essential solitariness of her life. In this later novel, however, devastating loss of faith in a benevolent deity is suffered not by a secondary character, a Miss Samson, but by the central character herself as she experiences malevolence at the very heart of what she thought was love.

In Other People's Worlds Trevor once again traces his typical line of evil from childhood abuse through that child's later adult perpetration of abuse on others. The “psychopath”⁸ Francis Tyte (very like Septimus Tuam in The Love Department) is the chief example of this phenomenon. Sexually abused when he was 11 by a homosexual lodger in his parents' home, he grows up unable to feel affection for anyone, unable to imagine that others have any feelings or needs, focused entirely on himself, lost in his own compensatory fantasies. He is, of course, an actor, both professionally and in his private life, always wearing a touch of makeup, always “onstage.” He readily charms and exploits women, and once persuaded a woman to bear him a child just from his passing whim of wanting to know what it is like to be a father; he stays in touch with the mother, Doris, and the child, Joy, because it is convenient to have a place to stay when he is in London, and he keeps them enthralled but also at bay by an elaborate series of lies about himself. Doris becomes a dreadful alcoholic, and Joy, at 12, is a dreadful adolescent. This segment of the plot presents a truly horrible case history of urban distress but also is frequently comic in its details (like Mrs. Tuke in Miss Gomez and the Brethren, Doris is a sloppy drunk whose self-deceptions and affectations are at times hilarious).

Although Joy's inability to read at age 12 is continually blamed on her school (which, with its various fads, such as taking elephant tranquilizers, also seems both dreadful and blackly funny), the name of that school connects it with her father: Tite Street Comprehensive and Francis Tyte have both failed her. A nightmare Joy has midway through the novel clinches the implied connection between school and father and personal damage, and indicates that she is permanently scarred with his “image”: “She dropped off to sleep and dreamed that she was back at Tite Street Comprehensive, where Clicky Hines had persuaded her to have the face of her father tattooed on her stomach. He'd even persuaded her that he could do the job himself. … She woke up with a jerk because the drill thing he was using had got out of control and was cutting her open when it should have been putting the blue in the eyes” (121). Such lethal disfigurement at the very center of her being has actually occurred, beginning with the irresponsible procreation, continuing through a childhood where both mother and father are either physically or emotionally absent, and culminating in the shock of her father's publicized bigamy and her mother's drunken murder of her father's first wife. All these events are either directly or indirectly the result of Francis's deeds, Francis's self. He was a damaged child, and now as an adult he damages others, including his own child, Joy.

“The child was the victim of other people's worlds and other people's drama, caught up in horror because she happened to be there” (219)—these are Julia Ferndale's thoughts, as the novel ends with her musing about Joy: “The child should not have been born but the child was there, her chapped face and plastic-rimmed spectacles. She was there in the garden and the house, while time went on and the seasons unfussily changed” (220). Like Corny and Tom in The Silence in the Garden, like Edward and Emily in “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp,” and like Timothy in The Children of Dynmouth, Joy is yet another child whose personal damage is juxtaposed with the tranquil beauty of a garden and its gentle cycle of normal change.

Julia's role in the novel prevents its being a simplistic exploration of a cliché about disturbed parents producing disturbed children. As in Trevor's other work, evil here is also shown to be a cultivated phenomenon, not merely imposed. And it is Julia's understanding of this process that is the real focus of the novel, not the black comedy of Francis Tyte's bigamous marriage to her, or of Doris's cracked mind, or of Joy's damaged life.

Initially presented as an “innocent,” a person who since girlhood has been taken advantage of by the various lame ducks she befriends (a judgment her own mother and both her daughters share), Julia takes on stature and nobility toward the end of the novel. Francis in his narcissism talks about forgiveness (and by this he means he forgives the people whom he has injured, never realizing he has done the damage, not they [216f]), but Julia is a person truly able to forgive. This contrast raises the question of whether her apparently foolish kindness represents character weakness or unusual magnanimity. When Francis on their unconsummated wedding night indicates he has married her bigamously because he thought marriage to him was what she wanted, then asks for her jewels and money before deserting her, she gives him the jewels and cashes her traveler's checks for the required amount, even supplying a statement that these are gifts. Repeatedly in the novel Julia says yes when common sense indicates she should say no: she accepts (and pays for) the dog Francis had ordered before their wedding; she allows hysterical Doris and dropout Joy to visit her at her lovely home in Gloucestershire, even giving Joy the run of the house; she brings Joy to see the aged Mrs. Tyte, her grandmother, in a nursing home in London, because there is no one else to do it. When Francis writes for more money, she sends it. Mere foolishness? or heroic, saintly giving coat as well as cloak?⁹ Is Julia another of Trevor's holy fools?

In deploying elements of good and evil in this novel Trevor has given his narrative a number of twists. He shows all the characters caught up in illusions in one way or another, then disallows illusions as an excuse for cruelty. He presents Julia as a woman easily taken advantage of, then shows her behaving with extraordinary responsibility. He lets her terrible experience with Francis destroy her faith in God, then allows her to feel that Father Lavin's prayers have, after all, saved Susanna Melody's life (whom drunken, jealous Doris had threatened to kill). Then in yet another twist he reveals that Julia's efforts to save Susanna are mocked by the fact that Doris has indeed committed murder (with, of all grotesquely comic things, a teapot), but it is Francis's first wife who has been bludgeoned to death, not the suspected girlfriend, Susanna. Thus prayer is mocked, and Julia is left with her grief, her despair, and the rest of her life to live out.

Julia's despair began after her desertion by and disillusionment with the man she so passionately loved; she then finds herself wondering if God too is an illusion, “my bearded cloudy God who saw me through my childhood and my widowing” (178f), just “a fog of comfort to be lost in” (179). Like Miss Samson, she suddenly finds life to be a catalog of horrors as she, in an apparent non sequitur, reminds Father Lavin of Pentecostal missionaries whose children were murdered before their very eyes: “They stood in a row. When the sun reached a certain point in the sky they were clubbed to death. A week ago a legless man in Arizona was tormented by teenagers until he died. In Birmingham a husband killed his wife with a knife because she wouldn't cook his bacon right. Bombs explode everywhere” (179). For her all of this is associated with Francis, with “his whole terrible world” (181), which makes Calvary seem remote, “just another distant act of violence” (181). This cry of anguish to Father Lavin is much like Miss Samson's to Elizabeth, or Kate's to Mr. Featherstone in The Children of Dynmouth, and none of these spiritual counselors is able to offer a satisfactory answer, leaving their confidants bereft. But unlike the aged Miss Samson and the young Kate, Julia moves beyond her lost faith to struggle with evil in whatever way she can. One of her chief insights is that Francis was responsible for himself and for his actions. His various stories—both true (that he was sexually abused) and false (that his parents died in a railway crash)—were designed to gain pity and to provide excuses. Yet in response to Doris's litany of blame—“I blame that lodger. … I blame the old parents” (163)—Julia realizes that “Francis Tyte had blamed other people when he should have blamed himself, that the blaming should not be continued” (163). By not allowing Francis's horrific childhood to excuse the man he has become, by not explaining away what she realizes is deliberate cruelty (144), Julia begins to understand how evil functions through human actions.

Even the irony of the murder Julia goes out of her way to try to prevent, a murder that indeed occurs but with a different victim, exposes yet another fact about evil: its permanence. (As Francis's father says years later of the abusive lodger, “He's dead now, but he hasn't taken his evil with him” [192].) The link between individual human actions and the abiding permanence of evil is expressed in a well-known colloquialism Doris so vividly remembers Francis using that it seems his voice is present in the room with her: “Again he referred to Constance Kent.¹⁰ Again he spoke of Rowena Avenue and the dressmaker's house, and the whispy grey moustache of the debt-collector. ‘Tit for tat,’ he said” (159). This “tit for tat” principle is what moves evil along through time, from one person to another. For Francis his early homosexual seduction by the debt collector who lodged in his parents' house has left him with a lifetime of “repayment,” which includes seducing as many people as he can, not sexually but with his lies and fantasies; the currency of this repayment is hatred, expressed by either petty thefts or personal cruelty; and the energy for the work comes from violent fantasies:

He stopped in his walk, indulging his dislike, listening to the shrill voices, the late-night cries of people determinedly having a good time. He wouldn't have cared if all of them had been shot down dead, if gunmen had appeared from the Mayfair doorways and opened fire in the orange street light. He imagined the bodies scattered, reminding him of the bodies in the train crash, and the victims of the terrorists the director [of his TV program] had referred to, and the victim of Constance Kent.

(85)

Francis's fantasies include the imagined violent murder of his wife in Rowena Avenue (104f), a murder Doris actually does carry out, since she is hardly a person in her own right but seems “a figment of his pretense which had somehow acquired reality” (118). Thus “tit for tat” not only serves to perpetrate retaliations but spreads an infection of evil to people not directly involved in the original equation. “Tit for tat” is shorthand for the game rules that operate in “The Distant Past,” “Attracta,” Fools of Fortune, and The Silence in the Garden—all those many stories of Trevor's which show what happens when ancient wrongs are not forgiven and forgotten. And in the phrase introducing Francis's fantasies—“indulging his dislike”—the word indulging damns the whole process of cultivated resentments by pointing up its deliberateness.

Francis is clearly a moral monster, unable to face his own culpability yet profoundly responsible for horrors that occur—a man unable, really, to forgive. But is Julia—morally sensitive and genuinely good-hearted, taking responsibility for the welfare even of strangers—also responsible for the evil in this narrative? Does she participate in its perpetration? Readers who see her gentle accommodation to the demands of others as a weakness, a fault, will no doubt answer yes. But beyond that the text offers another indication of her involvement. The images at the center of her experience of religious despair first came to her at a moment of great happiness: “a group of missionaries of the Pentecostal Church had been assassinated in Africa. They had been made to watch the killing of their children first, and then they had been killed themselves. She didn't know why she thought of that again, something that had horrified her for a moment while she prepared for her wedding” (137). Wedding and horror had been allied in her consciousness but, like other elements in the narrative, were “pieces from a forgotten jigsaw puzzle, the elements of a pattern … scattered, lost in a confusion that Julia wasn't even aware of” (48). She is “guilty” of not seeing, not understanding. At the end of her experience of loss—loss of husband, loss of God, loss even of family and friends because she is so much different from them now—when she is entirely solitary, she sees and understands connections that had been obscure. Francis's commonplace “tit for tat” is balanced by her insight into yet another cliché: “surely God's creatures are all connected” (179). With something near the madness of an Ivy Eckdorf, she takes this metaphor quite literally; however, although her childhood God has been destroyed and she is left alone, she nonetheless feels keenly the connectedness among these creatures, her fellows.

The novel ends by showing Julia having been crushed by evil yet rising above it. Fantasies, television, movies, alcohol, drugs—all have supplied vehicles of escape for various characters in various ways thoughout the novel. Julia's attempt to absorb herself in the passionless language of legal documents (which she types at home to make a living) in order to deaden her pain does not work. She finds she cannot “pack God and Francis Tyte away” (220). This phrase on the final page of the novel does not suggest that she regains her faith in the sense of returning to her childhood's comforting beliefs. That was Eden, and she is very much in a postlapsarian world now. God is coupled with Francis Tyte: both have failed her. Yet she finds she continues to love Francis: “she had begun to love him for what he should have been” (195); she still pities him and still longs “to forgive because it was her nature to” (217). And for God she perhaps also has pity and forgiveness, even though “the very thought of prayer made her feel as cold as ice” (216); she will at least “continue to go to mass, for it would be too much like a gesture never again to practise her Catholic faith” (216). She seems somehow to agree with the judgment of those who witnessed what she suffered: “It wasn't fair, the verdict was, though some said also that fairness was neither here nor there” (216).¹¹ In the colloquial world of ordinary people the assertion “that fairness was neither here nor there” may be as satisfactory a way as any to reconcile good and evil, beneficent creator and malevolent events.

Although in the fatigue of despair Julia agrees with her mother's earlier judgment that “her compassion made a victim of her” and agrees too with Father Lavin's observation that “she sought connections which didn't exist” (216), Julia continues with both her compassion and her sense of connection. Like the ending of Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel, Other People's Worlds ends with a focus on stories, narratives. The novel itself is a story about several stories and several kinds of stories: within the reality of the novel itself Francis's life makes up a story, as do Doris's and Julia's lives; the television account of Constance Kent's life is yet another kind of story, a grisly nineteenth-century murder, providing entertainment for a twentieth-century audience, just as this novel provides entertainment for its readers. The parallel between the stories of Francis's childhood abuse and of Constance Kent's abuse, as well as their mutual need for revenge, makes a neat piece of literary contrivance, interesting for the author to construct, interesting for the critic to discuss, and reassuring to the reader that fictional worlds, at least, are wonderfully coherent, full of dreadful events made a pleasure to enjoy vicariously. Thus once again Trevor nests the realities: in his fictional world there are fictional worlds (movies, daydreams, and this particular television program, based on a “real” murder that through dramatization becomes a fictional one). How far does the reader have to back out of the story to find what is real?

Trevor's narrative supplies an answer, at least with regard to something that is real enough. Watching the television program in which “an unbalanced girl revenged herself,” Julia realizes that Constance's story is merely “a glossy diversion,”¹² whereas “it was the child's [Joy's] story that mattered” (219). However real Constance Kent may have been in her time, she is long dead and has now become a fiction. But Joy is very much alive and therefore amenable to change. The meaningless image of Constance Kent on the television screen gives way to another image in Julia's mind, one that belongs to possibility and the future: “Mistily, a scene gathered in her mind, seeming like a family photograph: an old woman and a child, a middle-aged priest and a middle-aged woman, a spaniel asleep in the sun” (219). This odd collection of beings can become a family, through Julia's powers of forgiveness and her belief in connections: her own tough-minded mother and Francis's delinquent child; herself and Father Lavin, the parish priest who has loved her for years (present as a frequent guest, not as a lover); and, completing the idyllic scene, the dog Francis irresponsibly ordered but did not pay for. She sees this vision as a family portrait, and so it will become because she cannot deaden her feelings, cannot “pack God and Francis Tyte away,” and cannot doubt there being some purpose in her world. She lives in “a plain house,” but she knows it should be “made the most of” (220). Violent crimes may happen, but they are not “gorgeous” (as films or fantasies make them). “Four people [sitting] ordinarily beneath a tree” is perhaps as much good as mankind ejected from an ideal garden can now find. Julia's musings and the novel end with the affirmation that “in spring there were mornings of sunshine” (220).

Unlike Edward and Emily Tripp, unlike Francis Tyte, Julia will return good for evil. Although this provides no philosophical answer to the problem of the origin of evil, it does indicate a possibility about the future of evil, suggesting as it does that a chain of evil connections could be replaced with one of good. Thus even if a perfect Garden of Paradise cannot be regained, ordinary overgrown gardens can be weeded and perhaps reclaimed, offering pleasant refuge to motley groups of people whose altered fates, according to Trevor's system of correspondences, could change the course of nations.

Notes

1. “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp,” in The Stories of William Trevor, 70f; first collected in The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967).

2. Despite the difference in sound between short and long e, Mrs. Mayben's name suggests the “may have been” of Edward's hopes as well as the “has been” implied by her refusal.

3. “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp” was not included in Trevor's selection of his Irish stories, The Distant Past, although “Miss Smith” was. It is interesting that Trevor thinks of the latter story as being “set in a town in Munster,” even though no name, phrase, or detail suggests Ireland. The kinship of the two stories is clear, however, both showing children participating in games of destruction, games that destroy children.

4. A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature, 136.

5. “The Distant Past,” in The Distant Past (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1979), 67.

6. Archibald MacLeish. J.B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 11.

7. Elizabeth Alone (London: Triad/Panther Books, 1977), 279. First published by Bodley Head (1973).

8. Other People's Worlds (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1982), 142.

9. See Matthew 5: 38-42, especially “And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. … Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” See also Luke 6: 29.

10. Francis plays a minor role in a TV program about a nineteenth-century girl, Constance Kent, who was herself mistreated as a child and who later butchers her baby half-brother. Her story parallels Francis's and Joy's experiences of abuse passed from generation to generation. Francis feels closer to “the real Constance Kent” than to anyone else (86).

11. The theme of incomprehensible judgments at the bar of life—the desire for favor and the madness of expecting it—is supported throughout the novel by references to Mrs. Anstey's reading Dickens's Bleak House; the only lines actually quoted concern “a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet, who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgement to be given in her favour” (182).

12. Yet another instance of Trevor's device of significant simultaneity. Virtually all the characters involved in this novel are described as watching or not watching the broadcast of this program, as are other people all over Britain that same night, people known to each other and people not known to each other, in different rooms but linked by a common interest in or indifference to this event (218f).