Last Stories by William Trevor Cressida Connolly

By William Trevor Viking £14.99 Oldie price £13.34 inc p&p

CRESSIDA CONNOLLY

Last Stories Does anyone live a life of quiet despair these days? The question struck me with some force, one Sunday evening late last summer, when I found myself on the Leatherhead bypass. These proud detached villas, still with their net curtains and tidy front gardens, were exactly the sort of houses where people sighed in Betjeman’s poems over missing the fun; or pined for lost chances in the stories of V S Pritchett; or were resignedly unhappy in their marriages in the novels of Elizabeth Taylor. Brief Encounter country.

But our modern world is one of clamour and din. Everyone is busy shouting into their mobile phones or chanting the name of Jeremy Corbyn, or sobbing on telly because their cake didn’t rise. As has been noted elsewhere, extroverts have taken over. No more stiff upper lip. Quiet despair has been all but forgotten, like headscarves or sardineand-tomato paste.

I was reminded of the Leatherhead bypass while reading this final collection of short stories by the great William Trevor, who died in 2016. His fiction always had a melancholy cast.

Born in County Cork, Trevor wrote stories that often return to a sad, crumbling version of a lost Ireland. His England is no cheerier. Even when the stories venture on European minibreaks (Venice in Cheating at Canasta, France in Folie à Deux), they’re still essentially about loneliness and the impossibility of escaping it. But Last Stories is particularly gloomy and understated, even for him. Of the ten tales here, nine have properly unhappy endings.

Quiet despair, then, is the defining characteristic of these stories. In order to lend verisimilitude, they cannot be set in the present day; indeed, they take place in an unspecified time, all its own.

It’s an era which will be familiar to Trevor’s legion admirers. Tea is always served from china cups and saucers, each carefully washed and dried up by hand after use; the ‘damp tea towel hung on the line in the scullery’. Schoolgirls are fed pilchards; households have only one telephone, in the hall at the foot of the stairs, naturally. There is no throwaway Ikea-ware in this world: brass is polished, porcelain repaired.

If a grave-faced Roger Allam appeared in his wide-brimmed hat as Detective Inspector Fred Thursday from Endeavour, we would not be in the least surprised. The word computer makes one appearance, in a savings bank, but otherwise we might be in 1964 throughout.

Lest we suppose that nostalgia offers any joy, Trevor offers several rebukes.

‘The past is too far off, its laughter does not echo, its flimsy shadows fall away,’ he writes in one story.

Elsewhere he says of a heroine who’s recalling events many decades since, ‘Anita is less affected by her husband’s death than she was by his saying they had made a mistake in marrying.’

Nothing wrong with misery, of course. Anna Karenina, King Lear, Madame Bovary: the greatest works are seldom the sunniest.

There is one flaw here, though, and that is the dialogue. People always sound stilted: ‘We cannot come back. Not once again. Not ever now’; or ‘How little I would be, alone’; or ‘How slightly we know ourselves until something happens. How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can’t.’

More to the point, how can a writer of such genius and precision have thought people spoke like this?

This is not to say that this book is anything less than captivating. Trevor is a wonderful writer. He can tell us more about a character from the way they cook two rashers of bacon than many a lesser author would capture across a whole novel. There are paragraphs here as good as any he ever wrote. (One – it’s the second on page 12 – is a whole, perfect story in itself.)

If you have never read Trevor before, this might not be the best place to start: try After Rain or The Hill Bachelors, to begin with.

But if you’ve already savoured Trevor’s work, Last Stories isn’t a bad place to wind up.