The Room | William Trevor #IRLshortstory

_{‘Do you know why you are doing this?’ he asked, and Katherine hesitated, then shook her head, although she did know.}

As much as I would like to participate 100% in Cathy & Kim’s #WilliamTrevor2023 reading event, I knew that it would be an impossible ask. As much as I adore William Trevor, to read every single short story in my two volume collection in one year, would be too much. For me and for you!

Twenty-odd years ago, when a dear friend first recommended Trevor to me, I devoured his first volume of short stories in a short period of time, often reading several of them back to back in one sitting. They are now all a pleasant but indistinct blur.

I didn’t want to make the same mistake this time around.

Since then I have learnt to read short story collections one story at a time. It’s a slow way to proceed, but far more satisfying in the end. I tend to remember the individual stories better, and certainly since my blogging days, writing about them individually helps to cement them in my memory.

For January Kim decided to write about the 2007 short story collection, Cheating at Canasta. It contains twelve stories. Kim chose to focus on five of them. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to read all twelve this month, I chose to focus on the stories that Kim did not, to add some variety to the discussion.

The first is The Room, the second story in the collection.

The Room is one of Trevor’s England stories. Set in London, we first meet Katherine just after commencing an affair. The room is the small bedsit that the man in question has recently let after separating from his own wife. Katherine is still married to Phair, her husband of nine years. Her reason for having an affair was to discover for herself ‘what it felt like to deceive‘.

As Trevor carefully reveals Katherine’s story, we learn that Phair’s earlier affair was discovered when the woman in question was found murdered and Phair was charged with her murder. The evidence, however, was slim and circumstantial and the case was thrown out of court by the judge.

Naturally this had an impact on their marriage.

There was still love, but tempered by blame, guilt and fear. They continued on, happy enough, but something was missing (I would have said ‘trust’ but Trevor doesn’t seem to bring that element into the equation). When Katherine suddenly lost her job though, unwanted memories and thoughts began to creep in. For nine years there had been ‘restraint. There’d been no asking to be told, no asking for promises that the truth was what she heard….while work for both of them allowed restraint, there had been silence in their ordinary exchanges...’

It was at this point that Katherine realised a decision had to be made.

***spoiler alert***

The reason I ended up reading this story twice was because I misread this part of the story. It was only when reading a review by another blogger that I realised I had missed a significant moment. After six months with her lover, Katherine realised that enough was enough – it was now over. But as she was walking slowly home, she finally understood that her marriage was also over.

Somehow I missed that sentence first time, which left me feeling rather confused about the ending. The reread cleared everything up beautifully, sadly, inevitably.

_{The best that love could do was not enough.}

Once again, Trevor has written a deceptively complex character study. One where every word is carefully considered and placed. If you miss or misread just one, the whole meaning can be changed. It now makes me wonder how many stories I misread when I raced through the first collection twenty-odd years ago!

In 1989 in The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 108, Trevor compared his writing process with painting. When asked to define the short story he replied:

_{I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.}

Like an impressionist painting, it is very possible at first glimpse, to not see everything contained within a William Trevor short story. The mind’s eye needs time and space to see the whole picture, to sit with the emotional intricacies so that you can accept the surprising ‘explosion of truth‘ when it comes. As I found out with this particular story, it certainly does not pay to ‘wander‘!

• Read with Cathy @746 Books & Kim @Reading Matters for their reading event – A Year With William Trevor #WilliamTrevor2023

Title: The Room
Author: William Trevor
First published in Irish Pages | Vol. 3, No. 1, The Literary World (Spring/Summer, 2005), pp. 41-49 (9 pages)
Then published in Cheating at Canasta 2007 
And in my 2011 edition of William Trevor Selected Stories
Penguin Books pp. 448-457
Date Read: 17 January 2023
Reread: 25 January 2023

• This post was written in the area we now call the Blue Mountains within the Ngurra [country] of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples.