Five short stories by William Trevor themed around love and the way it profoundly impacts, shapes and transforms human relationships.

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 144 pages; 2007.

Bodily Secrets, by William Trevor, was published in 2007 as part of a 20-book series called “Penguin Great Loves”^^ which I bought as a beautifully designed boxed set many years ago.

This slim volume features five short stories — previously published in The Collected Stories of William Trevor in 1992 — all revolving around various forms of love, including unreciprocated love, adulterous love, sexual love and convenient love.

Black comedy

The opening story, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, is a black comedy in which four people — Mike, his colleague Swann, and two of Swann’s friends, Jo and Margo — go on a boozy lunch in London’s Soho that extends long into the night.

During this farce-like escapade, Mike is constantly looking for a phone to ring Lucy (in the days before mobile phones), a woman he is in love with but who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. In all the multiple conversations he has with her over the course of the day, Lucy is unfailingly polite, but he begins to wear her patience:

“Hello, Lucy. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Good.”
“Mike, you telephoned me at four fifteen. Do you know what time it is now?”
“What time is it now?”
“Four thirty-five.” (p9)

These nuisance calls are interleaved with conversations in which Margo beseeches Mike to help her with a personal problem. Her husband Nigel brings home elderly women, “explaining he has been attending some meeting with them and has brought them back for coffee”. But Margo doesn’t know what the meetings are about and is worried Nigel will start bringing home “tramps, grocers, one-legged soldiers”.

To find out what’s really going on, Mike pretends to call Nigel — under the guise of being an official from the Ministry of Pensions — but instead, he rings Lucy for advice. It’s ludicrously funny in places, especially when he reports back to Margo, telling her one lie after another.

The story ends with Mike musing on his need to get over Lucy — “the love of my life” — and to let time work its magic.

Unreciprocated love also features In Love with Ariadne, but this story is bittersweet rather than farcical. Barney, a medical student residing in a Dún Laoghaire boarding house, falls in love with the landlady’s daughter — but nothing comes of the relationship.

Forbidden love

Trevor turns his focus to illicit love between a married man and a much younger woman in Lovers of Their Time. The affair between Norman, a travel agent, and Marie, who is a shop assistant in a pharmacy, begins tentatively on New Year’s Day in 1963.

For the first 12 months, it’s a largely chaste relationship because they have nowhere private to go until Norman discovers a hotel where they can consummate their relationship.

Marriage and the prospect of children beckons, but ever-practical Norman is aware that getting a divorce from his wife Hilda will likely drive him into poverty: is his illicit love for Marie worth it?

This is a beautiful, largely melancholic story, but Trevor upends traditional stereotypes by making Hilda, the cheated-upon wife, as painfully uncouth. She’s lusty and “demanding in the bedroom” and makes Norman feel inadequate and unhappy, while Marie, whom he initially suspects may have a “tartish disposition”, turns out to be “prim and proper” and a genuinely lovely person who thinks highly of him.

Their love affair, gentle, romantic and sweet, offers the prospect of happiness for both of them.

“Oh darling,” she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. […]
“I know,” he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
“I lie awake and think of you,” she whispered.
“You’ve made me live,” he whispered back.
“And you me. Oh, God, and you me.”

Marriage of convenience

In the titular story, Bodily Secrets, a wealthy widow, 59-year-old Norah O’Neill, contemplates remarrying to have a “companion for her advancing years”. Her choice is limited, but the town’s affirmed bachelor Agnew, who is 51, seems the best fit — although her adult children and most of the townfolk think otherwise.

Agnew is a dapper dresser, a good dancer and has been a loyal employee: for 17 years he managed the family’s toy factory until Mrs O’Neill’s son, the angry and opinionated Cathal, shut it down. The only blot on his character (apart from his Protestant religion) is his frequent weekenders to Dublin, where it is thought he sleeps around with women or goes drinking.

Mrs O’Neill, a handsome woman, despises her ageing body and is not seeking a sexual partner. Her marriage to Agnew is ideal. Not only do they have separate bedrooms, but she also gets the emotional support she craves, along with a man who can manage the apple orchard she wants to establish on the site of the closed factory. While Agnew gets the financial security he needs, along with a cover for his homosexuality (the “bodily secret” of the title).

A similar “marriage of convenience” occurs in Honeymoon in Tramore in which a farm labourer, Davy Toome, marries Kitty, the farmer’s daughter, when she falls pregnant to someone else. It’s 1948 and pregnancy out of wedlock is viewed as a sin, so a hurried marriage is arranged. The real father, who is revealed at the end of the story, comes as something of a blow to Davy who had been told it was someone else entirely.

As ever, Trevor’s stories are compelling and expertly crafted and full of memorable characters and incidents. Each one looks at how love — in all its many various forms — profoundly shapes, challenges and transforms the men in these vastly different stories, all set in different periods and locations.

These poignant tales also showcase the complexities and vulnerabilities of human relationships, which is why reading them is such a wonderfully intimate and rewarding experience.

And that’s a wrap! This is the final book in my 12-month project A Year With William Trevor, which I co-hosted with  Cathy from 746 Books. Please click here to see all the books we read between us and to see a brief round-up of William Trevor reviews published on other blogs. If you have reviewed a William Trevor book this year and it hasn’t been included, please do leave a comment (either under this post or the main William Trevor page) and I will update accordingly.

Update: This month Cathy has reviewed Trevor’s posthumously published short story collection ‘Last Stories‘. I have previously reviewed this collection here.

^^ Other books in this series which I have reviewed here are:

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