William Trevor: 'The Piano Tuner's Wives'
Part of an occasional series on individual short stories. This looks at the opening story in William Trevor’s collection After Rain (1996), ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’. At the bottom of the post, Trevor reads the story at 92NY (may require free sign-up): start at 23:00 minutes.
Warning: preferably do not read this before you have read the story itself. For a start, there are spoilers, but also every Trevor story needs to be come to in openness and innocence.
My ‘Irish Times’ piece on William Trevor at School.
How does William Trevor do it? His short stories - and ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wife’ is a model example - could so often be entire novels. This story covers over 40 years and two marriages and yet somehow is only 15 perfectly-written pages long.
‘The Piano Tuner’s Wife’ starts with a crisp and apparently straightforward two-sentence paragraph:
Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.
Then Trevor writes in his gentle understated way: There was a little more to it than that. The story is entirely about that little more, the fact that the blind Owen Dromgould as a young man married Violet, rejecting Belle, and the latter has since spent a whole life waiting for him. Now that, 40 years later, they are together, she finds herself haunted by her dead predecessor, who
still claimed existence. Not as a tiresome ghost, some unforgiving spectre uncertainly there, but as if some part of her had been left in the man she’d loved.
The simplicity of the start is steadily made more complex by Trevor’s empathetic imagination. This is a love triangle in which one of the three people is already dead, and as the story progresses the full three-dimensional humanity of each of the characters, initially identified in the title only by their roles, is opened up to us. Trevor never condescends, trivialises or reduces: in Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s wife Linda says to her sons So attention must be paid ....Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person and that kind of attention is just what Trevor gives us here.
The dominant perspective is Belle’s. As her name suggests, she is beautiful, a beauty which was useless for her in competing for the hand of a blind man. She has spent all her life in this tight community, living with her brother and his family above their jewellery shop in which she has always worked.
making out tickets for the clocks and watches that were left in for repair … in time, clocks and watches required only the fitting of a battery, and so the gift side of the business was expanded. But while that time passed there was no man in the town who lived up to the one who had been taken from her.
So every day has been dealing with time, and time has passed and passed. Now (too late?) she has a chance two years after Violet’s death.
But how does she make her own space after Owen and Violet’s long marriage? Like her, his whole life has been here, and their first ‘date’ is in the graveyard in which his father’s family are buried: what breathing space can there be in this stultifying place? She has looked after the family chickens since she was 10, but does not take them to Owen’s house (She said she’d had enough of chickens), soon regretting her decision because at least that would have been something particular to her:
Every time she did anything in the house that had been Violet’s she felt it had been done by Violet before her.
The rest of that paragraph on page 8 of the Viking edition lists all the things she tried to do differently (while Trevor is a master of the single sentence, every now and then he produces a long paragraph that is a masterpiece in itself) - it is half-touching, half-pathetic:
She diced carrots, hoping that Violet had sliced them.
A man who is sensitive (in ways that other people weren’t), he takes her on a break to a seaside resort where he had often gone with his first wife, and they stay in the same boarding house and drink in the same pub. He buys the television for her that Violet did not want (Nice for the winter that is coming for both their lives). She acquires a small black sheepdog rejected by a farmer because it was afraid of sheep. But none of these things makes her feel at home, in fact quite the opposite:
Violet had left her no room to breathe.
And then, with three pages to go, comes the turning point, the step-change which deepens the story into profound richness (again - spoiler - turn back now if necessary). In his brilliant analysis of Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders asks us to look at moments of ‘escalation’ in a story, and this is the culminating non-trivial escalation of ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’, the development which turns it into a masterpiece. The couple are at the most distant house of those they visit, looking at Mrs Grenaghan’s piano, and Owen asks afterwards:
Did you ever see a room as sombre as that one?’
As she drives she is on a lane like a riverbed, steering around the potholes as best she could. Think of George Saunders’s insistence that everything in a story must earn its place, like the potholes do here.
It is indeed a small, melancholy room, but Belle changes it: she says the holy pictures have been taken down, and there is instead a photograph of the estranged daughter on the wall. She remakes reality. And she does not stop. Suddenly more confident, not caring what people thought she makes other changes to their house and their lives, some of them imaginary.
I know some people regard this development as sinister, the manipulation of a blind helpless man. But I am not sure of that: in his generosity of vision, does Trevor condemn Belle? The piano tuner himself senses what is happening, and he accepts it, reminding me of Gabriel’s ‘generosity’ at the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. As they visit other houses for piano tuning, there are further ‘contradictions’, and Owen acquiesces to these changes, as the end of the story shows us.
since it was fair that he should do so. Belle could not be blamed for making her claim, and claims could not be made without damage or destruction. Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years.
That perfect balancing echoes the start of the story, a beautifully-written and profound achievement from a writer at the height of his powers. A piano tuner makes sure that all the notes are in order: and they are here, perfectly in order in just 15 pages.
An analysis of William Trevor’s short story, ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’, a masterpiece of fiction.