Each of the stories begins with a simple situation. In ‘Sitting With The Dead’, Emily is newly widowed, her husband laid out in an upstairs room. The Geraghty sisters, whose self-appointed task it is to sit with the dying, call at the house, not knowing that Emily’s husband is already dead. In the conversation which ensues, between the delicate clink of a teaspoon on a saucer and the soothing respectful pauses which the Geraghtys accord the widow, the appalling nature of Emily’s marriage is revealed. In spite of her wish not to speak ill of the dead, she cannot help herself. He married her for her land. He crushed her spirit with bullying and dismissiveness. He despised her and taught her to despise herself. She looks at a lightbulb of an unsuitably low wattage and wonders now that he’s gone if she can change it. She recalls other examples of his bullying parsimony and cannot remember if nervousness has always been a part of her. Her future now is bleak, full of debt (for he was never mean with his own obsessions) and selling up, but desperately she tries to remember the good times and not blame her husband for her foolishness in marrying him. By the end of the story, the vicious irony of its title becomes clear.

Death is at the heart of another story, or appears to be so. In ‘Graillis’s legacy’, Grailis consults a solicitor about rejecting a legacy. He wishes instead only a small memento of the dead woman. He thinks of a room, ‘still as a photograph’, where he and she used to meet, of an ashtray with a fish pattern. He was a bank clerk turned librarian, with a wife who did not understand his love of books. The other woman and he struck up a reading friendship which became a deep and important part of his life, with secret meetings at her house. His wife excused his ‘lies of silence’, believing him to be not quite himself for a time. He never disillusioned her. The affair ends, as it must, at the library counter.

‘they had to wait until Seven Pillars of Wisdom was stamped for Mrs. Garracher before they said goodbye, a Tuesday it had been.’

Grailis lives alone now, a widower with grown up children who occasionally call, but the past and its sacredness mean that he will not take the legacy, for fear of the interpretation which would be put on it by others. His affair with the woman was a separate thing from his happy marriage, and to him a thing of value, not something to be sullied by sordid gossip, not, even now when the two women are dead, to be ‘touched except in memory, where everything was there forever and nothing could be changed.’

This theme of unsympathetic interpretation of a love affair and the importance of memory is repeated in the title story ‘A Bit On The Side.’ Again, two lovers have come to the end of their affair; again, the affair was something apart from his marriage (she never finds out why he will not divorce his wife as she has divorced her husband), not a threat to it. Their affair belongs to the streets they walk together and the places they meet in: the picture gallery, the Japanese café, the early morning office floor if the cleaners have finished in time. Subtly, though tiny details (a fleeting look, a question not asked, a thought repressed – Trevor is superb in conveying the tense significance of these) it becomes apparent that the man is coming to the end of the affair. He is troubled by the look in the eyes of the people they encounter when they are together, a look that recognises a ‘bit on the side’, and his own recognition that he is ‘using up her life’ . How much of this trouble is shame on her behalf or on his own, how much is caused by his uneasiness over her divorce which changes the tenor of their relationship, is unclear, but her dignity and strength are impressive, her determination to retain the memories is poignant.

The subtle nuances of the dialogue between male and female are explored again in the darkly funny ‘An Evening Out’. Jeffrey and Evelyn, via the good offices of a dating agency, meet in a theatre bar (although they do not intend going into the performance, a darkly humorous indication that they themselves are the performance worth seeing.) He wears corduroy trousers which almost match his jacket; she worries about the unimportance of truth in the world of the dating agency and recalls with a shudder unsuitable dates whose ‘doggedness and smiles’ covered ‘a multitude of sins’. From the outset, it appears that Jeffrey is an unsuitable date. He suffers from ‘small rages’ over trivia; he is calculating, keeping in mind that Evelyn has a legacy and private means. However, she is a disappointment to him because she does not have a car. A car is a requirement for him because he needs someone to transport his photographic equipment about London. He suppresses his crossness, deciding that a free meal on Evelyn will be a small consolation for wasting his time. Evelyn herself is not truthful, although not a liar. She tells nothing of her life, the lost love, the mother nursed devotedly for years. But the reader must feel for her restricted spoiled life.

‘You put it all together and it made a life; you lived in its aftermath, but that too was best kept back.’

In feeling herself to be a tedious person with nothing to tell, she loses her chance of human contact; Jeffrey, in being so calculating, loses his. The end result is surprising. Trevor always packs a punchline with a wallop.

In ‘Traditions’ and ‘Solitude’, Trevor examines the uncomfortable side of childhood. In ‘Traditions’, Oliver’s school lays great stress on the virtues of traditional values. The schoolboys have their own traditions, not so virtuous, in the shape of a maidservant at the school. She cannot abide the rough men of her class – but the lovely educated boys who share with her their scraps of French and knowledge are sufficient to fill her romantic dreams, while they regard her as a traditional outlet for their less attractive attributes. Oliver, a true subversive, recognises in her a subversiveness which results in periodic outrages aimed at the destruction of the school. In ‘Solitude’, a little girl indulges in an outrage so serious that her parents must take her away from England forever. The grinding pity of the story is that the little girl adores her parents and worships them as truly good, when it was their behaviour which pushed her to outrage, their reaction which condemned her to solitude and a strange wandering life in which she is compelled to tell her story. She means her narrative to illustrate her parents’ goodness, but the tale only brings her rejection. ‘They dwell on her darkenss, not their light.’ It is many years before she is granted a ray of hope.

Another child burdened by adult betrayals is Rosa in the story ‘Rosa Wept’. Her tutor is being cuckolded by his wife while he teaches Rosa. The stunning feature of this story are the parallel dialogues which take place: one between Rosa and her friends (prurient, childishly knowing, and greatly interested in the difference between cuckold and comaplaisant); the other between Rosa’s parents, Rosa, and the tutor – light, chatty, casual, hiding a world of pain and bleakness. Rosa is part of both conversations, guilt ridden with knowledge, fearing her own future as she glimpses the adult world and the cruel betrayals which happen so easily. It is enough to make any girl cry.

Like Oliver’s school maid, Brigid’s story , in ‘The Dancing Master’s Music’, is one of frustrated longings and strangled dreams. She is a scullery maid at the outset of the story, living a perfectly humdrum life of drudgery, until she hears music played by a dancing master. Alone of all those present, she hears the music properly, its babbling streams, its thunder, its link to the blazing stars. For years, the remembered music transports her to other places, the sort of places the musician would visit. And when she is very old and the family she served decayed, it is that one evening of music that is ‘the marvel of her whole life’, which is probably the saddest ending of all these stories.

‘Sacred Statues’ again examines the frustrated lives of the poor. Nuala’s husband is a master woodcarver, specialising in religious statues and panels. But it is impossible for him to make a living this way, and he must go to work on the roads. Nuala thinks of a solution to their problem, but it is ultimately unacceptable and she and her husband remain trapped in a world of poverty and need where artistry and divine inspiration are unappreciated, even by the Church which is more concerned with falling attendances than religious images.

The place of the church in Ireland is a feature of the story ‘Justina’s Priest.’ Justina is a simpleton, devout, humble, and guilt ridden for very little reason. The priest is fond of her, but is much taken up with falling attendances, the church’s lack of authority, his own failing vocation, and a congregation which is insistent in doing what it pleases without regard to duty and obligation. Under his nose, Justina lives a wretched life, resented by the sister who must care for her, her drunken husband, her ailing father-in-law. No shortage of duty and obligation there, and no support from the priest who values these virtues so much. Justina is admired by priest and nuns alike for her simple humility and willingness to serve in the church. The ending is bitter in this story – the simpleton is the only one happy to see God in the priest’s face.

‘Big Bucks’ is a tale of lost or mistaken opportunity, of Ireland’s haemorrhage of emigrants to the USA. Fina and John Michael are childhood sweethearts who decide their future is in America after the death of John Michael’s mother leaves them free of obligation. He goes on ahead, and week by week, it becomes clear that America is not the land of opportunity that John Michael thought it was. Their marriage plans are constantly postponed – the details of this are poignant and painful. In the end, the girl who would have walked all the way to Galway for John Michael, is forced to reassess her life and plans. The sense of lost opportunity, and of the idea that some things are more important than ‘Big Bucks’, scream behind the insouciant closing lines of the story.

The oddest of the stories is ‘On The Streets’, the tale of Arthurs, afflicted by odd compulsions. He follows people and notes down their details. He startles his ex-wife by stepping up behind her in the street and demanding to talk to her. He cannot get over the unpleasant behaviour of a complaining customer in the restaurant where he works, and even photocopies a note she had left at the table in case he loses it. Arthurs is, not surprisingly, desperately lonely. The one person he has any contact with is his ex-wife, a woman who married him out of loneliness before she realised his true nature. Arthurs is quite incapable of having any kind of normal relationship with anyone, but his ex-wife sits with him from time to time to hear how he murdered the complaining customer (which he didn’t), and grants him the grace of pity and a little companionship.

Trevor’s people are unheroic, unspectacular, clad in headscarves and worry lines, corduroys and priest’s cassocks. You pass them in the street every day and never notice how extraordinary they are in their pains and frustrations and incomplete lives. Perhaps after reading this collection, you will notice them in future.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.