William Trevor - Love and Summer

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

By the same author

NOVELS

The Old Boys

The Boarding House

The Love Department

Mrs Eckdorf in ONeills Hotel

Miss Gomez and the Brethren

Elizabeth Alone

The Children of Dynmouth

Other Peoples Worlds

Fools of Fortune

The Silence in the Garden

Felicias Journey

Death in Summer

The Story of Lucy Gault

NOVELLAS

Nights at the Alexandra

Two Lives

SHORT STORIES

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake

The Ballroom of Romance

Angels at the Ritz

Lovers of Their Time

Beyond the Pale

The News from Ireland

Family Sins

The Collected Stories

After Rain

The Hill Bachelors

A Bit on the Side

Cheating at Canasta

PLAY

Scenes from an Album

NON-FICTION

A Writers Ireland Excursions in the Real World

FOR CHILDREN

Juliets Story

VIKING

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Published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,

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Copyright William Trevor, 2009

All rights reserved

Publishers Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Trevor, William, 1928-

Love and summer / William Trevor. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14853-2

1. City and town lifeIrelandFiction. 2. PhotographersFiction. 3. Farmers spousesFiction. 4. IrelandFiction. I. Title.

PR6070.R4L.914dc22 2009018184

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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For Jane

1

On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.

The life that had come to an end had been one of good works and resolution, with a degree of severity in domestic and family matters. The anticipation of personal contentment, which had long ago influenced Mrs Connultys acceptance of the married state and the bearing of two children, had since failed her: she had been disappointed in her husband and in her daughter. As death approached, she had feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to. Her daughter she was glad to part from; her son - now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant - Mrs Connulty had wept to leave behind.

The blinds of private houses, drawn down as the coffin went by, were released soon after it had passed. Shops that had closed opened again. Men who had uncovered their heads replaced caps or hats, children who had ceased to play in Hurley Lane were no longer constrained. The undertakers descended the steps of the church. Tomorrows Mass would bring a bishop; until the very last, Mrs Connulty would be given her due.

People at that time said the family Mrs Connulty had married into owned half of Rathmoye, an impression created by their licensed premises in Magennis Street, their coal yards in St Matthew Street, and Number 4 The Square, a lodging house established by the Connultys in 1903. During the decades that had passed since then there had been the acquisition of other properties in the town; repaired and generally put right, they brought in modest rents that, accumulating, became a sizeable total. But even so it was an exaggeration when people said that the Connultys owned half of Rathmoye.

Compact and ordinary, it was a town in a hollow that had grown up there for no reason that anyone knew or wondered about. Farmers brought in livestock on the first Monday of every month, and borrowed money from one of Rathmoyes two banks. They had their teeth drawn by the dentist who practised in the Square, from time to time consulted a solicitor there, inspected the agricultural machinery at Des Devlins on the Nenagh road, dealt with Heffernan the seed merchant, drank in one of the towns many public houses. Their wives shopped for groceries from the warehouse shelves of the Cash and Carry, or in McGoverns if they werent economizing; for shoes in Tylers; for clothes, curtain material and oilcloth in Cor-ballys drapery. There had once been employment at the mill, and at the mills electricity plant before the Shannon Scheme came; there was employment now at the creamery and the condensed-milk factory, in builders yards, in shops and public houses, at the bottled-water plant. There was a courthouse in the Square, an abandoned railway station at the end of Mill Street. There were two churches and a convent, a Christian Brothers school and a technical school. Plans for a swimming-pool were awaiting the acquisition of funds.

Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there. It was the young who left - for Dublin or Cork or Limerick, for England, sometimes for America. A lot came back. That nothing happened was an exaggeration too.

The funeral Mass was on the morning of the following day, and when it was over Mrs Connultys mourners stood about outside the cemetery gates, declaring that she would never be forgotten in the town and beyond it. The women who had toiled beside her in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer asserted that she had been an example to them all. They recalled how no task had been too menial for her to undertake, how the hours spent polishing a surfeit of brass or scraping away old candle-grease had never been begrudged. The altar flowers had not once in sixty years gone in need of fresh water; the missionary leaflets were replaced when necessary. Small repairs had been effected on cassocks and surplices and robes. Washing the chancel tiles had been a sacred duty.