I think, of all the William Trevor stories I’ve read over the last 16 months, “Being Stolen From” is in its way the most Trevor-y. More than any other story, this one distills the main Trevorian operating principles into one piece—maybe more than that, it most clearly articulates what feels like his guiding philosophy of both life and narrative. Put another way, while I don’t necessarily feel this is his best work, or my personal favorite, it might be the one I would recommend to someone asking for a representative story to see if they like Trevor. If “Being Stolen From” isn’t your cuppa, WT might just not be for you.
“Being Stolen From” concerns Bridget Lacey, a middle-aged single mother of a toddler, Betty, whom she and her husband Liam—in their forties and unable to have children—adopted from a struggling teen named Norma. In the interim, Liam has left Bridget, taken up with the woman who bought the newsagent he manages, and Bridget looks after the girl with a little help from her lodger, the near-elderly Miss Custle. We begin with Bridget visited by Norma and her new husband, and Norma pleading for the return of her daughter. They leave, but the husband, a social worker, continues pestering Bridget, and we see her defenses slowly erode over the course of the story. She remembers her childhood in Cork, her sense of always being stolen from by others and never complaining, and her surprise at being chosen by Liam. She feels silently judged by her priest and solicitor and lodger, and we leave Bridget in tears, having quietly decided to give the child up.
She mainly does so on the basis of an inarticulable (for her) feeling that this is the right order of things, that she deserves in a cosmic sense to be alone and childless. This feeling, which amounts to an articulation of Trevor’s worldview, is introduced in Bridget’s memory of her girlhood in Cork:
It was then, while she was still a round-faced girl, that Bridget had first become aware of fate. It was what you had to accept, what you couldn’t kick against: God’s will, the Reverend Mother or Father Keogh would have said, but for Bridget it began with the kind of person you were. Out of that, the circumstances of your life emerged: Bridget’s shyness and her tendency to blush, her prettiness and her modesty, were the fate which had been waiting for her before she was born…
Fate is one of Trevor’s great subjects, undergirding all the sexual deviancy and bad marriages and loneliness and suffering and general stuckness. As I have written about in previous installments, Trevor’s characters lack agency to an almost singular degree—short of Malamud and O’Connor, one is hard-pressed to think of an author that allows his characters fewer options, in both thought and deed. The degree of constrainment in Trevor’s work is nearly penal, but it is the constrainment, finally and as described in “Being Stolen From,” of self. Material facts of birth—place, time, class, adjacency to The Troubles, and so on—all play a role, but nothing determines the contours of one’s life more than one’s personality.
And even “personality” doesn’t quite get it—as described in the paragraph above, Bridget has a sense of her fate, her herness, being sealed before she was even born. It might be argued that this is a Catholic view of inherent, original sin, but in my view it is even more strongly a Calvinistic view of humanity—it consigns characters like Bridget to their unhappy lives while providing bleak philosophical comfort in the sense that their life could never have been otherwise. Very often in Trevor stories, certainly in “Being Stolen From,” there’s an almost libidinal pleasure derived from surrendering to one’s destiny. Norma’s husband is fate’s emissary, cajoling and wheedling and guilting Bridget into doing the thing that she has always subconsciously felt she should do: give up a child she never really deserved by dint of her ineffable and quietly doomed herness. We sense the grim pleasure Bridget feels in this surrender in the story’s final lines, a kind of exhausted and grateful acceptance:
In the countryside of long ago her failure in marriage and motherhood might be easier to bear, but she would be a stranger there now. She belonged among her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved. She would look after Miss Custle when Miss Custle retired from the Underground, as fate dictated.
