Whatever else may be true of this story, it has the best title of any story in the Collected—possibly the best story title ever. The lady with the bedroom eyes in question, Mrs. Vansittart, is an American expat living in Cap Ferrat, on the Cote d’Azur, in a grand Villa with her meek husband Harry. As small communities, even or especially fabulously rich ones, tend to do, the denizens of Cap Ferrat have concocted near-mythical rumors about Mrs. Vansittart’s, well, tartiness. At 54, she still cuts a striking figure on the beach and is said to have left a trail of men behind her. One specific story has her, during a visit to Sicily, spat upon by a local woman for “permitting a local man to have his way with her” in public.
The present-moment action of the story details the creation of a new bit of lurid Vansittart mythos: while playing bridge with her rich friends—among them her closest friend, Jasper, a lightly-coded gay man and terrible gossip—the Vansittart’s Villa Teresa is approached by a small swarthy man, a local who waits tables in Cap Ferrat’s finest hotel. Jasper overhears him complaining that she was not there at their planned rendezvous that morning at the lighthouse, and he proceeds to start the rumor mill churning; further, he follows Mrs. Vansittart the next morning, watching her give the man 10,000 francs. We then move into a first-person section written by Mrs. Vansittart in her journal that reveals the truth of the matter. The money is to buy off the silence of the waiter, who years earlier was witness to to a scene at another hotel in Switzerland, where a young girl accused Harry of taking her to bed. Contra public perception, Mrs. Vansittart has been at Harry’s mercy since their first love as schoolchildren, her devotion to him weathering even the subsequent revelation that Harry is a pederast. They moved abroad and then around Europe, affecting British accents, escaping one near-miss after another as Harry wound up in bed with underaged girls. It turns out that the slatternly Mrs. Vansittart is actually a virgin; the meek and subservient Harry, who caters the bridge nights with his homemade patisseries is a manipulative monster.
This is not the best story in the Collected. For one thing, the story’s turn is a bit predictable, easy to see coming. If an entire village is gossiping about the sexual deviancy of a woman and the saintliness of her poor husband, it’s as narratively easy as it is obvious to have the truth be the exact opposite. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this one—in particular, I admire the sense I got of Trevor trying our some different approaches to storytelling. If I have a bit of an overarching critique or complaint about the Collected, it would be that the stories, en masse, start to seem a little samey. As I’ve mentioned, perhaps too often, subcategories emerge: the party story, the outcast story, the drunken shambles story, and so on (many stories fit all of these categories at once). It would probably be fair to say that part of my sense of sameness also derives from this project’s fairly unusual approach of reading all the stories, one after the next. It might be fair to say that, as a form, short stories are almost best encountered at odd intervals and via serendipity—a magazine lying on a friend’s coffee table; a link in someone’s tweet. Few of the greats of the form boast a corpus that would fully stand up to a relentless sequential examination.
Nonetheless, “The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs. Vansittart” shows an author at the height of his powers, trying something he hasn’t done before, and even if all of it doesn’t work, it’s gratifying to see. One oddity of the story is the way that it alternates between the present and past tense. Present for the ongoingness of life on Cap Ferrat and the narrator’s presentation of moneyed existence on the Cote d’Azur. Past for the specific narration of Mrs. Vansittart’s bribery of the waiter, and the subsequent latest round of gossip and social demotion. The story’s structure, too, is intricate, the main sections as follows:
- The narration of Cap Ferrat’s attitude toward the Vansittarts, as well as a little bit of inside information about them (that they are Americans feigning British accents)
- Back in time a month, to a long scene of bridge at the Vansittarts that introduces several other characters; to a scene after he party that flits among the minds of those bridge-players as they return home
- Mrs. Vansittart thinking
- Harry thinking
- Jasper spying on her the next day
- Mrs. Vansittart’s first-person journal section, following her bribery of the waiter
- Jasper’s friend (lover) gossiping with one of the bridge-players
- Another omniscient third bridge scene
- Mrs. Vansittart thinking as she plays bridge
This is a an almost absurdly complex structure for a somewhat middling 12-page story. It might be argued that the material—the reveal of the Vansittart’s “true” relationship and the characters under inspection—does not demand this degree of attention and technical effort. It’s a little like a fifteen-thousand dollar car being given the royal detail treatment: a candy coat of paint, twenty-two inch rims, a jet-intake stereo, etcetera. But then, isn’t there something beautiful about that? This is somewhat modest stuff, but I find the almost experimental degree of attention Trevor lavished on it to be thrilling.
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Source : The William Trevor Reader: “The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs. Vansittart”
