“Beyond the Pale” is a weird one, and in writing about it I hope to figure out what exactly it’s doing. The story concerns a quartet of English tourists who biannually ferry from their home in Surrey to visit a hotel in County Antrim, Northern Ireland called the Glencorn Lodge. The Glencorn Lodge is a private inn run by a couple called the Malseeds, who prefer not to advertise, wanting to know their guests and to have their bookings come via word-of-mouth. The tourist quartet is comprised of two men and two women: the narrator Milly, the mousy Cynthia and her husband Strafe, and Strafe’s old school-friend Dekko.
We learn early on that Milly has been conducting a long-time affair with Strafe, a situation nebulously concealed from Cynthia. After taking a walk to town one day, Milly and Strafe and Dekko return to the hotel to find Cynthia in hysterics, having witnessed the drowning death of a strange young man the quartet noted sitting by himself the evening before. The young man, it transpires, told Cynthia a terrible story about visiting the area with his young love before the Glencorn Lodge was restored, about the two of them parting ways, he remaining in Ireland, she to London where she became radicalized and started making and planting bombs for the IRA. When the young man found his old love, he bought a gun, intending to kill her, then returned to the site of their previous joy in an attempt to understand what had happened to her. Failing to, he’d finally elected to drown himself in front of poor Cynthia. This story, and after that, Cynthia’s knowledge of her husband’s affair with Milly, is related in a long section toward the end of the story, when Cynthia descends accusingly on the trio at tea-time after being given sleeping tablets to rest. Her harangue ultimately draws the attention and ire of the Malseeds, and Cynthia is dragged away, although victorious in ruining the false Eden the quartet has built here over the years, in the false Eden of the Glencorn Lodge.
Cynthia’s morally lucid go-to-pieces is dramatically effective, yet false in tone to me—stagey. Indeed, as is sometimes the case with a Trevor story, it can feel more like a play in search of actors and a stage and a proscenium arch. Trevor loves nothing more than to wind a character up with repressed anger, fear, disappointment, and grief—usually an admixture of all four—and let them go to work in a public setting for maximum spectacle. It occurs to me that this probably scratches a peculiarly British itch, and a largely bygone one, that famous personal and social repression, the reticence that powered so many of the great British novels and stories from 1800 to around The Remains of the Day.
The parallels between the personal and political feel a little ham-handedly stagey as well. The placid romantic deceptions of our quartet mirror the placid political deceptions of this vacation spot located only fifty miles from the turmoil in Belfast; the young man’s inability to face his lover’s betrayal speaks directly to Cynthia’s surrender to Strafe’s infidelity. It all works, but somehow too well. I’m reminded of a Martin Amis description of the “fat wet handshake and grinning dentures of bad art,” although that goes too far: “Beyond the Pale” is not that bad, just overlong and a little obvious.
It is partly redeemed, in my view (and to be clear, I’m well aware nothing William Trevor did in his long successful career requires approval from the likes of me) by the voice of Milly. Here we have a female narrator who sounds like her own person, not merely a Trevor stand-in. She has a voice, and it is the voice of the person she is, a not especially nice woman content to betray her best friend, a woman who produces summary judgments of other characters in the inn with complacent ease and pleasure. The things she notices—clothes, jewelry, perfume—seem right for a person happy to keep their attention on the surface of the world.
