I must admit to feeling dispirited by the title of this story before reading it, but “The Teddy-Bears’ Picnic” is actually a pretty fun one—I ought to have known that with a title like that, Trevor would deliver something appropriately vicious.
The story concerns a young married couple, Deborah and Edwin, whom we meet in the midst of a row about her desire to attend a teddy-bears’ picnic in the summer. This is a tradition she has held into her twenties with a group of people she grew up with in a London exurb, and it’s what it sounds like: they have a picnic with their teddy-bears in the beautiful garden of an elderly couple called the Ainley-Foxletons. (Trevor is, incidentally, something of a wry master at toff British names.) Edwin is—somewhat understandably, to my mind—aghast at this little tradition, but he takes his incredulity too far and cannot let go of his anger at being dragged to this ridiculous party, months later. At the lunch and subsequent picnic, Edwin gets far too drunk and reminisces about another social event he hadn’t wanted to be at—as a boy, he’d sneaked into the house of the garden party his mother had dragged him to, gone up to the roof, and balanced on the parapet, causing the crowd to gasp and his mother and siblings to cry, taking over the party as his own. This presages his encounter with old Mr. Ainley-Foxleton, when, pointing out something in the garden, he nudges—maliciously or not, it’s difficult to tell—the old man, causing him to fall and hit his head on a sundial, killing him. The story ends with the picnic being interrupted by Mrs. Ainley-Foxleton’s shrieks, and Edwin making the event his own just as he had as a boy: “He declared that Mr. Ainley-Foxleton was dead, and then took charge of the proceedings.”
The boorish, insensitive husband is a dominant figure in Trevor’s stories, as is the figure of the unfortunate woman trapped in a marriage with this sort of man. Bad Marriages is broad category of Trevorania, most notably and thoroughly rendered in “The Grass Widows,” but also in stories like “Nice Day at School,” “A Choice of Butchers,” “Angels at the Ritz,” “Teresa’s Wedding,” and “The Ballroom of Romance,” in which the specter of an inevitable Bad Marriage haunts the story’s conclusion. Bad marriages in Trevor stories almost always take the form of the lousy shithead husband who pays no attention to his wife, her life, her needs, or feelings. This set-up is, in fact, so deeply ingrained in this world that even in stories that don’t concern marriage itself, a bad marriage is often lurking in the background, as much a part of the ambient story environment as the ever-drizzling rain.
Edwin is an especially Bad Husband, an ambitious and narrowly competitive little monster who cannot abide anything in life being about a subject other than himself. The story is about Deborah’s, the reader’s, and to a slight extent Edwin’s dawning realization that this is the case. Typically of Trevor, this revelation is casually parceled out via a series of pieces of third person narration of varying nearness to the character. Trevor makes this kind of thing look so easy, but it is not. Earlier in the story, after their quarrel, we get this:
During the quarrel Edwin had felt bewildered, never quite knowing how to proceed, and he hoped that on some future occasion he would be better able to cope. It made him angry when he wasn’t able to cope, and the anger still hung about him. On the other hand, six months wasn’t long in a marriage which he hoped would go on forever: the marriage hadn’t had a chance to settle into the shape that suited it… it was only to be expected there should be problems and uncertainty.
This feels fairly objective, but it is, in fact, inflected especially at the end by Edgar’s opinion of the marriage. And the unspoken part of this reflection is that “the shape that suited it” really means “the shape that suits Edgar,” which further means “Deborah having no agency or friends.” A bit later in the story, we are told that “Deborah did not recognize these telltale signs”—the telltale signs being Edgar’s utter lack of interest in her office work, or in anything that does not have to do with him. In a couple of pages, a judgment is slyly rendered about Edgar, that begins with Edgar’s obliviousness about what marriage requires and ends with Deborah’s obliviousness about her new husband’s awfulness. But the story itself is not oblivious: the long-awaited teddy-bears’ picnic is really an occasion to see Edgar’s true self manifest itself to devastating results. A man dies because Edgar is decentered and bored, and we are left understanding just how Bad this Marriage will be when he successful isolates Deborah from her friends and former life, when the marriage settles inexorably into shape.
Happy new year, by the way! The William Trevor Reader continues in 2023, with about a third of the book and accompanying essays remaining. Thanks to all who have read along from the start, and to those who have recently joined, as well! Next time around, “The Time of Year.”
