Like all William Trevor stories with a deceivingly quiet, perhaps even mundane façade, "Three People" reveals the danger, sometimes dark, sometimes fatalistic, sometimes inexplicable, underneath the surface. Time is unkind to all three characters in the story: Mr Schele, whose life is going to be gone from the world like the rosebush uprooted by the storm; Vera, whose youth is no more (yet it is not the loss of her youth that threatens her but the truth she will have to face again after her father's death); Sidney, for whom past and present interweave into an unspeakable dream, half nightmare, half fantasy.
I have chosen this story because a Trevor story requires rereading, and what can be a better way to reread a story than reading it aloud, savouring each line, each word? Also because of what the story means to me: I loved it and wrote a story to have a conversation with this story, which became the title story of my latest collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.
