“Taking Mr Ravenswood”
by William Trevor
from Last Stories
Eight of the ten stories in Last Stories had been published somewhere before the collection came out in print. “Taking Mr Ravenswood” is one of the two that had not. As was the case with “At the Caffè Daria,” the other unpublished story, I wondered if “Taking Mr Ravenswood” would be any good. Was it rejected? Was it never presented for publication because it was unfinished? One thing I can say, it feels finished and it’s lovely and a bit sinister. Lesson learned: None of the stories in Last Stories is a dud, even those Trevor never got around to publishing before he died.
Mr. Ravenswood is an older, wealthy widower. He’s tidy and seems to have his life under control. By contrast, the character we follow for the most part in this story is Rosanne, a Customer Care representative at a London bank. Rosanne is a single mom who out of necessity must leave her child with a woman she doesn’t trust. The child’s father, Keith, Rosanne still loves, though we, like Rosanne’s mother, don’t see much sense in it. Keith is an uncertain force in Rosanne’s life, unsteady and volatile:
She did not deny that complication came into it: that Keith was a complicated person she accepted as the truth because he said so himself, and because it was so often confirmed by his decisions, the conclusions he reached, and his capacity for making the most of unpromising circumstances.
Toward the beginning of the story, Mr. Ravenswood asks Rosanne if she would like to go to dinner some time. Naturally, Mr. Ravenswood is the polar opposite of the man Rosanne cannot leave well enough alone. He is, she knows, very wealthy. He is polite. He doesn’t want to pressure her to accept his invitation. And she at first declines.
Keith, when he hears of this, is furious with her. He thinks she should take advantage of the man’s “weakness for girls.” Rosanne tells Keith she couldn’t:
Disagreement was fractious then, and bitter later. Why could she not? What was her trouble? When chance for once was offering so much, why couldn’t she see sense, since so often she had before?
And so the story continues, with Rosanne caught up in this awful situation. Can Mr. Ravenswood help her financially where Keith cannot or won’t? And just why, oh why, can she not feel for the kind man what she feels for the dangerous one?
Perhaps going to dinner won’t be an attempt to take Mr. Ravenswood but will instead be a healthy way for her to move on from Keith. And so she does.
Trevor’s story, though, is not so simple as what I’ve written suggests. It never really suggests that Rosanne should take advantage of Mr. Ravenswood, but it is not altogether clear that, even if she tried, Rosanne would be the one getting anything out of the relationship. This is where Trevor’s story turns rather sinister and we wonder if Mr. Ravenswood is truly what he seems.
I will wait until I finish reading the other stories in the book, but this one I found more difficult to follow and the last page left me really unsure what ultimately happened. You say the story feels to you as finished, and I would say there is a clear sense that this is true, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe he was not done with it and would have made it at least a little less difficult to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ll see what I think when I read it again.
I agree with David’s comment from August 2018.
I’ve spent perhaps too much time trying to figure this story out, sifting through the details like a detective for clues that hint at what most likely happened. I agree with the reviewer – Mr Ravenswood may not be what he seems, as he clearly allows Rosanne to get very drunk; if he was half the gentleman he seems to be (which is always via Rosanne’s point of view, and she’s not wholly reliable) then he would not have continued pouring her wine until she passed out on his sofa. Ironically, the unreliable though cynical & presumably streetwise character, Keith, may provide the key. Despite Keith’s multiple manipulations of Rosanne, it his him who puts the idea in her head that her coat having fallen on the floor is evidence of foul play, and this is why she decides to go back to his house – because, more irony, it is (or might be) Mr Ravenswood who has “taken” Rosanne. This seems to be what the narrative is hinting most strongly at. If there’s any more evidence, it has to be in the paintings on Mr Ravenswood’s walls; these get described briefly, but clearly with great significance; (1) a lonely woman reading a book in her kitchen (i.e. Rosanne), a man & woman walking a street at night (i.e. Mr Ravenswood & Rosanne returning to his house); (3) a man smokes a cigarette while browsing suits in a shop window (i.e. the always be-suited Mr Ravenswood here “smoking a cigarette” – a suggestive euphemism for post-coital satisfaction).
I’m glad to see William Trevor brought back into discussion. I didn’t know this site back when it was current. I read _Last Stories_ years ago, and have now reread “Taking Mr Ravenswood”.
Were William Trevor’s stories almost always published in periodicals before being included in his collections? I note that many writers’ collections commonly include stories not previously published. Hard to think a W Trevor story would have been rejected.
Like David, there were moments when I found the narrative hard to follow. Particularly, I’m left uncertain at a couple of points whether it is Rosanne’s first or second visit to Mr Ravenswood’s house being described, as the narrative moves around between them.
Of course, the narrator is following Rosanne’s pov, and she was somewhat confused at times. So unless the narrator is insinuating information beyond her knowledge, we only have her perception of whether or not Ravenswood’s intentions or behavior were untoward in any way. Would W Trevor have assumed omniscience? Not knowing an author’s intentions, or how perfectly their intentions are executed, we can’t “know”, can we?
Blair’s point about the pictures on the wall is interesting. Maybe you’re right! I don’t always catch such allusions in stories, and am not always sure they are intended or relevant. When sharing reading interests with my mother in her last years, she often insisted that this was the practice, the art, of literary fiction writers in the “modern” period, which for her was post-WWII 20th Century. At the time, I tended to feel that such a practice was contrived and turned realistic fiction into a sort of fantasy.
I’d be pleased to see further comments on these issues.
By the way, a large short story anthology she and I read was _The Art of the Tale_ , edited by Daniel Halpern, a noted poet, still living. With 82 stories by 82 authors, it covers the 40 years following WWII. It is an exceptional selection for serious discussions. Interestingly, the W Trevor story included is “Beyond the Pale”, the one referenced in Yiyun Li’s “The Particles of Order”
Halpern later published a second volume called _The Art of the Story_ , with 78 stories/authors, covering 1970s-90s, emphasis on the later years. Ancient history, I know, but I haven’t read half of it, must get back to it! If anyone knows a great recent anthology that covers 21st C., please let me know.