In the morning, as the town pays its somber respects, a stranger, our Florian, rides into town on his Golden Eagle bicycle and surreptitiously photographs the funeral. He is “a polite, unpretending presence,’’ a man given to reticence and solitude and with a “fondness for concealment.’’ He is also muddled, aimless, adrift, and bankrupt. Florian is selling off his decaying family home, applying for a passport, and planning to leave Ireland.
When he asks her for directions to the burned-out cinema, Florian catches Ellie’s eye, and when, days later, the two speak for the second time while Florian shops for chicken-and-ham paste at the Cash and Carry, Ellie is alarmed to realize that she doesn’t love her husband. Her marriage to the older Mr. Dillahan is based on kindness and necessity, yes, and on affection, but not on passion.
Ellie had been a foundling, one of those children who “wonder who it is who doesn’t want them,’’ raised by nuns in the orphanage at Cloonhill. When Mr. Dillahan’s first wife and baby were killed in a horrific accident, a catastrophe that torments him still, Ellie was sent to his remote farm as a housekeeper. In time, the housekeeper became the wife.
Florian returns Ellie’s love with tenderness. They carry on their affair among the ruins of Lisquin, the razed estate of the prosperous and long-gone St. John family, away from the eyes of the townsfolk, but not beyond the notice of the addled Wren and the curious Miss Connulty, Eileen’s estranged and embittered daughter.
Trevor worked as a sculptor, so it’s no surprise, perhaps, that he is a master of the art of omission. He sees the story in the marble, as it were, and carves to set it free. What Trevor leaves out of “Love and Summer’’ are precisely the concerns that might attract the lesser writer: the larger world beyond the heart-rending lives in this compact, ordinary town and the ardent lovers entwined in the throes of passion. What he examines and explores, more significantly, are shame, desire, the tyranny of the past, what is unknown, and what goes unspoken.
