Parables With an Audible <i> Ping!</i> : FAMILY SINS <i> by William Trevor (Viking: $18.95; 251 pp.) </i>

A secret is hidden not once, but every day. In William Trevor’s stories, each daily concealment is the thinnest of layers. Added one by one, they work up over the years a texture as rich as flake-pastry. Besides the richness, they also work up tension. And at some point, the tension snaps; a hidden shame, longing or meanness is revealed with an almost audible ping!

Pings! are not much found in the short stories written in this country nowadays. Our newer writers dismantle the spring even as they tighten it, and the final release is a dampened-down Chirr!

There are good contemporary reasons for this, and unquestionably, the stories of the Irishman Trevor can seem old-fashioned. In his new collection, not as strong as “The Silence in the Garden” and “Fools of Fortune,” which preceded it, this faintly archaic note is especially noticeable.

No writer uses more cunning strategies or a more finely meshed prose. These should be almost enough in themselves, but perhaps they involve more artfulness than life. Trevor, in any case, seems to require a theme of some sweep--the passing of time and history over Irish lives--for his skills to do themselves justice, for his pings! to suggest the striking of a tower clock and not simply the four minutes of an egg-timer.

Two of the egg-timer stories take a frequent Trevor theme, and delicately elaborate it. The protagonist of “In Love With Ariadne,” middle-aged and established, still carries his longing for a girl he had met at the boarding house where he lodged as a university student.

Shy and fragile, she had entered a convent as soon as he revealed his attraction. Shame sent her there; her father had been caught making advances to a child. On a snowy night years later--we think of the snow in “The Dead”--a bus passes, Trevor writes. “A lone figure stares out into the blurred night, hating the good sense that draws him away from loitering gloomily outside a convent.”

Another youthful love set in unhospitable soil is recalled by an artist, now in her 30s. She had gone as an au pair to a French family living in the Jura. Mme. Langevin was kind and welcoming, but with a touch of steel. During the war, left alone to run the estate, she had shot a German soldier. And when she senses a spark between the girl and her husband, she quietly puts an end to his custom of driving her, on her days off, to a neighboring village. For the artist, now, an ocean of yearning surges in a teaspoon of memory. Not a drop spills.

The transactions of love and of regret could not be better set out, nor could every last detail of their setting: the pinched Dublin boarding house, the French country estate. Yet both have the air of a geometric proof; the characters have no real shape outside the shape of their transactions.

The same is true of the transactions of malice. In “The Third Party,” a husband meets in a bar with the man that his wife is leaving him for. All bluff understanding and sportsmanship, the husband works a needling torment of his rival, capped with a revelation that will take full revenge both on the other man and on the faithless wife. In “Coffee With Oliver,” we get an exquisite portrait of a middle-aged scoundrel who lives in Italy on remittances from his wife, and on his own careful meannesses.

The geometry is less naked in “August Saturday.” A woman unexpectedly meets, at a country-club gathering of her set--old friends, all of them--a man who had been her lover one night, years before, after another such gathering. The dinner, the bantering and reminiscing among the couples are a tapestry of shared lives; the presence of the outsider and the memories he evokes are a red thread through it.

All of these stories have a fine command of texture and pace; the polish of a supreme attentiveness. Yet they are remote. They float in a curious idleness; no necessity reaches out to us from them.

It is in the stories set among the impoverished homes and farms of rural Ireland that Trevor’s gifts find a more important use. In “Kathleen’s Field,” the daughter of a hardscrabble farmer goes to work as a maid for a local shopkeeper so that her wages can pay for a well-sited field that will let her struggling family survive. The shopkeeper abuses her sexually; she has no choice but to put up with it. We feel the fearful wound to her spirit, not so much in the abuse itself as in her helpless knowledge that other girls, who had worked there and quit, will know the shame of her staying on.

The burden of unjust shame gives passion and life to the other rural stories. In “A Husband’s Return,” Maura Brigid Colleary, her brother, Hiney, and their mother live half-destroyed by it. Maura Brigid had married Lawless, a young neighbor. Six months later he ran off with Bernadette, her sister and the family favorite. And Bernadette died, pregnant.

Hiney lodges his pain in stolid labor, Mrs. Colleary in endurance, Maura Brigid in longing for her vanished husband. The family lives by its myth: Lawless is a scoundrel, Bernadette a poor victim. And when Lawless asks to come back, and convinces Maura that it was her sister who was the seducer, she struggles to get the myth changed.

But her family cannot put aside its image of Bernadette; it is all they have. Maura Brigid must live on, not only husbandless but also bearing the story’s burden: She is the one who, by foolishly marrying a wicked man, brought death to her saintly sister and disgrace upon them all.

For us, of course, it may be hard to think of shame as having the power to become a story’s heart’s blood. It is a rural, not an urban agony; it burns in poor and enclosed communities where honor is the only treasure. It is remarkable that a modern and sophisticated writer is able to take such a notion from the book of dead sayings, and make it live so ardently.