I think this is one of the stronger pieces in the Collected, a spiritual descendant of the early masterpiece “Access to the Children.” As with “Access,” we are given a main character written in such close third that the story feels told from their perspective—in the case of “Lunch in Winter,” this character is Mrs. Nancy Simpson, an aging actress and former chorus girl, who has lunch once a week in an Italian trattoria with her ex-husband, the stolid and recently widowered Fitz. They’ve been meeting at this spot over the last six months, having run into each other after decades. Fitz commutes to London from the coast, relishing Nancy’s company and working up his nerve to ask her to “give it another go.” Nancy half-listens to Fitz pleading his case, distracted as she is by their handsome waiter Cesare. In the end, she demurs and returns to her usual spot in the bar of the grand Sceptre Hotel, musing that to accept Fitz’s offer would have been tantamount to giving up hope—we leave her, hope intact, anticipating the imminent arrival of a handsome hotel guest who might be Mr. RR: “Mr. Robin Right,” in her cherrily demented phrase.
Trevor’s mastery of free-indirect discourse (FID) is oft-referenced—in this project included—but in a curious way, Trevor’s FID is unusual, in the sense that it almost always just sounds like William Trevor. Which is to say that Trevor is alarmingly good at descending into people’s minds and writing from their points of view, but he rarely tailors his narrative voice to especially fit his subject. He does do so here, and the result is an unusually vibrant and persuasive summoning of his subject, often to pretty funny results. Here, she tunes out Fitz’s entreaties, while thinking about his dead wife:
“He… appeared to have had quite a cosy time in the intervening years. Certainly, the responsible-sounding woman hadn’t battered him, far from it. They’d been snug as anything in the house by the sea, a heavy type of woman, Nancy imagined she’d been, with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was. It was after she’d dropped off her twig that he’d begun to feel sorry for himself and of course you couldn’t blame him, poor Fitz.”
This little half-paragraph manages to capture Nancy’s entire character—her physical vanity and physical judgment, her glancing envy, her ornamental sympathy, and her surprising depth of perception, as well. The “with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was” is especially telling, her refusal to listen to Fitz about the details of his life or subsequent refusal to retain them, whatever the case may be. Nancy’s disastrous self-centeredness is explained via exposition, as we learn about the children she abandoned in Philadelphia after another failed marriage, but we hardly need these biographical details, so precisely does Trevor capture her voluptuously bored inattention via free-indirect in the narration. In the same sense, sitting with Nancy alone at her hotel bar, we are given to understand that she is determined to maintain her romantic delusion at great personal cost, but we already know from the rhythm of her self-regard that this is someone incapable of change or even noticing the need to change.
The question of change at the end, or rather, the certainty that Nancy will not change and the question of how to feel about it, is an interesting one to me. As is often the case in Trevor’s stories, we are presented with a character defending their psyche with a catastrophic aegis of denial. We are meant, in my reading, to find her ridiculous, a nearly elderly woman being tended to gently by the young barmaid, still fixated on the possibility of the great romance that might walk into her life. And yet, as is often the case with stories of this shape, I wonder just how harmful this delusion really is. It is harmful in the sense that Nancy may be passing up the last opportunity she has to find domestic comfort, with a man she seems to respect the most of all the men she has been with in her long erotic life. And yet, as silly as she is, she is not a fool, either. Back at the Sceptre Hotel, she muses to herself that she could have said yes, and could have been honest with him about the kind of irresponsible woman she is, but that to say yes purely for the sake of comfort would be a kind of fantasy. And it seems to me that despite the romantic fantasy this self-awareness is predicated on, it is nonetheless a form of fairly steely self-awareness.
Whether or not Nancy truly believes, on the deepest level, that Mr. RR will walk through the barroom door, she does know that she requires this belief, that she cannot be happy in its absence. Knowing the lies one must tell oneself is, itself, a form of deep and unsparing self-knowledge—especially if, as seems the case with Nancy, one also knows that these lies really do make you happy. On the one hand, we might be tempted to go along with what seems to be the narrative POV and see her as a pathetic older woman who might have just passed up her last chance for comfort; on the other hand, maybe the assumption that a person must at last give up their dreams is the truly pathetic belief—in this light, I’m happy to see Nancy as both a fool and a kind of hero.
