The William Trevor Reader: “Running Away”

I found “Running Away” to be one of the more devastating stories in the Collected, primarily because it offers its protagonist, Henrietta, the rare chance of agency and escape. The story is divided into thirds—the first third follows a familiar pattern, as we begin in the middle of a conversation between a younger hippieish woman Sharon Tamm (fresh out of an apparent cult, weirdly), and our prim middle-aged hero Henrietta. The conversation is somewhat inscrutable. Its inscrutability, we come to learn, derives from Henrietta’s refusal to absorb what Sharon is telling her: that she is in love with Henrietta’s professor husband, Roy. But Sharon leaves, and Roy comes home, and we slowly get the full, brutal picture, Roy admitting his infidelity over many drinks as the scales fall away from Henrietta’s eyes in the usual Trevorian fashion. Roy weeps and leaves, a door slams shut, seemingly on Henrietta’s prospects for happiness—a reflexive, anticipatory reading we have grown accustomed to making after reading sixty-odd stories of irreconcilable loss and loneliness.

But then, the second act! Henrietta moves to a small town in Italy, and get a load of this… she is happy!

She is happy because he is alone. She is happy in the small appartamento lent to her by friends of her sister, who use it infrequently… She is happy because the nightmare is distant now… When she thinks of herself now she feels a child herself, not the Henrietta of the suburban sitting-room and the tray of drinks with chiffon tidily in her hair.

Over the next four pages, we get a portrait of the possibility of mid-life change and satisfaction, the childlike (but not childish) wonder of a woman who had felt her life settled, and who, upon that life’s catastrophic destruction, has found herself up to the challenge of starting over and better. She lives simply, taking money from her former husband for the damage he has done, taking long walks in the beautiful village and countryside, taking lunch by herself, taking Italian lessons and becoming fluent in the space of a few months. When her landlord offers her a job as a kind of live-in housekeeper at the new apartments they have built to attract English tourists, she accepts, aware that this work is at once beneath what she might have previously considered, but also that she is not who she previously was. She lives a humble life here, but it is her own.

Until the third act, that is, when she is called back to England, Roy having suffered some sort of medical emergency, presumably a heart attack. While he convalesces upstairs, Sharon Tamm informs Henrietta that she will be returning to London—in the time Henrietta has been gone, Sharon and Roy have split and Sharon has fallen in love with someone else. The girl leaves, and Henrietta brings Roy his lunch, Roy once again weeping at the ruin he has brought upon himself and the woman he used to love.

The four pages in the middle of this story are like a cool breeze blowing across an arid stretch of desert. I have never personally put much stock in Grace Paley’s idea of giving characters “the open destiny of life.” They are fictional characters: they have no life let alone destiny. Yet, spending nearly two years in Trevorland has softened me to that view, or at least made me appreciative of any reprieve he grants character (and thereby reader) from the awful ineluctability of their fate. The mere fact of Henrietta bouncing back from Roy’s faithlessness, trying something new, seeing herself in a different light, rethinking her former assumptions, appreciating life in a different and perhaps morally superior way: this section—of the story and of Henrietta’s life—feels like a revelation. And all the more brutal, therefore, when it is summarily taken away. Why must she return to England? Why must she look after Roy?

She does so, of course, out of duty and lingering love for her pathetic husband. Poor old weeping Roy, helplessly destroying her life as Trevor helplessly destroys the lives of most of his characters. It is, of course, not a settled matter that Henrietta will stay there, but it is difficult, after having read 80 percent of the Collected, to imagine she has the emotional fortitude to make another go at Italy. I realize, writing this, that I sound annoyed, and I think I am, a little—the moment when Henrietta realizes she will accept the role of menial in exchange for freedom feels like a place the story might have ended to greater effect, achieving the usual diminishment while balancing it with the enlargement of personal freedom. For a moment, Henrietta and the reader are offered this complex emotional arrangement, a kind of bitter happiness a la “Lovers of Their Time,” but it is snatched away, and in its place we are given full pathos. It’s just a story, of course, but it does feel cruel.