This short novel is one of two contained in the volume: Two Lives. My husband and I love William Trevor’s stories although they are unbearably sad. I once lent a neighbour a video of an adaptation of his novel Fools of Fortune and she was shocked by how heart-wrenching it was. How could we bear to watch it? It is one of my favourite films.
My House in Umbria was made into a film too starring Maggie Smith – the settings were exquisite but the ending spoilt by being much more cheerful than was portrayed in the novel.
Elizabeth Delahunty is flawed from childhood. This encourages her to write romantic fiction:
I fear abandonment and have instictively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not pitifully plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt with happiness ever after.
And so she lives in a beautiful house in Umbria, wears lovely clothes and stays in elegant hotels until one day she is seated on a train to Milan. A bomb explodes in her carriage and, on leaving hospital, invites a few others from Carrozza 219 to recuperate and stay at her villa. Her imagination as a romantic novelist knows no bounds as their lives become woven together through circumstance. And so she tells her story.
William Trevor writes beautifully, compelling that story to heard.
Except to write about that summer I have never since sat down at my black Olympia, and never shall again. I haven’t learned much, only that love is different among survivors.
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