Yesterday I read My House in Umbria by William Trevor, an author I have liked for a very long time. Like his short stories, My House in Umbria is underscored by a theme of survival over which his very real characters play out their scenes of lost faith, lost love, and lost security. The narrator, currently going by the name of Mrs. Delahunty, (“although strictly speaking, I have never been married“) recounts her own story from birth on the upper stairwell of an English seaside resort to her current place as owner of a guest house in Umbria. The details of this span of fifty-plus years, times of hardship, physical and mental abuse, and a long series of abandonments (beginning with her parents selling her for a paltry sum to a childless couple), are interspersed with the story of the three people who come to recuperate at Mrs. Delahunty’s guest house following a train sabotage in which they were all injured.
What becomes clear as the two stories unfold, Mrs. Delahunty’s life and the relationship between the survivors of the train bombing, is that there are certain losses and regrets and traumas that cannot be salved over. There is survival but there is no healing. The two stories intermix the endurance of people in the face of maiming, as in the lost arm of the young German, the damaged psyche of the young girl, the guilt of the old man, and the fear of Mrs. Delahunty, but such endurance cannot erase or make whole the maiming.
For Mrs. Delahunty, the most-scarred of the group — the irony is that she is the least wounded from the train accident itself, having “no one to lose” — the retreat into illusion is what has allowed her to survive the hardest years of her life: “Illusion came into it, of course it did. Illusion and mystery and pretence: dismiss that trinity of wonders and what’s left, after all?” In fact it is her ability to create illusions of love and security that allows her to become a best-selling writer of romance novels. But following the train bombing, what she wants is no longer illusion but a genuine miracle of healing, of love and security offered and taken between the four survivors.
Mrs. Delahunty hopes that by saving the young girl and the others, the older woman can save herself, and that all the people in her house can be made whole: “There had been a terrible evil….but in this little corner of Italy there was, again, a miracle… Three survivors out of all the world’s survivors had found a place in my house. One to another they were a source of strength….Dare we turn our backs on a miracle?”
Trevor writes so beautifully. He is clean and rich with his words, creating a perfectly rendered world with very human people who are vulnerable and yet not weak, and beaten but not down. He never offers false sympathy or lays out a promise that all will be well when it won’t be, but he does always demonstrate the dignity and the tenacity of the human will: “Perhaps I will become old, perhaps not. Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it. When the season’s over I walk among the shrubs myself, making the most of the colours while they last and the fountain while it flows.” No great miracle occurred at the house in Umbria, no one was healed, but the daily renewal of life is miracle enough.
