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. 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 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.

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.īut then, the second act! Henrietta moves to a small town in Italy, and get a load of this… she is happy! 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. 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. The conversation is somewhat inscrutable. 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. 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 Collected Stories by William Trevor