I wondered at first if the two short novels were linked – but no, not by more than being about the lives of middle-aged women with their own take on life. It’s been years since I last read Trevor; my enduring recollection is of muddy Irish farmyards, tightly bound little lives and idiosyncratic characters.

Reading Turgenev

Small-town Ireland, dwindling numbers of Protestants, a fairly unchanging way of life, and little escape from poisonous relatives and prying eyes. The third-person story switches between middle-aged Mary Louise in her mental asylum, shortly to close (present tense), and young Mary Louise (past tense). Perhaps she was always a little vulnerable, but this is only implied through the thoughts of her old teacher. In another life, she could have been a different person. She attracts the attention of an older draper – another Protestant, now of an age to take a wife to live above the shop with himself and his two sisters. Shades of Cinderella, for the sisters are horrible, and, once unhappily married, Mary Louise finds her Prince Charming in her sickly cousin. He reads Turgenev with her; it’s never clear whether she values the stories beyond the fact that he introduced her to them. After his death she retreats into a fantasy world – partly propelled and kept there by the sisters’ behaviour and her shame-faced husband’s increasing alcoholism. The outside world goes on around her for 30 years until the asylum closes – and she returns to the shop above the flat, her husband and sisters-in-law and continues with her gentle, oppressive obsession. Quietly and simply told, and rather heartbreaking all round.

My House in Umbria

Another middle-aged woman, but quite different. Told in the first person by someone who has had several incarnations. We gradually learn that she has been abused and exploited, but she has survived and even thrived. I wondered at first if the house in Umbria was going to be a brothel, but no – she takes respectable paying guests. (Her manservant is called Quinty – shades of Peter Quint? He has that same potential for malevolence.) She has had a late career as a romantic novelist – perhaps a way of transmuting the base metal of her experiences into gold. She survives the terrorist bombing of a train and invites the other three survivors – all bereaved, all now damaged – to her house in Umbria until they are ready to face the world again. It’s questionable how reliable a narrator she is: she has either a quasi-supernatural understanding of other people or she’s a garrulous lush. A bit of both, but where the dividing line is between the two I couldn’t say. She does get drunk and carried away – but she also has a fine sense of empathy and character. (Or – since she is the narrator – she appears to have etc etc.)

I loved the final page:

I am as women of my professional past often are, made practical through bedroom dealings, made sentimental through fear. I know all that, I do not deny it. I do not care much for the woman I am, but there you are. None of us has a choice in that. . . .

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.