This is a strange and surprising story, centred around a dialogue between two women in the Devon home of a dead writer of murder mysteries named Edmund Thornton. Ursula is Thornton’s former typist and now runs his cottage as a holiday rental. Lilian is her guest. Like Li herself, Lilian is a writer who lives in the US and has lost both of her sons to suicide. If at first, when Ursula is its main subject, the style has a touch of the twee murder mystery, that changes as its focus turns towards Lilian. The story’s true concern reveals itself at the revelation that the writer William Trevor also used to live just down the road. Lilian asks:
‘There’s something comforting about the idea of living in his fiction, don’t you agree?’
Comforting? Ursula thought of the years she’d spent as Edmund’s typist – nearly half her life. All that time, however, could easily be condensed into a single image in a William Trevor story, no more than two or three sentences. A woman walks alone by the sea. A man, whom she has not stopped loving, lives without returning her love and then dies without thinking of her. ‘I suppose very few people in William Trevor’s work get themselves murdered, if that’s what you mean by ‘comforting.’
The story becomes a thoughtful reflection on how the two characters’ lives might have fit – or not – into the works of these two different writers, and, in turn, on the way that new experiences need to produce new kinds of writing.
First published in the New Yorker in August 2024. Available to subscribers to read here
A Personal Anthology 