The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon. Ursula, having arranged the welcome platter, waited until she heard a car slowing down in the driveway, its gravel rinsed all day by the rain, before drizzling some honey in broad strokes on the cheese and the nuts. From the kitchen window, she could see the cabdriver—Timothy today—place a suitcase next to the door, heavy, as demonstrated by his eloquent grimace. Likely he had entertained his fare with one of his two America-related stories: the cousin who’d done life in Sing Sing or the great-granduncle escaping Alcatraz on a stormy night. Visitors from America were rare, or else Timothy would have invented more credible family legends.

The woman, Lilian Pang, smiled tiredly as she got out of the car and thanked Timothy. She was between forty-five and fifty-five, Ursula estimated, a time when some people’s lives come into order while others’ fall out of it. It was mid-January, not the best season for anyone to holiday in the Devon countryside, particularly alone. A reservation of two weeks was long; guests usually stayed for a few days at most. Ursula had not dwelled too much on this, but she had noticed the facts. And now, assessing the guest through the window, she did not think there were any red flags. People who have taken the trouble to travel seek something they cannot find at home. Ursula’s job was to provide the possibility, not the certainty, of success.

By the time Timothy drove away, Ursula had cut the pear and arranged the slices in the small bowl, which sat just off the center of the plate. No two guests would see the same composition, but this was a minor achievement, known only to Ursula: a still-life that did not last.

How much still-life is too much still-life? Once, when she had told Edmund that the only kind of art works she would never tire of were still-life paintings, he had protested mildly, though before she said anything he had added that she could turn the question back to him. How many murders is too many murders? A prolific writer of murder mysteries, Edmund had been known to say that he had lost track of the body count by mid-career. A few times he had recycled the names of minor characters, but Ursula had made sure to change them when she typed up the manuscript. Margot to Margarette, Mrs. Southward to Mrs. Southwood, Julian to Jude. Edmund never seemed to notice the subtle intervention. He had often stated that he did not feel attached to any of his characters, was interested only in their shared fate.

Ursula gave Lilian a tour of the house, asking about the flight from New York and expressing satisfaction that Lilian had caught the fastest direct train to Exeter, as Ursula had instructed in their correspondence. “Do you live in New York?” Ursula asked.

“Yes, New York,” Lilian said. After a pause, she laughed lightly, as though at a private joke between herself and someone not present. “Actually, New Jersey.”

“Is that the state next to New York?”

Lilian nodded. “It was pointed out to me that it was a bad habit to keep calling New Jersey New York,” she said.

By whom? Ursula noticed the passive voice.

“I’ve got to stop that,” Lilian said.

“Oh,” Ursula said, not asking why. She knew very little about New Jersey. She said so to Lilian.

“There’s not much to know about it.”

“Oh, now I remember. One of Kierkegaard’s brothers died in New Jersey,” Ursula said. It was a stroke of luck. She had been reading a biography of Kierkegaard. She was not particularly familiar with his work, but a book she’d been looking for at the library, a biography of George Eliot, was checked out. On the librarian’s suggestion, Ursula had taken the Kierkegaard biography, which was by the same author.

“Really? Where in New Jersey?”

Ursula shook her head. Wasn’t it enough that she had retained one interesting fact about New Jersey? Though, now that she thought about it, what could anyone do with a single fact, which, like a point, begins and ends in itself. You needed two points to make a line, more if you wanted to make a life.

Lilian said it didn’t matter. “It’s too late for me to read Kierkegaard in any case,” she said.

Again, Ursula had a sense that Lilian was talking to someone not present, or else voicing a thought meant for herself. A lone traveller sometimes carried an air of disturbance, but Ursula did not feel the need to fret. She herself was a lone woman. Besides, she did not mind odd people, having lived with—through—odder ones in Edmund’s books.

The collection of Mr. Thornton’s work, Ursula said, could be found in the library next to the solarium. “That is, if you want to reread them. Likely you already know them well.”

“Who’s Mr. Thornton?”

How on earth had an Asian woman from that faraway place called New Jersey decided to come to Beechwood Cottage if she’d never heard of Edmund Thornton? Most guests were avid readers of his work. They came because they wanted to stay for a few days in the place where he had spent his last forty years. They walked to the beech grove where a hidden body could be conjured up in their vivid yet harmless imaginations. They visited the village, which was fifteen minutes away by foot, to catch a glimpse of the context for Edmund Thornton’s work: an idyllic setting for the fine art of murdering and the finer art of detecting. And, in the cottage, they studied a lopsided initial carved on the back of a cabinet door, a half-torn pad in a drawer, an unfinished sentence on a sheet dangling from an old typewriter, not realizing that these artifacts were not genuine traces of the author’s life but vestiges left by other visitors. There was no way to stop the minor vandalisms: the house was not a museum. And any marks left by the visitors could only point to more stories. Edmund would’ve approved, a service done by his readers and for his readers.

Ursula gave a brief introduction to Edmund Thornton. “How did you find us”—she could not help but ask—“if you’d never heard of him?”

Lilian said that a friend’s friend had recommended the house when she was looking for a quiet place in the English countryside.

There were many quiet places in the countryside, but only one of them had once been occupied by Edmund Thornton. Ursula, however, saw no reason to protest. She led Lilian to the kitchen, where she had left a few eggs, a bottle of milk, and some bread and butter. There were shops in the village, Ursula said, if Lilian wanted to prepare her own food. There were also a couple of gastropubs and a coffeehouse, in case that was easier. Lilian nodded, giving the briefest glance at the welcome platter, noticing nothing about the composition.

Before Ursula left, Lilian asked if the house was booked immediately after her stay. Ursula knew that it was not—early February was not yet prime season—but she said she would check and get back to Lilian.

Ursula had been Mrs. Burnett when she first began to work for Edmund, and nearer his death, beset by dementia, he returned to addressing her as Mrs. Burnett, so that once again she addressed him as Mr. Thornton, putting an end to the period—decades—when they had been Edmund and Ursula to each other.

It was in 1982 that she had answered a handwritten note pinned to the co-op’s bulletin board, seeking “a lady typist.” Ursula was twenty-nine that year, not quite a lady, but a young widow. The year before, her husband, Robert, had died when his vehicle slipped off a flooded road into a river, leaving her the farmhouse, which had been in his family for three generations, the land around it, which had dwindled over the years, and some loans, which she managed to repay by letting the last pocket of land go to the Hinshaws, who owned the neighboring farm. For a few months Ursula had thought of selling the farmhouse and returning to Nova Scotia, where her parents and two brothers still lived. They had all adored her as a doll-like child, the youngest in the family; they had adored her despite not knowing her at all. They would have welcomed her back, would even have pretended that her sojourn in England had never happened. There was some solace in imagining that—a tight lid put on three years of marriage, during which she had tried and failed to get pregnant.

Instead, Ursula saw the ad: typing she could do, easily. With that and a few bookkeeping jobs she had picked up during her marriage, she could sustain herself for the time being. Perhaps she would find another man to fall in love with, and they’d have some children if it was not too late.

“This is the perfect way to watch movies if you love mosquitoes and having a cold, wet butt.”

Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

Copy link to cartoon

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

Shop

In the end, she did not marry again. She became Edmund’s typist, a situation that caused some raised eyebrows initially, but a friendship rather than a romance ensued. There had not been a scandal because Edmund had been looking for a typist, not love or companionship. Ursula was not an ambitious woman, just an adaptable one.

When Edmund died, in 2017, Ursula read the obituaries in various newspapers, all of which talked about his early life as a boarding-school master, his prime in London writing murder mysteries, his abrupt decision to withdraw to the countryside after his second divorce, and then his decades of living as a recluse while continuing to produce his popular novels—one series featuring a detective who was an aspiring watercolorist, the other, set in Victorian London, about a woman working as a medium, whose séances revealed an underworld where murder victims, like Old Hamlet, demanded justice and revenge. None of the obituaries mentioned Edmund’s working habits, so few people would know of his lady typist.

Ursula was a petite woman, still agile and youngish looking, as though her aging had stopped at the moment she entered widowhood—at least her pageboy haircut had not changed.

When Edmund’s three sons from the two marriages converted the cottage into a rental, to serve curious readers on a literary pilgrimage or a murder-themed holiday, she was the natural choice for the role of caretaker.

It was not an onerous job. A young woman from the village came to help her clean, and Mark, the son of the old gardener, mowed the grassy slope and replenished the annuals in the pots. Ursula liked to study the guests and wonder who among them would’ve found a place in Edmund’s next book, had he been alive. Most of them would do as a body neatly tucked away or haphazardly sawed apart. Few of them, despite their belief otherwise, looked the part of a murderer or a detective.

In the next three days Ursula did not see Lilian in the village, and casual exchanges in the shops confirmed that no, the guest staying in the cottage had not been spotted. Perhaps Lilian had stretched out the food left by Ursula, or she was on a special diet and her nourishment came from her suitcase. She would not starve, Ursula thought, but there were other possible scenarios that might justify checking on her: an accident in the shower, a heart attack, and, of course, a suicide. Ursula thought this last scenario improbable. If Lilian did mean to kill herself, a few days’ stay might suffice. A reservation for two weeks would be a waste, no? But right away Ursula realized that she had made the same mistake many characters in Edmund’s books did: much of life, contrary to what they believed, did not operate according to logic. Only a mystery writer relies on logic, to construct the puzzle of the crime and its resolution.

Ursula put a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, some eggs, and a couple of apples in a basket. On second thought, she took out everything but the milk and placed her book-size calendar in the basket. She could easily say she was stopping by to show Lilian that there would be two and a half weeks of vacancy after her reservation ended.

It was a day of sun between days of rain, and Ursula had decided to try the solarium first. Her instinct was proved right. Lilian was hovering over some books, seemingly hard at work. She had not noticed Ursula outside or the shadow she cast before she tapped on the glass.

“Oh, hello,” Lilian said when she opened the French windows.

Ursula handed the milk to Lilian and asked if everything in the cottage was satisfactory. In the past, some guests had complained about the Wi-Fi connection, she said, and Lilian thanked Ursula, saying she hadn’t really been online, and everything else worked perfectly well.

Having little more to say, they smiled at each other, one waiting to be invited into the solarium, the other waiting for the intruder to take her leave. After a moment, Lilian gave in and asked Ursula to step inside. Ursula pulled a second chair close to the round table, so that Lilian would feel obliged to sit down again.

There had been a few knickknacks on the table—a bust of the Duke of Wellington, an ornamental inkstand, a set of miniature porcelain owls, and an antique butter stamp with a crudely carved bird holding a berry in its beak—but Lilian had cleared them off. She pointed to a box at the corner, where all the things were safe, she said. She promised that she would return every object to its original place before she left. She had taken a picture of their display on the table. “I suppose they belonged to Mr. Thornton?” she asked.

Ursula nodded. She recognized the desultoriness of small talk in Lilian’s question. Of course she would not recognize the meanings of those objects. They, like many other things in the cottage, had entered Edmund’s work, a trail of bread crumbs left behind . . . For whom, though? Ursula wouldn’t allow the thought that they were for her. For himself, really.

“People in the shops said you haven’t been in. I want to make sure you have enough food,” Ursula said. I want to make sure you’re alive, unlike Ellie Boyle, a girl with hazel-green eyes, who never saw another day after checking into the Fox and Hounds.

“Oh, food,” Lilian said vaguely, as though she did not understand the real query in Ursula’s words. “I suppose I’m doing fine.”

There was a stack of books and an open notebook on the round table, but Ursula resisted the urge to scrutinize them. Instead, she looked around and said that the solarium was her favorite part of the cottage. Her favorite, too, Lilian agreed, and then praised the loveliness of the house. Flavorless words—Ursula thought that neither of them was good at putting on a performance beyond mere human courtesy. Any moment now she should stand up and take her leave. She wished she had entered via the kitchen and put the kettle on, so there would be the excuse of waiting for the water to boil and the tea to be made and drunk. There would also be the opportunity to have a quick glance around the cottage for signs that might or might not tell a story. Ursula did not remember another case when she’d had a solo guest in the cottage.

“Guess what? I found out where Kierkegaard’s brother died,” she said, when they seemed to have run out of small talk. “In a place called Paterson, in New Jersey.”

“How fascinating,” Lilian said, lacking enthusiasm.

“He died in a hotel,” Ursula said. She remembered thinking of the poor maid who must have discovered the body after having knocked on the door to no answer.

“Oh, how sad.”

“He died at twenty-four. Very young.”

“I suppose that could be called young.”

Robert had died at thirty-one, and at the funeral several people had repeated the same words: gone too soon. “Twenty-four is young,” Ursula said, and felt right away that her tone came across as argumentative. She softened it and asked Lilian if she had been to Paterson.

Lilian said she had never been to that part of New Jersey. She added that she made it sound as though New Jersey were a giant state, but it was really a tiny one. Ursula said she understood—there were still parts of Devon she had never been to, even though she’d lived here most of her adult life.

“But do you want to visit those parts?” Lilian asked.

Ursula was mildly taken aback. So far, they had abided by the rule that governs conversations between strangers, talking about neutral topics instead of themselves. It had taken her and Edmund nearly a year before they had ventured into personal conversation. Every Tuesday and Friday, she’d brought cleanly typed pages to him and received more handwritten pages, and sometimes typed pages that had been cut up and pasted on new sheets, with paragraphs and sentences rearranged. But one Tuesday he had asked her if she was fond of green. He had noticed, he said, that she often had some shades of green in her attire. Not surprised but touched that he had paid such attention, she confessed that her mother used to praise the color of her eyes—hazel—and often dressed her in ways to accent the green, and she had retained the habit. A few weeks later, Ursula encountered Ellie Boyle in his manuscript, a young woman whose hazel-green eyes had caught the fancy of a man because his mother had the same eye color.

“What I mean,” Lilian said when Ursula did not speak right away, “is that the parts of New Jersey I haven’t been to, I have no desire to visit.”

Ursula smiled. “In fact, there’s one part of Devon I did want to visit. Thirty minutes by bike in that direction,” she said, and pointed beyond the garden. “You see, Mr. Thornton wasn’t the only writer in this part of the world. There was another writer who used to live not far from here. I always thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to bike down and take a look at his house?”

“But you didn’t? Why?”

Ursula could say that it was impolite to intrude, and she understood a writer’s need for privacy, but these were only convenient excuses. These explicable reasons would not have deterred her from going, had she wanted to. “Don’t you think sometimes it’s enough just to have imagined it?” she said. It was one of Edmund’s sentences, she knew, except that his characters never followed that line of thinking. Mere imagination was never sufficient for murderers or for detectives.

Lilian was silent for a moment, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “What was this other author’s name?”

“William Trevor.”

“Oh, I’ve read his books,” Lilian said. “I didn’t know he lived near here. Do you like his work, too?”

Ursula would never ask a visitor, Do you like Mr. Thornton’s work? Rather, she would ask, Do you reread Mr. Thornton’s work? Or, Which of his books is your favorite? Even, Which of his books has upset you most? “ ‘Like’ may be the wrong word,” she said. “What I think—sometimes—is that my life is a William Trevor story.”

For the first time, Lilian studied Ursula, and there was no longer a vague, distracted look in her eyes. “Do you mean you see yourself as one of his characters? Or do you think your life follows his kind of . . . plot? But, of course, his work is not about plot, unlike Edmund Thornton’s.”

“Not all murders have a plot,” Ursula said.

“But a murder mystery has to have a plot, no?” Lilian asked.

Ursula understood right away that Lilian was not a reader of murder mysteries. “People often make that mistake,” she said. “Mr. Thornton would say that a good murder mystery is never really about the plot. Or even about the murder. He would say that a murder mystery is all about logic and intuition.”

Lilian pondered. “Whose logic and intuition? The detective’s or the murderer’s?”

“Neither,” Ursula said. “The writer’s. And, of course, the reader’s. Mr. Thornton would say if a writer offers a puzzle that’s beyond the reader’s ability, then it’s not a good book.”

“So it’s . . . like a game?”

Ursula did not like the word “game,” and she smiled without answering.

“And everything is in order by the end, for the writer and the reader?” Lilian asked.

“Yes,” Ursula said. “Mr. Thornton would say that the world fails to live up to the standard of a murder mystery in that aspect.”

Lilian thought for a moment. “But all good writing is about logic and intuition, don’t you think? Does this mean that the world fails to live up to the standard of good writing?”

It mattered little to Ursula if the rule applied to all good writing or to some good writing. Edmund’s writing was about logic and intuition—that fact alone was enough for her.

“For instance, you could say that William Trevor’s writing is also about logic and intuition,” Lilian said, a bit too adamantly.

Ursula could feel a strong disagreement arise within her, but she did not want to argue. She shrugged.

“Have you ever thought of yourself as a character in Edmund Thornton’s work?” Lilian asked.

“I don’t think I would be a good model for a murderer,” Ursula said, not entirely honestly. In one sense, she would’ve made a perfect murderer in Edmund’s work—a harmless-looking person, indispensable to nobody. Only, he had never modelled one on her.

“Why not?”

Ursula looked at Lilian, whose curiosity could be called impudent by now, although Edmund would’ve liked this turn of their conversation. Together, talking in their odd manner, they would have offered the possibility of a lead in the case, but, ultimately, they would simply be a pair of bystanders. Most characters in a murder mystery are just part of the backdrop of the drama. “I guess I’ve never felt the urge to kill someone,” Ursula said. She turned away from Lilian’s gaze and looked at the open notebook on the table. There were letters and numbers written across the page.

“But you don’t see yourself as a murder victim, either? He must have had all kinds of characters murdered in his books?”

What could she say to that? Sometimes Ursula wondered if all the victims in Edmund’s books—or those since she had begun to work for him—were the same person named Ursula Burnett, even though they went by other names in his pages. “I’ve never thought of that,” she said. Then she changed the subject, pointing to the notebook and asking Lilian if she was a mathematician.

“Isn’t eating together more fun?”

Cartoon by Liza Donnelly

Copy link to cartoon

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

Shop

“Oh, God, no, I have very little talent for mathematics,” Lilian said. She picked up the top book from the pile and showed the title to Ursula. It was Book I of Euclid’s “Elements.” “I figured I could take a couple of weeks off from work to do a bit of studying. I wanted to see if I could make some sense out of this.”

“Why?”

“Why geometry? Or why Euclid? I don’t honestly know why. It’s something to tackle on a holiday?” Lilian said, and laughed, again, as though she were sharing a joke with someone not present. “That’s really not a good answer. I could’ve brought Proust’s work in French.”

“You know who liked to talk about geometry?”

They nearly replied at the same time—“Mr. Thornton” and “Edmund Thornton”—and both laughed.

“He once said a good grasp of geometry was all you needed to write a murder mystery,” Ursula added.

“That must be the logic-and-intuition part—I’ve heard geometry described that way. In fact, that’s why I brought the books on the trip,” Lilian said, looking at the pile of books with a tender suspicion. “I don’t know how feasible it is for me to finish these books in two weeks. It’s not easy reading.”

Ursula fetched her calendar from the basket. “I promised to bring you the answer. The house will be vacant until the sixteenth of February.”

“Which means it’s possible for me to stay till then?”

“Yes . . .” Ursula said.

“But?”

Ursula said there was no “but,” though she had noticed that Lilian hadn’t been to the village. “I didn’t leave a lot of food for you.”

“Oh, that,” Lilian said, as though she were surprised by the necessity. “I’ll try to go and get some provisions, if that makes you feel better.”

Ursula said she wouldn’t mind stopping by every now and then and bringing some supplies with her, and Lilian appeared relieved, accepting the offer.

Ursula looked at the sky outside, which during her visit had turned heavy with clouds again. “It isn’t really the best season to visit,” she said. “I don’t blame you if you don’t want to leave the house.”

Lilian nodded, waiting, Ursula suspected, for her to leave finally.

“What do you do?” Ursula asked. “You said you were taking some time off from work.”

“I teach at a university. And I write some books.”

“In what field?”

“Oh, I don’t have a field, really,” Lilian said. “I write fiction, but not the kind of work that’s as widely read as Edmund Thornton’s.”

Ursula did not point out that Lilian had never heard Edmund’s name before her arrival. “Do you write more like William Trevor?”

Lilian laughed. “I would have to suffer from delusions of grandeur to compare myself to him.”

They were no longer strangers. Ursula smiled, and stood up to leave. At the door she said to Lilian, “I’m afraid you’ve got one thing wrong about William Trevor. His work is about illogic.”

Lilian, surprised, said that she would have to think about it and they would discuss it when Ursula came back.

The next day, the sky was dark as lead, the rain icy cold. Ursula wondered if she should wait for the weather to ease up before going to the cottage, but the forecast did not look promising for the entire week, and Lilian, she thought, could do with some more food. Then Ursula wondered if she was doing what many ordinary people had done—in life as well as in fiction. Favoring logic over intuition, they’d dismissed their misgivings, as though they strove to present themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Robert, refusing to believe in the possibility of a flood, because the last flood had been fifty years earlier, or Edmund’s murder victims, nearly all of them contributing in one way or another to their own demise.

Are you indulging your imagination? Ursula asked herself. Edmund used to scoff at people who praised his imagination, saying that it was like praising a master jeweller for the velvet on which he showcased his creations. Lilian was studying Euclid, not reading Edmund’s books for murderous inspiration. A caretaker of a house once occupied by a writer of murder mysteries is found dead in that very house, killed in a manner that had been described in one of his books—Edmund would’ve considered such a scenario beyond the pale. Or did Ursula fear that she herself, a harmless old woman, might act uncharacteristically, committing a crime that would not present a technical challenge for any detective and yet would remain a puzzle for all concerned?

Perhaps there was a simpler explanation for her wish to see Lilian, Ursula thought. Odd women tended to exist in parallel. An encounter between two such specimens should not be avoided.

Lilian poured tea and neglected to offer milk. Today she did not have time for small talk. “When you said that William Trevor’s work was about illogic, did you mean the characters’ illogic or the author’s?”

Again they were sitting at the round table in the solarium, the rain drumming on the glass roof. Ursula had to ask Lilian to repeat the question. They raised their voices, like two people hard of hearing.

Ursula thought about the question and said that she wasn’t a writer, so she couldn’t really say for sure. “Only, you see, the murderers in Mr. Thornton’s work may surprise others, but they never surprise themselves. People in William Trevor’s work are often strangers to themselves.”

“But does that mean that Trevor’s characters are lacking logic?”

“It looks to me as if they wouldn’t have become his characters if they had a strong sense of logic. They would’ve known themselves, and they wouldn’t have ended up in his story.”

“Why not?”

“Because William Trevor doesn’t make puzzles that can be solved. Those characters simply live on,” Ursula said.

Lilian thought and then nodded. “I used to think I lived like a William Trevor character,” she said. “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.’ ”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about that,” Lilian said. “What I mean is, in William Trevor’s work, life remains endurable.”

“But isn’t that because his characters are the kind who have set their hearts to endure?”

“You can set your heart to endure, but that doesn’t mean you get to live in his stories,” Lilian said with a mocking smile. “Sometimes I feel like I got evicted from Trevor-land.”

Ursula held Lilian’s eyes steady with her own, waiting with patience. A person exiting a William Trevor story—where would she go from there?

“Do you have children?” Lilian asked.

Ursula shook her head. There were many solitary and lonely women in William Trevor’s stories, and not all of them were mothers.

“I had two,” Lilian said. “Two boys, and they both chose suicide. No, you don’t have to say anything. It’s a fact, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ursula nodded. A jarring fact could never be softened by words. “Did they die together?” she asked. Perhaps she was wicked, asking such an impertinent question, but then, she thought, she could be no more wicked or impertinent than life.

“No, some years apart,” Lilian said.

“How old were they?”

“Young. Younger than Kierkegaard’s brother.”

That woman walking alone on the waterfront, with the sea breeze lifting her scarf and messing up her hair—those who knew her by sight might be moved to pity her, but their pity could come only from their conjecture about her life. They could look for clues, but they would not have the facts. No wonder Lilian had wanted to find a quiet place in the English countryside, where a cabdriver told fairy tales about criminal America. Very few deaths could remain private. In that sense, Ursula counted herself fortunate: Edmund’s death, so public, nevertheless had left her safe in her bereavement. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did the second child . . . Did it happen recently?”

“Six weeks ago, and, before that, six years ago,” Lilian said. “So you see, I can never return to a William Trevor story. It would be a comfort to endure only the endurable.”

Where could Lilian go? Into a Greek drama or a Shakespeare play? Even Edmund would not make this mother a murderer or a murder victim.

“But I just realized a slip in my logic,” Lilian said. “I can’t call my life unendurable. If it’s endured, it would become, by definition, endurable.”

“What about your . . . well, the father of the children?”

“My husband? He’s somewhere in Herefordshire, staying in an abbey,” Lilian said. “We thought it might do us good to have a change. He’s going to spend some time reading Wittgenstein there. I’m reading Euclid here.”

“And you both chose well. A quiet place is what you need.”

“Owing to unusually high call volume, here’s the same recording you’ve already heard dozens of times in the last forty-five minutes, each time hopeful that the pause in hold music signalled something more, only to have your hopes dashed yet again.”

Cartoon by Meredith Southard

Copy link to cartoon

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

Shop

Lilian nodded, looking up at the rain, which made a torrent on the glass ceiling. “A quiet place where the vultures cannot find me.”

“Vultures?”

“Untimely and unnatural deaths attract them. I suppose Mr. Thornton had plenty of those characters in his books?”

Ursula thought of the other guests, who came because here they could catch a few glimpses of a man who was gone from the world. Vultures of a kind they were, too, but they knew only his work, which was no more than the husk of a real person. It was for this reason that Ursula had resisted the urge to ride her bike past William Trevor’s house, both before his death and, particularly, afterward. “Yes,” Ursula said. “But Mr. Thornton spent very little time writing about what you call vultures. They didn’t interest him.”

“And that’s the luxury an author has when writing,” Lilian said. “In real life . . .”

“People wouldn’t leave you alone?”

“Some strangers could not,” Lilian said. “ ‘Dear Ms. Pang, I’m sorry for your loss. I decided to dedicate my next book to you. Can you help me find a publisher?’ Or, ‘Dear Lilian Pang, I have suffered a greater tragedy. Please call this number at your earliest convenience, so you can hear my story. Maybe you can write my life into your book.’ ”

“Oh, my. What do you do with these people?”

“Nothing. They can’t help themselves, and they can’t be helped,” Lilian said. “But they’re harmless.”

“Mr. Thornton used to say some people are like sixpence balls and you have to allow them to bounce just like sixpence balls.”

Lilian laughed. “He was absolutely right. The real problem is that there are plenty of sixpence balls who have taken it upon themselves to be crystal balls in life.”

“What do they do?”

“Tabloid journalists create a dramatic woman writer who suffered tragic losses as clickbait. YouTube psychologists give analyses on how I’ve failed as a mother. Armchair astrologers look into my birth data. Trolls. Conspiracy theorists. They’ve all made noise about this mother who killed her children.”

“Jesus.” Ursula shook her head, not fully grasping everything Lilian was saying, but she knew that these were people who would never be given a place in a William Trevor story. There was some solace in that. Grace, even.

“I must specify that many of these people are from China. I grew up there, and my life is too sensational for them not to revel in this. Some see the justice of a divine punishment, because I’ve long turned away from the mother country. Many simply cannot resist the temptation to make a statement.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t pay them any attention.”

“I know, but what can they do to me when my life has done much more?” Lilian said. “People are predictable in their mean-spiritedness and wrongheadedness, but I always wonder if someone among them might surprise me. You see, I can’t be helped, either. That’s a vocational hazard for a writer.”

“Are there surprises?”

“Someone called for an investigation to see if I’m connected to some cult that specializes in putting suicidal thoughts into people’s minds, and to ascertain whether there’s an elevated rate of suicide among people who have read my books.”

“What?” Ursula said. “Why did you even look at this rubbish?”

“Because one always wants to know the world as it is,” Lilian said. “But, really, what makes that conspiracy theorist any different from Edmund Thornton? If a crime can be imagined, it can be committed, too, is that right? No, don’t you worry. I’m not in a cult.”

Ursula hesitated. Very few murderers would call themselves murderers.

“Of course, you have nothing to go by but my words,” Lilian said. “But, if you think about it, this person’s suicide-cult hypothesis could be a perfect subject for a murder mystery. A serial killer by words?”

“But Mr. Thornton did not take anything from real life,” Ursula said. “He wrote murder mysteries as an intellectual activity, not as an act to harm anyone in real life.”

“Are you sure he never took anything from real life?” Lilian asked. “That would be rather . . . extraordinary.”

Ursula looked away. If those victims could all bear her name, perhaps all the murderers, too, were but one person named Ursula Burnett. If she had been killed many times and if she had killed many times, all through Edmund’s pen, could it be that he was not entirely ignorant of her feelings? On her side, she had imagination only, but on his side he had intuition and logic. Those minor changes she had introduced while typing—the hair length of a character, another character’s favorite brand of wheat flakes, the plate number of a suspect’s vehicle, all of them bearing a shadowy resemblance to her life—perhaps Edmund had been aware of them? He might have deemed the changes harmless to his work; he might even have accepted that they were meaningful to her.

“Well, in any case, I got tired of the noise,” Lilian said. “That’s why I’m here, reading Euclid. He makes a better companion than many people. Would you like some more tea?”

Ursula said yes, and Lilian went into the kitchen to boil more water. The rain had abated, but only for the time being.

If a person’s imagination, kind or wicked, was boundless, sooner or later what was imagined could become a fact. If Ursula slipped something into Lilian’s food, people might say she had been too heartbroken by her children’s deaths to live on, and what a tragedy it was that she should have come all the way from New Jersey to Devon to die. If Lilian, on the other hand, slipped something into Ursula’s tea, she, too, could die, the meagre history of her life forever sealed, just as she had always wished.

But the woman walking by the seaside in William Trevor’s story would never throw herself into the water. And all things unendurable, in the end, become less so. For that reason, Ursula knew that she and Lilian were going to be all right. In a world of disorder, they would hold on to their positions as two particles of order—against logic, perhaps, but true to their intuitions. They met, they parted ways, but they would not make this cruel world more senseless for each other. ♦