The Mysteries Of Loss

By Paul Gray

Life offers such a grim plenitude of fatal accidents, of deaths visited on the undeserving without discernible pattern or purpose, that serious fiction, as opposed to mysteries and thrillers, tends to shun or downplay such events. Writers and readers alike expect stories to make sense, after all, and random tragedies simply don't. So author William Trevor takes something of a risk when he opens his latest novel, Death in Summer (Viking; 214 pages; $23.95), with a woman riding a bicycle along an English country lane being hit and killed by a car.

She is, or was, Letitia Davenant, wife of Thaddeus and mother of a 4 1/2-month-old daughter named Georgina. It was Letitia's inheritance that allowed her husband to refurbish his ancestral home, Quincunx House in Essex, to its former splendor. Before he married her, Thaddeus had been reduced to selling local markets the produce he grew on his property. So he is grateful to Letitia but harbors a pained secret that occurs to him again on the afternoon of her death: "It was his considerable loss, Thaddeus was every day aware, that he did not love his wife."

Why this should have been so is but one of the mysteries that Trevor, with remarkable artistry and economy, introduces and then solves in Death in Summer. Letitia's death raises a practical problem: how to care for the infant daughter. Mrs. Iveson, Thaddeus' mother-in-law, suggests that he advertise for a nanny and agrees to help him interview the applicants. Four young women eventually arrive at Quincunx House, none of them found suitable for the post by Mrs. Iveson. She then volunteers to sublet her London apartment and take over Georgina's upbringing herself. Reluctantly, Thaddeus consents.

But one of the spurned nanny applicants is Pettie, an unstable kleptomaniac in her early 20s who grew up in the Morning Star, a London home for unwanted children. Her interview at Quincunx House has left her enchanted with the beauty and serenity of the place, so at odds with the conditions of her own childhood, and stirred by her meeting with the handsome, fortyish widower who owns it. She assumes, correctly, that she was barred from this paradise by "the old woman," Mrs. Iveson. Pettie begins making daily train trips to spy on the Davenant household and exact revenge.

Pettie's growing obsession with her lost opportunity is observed warily by her friend Albert, another alum of the Morning Star who now makes a living cleaning graffiti off the walls of the London Underground at night. Albert is another masterpiece in Trevor's long career of creating odd but wholly plausible characters. Terribly well meaning but also mentally handicapped ("Not being the full ticket" is how Pettie puts it), Albert plays a crucial role in determining whether Letitia's innocent death will be followed by others. Trevor's narrative tone is, as always, gentle and nuanced, a model of calm understatement. But for all the wit and charm of Death in Summer, horror stories don't get much more hair-raising than this.

--By Paul Gray