THE ONLY STORY by William Trevor

“‘The house is full of smiling people,’ I said. ‘There’s a child on the stairs’”

I had claimed, till today, that I had read and reviewed all of the many William Trevor Stories (variously linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/william-trevor/) but this work proves me wrong, having now discovered it, by chance, through obtaining this (increasingly impressive) anthology for the sole purpose of reading the Marghanita Laski work!
This William Trevor is a powerful attrition of a man having found the hindsight of his life pointless, writing in an exercise book, and now abandoned by his wife (and children) with the help of her Wing Commander father, and remembering when working for an advertising agency he had hit a client in the form of an epiphany after working on many tedious projects… now haunted by, inter alios, the author pretending to be his brother (thus making himself nothing at all but fiction?)…this work somehow becoming, ironically for me, William’s only story! If I understand it correctly.

“Oh God, make William understand.”

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Full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/twentieth-century-ghost-stories/