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** spoiler alert **
I was surprised to see this was published in 1984. It felt 20-40 years older.

Mrs. Blunt is a widow (age unspecified) living in Wiltshire, England in a large house. Her husband, a Colonel, died several years ago and she's still deeply grieving; they had been so close that their daughter, Nadine, often felt excluded. She doesn't do much of anything, except be annoyed by the largeness and loudness of her Irish housekeeper, Mrs. Murphy. One day a handsome man in a wheelchair comes to her door soliciting funds for the St. Crispins hospital/home for the disabled in London. He appears to be about 35, and is known only as Corrigan. Mrs. Blunt takes a liking to Corrigan, is sympathetic to his stories of disability and deprivation, and over the course of weeks and months becomes closer and closer to him. Corrigan asks her to become penpals with his co-resident at St. Crispins, Rupert Sinclair, and she does, revealing more about herself to someone she has never known than she ever does to those closest to her. She sends champagne back with Corrigan to St. Crispins. Mrs. Murphy takes an instant dislike to Corrigan, beyond the fact that she has to lift him into the house each time he visits. Corrigan shows up one day with bandaged hands in a different wheelchair and explains he was in an accident that destroyed his wheelchair; Mrs. Blunt contrives to anonymously donate two thousand pounds to St. Crispins for his new wheelchair and other items.

In the meantime, Nadine Blunt Conroy is living unhappily with her husband Justin, a journalist, and their rowdy twin boys. Justin expects Nadine to run a perfect home, meals cooked on time, dinner parties thrown, the house kept clean, the boys well-behaved, and she's getting a little tired of it. In fact, she has stopped having sex with Justin and moved out of the bedroom and thinks she might want a divorce. She has conversations about her life with her model friend Sabrina (literally, a model).

Soon Mrs. Blunt has remodeled her house with a wheelchair ramp entrance, and done over the whole first floor, installing a bathroom for Corrigan and giving over the entire parlor for his bedroom. He more or less moves in and they eat all their meals together and read poetry and sing songs. She also plants her garden with vegetables that can be donated to St. Crispins, and buys the farm next door because she has a sudden desire to raise dairy cows. She buys a big van so she can drive around to furniture auctions and buy up antiques. She begins to paint. All of this is due to Corrigan's influence.

Finally, Nadine meets Corrigan and, as can be expected, loathes him. She can see that Corrigan is a first-class manipulator and she can't stand to spend time around him.

Mrs. Blunt dies of a heart attack suddenly. Nadine tracks down the address of St. Crispins and finds not a hospital there, but a greasy, disgusting pancake restaurant frequented by surly-looking lowlifes. She sees the fancy ormolu dresser her mother bought standing against a wall. They claim there they've never heard of Corrigan, although as it turns out, the woman serving pancakes - who looks like an old prostitute - is probably Corrigan's mother (whom he had said was dead).

Fortunately for Nadine's nerves, and for the reader, Mrs. Blunt has actually left Corrigan out of her will. Her estate is to be divided among Nadine and Mrs. Murphy, with Nadine getting the house and land. This gives Nadine the freedom to finally leave Justin and move to Wiltshire. We also find out that Mrs. Blunt had been more cognizant of Corrigan's lies and manipulations than we thought; she knew there was no Rupert Sinclair, probably (?) she knew there was no St. Crispins (I'm not clear on that), and she knew that Corrigan actually was not disabled because she could hear him walking around the house at night. She maintained a friendship with Corrigan because she wanted the friendship; it provided her with certain things, with companionship, with a sense of helping someone else, and it got her out of her lethargic grief. After Mrs. Blunt's funeral, we never see or hear from Corrigan again. Nadine decides to let sleeping dogs lie rather than prosecute him for fraud or theft.

Mrs. Murphy, from a moral standpoint, comes off best in the novel. Justin struck me as just as despicable a human as Corrigan, and Mrs. Blunt, Nadine, and Sabrina fell into a large middle, neither admirable nor rogues.

The novel did begin to drag at about the 80% mark. I felt like a good 20 pages could have been cut with no repercussions. There was quite a bit of repetition - conversations, especially with Nadine and Sabrina, that went over the same ground again and again. (Andrew Solomon addresses this repetition in his Afterword.)

Solomon explains that he knew Caroline Blackwood - he had "the pleasure of knowing her" and that she enjoyed duping people, so it was no surprise that she would write such a novel. When your friends dupe you, is that a pleasurable thing? Me, if I have friends who dupe me, no matter how charming they are about it, and Solomon clearly was charmed by Lady Caroline Blackwood, they are not my friends any longer. As is often the case, this is an NYRB afterword which doesn't do justice. Solomon does a relatively decent job of explaining the novel, but he's not convincing on why we ought to like or admire Caroline Blackwood, or how he knew her. How did they become friends, and why?