Agatha’s typewriter is at the core of her identity, and it appears several times in the novel. Unlike her car, which carries great sentimental value, the typewriter is often overlooked as one of her most beloved possessions. It has transcended the role of a coveted possession and become an extension of her person: “She wrote her books wherever she found herself, so long as she had a table and a typewriter” (24). As Agatha prepares to leave her home, she takes stock of what she’d like to bring with her: “the wonderful car she’d bought all on her own. The typewriter that made it happen” (60). Here Agatha’s first thought is to her car, which is her most treasured possession, but she acknowledges that she has it only because of her deeper, more intimate relationship with her typewriter. When she goes astray and leaves with Finbarr, she forgets her suitcase in her car but makes sure to bring her typewriter with her.

Later, the typewriter is used as a metonym for Agatha herself. Chilton reaches a house abandoned by everything save the sound of typewriter keys. At this moment, the reader knows immediately that the sound means Agatha is nearby. The typewriter continues to be a motif in Agatha and Chilton’s relationship. When each of them imagines a possibility of a future together, the typewriter is always in the picture. Agatha envisions herself as “Mrs. Chilton clatter[ing] away on the typewriter” (238), and Chilton imagines the way the sound of typewriter keys would fill their home. In his mind, any future with Agatha also involves coming home to her writing. Later, this dream is cruelly inverted after Agatha leaves with Archie, and Chilton is left with a handwritten note: “Please see to my typewriter and most importantly my papers” (347).

To both Chilton and Nan, the narrator, and to Agatha herself, the typewriter is a part of who she is. Notably, the typewriter never features in any interaction between her and Archie, showing the distance between them and how little he understands her. The typewriter symbolizes everything she is away from Archie as she becomes an independent person.

The Timeless Manor is the name both Nan and Agatha give the empty house where Agatha and Finbarr stay in Harrogate. For both women, as well as for Chilton and Finbarr, the house comes to represent a slice of reality away from time, responsibility, ambition, and societal constraints. Nan asks, “How does one measure time in a place where time has vanished?” (252). For Agatha, it is where she reaches a turning point in her character and learns to embrace her agency and desires; for Nan, it is the opposite—a place where she can set the weight of her agency and desires aside. For all of them, it is a place where the impossible is not only possible but natural. A murderess plays tennis with a police inspector; a betrayed wife finds new love; a man’s wife and mistress dance together with carefree abandon.

Later, Nan and Agatha find that their memories of the Timeless Manor have shifted into legend: “She and I agreed that although we’d spent not even a week in the Timeless Manor, in the dead of winter […] we remembered the house in every season” (325). They remember Teddy there running through the sun and, for Nan, it becomes a place where her lost friends and relatives come together. The Timeless Manor exists “only as a place we visited in conversation and memory” (326) where the four friends somehow became the unlikeliest of families.