Life must be filled up

I enjoy Adèle Geras’s novels because they’re so full of the kind of detail I like about clothes, houses, gardens etc. Cover Your Eyes has all this, as expected, but is also a kind of ghost story, with a mystery buried in the past. There are two main characters. Megan is an aspiring journalist who is dumped by her lover, also her boss. She has previously interviewed Eva Conway, a once-famous fashion designer, at her home, Salix House. When the two meet again, there seems to be a bond between them.

Salix House is at the heart of the novel. Eva and her husband Antoine bought it as a wreck and she turned the house and garden into a thing of beauty. Now Antoine is dead and the house is shared by Eva’s daughter Rowena, her husband and their two little girls. Eva had made the house over to Rowena to avoid death duties and now Rowena wants to sell it, because they can’t afford the upkeep. Eva is utterly miserable at the thought of leaving not only her creation but also her memories, both good and bad. For Eva is constantly suppressing bad memories, to the extent that she has every mirror covered up for fear of what she might see in it. Who or what is this presence which can sometimes be felt or worse, seen? It’s all linked, we know, to what happened to Eva just before the war, when she was sent to England with the Kindertransport and her sister was left behind. Curiously, when Megan visits the house again, then moves in to look after the children, she senses something strange and thinks she sees – someone? – in her looking glass. Possibly it’s because Megan also feels guilty about something in her past. So there we are; a ghost story and an exploration of the nature of guilt and forgiveness.

By the end of the book I’d changed my view of most of the characters. When Megan first appears, broken hearted, she seems a sympathetic character but isn’t she actually rather stupid, having an affair with a married man WHEN THEY NEVER LEAVE THEIR WIVES? Also something of a slag, sleeping with the first available man and then falling immediately for another. Can I really be more old fashioned than Adèle Geras who is, if she will forgive my saying so, even older than I am? Oh well, I’m not a popular novelist and obviously never will be as I am far too strikt. Rowena at first appears shrewish, bossing her mother about. When I knew more about her childhood, I felt sorry for her and started to dislike Eva. As this is fiction, every problem is resolved at the end of the book.

I read the book very quickly and although I don’t think it’s Adèle Geras’s best novel, it is an enjoyable read. It’s published by Quercus and I read it courtesy of NetGalley.

The Poppy Factory , Liz Trenow
Diamond, Jacqueline Wilson
Dangerous Lover, Sonia Deane
Summer of Love, Katie Fforde
As Berry and I Were Saying, Dornford Yates
Saving Grace , Jane Green
It Started With Paris, Cathy Kelly
( opinions )

The heroine isn’t really called Miss Bun, of course. Her name is Miss Pringle and she is a baker’s daughter. Sue Pringle’s mother is dead and her father, a domineering man whom nobody likes, forces Sue to leave school at fourteen in order to keep house for him. Then he marries again, and two women in one house just don’t fit. So here’s Sue: nineteen years old, uneducated, living at home in a small Scottish border town and depending on her grandparents for love and kindness. One day, wealthy Mrs Darnay is in grandfather’s shop bewailing her lack of a cook. Sue immediately offers her services, to grandfather’s distress. Her mind made up, Sue packs a case and sets off for Tog’s Mill. Little does she suspect Mrs Darnay’s cunning plan. She and her French maid disappear in the night, leaving Sue alone in the house with Mr Darnay, an artist. She decides that he is helpless around the house and declares that she will stay to look after him. The impropriety of the situation is obvious to all but the two involved and Sue is quite a strong-minded young woman. She finds herself fascinated by Darnay’s work, conversation and attitudes. Without realising it, she is being educated at last but also, just to complicate matters, falling in love with him. The rest of the book is about what happens, much of it highly unlikely but Romantic.

What’s worrying about that? I hear you ask. This book was first published in 1939. At one point Sue says, ‘I like Franco. He has a nice face.’ ‘Stupid, ignorant girl’, you think. Ignorant she may be, but the reader is not allowed to think her stupid; rather, according to D E Stevenson, she embodies all the sterling qualities of the lowland Scot. Towards the end of the book, Sue has tracked down Darnay’s London dealer, Hedley. The following appalling conversation takes place.
‘Gaga!’ declared Edward, waggling his head idiotically.
‘Gaga!’ cried Mr Hedley indignantly. ‘Why on earth can’t you speak English? Need we have Yiddish words foisted upon us? It’s time Hitler …but no matter.’
Time Hitler what? Am I reading this wrongly? I’m usually tolerant of outmoded and repugnant attitudes in books written between the wars, saying, autre temps, autre moeurs, but this is 1939! This one brief incident put me right off the book and off Stevenson.

The charm of the book lies almost entirely in the descriptions of the landscape, language and people of lowland Scotland. None of the characters engaged me much. I’m thankful that D E Stevenson wrote better books than this one, and it will be a while before I read another.

The Women of Pulp on AbeBooks

Wonderful covers! Posted direct to LJ.

This month I have been mostly reading books already lying around the house or on the Kindle.



The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (Isabel Dalhousie), Alexander McCall Smith
Glimpses of the Moon, Edmund Crispin
Illyrian Spring, Ann Bridge
Chocolate Wishes, Trisha Ashley
Alice by Accident, Lynne Reid Banks
Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, Xandra Bingley
Call to Romance, Maureen Heeley
I Met him Again, Maysie Greig
Half Sick of Shadows, M C Beaton
Take no Farewell, Robert Goddard
Venetian Rhapsody, Denise Robins
The Glass Painter's Daughter, Rachel Hore
( thoughts )

Yet again ramblingfancy has introduced me to a detective series which I’m going to enjoy. Telling Tales is part of the Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves. I see from the cover there’s been a TV series but it passed me by completely. This story is set in Yorkshire, the flat, coastal part getting towards Lincolnshire (coincidentally the setting for South Riding) and the landscape dominates the book, making it very atmospheric; the sea and the wind seem everywhere. A teenage girl has been murdered ten years before and the case is to be reopened. Secrets and lies abound in the small community and Vera relies perhaps too much on her instincts to find out the truth. It reminded me a little of Anita Shreve’s Eden Close, which I read last year. As is so often the case, the dénouement is less interesting than the steps towards it but I liked the book and will be happy to read more by this author.

ramblingfancy also lent me the latest Catriona McPherson novel, Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder. This one is a Montagu & Capulet story set in Dunfermline. Two department stores, two families whose members all hate each other, two deaths. I loved the descriptions of the shops and the people working in them but much as I like Dandy and Alec, the plot of this one was too convoluted for me. If anyone can beat Dandy to working out the complex relationships between the Aitken and Hepburn families: congratulations!

I have two more crime books lined up. At the market yesterday the nice man who finds books for me had the first Maisie Dobbs novel, hurrah! I’ve been reading them out of order and now I shall be able to see how it all started. He also offered me two Daisy Dalrymple books, one of which, Rattle His Bones, was next on my list to read. I was just as pleased to spot two books by O Douglas, after rummaging through several unpromising boxes.
( if you like looking at book covers )

debodacious put me on to Victoria Clayton as an author of light fiction I might enjoy so I grabbed Clouds among the Stars with glee when I saw it at the library. At over five hundred pages it’s light only in one sense but I read it quickly and was sorry when it ended.

The Byng family are eccentrics. Pa is a famous actor, Ma a former actress; they tend to converse entirely in Shakespearian quotations. There’s something Mitford-esque about the children: four beautiful girls and one son. The ‘Fanny’ role is played by Harriet, the only one in the family not entirely self-obsessed and self-confident. As soon as she appeared, I saw her looking like the drawings of another Harriet, the one in Noel Streatfeild’s White Boots, all long legs and long black hair. This is strange because the book gets a name check later. When Harriet and her precocious younger sister Cordelia (twelve going on twenty) are in Derbyshire for Christmas they go skating: (Cordelia) had fallen in love at an early age with Noel Streatfeild’s White Boots. I could see she was planning to cut a dash before a marvelling world, as the beautiful, talented, tempestuous Lalla Moore. There are many other references to children’s books.

The household is upset when Pa is arrested for murder. This is one of several plotlines (none of which matter very much) and serves the same function as the disappearance of parents in children’s books (there we go again): it leaves everyone to their own devices and allows Harriet and Cordelia to visit Pye Place with Rupert Wolvespurges and Archie, every woman’s perfect gay man. Hawk-eyed readers will spot that anyone called Rupert Wolvespurges will be a hero. He is straight out of Georgette Heyer, as is some of the language; Jonno, heir to Pye Hall, speaks of girls having ‘a fit of the sullens’, which is hardly modern usage. When the family fortunes fall, with Pa banged up and Ma selfishly off having a chin tuck, Rupert steps in to help, on condition everyone gets a job. Harriet finds work as a journalist, writing mostly about ghosts, so ghosts and mysteries tend to dominate life at Pye Place. It’s not a ghost story though, or even really a mystery, as it’s the characters, their conversations and the descriptions of places which make the book so enjoyable. Harriet finds somewhere to write: A narrow flight of stairs led from the drawing room to what was called the Little Parlour. It was hardly more than ten feet square, with painted green panelling and an arched window that looked on to the waterfall. It had in it a desk, a table lamp, an armchair and a bookcase. There was a charming little fireplace with Delft tiles … Don’t you want to appropriate it immediately for your study?

What with all the actors involved, the lovely sisters and the police (Chief Inspector Foy is a delight) there’s quite a tangled web of fluctuating relationships. The reader’s sympathy is always, quite rightly, with Harriet; trying to please everyone (succeeding only too well in some cases), left entirely in charge of Cordelia, the only worrier in the family and the fondest of her Micawber-ish father. Does it come right for her? Aha! I recommend this book highly as a lose-yourself-in-it romantic novel.

Does Eva Ibbotson write for children or for adults? I’d say A Song for Summer (lovely book) is for adults and The Secret of Platform 13 for children. The two novels I’ve just read come somewhere between the two and I’d categorise them as romances; romances strongly influenced by Georgette Heyer.


In A Company of Swans Harriet is the daughter of a Cambridge professor who leaves her upbringing to his mean spirited, narrow-minded sister and refuses to let the brilliant girl go to Girton. These two are pantomime figures, a pair of Murdstones. Harriet is well trained in classics but has another secret love: the dancing classes she is allowed to attend each week. She is offered a place in a Russian touring ballet company which her father of course refuses for her and so she rebels. This is all highly unlikely since she is eighteen and has never danced on stage but the author knows this and explains it away.

The hero, Rom, one of Ibbotson’s brilliant but rebellious misfits, is impossibly handsome, brave, athletic, clever – and rich. So, like a true Heyer hero, he is able to act above the law and fix things to be the way he wants them. Here’s an example of the Heyerish-ness. Harriet wants to speak to Rom but finds her intentions misunderstood; to his great disappointment Rom sees her as just another dancing girl and she finds herself being groomed for the bedchamber. Expecting to be ‘ruined’, as she puts it, she says, ‘I don’t know what to do’. He realizes she is virtuous, then
‘(she) lifted her face with perfect trust to his.
Which made it difficult for Rom to do what he intended…But he mastered himself…And his voice suddenly rough, “No breath of scandal shall touch you while I live”.
See? Pure Heyer.

The other day I noticed this book in a ‘three for two’ display of children’s books in W H Smith’s. I wouldn’t buy this for a ballet-mad eight year old as there is quite a lot of (pure and non-explicit) sex in it. A lovely romance for older girls, though.

I loved A Secret Countess so much that I read it almost at a sitting. Another Heyer-eque romance, I’d say. Anna is an aristocratic Russian exile forced to earn her living. Rupert has returned from the (First World) war to take over the earldom and estate he inherited when his elder brother was killed. There are shades of Lord Peter Wimsey here when the butler says, ‘there’s no doubt who was the finer gentleman’. Rupert has been inveigled into a promise of marriage to one of the nastiest women you could ever hope to read about but his sense of honour will not allow him to break the engagement. Will true love conquer all? If you know your Heyer, you know the answer.