Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

Painted by the French artist Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942). Born in Paris and more or less self taught, he became a celebrated portraitist - he painted Proust, James Joyce, Aubrey Beardsley, Violet Trefusis, Julia Stephen and many others. He also wrote two books about portrait painting, about which Walter Sickert said "he is liable to twist things he hears or doesn't into monstrous fibs". He made a nice job of this lady's beautiful skirt, anyway.

Sleep No More by PD James

It's no secret that I'm a great admirer of PD James, and have deeply regretted the fact that there are  no more of her excellent novels to look forward to. So what a treat to spot this, subtitled Six Murderous Tales, which has recently come out in paperback. These are stories which share the psychological perceptiveness we have come to expect from James  and generally have a golden age setting. Indeed the longest story in the book, 'The Murder of Santa Claus', takes place in a Cotswold manor,  'in the heyday of the cosy "whodunnits', the Christmas of 1939, the first Christmas of the war'. The narrator is a second-rank writer of detective fiction: 'I'm no HRF Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a PD James'. He's an old man now, but tells the story of something that happened in his youth. As a sixteen-year-old he has been invited to spend Christmas with Victor Mickledore, a step-uncle who he hardly knows, and is to be the only young guest in the small house party. The other guests are an elderly couple, the Turvilles, previous owners of the manor, a distant relative and famous amateur pilot, and a well-known actress. On Christmas Eve a threatening message is delivered to Mickledore, in the form of a cracker containing a poem: 'Merry Christmas Mickledore/Go to bed and sleep no more./ Take this charm and hold it fast/This nights sleep shall be your last./Christmas bells ring merrily;/Bells of hell shall ring for thee'. Determined to ignore this ominous message, the party continues with games and dancing till bedtime. Needless to say, Mickledore is discovered dead in his bed the following morning. The solution takes time to unfold, and has a satisfactorily moral lesson contained in it.

Another Christmas is spent in another small manor house by another teenage schoolboy in 'The Yo Yo'. This time, on the long car journey to his grandmother's house, the boy witnesses a murder. But the circumstances are such that he has to keep quiet about it - the yo yo is given to him by the perpetrator in return for his silence. Now an old man, the narrator wonders what his heir will make of it being among his possessions: 'will he briefly wonder what happy childhood memory made an old man so reluctant to throw it away?'

'The Girl Who Loved Graveyards' starts in the summer of 1956, when an orphaned girl of ten is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in East London. It's a loveless childhood, and her only pleasure is visiting the old Victorian graveyard, 'a place of delight and mystery, her delight and her solace'. We follow her into young adulthood, learn that she did once have a relationship with her father though he is now in prison - and at last, in the final paragraph, learn the disturbing details of her own backstory.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. Each story is satisfyingly twisted, and each has a motive of revenge at its heart. I'm not generally a great reader of short stories, but I absolutely raced through the whole volume, loving every minute. This would be a perfect Christmas present for anyone who loves crime, or PD James, or just thoroughly good writing.

 

 

Woman Reading to Children

This was painted by James Jebusa Shannon (1862-1923). Born in America he moved to London at the age of sixteen and became a sought-after portrait painter.

Man Reading

Somebody asked me in a comment last week whether there were any paintings of men reading. Yes there are but I think in not such great numbers as women. However here is one, by the great John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), which I like very much because he looks so wonderfully comfortable and cosy. Love those pillows!

Breakfast with the Nicolides by Rumer Godden

I hadn't had enough of Rumer Golden after I finished The Lady and the Unicorn, so when I spotted this one unread in the bookshelf I knew its time had come. This is another of Godden's early novels, published in 1942. And what a strange, uncomfortable book it is. You might think, as I certainly did, that the breakfast referred to in the title would be described in some detail, but such is not the case. It's what happens at home while the two children are out that is the subject of the novel.

Let me explain. Like many of Godden's novels, this takes place in India, in 'the little agricultural town of Amorra, East Bengal'. Here lives Charles Pool, who has  the task of improving the ability of the Indians to cultivate their land - indeed he has been very successful in the twelve or so years since he arrived. He's been living alone in his pleasant house for eight of those years, but as the novel begins he is joined - much to everyone's surprise - by his estranged wife and his two young daughters, Emily and Binnie. They have been living in Paris, but have been forced to leave France by the arrival of the Nazis, and have come here because they have nowhere else to go. Louise Pool is a beautiful woman, but a deeply unhappy one - she hates everything about India and her relationship with Charles is badly damaged by some event from the past which is not explained until late in the story. She's not a natural mother, and, though eight-year-old Binnie is an easy, pretty, quiet child, she cannot get on with, or understand, Emily, who is four years older. Emily loves everything about India that her mother hates - the sounds of the bazaar next to the house, the river, the sights and the smells. She's fascinated by the culture she sees around her and longs to understand it.

Emily's difficult relationship with Louise makes her a rather unhappy child, but her father sees how sensitive and interesting she is and the two, though still rather distant, have some kind of understanding - indeed, Emily soon hero-worships Charles. Seeing that she's lonely, Charles fulfils one of her greatest desires - he buys her a puppy, which she calls Don, and which becomes the centre of her life. The two are inseparable, and Don sleeps in a bed next to Emily's, so she can reach out to him in the night and stroke his soft fur. One night, though, Don chews through his lead and disappears into the grounds, returning in the early hours of the morning. Louise, going into the children's room before they wake, looks at Don and panics, seeing signs that he has developed hydrophobia. She takes the dog downstairs, hides him in an outbuilding, and arranges for the girls to go to breakfast with the only other European family in the area, the Nicolides, an morning-long event which involves a ferry ride and a late breakfast. During the morning while the girls are gone, she sends for the Indian vet Dr Das, and persuades him, much against both his training and his religion, to give the dog a fatal injection. This act causes Das terrible agony - though he is not conventionally religious, his upbringing and culture are deeply embedded, and killing any living creature is believed to be a sin, not to mention the fact that vets are supposed to wait three days for confirmation that the dog has the disease. When Emily returns from the breakfast - which has badly affected her sensitive stomach -- her mother tells her that Don has died, and that the body has been disposed of. Emily is devastated and is sure her mother is lying to her. In her fury, she decides to pretend that Don is not dead, and spends weeks trailing his lead around and calling him by name, which infuriates Louise. But more tragedies must ensue before a conclusion of sorts is reached.

This is quite a dark and disturbing novel, although some kind of peace has been reached by the end. Godden frequently wrote about children, especially intelligent, alienated little girls, who are often found watching their parents and making their own conclusions about feelings and incidents they only partially understand. That's certainly the case in this novel, in which towards the end we learn the rather upsetting facts that caused the break-up between Louise and Charles. Evidently Godden herself always felt like the outsider in her own family, believing her sister to be more attractive and more talented than she was herself. I'm glad I read this one, and suspect it would justify a re-read, as I raced through it really fast because I was so anxious about the outcome! 

 

Woman Reading

This woman in her gorgeous dress was painted by Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). If you watch the BBC programme Fake or Fortune, you may have seen one of Vuillard's paintings being rediscovered and confirmed by the strict Wildenstein Institute in Paris.