Depths and shallows
Charlotte Moore
THE PRIVATE PARTS OF WOMEN by Lesley Glaister Bloomsbury, £10.99, pp. 240 ven in my great escape I play it safe. I do it in the English, female way, the little hen way. . . I am little and pathetic and hindered by edges.'
Inis Goodie, the speaker, is a 30- something photographer in flight from her kind, sympathetic doctor husband and her two beloved children. She is on the run from her own failure to accept the emotional and material comforts of her existence; the recent abortion of her third child has destroyed the distinction between her urge to love and her urge to harm. Iris flees to dismal Sheffield in desolate Febru- ary. She dyes her dark hair white, she cov- ers the walls of her rented terraced house with white emulsion, and tries to lose her- self in her new, anonymous life.
`I don't care what's underneath, as long as it stays underneath,' declares Inis, as she paints over the wallpaper, but of course things refuse to 'stay underneath'. The roots of her hair show dark, the roses on the wallpaper glower through the white paint. Next door to Inis lives 84-year-old Trixie Bell, who has devoted her life to keeping things 'underneath'. When the fragmented personalities of these two women come into contact, hot, dark secrets come bubbling to the surface. When Inis first takes tea with her neigh- bour she notices three hyacinths struggling in a bowl: 'Hyacinth breath stifled and baked in the electric heat.' One bloom is `strong and fat,' one is less developed and the other is 'only a puny little thing'. One senses that these hyacinths are not just there for decoration, and sure enough we discover that Trixie's body houses not one but three distinct identities, all fighting for breathing space. There's, Trixie herself, a former tambourine-basher with the Salva- tion Army, a respectable spinster who keeps her garden under perfect control. Then there's Ada, once a gangster's moll with a rose tattooed on her withered inner thigh to prove it. The third character is `Boy', the ghost of Trixie's twin brother who died at birth. Boy is malevolent, violent, 'stuck in Trixie, a danger and a dis- grace.'
The competing hyacinths are typical of Lesley Glaister's symbolic use of the details of ordinary life. Lilies and roses crop up in a variety of forms, their traditional associa- tions often overlaid with new meanings. Photography is a central metaphor; revela- tory images float to the surface in Inis' dark room just as memories from the submerged past emerge to taunt and challenge the two women. Attics are obliquely equated with the mind or imagination; Inis' dark room is her attic, and the other side of the wall in Trixie's attic is the wardrobe crammed with clues to the old woman's secrets. Trixie locks Inis in, forcing her to share her waking nightmare, and causing her to confront and realign her own, disordered identity.
Glaister's prose is crisp and confident enough to allow her details to carry their freight of meanings quite successfully, though there is the odd lapse — the moths that flutter symbolically round are not the kind that, equally symbolically, chomp holes through your clothes. The meaning- fulness of Glaister's use of names is trying. Inis is an anagram for I Sin, her perfect husband is Dr Goodie, the women live in Mercy Terrace, Trixie was introduced into the Salvation army by Mary Bright, and so on. But the prose is anchored by vivid sensual perceptions: Trixie's cruel, hollow- hearted father has 'bundles of bristles coming out of his nostrils and ears as if he was really stuffed with straw'; 'crocuses, like yellow and purple gas flames, flared up through the wet earth'. Glaister makes her descriptive details work hard to create real settings in which the few characters can move with conviction.
And yet there's something overly schematic about it. Trixie is too crudely divided into soul-saver and sinner, spinster and whore, victim and killer, and the parallels between the two women are so insistently made that this reader, for one, was in danger of neither believing in nor caring about their plight. The novel is less than the sum of its parts. 'The private parts of women' are carefully revealed, but they don't amount to a whole picture.
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