The unsuitable suitor in the lake
Antonia Fraser
THE BLANK WALL by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Persephone, £10, pp. 231, ISBN 1903155320 W hen I told him to leave
the premises, he refused.
But I dealt with him. To
tell you the truth, I pushed him off into the water.' The speaker is an old man who is feeling pleased with himself. On his own initiative, in a dark boathouse, Mr Harper has, so he believes, seen off his teenage granddaughter's unsavoury 35-year-old (married) suitor. He is reporting his triumph to his daughter Lucia Holley, with whom he lives. In the absence of Lucia's husband Tom on active service overseas 'some
where in the Pacific', Mr Harper has assumed the male role and solved the dilemma of young Bee Holley's love life.
What Mr Harper does not know, and what Lucia Holley finds out at five o'clock in the morning, is that he has unintentionally killed the unsuitable Ted Darby instead of merely warning him off. In a freak accident, Darby has been impaled on a spare anchor as he fell. So Lucia decides to dump the body far out into the lake, to spare her father, her daughter, the absent Tom and indeed herself. And so begins her nightmare — the first horrible step being to de-impale Darby's stiffening corpse from the lethal anchor.
.1 couldn't touch him.' she thought, followed by: 'That's nonsense,' she told herself. 'I thought I couldn't possibly kill old Tiger with gas. But I did:
If only the disposal of Ted Darby's body and his connection with the Holleys were as easy as this decent, emotionally isolated housewife, with her comparison to the deceased family pet, tries to make it ... The Blank Wall is on the one hand an illustration of the old adage, 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practise to deceive.' On the other hand it is a brilliant psychological thriller with twists and turns, both morally and amorally, worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself. I was indeed strongly reminded of the latter's work on first reading it.
To invoke the hallowed name of Highsmith is, however, to be sharply reminded that Sanxay Holding, born in 1889, was Highsmith's senior by 32 years. The Blank Wall was first published in the US in 1947, whereas The Talented Mr Ripley, the original Highsmith celebration of her amoral hero, was published in 1956. Furthermore, with The Blank Wall Sanxay Holding was reaching the end of her career, which had begun in the Twenties with romantic novels until the stock market crash of 1929 persuaded her to enter the more lucrative field of suspense fiction. She died in 1955. So it is Sanxay Holding who is the precursor rather than Highsmith (it would be interesting to know if Highsmith ever read her).
The Blank Wall has certainly met with success in the past. Hitchcock printed it in full in My Favourites in Suspense in 1959 and it was admired by Chandler. Two films have been made of it: The Reckless Moment by Max Ophuls in 1949, starring James Mason and Joan Bennett, and in 2001 The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton. Inexplicable, then, that the original English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, let it go out of print. But let us not repine
since that admirable institution, Persephone Publishers, have produced an edition, complete with Edward Bawderiesque endpapers, which makes this racy, suspenseful tale a pleasure to read. I certainly feel I have been introduced to a masterpiece.
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