Growing old disgracefully
Cressida Connolly THE PEOPLE ON PRIVILEGE HILL by Jane Gardam Chatto, fl 2.99, pp. 211, ISBN 9780701177997 © £1039 (plus £x.xx p&p) 0870 429 6655 1 t is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam's interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages.
If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully. The first four stories are about old people, and the aged turn up in other stories, but in Jane Gardam's hands this does not mean knitting in front of daytime telly. One tale begins: At three o'clock in the morning over a hundred miles from home in a hotel I'd never heard of before that weekend, I broke my ankle in the bathroom of the ensuite bedroom where I was spending the night with my lover. He was my first lover. For thirty years I have been married to my husband, Ambrose.
One old lady falls in love — actually in love, not just a vague fondness — with a gorilla at the local zoo. Every day she goes and sits by his enclosure, becoming as much of an attraction to the visitors as the primate himself. In a wonderful penultimate scene, she realises with sudden clarity: 'I bore him All these years I have bored him I have literally bored him to death.' This, of course, is very funny and a less adroit writer would have left it at that. But Gardam manages instead to end the story, only a paragraph later, in such a way as to leave a tear in the eye.
It would be a callous reader who emerged from 'The Latter Days of Mr Jones' with only one tear. This is a story, about an old boy, 'the last of his tribe, the last of his kind', well over 80, inhabiting still his boyhood home, who sweeps the church, lives alone, misses his dead dogs. It is like that weepiest of tales, Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant, reconfigured for the 21st century. Mr Jones has what would now be called learning difficulties: he's a bit simple. He is accused of the rape of a young girl many years before, an exploitation of his innocence (in every sense of the word) which is agony to read. But something happens, while he is locking the church one evening in Advent, which makes everything all right for him Again, Gardam's touch is deft and light: this is not a mawkish story, albeit a magical one.
Other stories touch on Aids, abortion, racism, infidelity, but never preachily: Gardam's priority, always, is storytelling and the best stories rely on secrets. The fact that someone may not like their child very much, or that a spinster turns out to have slept with an old friend's husband, are of greater concern than politics or reproductive rights. And she's such a good writer: a nasty woman licks her spoon 'with a fat, pale tongue'; hens talk 'to each other in rusty voices'; a plain old lady has fingernails 'as broad as postage stamps'. I can't think of a lovelier sentence than this: 'He followed the whiteness of the woman and her child up the hill until the houses stopped and darkness spread before them like the sea.' This is Jane Gardam's 16th book of fiction: may it not be her last.
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