Unfortunate women of Cambridge
Anita Brookner
AIR AND ANGELS by Susan Hill Sinclair-Stevenson, f13.95, pp. 276 Aclergyman in his mid fifties and a girl of 15. It sounds unpromising, and in many ways it is, but such is Susan Hill's skill, in her first novel for 16 years, that one accepts the premise and follows the story, which hovers uneasily between a love affair and a picture of English, more specifically Cambridge, life in the early years of this century. But if the love affair is pure (or nearly pure), the attendant circumstances are dire, and it is the story behind the story which in many ways is more persuasive.
The Reverend Thomas Cavendish is a cleric and a don at an unnamed Cambridge college, probably King's, since there is a magnificent altarpiece (here ascribed to Giorgione) in the chapel. This Cambridge college appears to boast only one pupil, Eustace Partridge, who is forced to sacri- fice his promising career when he goes home to marry the girl whom he has made pregnant. This is but one of many straws in the wind, since the novel is or can be read as having to do with sexual blight. Thomas Cavendish lives with his unmarried sister Giorgiana and has always had her unstint- ing devotion: since he scarcely notices this she is forced to spend her days writing beg- ging letters to influential people in order to raise money for a home for fallen girls. Giorgiana spends a lot of her time in tears, or suffering from a cold, as well she might. Her ambition is to persuade her brother to marry her friend Florence Bowering, so that she can escape from Cambridge and go off on her travels. This, of course, she never does.
Thomas Cavendish is one of those men who madden women. He is handsome, polite, devout, and unfailingly indifferent. He has reached the mid-point of a success- ful career and his name has gone forward in the election for the mastership of his col- lege. His passion is for birds: he has an aviary at the back of his house, and he peri- odically goes off to the north Norfolk marshes to lie in the bottom of a boat and observe seabirds. He wrecks all this peace and promise by falling suddenly and vio- lently in love with a girl whom he sees one day on a bridge, one hand resting on the rail, and the other holding a parasol. It is the stance, the attitude of the girl, which fires this fatal inclination, and the attitude is referred to, and thus established, in the prologue to the novel so as to fix it in the reader's mind.
If the love affair had remained tied to an attitude, this reader would have felt more comfortable. But not entirely. Milan Kundera, in his new novel, Immortality, ties the reader's attention to the power of an attitude and arranges his narrative around it. It fails to work. Nor does the attitude on the bridge work more successfully here. A 55-year-old clergyman might well have been struck by the grace of an unknown girl, but to descend at once into amour fou is hardly in tune with what we know of his character.
It has to be said that I read this novel as a scathing criticism of late Victorian morals, but surely even these were more expansive? If Giorgiana is cast in the tradi- tional spinster role, and her friend Florence as the moneyed and predatory widow, what are we to make of Adele Hemmings, who lives with her aunt and who slips out, naked, into the lane at night, or of Amelia Hartshorn, governess to Kitty Moorehead, the girl on the bridge, before she was on the bridge and at home with her parents in Calcutta? These characters are little more than stereotypes, although Miss Hill weaves them into a convincing pattern. Indeed the Indian sections are among the most successful in the book.
We are asked to believe that Kitty, in Cambridge to complete her education, falls in love in her turn with Thomas Cavendish. This love is very nearly brought to fruition, in a boathouse in Norfolk, and later beside the sea. Kitty gravely removes her clothes and allows Thomas to worship her. Today this would probably constitute child abuse; it remains difficult to say how prevalent this type of behaviour was at the beginning of the century. In any event, it wrecks Cavendish. He withdraws his name from the list of possible candidates for the mas- tership of his college and is later glimpsed as a senile figure, wandering, saucerless teacup in hand, on the Backs, while a rather more populated Cambridge sets out to celebrate May Week. Love has done him no good at all, although in his own estima- tion it has provided fulfilment in an arid life.
`And Kitty ?', asks Susan Hill sharply, in the last line of this strange novel, which will undoubtedly be extremely popular. Kitty, in the book, is unfledged, and may remain so. But she will have had the benefit of a great deal of attendant nature writing, with the pathetic fallacy going into overdrive. Weather dominates Thomas Cavendish's Cambridge, as if in sympathy with all those women he has ruined. Unfortunate women abound. They are so unfortunate that Thomas Cavendish's adventure seems, in comparison, almost whimsical. That is the book's main weakness. Besides that, its determined innocence conceals perversity, even perversion. In preferring the former to the latter, the author has written one of two possible novels, but may have taken the easier, if more angelic, route.
Previous page
