Appearances to the contrary
Anita Brookner
GOING INTO A DARK HOUSE by Jane Gardam Sinclair-Stevenson, £12.99, pp. 183
t is pleasant to report that Jane Gardam's stories are as good as ever, neither insubstantial nor commonplace. Similar collections published this season have proved marginally disappointing, Mavis Gallant revealing herself as man- nered, Rose Tremain as elusive (and illu- sive), and Mary Flanagan, arguably the most efficient, as perhaps too various. This is not to decry these excellent writers, merely to point out that collections of short stories more often than not leave the read- er dissatisfied. This may have something to do with their scanty presentation. Witness the present volume: eight stories, originally published in magazines, one of which I seem to have read more than once before. That Jane Gardam can make her mark with what is undoubtedly a minor offering is a tribute to her peculiar talent, which, although robustly English and eschewing post-modern tricks, conquers by stealth, as all good fiction should, and surprises one with a convincing account of eccentricities triumphing over the most mundane of circumstances.
Jane Gardam's world is cautious, middle- class, respectable, and capable of extreme wildness, like Mrs Florrie Ironside, the heroine of 'Telegony'. She is a doughty Victorian matron who has been left a substantial amount of money by her late husband and who reigns over Shipley as well as over her oppressed daughter Molly. This paragon falls in love with an Italian photographer and in later life haunts his birthplace, which happens to be Cremona. But Molly gets there first, or rather the photographer does. The curious thing is that Molly's daughter Alice inherits not her own father's features but the photogra- pher's, although there was no physical contact between the original pair: Florrie was chaste, Molly was (relatively) chaste, and Signor Settimo lit out for Cremona before the fuss started. Telegony, accord- ing to Jane Gardam's explanation, is when sexual intercourse produces offspring who look like the first or phantom lover. Alice, according to this law, looks entirely Italian. But it is thwarted Florrie who has the last word.
This story is the most elaborate in a collection which is marked by a laconic simplicity. Curious things happen in placid English settings, as when two nuns, convey- ing one of their community to a hospice, find something untoward in their car on the journey back to the convent. Or the very old lady, taken to visit a stately home by her daughter, who successfully com- pletes not one journey but two in the com- pany of the chatelaine. Characters are on the whole middle-aged or elderly: young people, when they appear, are obviously unfledged. Yet my favourite story contains just such a young person, Klaus, a morose Swiss student, sent to live with relatives in Kent after the death of his mother. Being Swiss, Klaus is a stoic; he is also starving. The narrator, co-opted to tutor him for his Common Entrance exam to a public school, sees at a glance that the household subsists on baked beans and sliced bread and determines to cook Klaus a meal. The meal she cooks for him inspires wonder and envy in the reader, who is unlikely to be so expert, so extravagant, so grandiosely indifferent to calories and cholesterol. This is followed by a tea of even more imperial splendour. Klaus gets into public school and in due course becomes a cantonal judge in Geneva. He retains happy memo- ries of England, he tells his erstwhile tutor all those years later. Unfortunately the 'It cuts two milliseconds off the journey.' food was terrible.
These stories can be read in an after- noon, and will be. I finished them with a smile on my face, Those similarly gratified can be directed to Jane Gardam's earlier collections — The Sidmouth Letters, The Pangs of Love — and to her excellent novel, The Queen of the Tambourine. There they will find the no-nonsense approach that is a convenient cover for so many untoward happenings. They will appreciate the fact that surprises are so near at hand, since this is a fact they have already veri- fied for themselves. Jane Gardam has this gift: she convinces the reader of her own
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