Young pretenders
Auberon Waugh
Harriet Said . . . Beryl Bainbridge (Duckworth £2.35) Pasmore David Storey (Longman £2.00) I Want Adrian Henri and Nell Dunn (Cape £1.50) A girl of thirteen develops a morbid interest in an old man who lives in her village. Under the influence of her friend, called Harriet, this develops into a crush. Harriet, who is a year older and infinitely more precocious than the narrator, is a totally evil child, probably a psychopath, and the narrator is completely under her spell. Between them, they plot to humiliate the old man called Mr Biggs who is easily tempted into making sexual advances. The book opens with the children coldbloodedly walking away from• the old man's house and discussing when they should start screaming. We assume, throughout the build-up to this event which comprises the rest of the book that they have either successfully tempted this old man, called Mr Biggs to some illicit sexual act and are now going to denounce him to the police or, rather more likely, that he has resisted them at the last moment and they are going to denounce him just the same for crimes he has never committed — a fairly frequent occurrence, we are told, when teenage girls are rebuffed.
In fact, the explanation is quite different and rather less satisfactory. Mr Biggs has violated, if that is the word, our extremely willing narrator the previous day; for no very good reason they have returned to his home and find him drunk; they decide to humiliate him further by rearranging the furniture but are surprised by the unexpected arrival of Mrs Biggs whom they inadvertently murder. At the beginning of the book they are planning to frame Mr Biggs for this murder—apparently with his connivance.
As my summary may have hinted, the book's preoccupations are a trifle eccentric and many might suppose that it would appeal only to the more jaded end of the market. But Miss Bainbridge's description of the psychopathic Harriet is totally convincing — her ability to charm anyone instantly, her cruelty and emotional coldness, her brutal father and stupid mother, her beauty and promiscuity. Harriet's dominance over the narrator — a basically decent girl, but silly and malleable — is beautifully described, too. The sudden flights into a terrible grown-up perception by one character: " At thirteen there is little you can expect to salvage from losing someone but experience" contrast with the childish acceptance by the other to make what I can only describe as a thoroughly enjoyable horror experience. It is very seldom that writers of intelligence and imagination lend their talents to a really good horror story, and this one could scarcely be bettered for the accuracy of its observations and the maintenance of tension. Its only fault, as I have indicated, is in the ham-fisted 'surprise twist' at the end. This is made necessary, I suppose, by the ' flashback ' at the beginning, which Miss Bainbridge must have judged necessary to awaken interest in the first place. Piers Paul Reed used the same trick to good effect in his last novel — The Parsorfs Daughter — but I don't think it was necessary here. Far better if she had started the novel at its beginning and concluded it in the manner originally suggested by the flashback, with two depraved children denouncing Mr Biggs for some sexual misdemeanour, whether real or imaginary. However, we really must not complain about a first-class horror story which wins its author a spectral silver medal and holiday for two at Blackpool.
"This is unquestionably Mr Storey's most important novel," said Messrs Longman on the dustcover. For four weeks now I have been groaning and pushing the book away at that sentence. Not even this novel was quite important enough to save Messrs Longman from the humiliation of admitting publicly that they are not competent to publish novels. People do not read novels in order to arrange them into little hierarchies of importance. Only clapped-out literary editors and reviewers do that. People read novels to have their imaginations stimulated in one way or another. If Messrs Longman had only drawn attention to the more stimulating parts of Mr Storey's books, instead of drawing attention only to their importance, this unhappy firm might just have pulled through.
The narrative concerns a young married university lecturer of working-class origins, who starts being troubled by dreams that he is running in a race and losing. Now that, of course, is quite interesting. I never knew the workingclasses had dreams before. As a result of this unpleasant experience, our hero loses all sexual desire for his wife, called Kay. He delivers a few ritual harangues about what it feels like to be working-class — "I come from a class of people," Pasmore says, "of which only a hundred years ago, only one in ten survived to the age of thirty. Instincts bred from •that don't die out as quickly as you imagine," and then starts an affair with a strange faceless lady called Helen. When Helen's husband has him beaten up, he forgets about his class for a bit and goes quietly, classlessly mad in the approved literary fashion:
He saw, first of all, a black disc . . . It was like a hole — but then a hole without dimensions. It was merely an absence of things. He felt himself sliding towards it. It was, on the one hand, like a hole in the top of his head; it was, on the other, like a hole in the ground. It was both within him and without. He felt himself slipping over the edge. He was drawn into it and consumed by the darkness.
Poor fellow. Jolly well better look out, I'd say. It would be easy by selective quotations, to give the impression that the book is so crawling with clichés that there will be nothing else left when they are removed. I particularly liked the end, when Pasmore goes back to his wife who has been deserted by her lover (who made Pasmore frantically jealous) and the happy ending is all lined up for serialisation in the Times Saturday Review: "Yet something had changed. It was hard to describe. He had been on a journey. At times it seemed scarcely credible he had survived."
Ho! ho! ho! What about all those generations of working-class,supiiy0? Apt in fact the narrative moves easily and even if the dialogue is sometimes boring — dialogue as spoken is never worth reporting — the novel boils down to quite an imaginative version of the familiar husband's lament, my-marriage-is-hell-butlet's-look-at-the-alternative.
Again, it would be easy to ridicule the new slim volume by Nell Dunn and Adrian Henri, about a poor-little-rich-girl's love affair and continuing sentimental relationship with a member of the working-classes from Liverpool. Enemies frequently accuse me of being obsessed by class, but I do assure you that this is what these books are about. This is how Dolly and Albert converse: "Oh why don't you say Run away with me '? We could get a cottage on the edge of wild country and read Shelley. Away the moor is dark beneath the moon ' "
"You could be a miner, the house full of coaldust and the sweet smell of our loving. I'd bath you when you came home of a night and make a 'fry-up' for our tea — little cottagey curtains in the windows — all night in bed together."
And that's about it, really. It would be easy to sneer at the humourlessness of it all, at the spurious sex-mad whimsy, at the photograph of Miss Dunn trying desperately to look like a working-class housewife and M. Henri looking like a Spanish grandee. But I found a kind of hopeless, vulnerable honesty in all the stale and rubbishy ideas flying backwards and forwards between this undeniably ridiculous couple. By the end, their honesty shone through and one found oneself profoundly moved, just as, perhaps, Miss Dunn could still be moved much against her settled judgement by a banal hymn to the Virgin Mary in school chapel.
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