15 OCTOBER 1983, Page 23

Pitiless

Harriet Waugh

Good Night Sweet Ladies Caroline Blackwood (Heinemann £7.95)

Caroline Blackwood's new book of short stories sardonically entitled Good Night Sweet Ladies forces the reader to engage in five separate dark moods. It is a bit like having five visits to the dentist; the reader cannot but be aware of his own stoicism in staying the course. A couple of times the sessions turn out to be less painful than expected but there is still a need to brace up before embarking on the next. And the next inevitably turns out to be a real cruncher.

In some of the stories the reader inhabits the minds of desperate women as they squirrel wretchedly about inside their heads looking for some kind of release, structure or meaning that will make their lives possi- ble. Needless to say they do not find it. In two of the stories their pain is so suf- focating that I was unable to read either in one sitting. This feeling of claustrophobia is made worse because of the bleak power of Caroline Blackwood's prose. The only release lies in her gift for fine, hard-edged imagery that sometimes rings out above the gloom that she is deliberately engendering. However, there is little pity in her either for her readers or her characters. The character that is treated the least sympathetically is the hospital matron in the story called 'The Matron'. It is the first of the stories and as such is a little off-putting. She treats the disintegration of the matron's character in a brutally formal manner. I did not feel that she had any real understanding of her. In- stead she hit out at a possible vulnerable point in this formidable woman's psyche until it crumbled and gave beneath the onslaught and delivered up the ghost of a gargoyle for vivisection.

Not all the stories are quite so pitiless; my favourite, Addy, which tells of a woman going out to a dinner party leaving her dog to die in her absence will be in my personal

anthology of best stories I have read. Mrs Burton, the ruluctant owner of Addy is stricken by guilt. She is abandoning Addy on the night that she suddenly realises the dog will die — Addy has been digging with her weak legs at the sitting room carpet: digging her grave, trying pathetically as usual not to be a nuisance, while she is going out to dinner to the house of a smart woman whom she hardly knows, does not care for, and who makes her feel inferior. As Mrs Burton fails to eat her food or make conversation — 'Her soup no longer seem- ed like soup. As if she were hallucinating she saw it as a dangerous lake and she felt she ought to dive in and try and save the drowning croutons. But somehow some- thing stopped her and she could only stare at them in panic and watch them as they perished'. Addy's and her own inadequate lives are unfurled for her and our inspec- tion. Her humdrum tale of betrayal and disappointments, of never having been anything, is seen against her vision of Addy's stupid expectation in the giving and receiving of affection.

Although Mrs Burton's desperate anxiety and later desolation touches the sensibilities of the reader, Angelica, the heroine of a harsher story, does not, despite the vivid authenticity of feeling that Caroline Blackwood brings to the writing. This is one of the stories that is laid as an angry burden on the reader. It is also the longest, and possibly the most important. Angelica is a rich, ageing, one-time actress who has been left by her gigolo, a pretty young man whom she wore as a jewel to enhance her fading beauty. She is now suffering a neurotic collapse brought on by loss of self- esteem. As she wanders around Brompton Cemetery, communing with the grave stones, her concentrated misanthropy is ex- pressed by a feeling of extreme revulsion at the look of peoples' ears. 'The young men seemed quite as insensitive as the old ones, expecting her to enjoy making conversation while they made no effort to prevent her from seeing the repulsive hanging skinflaps of their lobes ... Sometimes she found the women were almost worse than the men, for she felt there was something deceitful in the way they seemed to be trying to hide the pink deformities that sprouted like fungi from both sides of their faces by draping them with coils of silken hair.' There are quite a few pages of this. Angelica does, however, for a brief period, find consola- tion by summoning up the ghost of a dead colonel whom she endows with the looks and sensibility that were so obviously lacking in her absent lover. She grows ashamed of her grinding egotism and looks set for a period of relative tranquillity. This, unhappily, is shattered before she leaves the cemetery.

The other two stories make more comfor- table reading because they develop in a con- ventional way so that the final awfulness that they betray dawns on one gradually. 'Olga', the story of a man revealing to a friend the depth of his hatred ,for his glamorous, dying mother is masterly.