Winner of the glamorous granny award
Katie Grant
THE SPACE BETWEEN by Rachel Billington Orion, £16.99, pp. 316, ISBN 0752846922 Thin, beautiful, flame-haired fortysomething widows make perfect light-reading heroines. Alice Lightfoot is such a widow. We meet her lying naked on the rug with her granddaughter, and at once we know that this grandmother is no granny because her breasts swing rather than sag and, after three years of sexual purdah. she is ready to play the field. And quite a field she plays. No lonely hearts for Alice. Men present themselves to her on a plate, mainly through her job as an interviewer for a quality national newspaper, but should these ever fail, she could always opt for her dead husband's best friend. She can afford to pick and choose, which she does, and in doing so is inadvertently caught up in a curious plot involving Sir Brendan Costa, a super-rich businessman, a handsome deep-sea diver called Blue Carroway, gold bullion,
young offenders and the Scilly Isles. A sub-plot involving Alice's family keeps the home fires burning.
In a world full of terrors, there is endless room for escapism and this book provides it. Alice Lightfoot lives a life of metropolitan sophistication among the London chatterati, those for whom nothing is important unless it appears in a newspaper article or a magazine picture. Rachel Billington has her tongue firmly in her cheek as her story inches from the mildly coincidental to the wildly improbable while Alice, professional revealer of souls, apparently sees nothing beyond the end of her attractive nose. When the denouement finally comes, with bullets and literal cliffhangers, I was unaccountably reminded •of hours of enjoyment reading about the Famous Five on Kirrin Island, although Rachel Billington's heroine has graduated from lashings of ginger beer to glasses of champagne and from egg sandwiches to sea bass. Nevertheless, the same sense of enjoyment in both skulduggery and the good things in life remain.
From very early on in this, Rachel Billington's 17th novel, you know that the ending will be satisfactory. You may even know what it will be, which makes the book a little too long. Alice's interior life is not complex enough to hold the reader after the main plot has resolved itself, and some of the characters, for example Alice's friend Mitzi, seem superfluous in a book which is really an adventure story rather than an adult Bildungsroman. But it's fun to laugh, with the author, when Alice thinks that her love — I shan't tell you for whom — is 'a burden so heavy she'd kept the secret even from herself, when the man is so eminently suitable and so dashed decent that a more worthy recipient could hardly be found.
'They were in a hurry,' writes Billington near the end, tut, on the other hand, they had all the time in the world.' It is really nice to be able to report that, for Alice Lightfoot, the Space Between was simply an interlude before Happy Ever After.
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