Life goes on
A.N. Wilson.
Darling Daughters Elizabeth Troop (Granada pp. 252, 46.95) Nobody cares how Cord elia got on with the King of France. Everyone prefers the bits of David Copperfield in which he is vying with Mr Murdstone for his mother's affections to the chapters when he is in love with the dreadful little Emily, Dora or Agnes. Sons are far less boring than Lovers. Parents and children are a' much more reliable subject for novelists than Love (often thought to be the central concern of fiction). Many modern novels bear out this truth. The Man Who Rode Ampersand is the best example; but Elizabeth Troop's latest book, Darling Daughters provides a fascinating handling of the theme.
Presumably the reason for all this isthat we forget being in love, but we never forget our parents. Yet, reassessing the changing pattern of a lifetime's relationship between a mother and a daughter is not an easy thing to do in the space of 80,000 words. Ferdinand Mount achieved it for Son and Father by juxtaposing a series of scenes from the imagined past of Harry Cotton— the man who rode Ampersand — with the old man of the present; both figures equally mysterious to his narrator son. Elizabeth Troop is less concerned to draw a portrait of the mother (Eva) than to draw a portrait of her relationship with her unsatisfactory daughter Kate, who narrates the tale. She employs a comparable method of flashback to Mr Mount's. But in this case, she uses the device of contrasting the narrator's actual life with a fictitious account of her childhood in Blackpool. The real Kate, in childhood, is described as the fictitious Sarah; Eva at the beginning of the book a gasping old woman in a modern geriatric ward — becomes Ellie, a rather tarty, chaotic young mother in wartime Blackpool, not altogether to be trusted with lodgers. The result is an eminently readable, often very funny book; and by the end, you feel that the narrative tricks have almost paid off.
Kate then, herself now cascading into middle age, starts the book feeling guilty about her hospital-bound mother Eva, who, when she is not gasping on the drip, pushes about 'the plaid shopping cart that all women of her generation use, part crutch, part companion. They get under one's feet in buses, on the pavement, like the young mothers wth push chairs. Thank God I have left one stage and not yet entered the other, I have opted out of the world of women with miniature wheels'. By the end of the book, her own daughter, Jennifis pregnant, and Kate, who admits to loving babies with 'a physical besottedness' comes to view miniature wheels with less detachment.
The story — if the book has one — concerns a television programme which is being made out of one of Kate's novels. She neglects her mother in hospital, partly because she is in love with the odious Simon (the T.V. producer), and partly because she is so anxious that the team of actors will manage to capture authentically some of her Blackpool childhood. Not all that long ago, the B.B.C. dramatised Harriet Said and then got Beryl Bainbridge on to the set to say how it had all been in Real Life. The novel in this story is not the same as Harriet Said but it has a strongly Bainbridgean flavour. It was hard to tell whether this was deliberate. 'The third of September 1939, unless you were Gran, Ellie and Sarah, was notable for the fact that Britain declared war on Germany that day. They noted that, but it was also the day they moved out of Rathmines Avenue, to two unfurnished rooms, a little way away.'
Sarah is a very Bainbridgean heroine, a scarcely adolescent girl with hopeless parents, disapproved of by her religious relations, unable to summon up the right moods for the right occasions. She ought to be lusting after men, but she finds herself so hungry that she lusts after chips and ice-cream; and, even when Lev, the lodger with whom she is in love, tries to seduce her, she finds she is not enjoying it. Each scene with Lev is observed with merciless ear and epigrammatic brevity. But these are not the only childhood memories evoked in the figure of Sarah. I loved the moment when her Aunt Lena gets her christened. Sarah wants to be called 'Barbara Stanwyck', but she never managed to get out the word 'Stanwyck'. 'The vicar came back for sherry and the usual spread. Margaret, from Keswick, looked strained . . . Lena kissed Sarah gravely, as if she were recovered from a long illness', Memorable too, is the chapter when Sarah answers an advertisement which reads GIRL WANTED. ARTIST'S STUDIO, WEEKEND or EVENINGS. 'The studio was a long shed, where a line of blue-overalled girls sat painting dots on the turbans of negress wall plaques'.
When the Bainbridge novel is over,' and we leave fictitious young Sarah for real middle-aged Kate, it seems as though Darling Daughters is nearly over too. This impression is correct. In a novel which had promised so much about Kate's relationship with her mother, it is rather peremptory just to be told 'Eva has made one of her miraculous recoveries, escaping the grim reaper yet again'.
The opening of the novel positively demands more about Eva than this. But, for all that, the final chapter is not altogether a failure, and it ends, much more in the manner of a clever T.V. play, with the reminder that Kate too has a daughter; and Jenni herself is great with child. It is not an interesting ending, because we have not been told anything about Jenni until she appears, rather tear-stained, in the Blackpool hotel in the last two pages. But it leaves you with the poignant sense that, as a northern poet once put it, Ob-la-di, ob-lada, life goes on.
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