Fiction
Food for thought
Peter Ackroyd
The Sly Servant Caroline Dilke (Chatto and Windus £3.50).
This first novel, which ought to be followed by many more, opens on a fragile note. Polly, an ordinary girl of indeterminate appearance, has bought some violets for Maggy, her rich "friend": "It gave confidence to arrive bearing a gift." But perhaps they might seem too cheap, or too few. Polly comes to a decision: She thrust the violets deep into the hedge before coming to her friend's door." From such small incidents are great characters formed, and from such implausible and inexplicable acts does Miss Dilke fashion a subtle and entertaining, if somewhat sly (if I may use her word) narrative. The Sly Servant is a prime example of a genre once thought extinct, the devious social comedy: "Leaning back a little in front of her mirror Maggie, face to face with her own image, had two thoughts. The first was: is my marriage held together by lack of adulterous opportunity? the second was: some day my prince will come."
Maggie, quite grand as she is, at least has the time for a perspective on such matters. Polly, on the other hand, is a quintessential Polly — pretty Polly, poor Polly, Polly put the kettle on, all the dear unliberated Pollies of the world reach their Pollyness in Polly. Or so it seems. But the great advantage of social comedy is that its characters never quite fill the roles assigned to them. Polly is not daft and, as the practically Chaucerian title of the book suggests, she has her wayward moments. She decides to leave her husband, an unwordly but dubiously talented painter called Bob, and become a cook/housekeeper for Sir Frances Horsefield, Bart, Maplington House, somewhere by the sea: "Some international dishes would be appreciated — salary negotiable."
It is in this atmosphere of the leisured appreciation of the culinary arts that her gifts of close observation and exact description come into their own. The country house has been a staple of English fiction for two centuries, and it needs only a few palpable hits to bring the whole mythical menage to life again. Who could better the retiring Nanny: "She was scrawny in her limbs but forthright and hefty in body like a cargo ship, and walked with a roll like a sailor. She had hair that had once been frizzed up and dyed to attract attention, though with no sexual motive." And we have all met Lady Woollacott across a crowded room: ". . she was thin and angular and honourable-looking as if she had been brought up to be a lady and there had been no escaping it; yet she had bright eyes and a head held to one side as if she were a wading bird that had just swallowed a fish." And what about Hugh Speider, who looks and behaves like a "friendly frog?" The mind boggles. Of such cameo parts is Society made, and where Society leads comedy must inevitably follow.
In this jewelled setting, Polly has turned into a 'treasure,' a miraculous cook whose culinary habits knit the household together in astonishing ways. Sir Francis, Bart becomes popular among his friends again, and even the countryside becomes inhabitable. This, of course, considerably annoys Maggie who has been receiving Polly's inarticulate letters with a potent mixture of disdain and vulgar curiosity. She becomes obsessed by Maplington and its inhabitants. Who is this Dr Spider? What is he? How can Polly have the good fortune of mixing with such stars, and stay so lumpish? Bob may have the answer: "So, I was thinking, if everything's subjective anyway, then it doesn't really matter what your life's like, does it? It might be deadly boring to anyone else, but if there are interesting things going on in your brain, do you see, that's the only reality you have." "Isn't that something to do with philosophy?" Maggie asked. Some reference to Bishop Berkeley wavered uncertainly across her mind.
Only a very skilful writer could get the dialogue as precise as that, and the passage is only equalled by the succeeding sentences: "Maggie was in a familiar, nightmare situation of trying to seem more intelligent than she was. She was rattling coat racks, rows and rows of them, trying to find the lost coat of a stranger."
And, as in all of the best stories, everyone comes down to Maplington. Will they 'find' themselves in the conventional pastoral manner? Miss Dilke plays with her ideal reader through the book, always the tease, always promising more than she delivers: and what we do get is, eventually, something very much like a happy ending. But the book has too much matter to be laid aside that easily; within the safe matrix of the country house. Caroline Dilke has engineered some very sharp character portraits, some very funny dialogue and even a few shards of mysticism. It is all busting out all over. What does in fact keep the book together is, literally, food. It provides a focus for most of the important situations, it provides the staple for much of the dialogue, and it engineers a great deal of the plot. For that academic exercise alone, Caroline Dilke deserves the plaudits of those of us who are still reading novels: she also has style, wit and perception.
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