Life without father
Kate Hubbard
EASY PEASY by Lesley Glaister Bloomsbury, L14.99, pp. 256
Easy Peasy is a novel about the price paid for silence, for the unvoiced guilts, or secrets, beneath the seemingly tranquil sur- face of family life. The family in question is that of Zelda, the narrator, the proprietor of a second-hand clothes shop and the lover of an older woman called Foxy. As a child Zelda is regularly awoken by the screams and retching of her father. Such episodes are never discussed. When she is 29, her father commits suicide.
The narrative alternates between the past and the present, and if Glaister appears less engaged by the latter, it is hardly surprising that so is the reader. Zelda's grief is largely conveyed through disjointed syntax and rhetorical questions — 'I am angry with my father for dying. For choosing to die. How dare he? It is the most selfish thing. Dad! How dare you? Eh?'. In one sense the stilted inadequacy of her response is apt, for how do you mourn a stranger? 'Daddy', shielded by spectacles and newspaper, has been a remote figure, and Zelda is ignorant of the cornerstones of his emotional life — his experiences with the Japanese as a POW and his love for a prostitute, Wanda.
Wanda and her deaf son, Vassily, live next door to Zelda and her family. Not just a tart with a heart, Wanda, unlike, say, Foxy, has a vivid physicality, with her patchouli-scented hugs, her soft flesh glimpsed, embarrassingly, through trans- parent nighties, her gaily dispensed Bacardi and cokes. Zelda is unwillingly drawn to her. Vassily is another matter. He is vari- ously known, by Zelda and her school- mates, as 'Puddle-duck', for his flat-footed walk, and 'Dog-belly', for the strange deformity that has given him six nipples. Puny, sallow, dwarfed by ungainly hearing aids, he is fatally different. To Zelda's dis- gust, but inexplicably encouraged by her father, he becomes a regular visitor — 'I disliked him in the fierce way children can dislike weaklings, or misfits — with a kind of fear'.
Glaister's descriptions of childhood, whether of eating an Easter egg, or of Zelda's relationship with her older sister, Hazel, are instantly recognisable, some- times painfully so. Hazel, with her smugly tossed hair and cool taunts, is implacable and remorseless. 'You make it smell', she informs Zelda, her slavish side-kick, after she's slept in her bed. And she writes bril- liantly about the cruelty of children. Zelda maintains her loathing of Vassily as a kind of duty, glimmers of compassion, even lik- ing, are hastily stifled. The possibility of hurting him brings a horrible, crawling excitement. The torture Hazel and Zelda devise for Vassily is considerably more shocking than the eventual revelation of what lies behind their father's nightmares.
Zelda, the 'wrecker of silences', with her period clothes, her self-doubt and self-con- sciousness is a tiresome narrator, tiresome in the manner of the overgrown adolescent. `For Christ's sake, Zelda, get a grip', she says at one point. You can only agree. But her excavations of the past bring under- standing and compassion and, finally, abso- lution. The scenes where she visits Wanda, pathetically shrunken and dying of cancer as the juggernauts roar outside her Felix- stowe semi, are extremely touching. Here, too, she re-encounters Vassily, improbably transformed into a glamorous, happily married, cashmere-clad architect.
Easy Peasy is an uneven novel, but an absorbing one. If Glaister had brought the same authenticity with which she writes of childhood to adult experience it would have been a very good novel indeed.
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