No! I am not Prince Hamlet . . .
Kate Hubbard
FALSE PRETENCES by Lee Langley Chatto, £12, pp. 289 Susan, one of two recurring characters in Lee Langley's collection of stories, sub- scribes to the 'repertory theory of life', which she explains thus: Each of us thinks we're the leading player in our drama, but at the same time we're supporting characters, spear carriers even, in another play, someone else's.
It's a theory most elegantly illustrated in False Pretences.
. Whilst the stories themselves shift in time and place between London, Wales, Australia, Japan and India, they are linked by the presence of two women, Susan and Josie, whether singly or together (they forge a friendship, built on common circumstances rather than sympathy, in middle age), centre stage, hovering on the sidelines, or just out of sight. In 'Brocken's Spectre' Susan is a young woman, slim, beautiful, the object of romantic interest, struck by the irrational terrors of a friend, a mother, for her baby. In 'Tango', the charming tale of Gloria, a lonely office Worker who discovers fire and passion on the dance floor, Susan is a mere footnote, as Miss Ross, the teacher of an evening class Gloria attends in the hope of meeting Mr Right. Many of these stories hinge on moments Of choice, especially on those leading to Involvement or non-involvement, to a solitary or domestic existence. Susan opts for the unruffled but stagnant waters of autonomy, and Josie for romance and fami- 1Y life — a lover who disappoints her, a husband who dies prematurely, children who are a source of anxiety. Both states are shown to have their satisfactions and their griefs. The sense of small dramas, with their attendant pathos and comedy, running con- currently and tangentially to each other, is beautifully caught in 'Bolivian Sailors Dream of the Sea', the literary equivalent ;0 a Renaissance painting. Here, in an bridal piazza, a photographer snaps a bridal couple emerging from the town hall and remembers his dead wife. The bride, confronted with her new husband's unexpected and hideous choice of suit — pistachio green with a broderie anglaise border — harbours misgivings, whilst in the corner of her vision a pickpocket stalks two tourists, one of whom is Susan, grown stout and solid, watching a young busker play, and reflecting that 'she too would like to dance, to shake her branches in the sun'.
Langley's stories are a pleasure for their shimmering irony and humour and for the precision and delicacy of observation — a baby's fingernail is 'no bigger than a lentil', an Indian matron 'undulates comfortably like a silk-wrapped walrus'. But there is also something formally pleasing about the way in which biographical detail falls into place, piece by piece, as Susan and Josie emerge as composites. The circumstances of the road accident in Delhi that killed Susan's parents and coloured her life are only fully revealed by a Mr Singh, a prosperous Indian businessman, whose rickshaw indirectly caused it and for whom it was merely a passing irritation. Character is viewed not just as matured by time, but through differing lenses. Josie, prickly and glamorous to Susan, is vulnerable before an old lover, and a kindly benefactress to a homeless old lady (if these stories have a flaw, it's a streak of sentimentality). Beneath the surface lightness of False Pretences is a process of layering, of patterning, the satisfactions of a novel in fact.
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