Middle English miniature
Daniel Johnson
GEORGE'S LAIR by John Bayley Duckworth, £15.99, pp. 208 John Bay! 's late flowering as a novelist has probably surprised nobody as much as himself. Self-effacing as only the most exacting critics can be, the writer who had remained quiescent for 40 years felt able to re-emerge only after the professor retired. His marriage to Iris Murdoch turns out to have been a lifelong apprenticeship. This grand old couple deserves its place in liter- ary history alongside Lionel and Diana Trilling, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, Mme de Stael and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
The concluding work of Bayley's trilogy, George's Lair, is no less enjoyable than the preceding volumes; it is, indeed, the most fluent and probably the best of the three. The occasionally uneven tone of the earlier novels has here been refined, while their common territory remains unchanged: the dialectic of age and youth, appearance and reality, mendacity and sincerity. There is nothing didactic about Bayley's variations on the theme of the ordinary in extremis, but his authorial presence is discreetly hint- ed at by the sparing use of dialogue to break up long retrospective ruminations, the economy of effort in evoking scenes and individuals, the subordination of plot to character in a tale which has at least some of the hallmarks of an old-fashioned thriller.
One's sympathies are immediately engaged by Martha, who is middle-aged, middle-class and in the middle of an affair with a gloriously gormless younger man, George, who shares with her an endearing passivity, a fatalism in the face of adversity, which in the end proves to be their saving grace. They inhabit the indeterminate region west of London which is neither town nor country: Betjeman called it Metroland, but Bayley's Ear!wood has none of his cheery cosiness. Martha would dearly love to recreate that warmth in her big house, but her husband Alexander and grown-up children prefer junk food to her roast joints and puddings: It seemed as if they were all inhabiting the still intact ruins of a former culture. Provi- sionally living while waiting for it to come to its destined end?
The other amiable innocent is of course Ginnie, Bayley's earlier protagonist, still a publisher's reader but now also a wife and mother. Ginnie is, as usual, bewildered by the knowingness of those around her; but her married bliss has unsettled her unde- manding self-image.
Being alive had acquired too positive a meaning, too much of a point. She had done without such a point in life before. And it was when that brief horror, or nausea, over- came her that she realised she could do with- out it again.
I must confess that, ever since I read Alice, I have been a little in love with Ginnie — and not just because she reminds me so strongly of someone I am fond of. Ginnie seems to me a more credible and likeable heroine for our times than we have any right to expect.
A different kind of innocence is por- trayed in Ginnie's five-year-old daughter, Pinky, a self-possessed little madam who worships the inquisitive social worker, Mrs Peabody, her elusive father, Peter, and his Russian first wife, Vera — anybody, that is, apart from her mother. At one point Pinky announces that 'Muz Paybody' wants her to put a notice in the back of her car saying 'Fuck the Kids'. Ginnie responds: 'I don't think it's dignified to use that word with grown-ups.' Ginnie felt proud of turning the tables, but Pinky remained unmoved. 'I know,' she said scathingly. 'It's a children's word. That's why Muz Paybody wants it in the back of her car. So that all the little bug- gers will understand it.
Neither Martha's woodland trysts with George nor Ginnie's rich inner life are proof against the depredations of three sin- ister brothers: Martha's wealthy husband Alexander, a cynical bisexual; Ginnie's reli- ably unreliable husband Peter; and the inscrutable voyeur, Major Bobby. Though the brothers Grey are unscrupulous and predatory, they are also charming and mas- terful. Yet even these children of darkness are at sea in the world they inhabit: espionage, now a euphemism for dealing in drugs and arms, seems insufficiently immoral to sustain Bobby and Peter in their chosen twilight. George's Lair is a funny, unpretentious miniature, but it casts a gently ironical eye over the bizarre cultural palimpsest we call Middle Eng- land. This trilogy is not an aged sage's bit- ter farewell to passion, like Goethe's Marienbad Elegy, or a satire on a world gone mad in the manner of Waugh. Still, Bayley's conspicuous sanity makes him a senior citizen in our shrinking republic of letters.
Daniel Johnson is Assistant Editor (Op-Ed) of The Times.
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