Quietly excellent and very English
Anita Brookner
THE GOOSEBOY by A. L. Barker Hutchinson, £9.95 A. L. Barker is such a quiet writer that she often passes unnoticed while noisier performers commandeer the stage. Her quietness, however, conceals but does not mask a deadly precision, every word hit- ting its target. The Gooseboy is a short novel — a mere 151 pages — but it is filled with matter of a strangely sad and serious nature. The tone is matter-of-fact rather than melancholy, and frequently very fun- ny. Nevertheless what remains is an after- image of a wilderness, in which a reclusive matinee idol lives his life between films, willing himself down to the essentials in an attempt to make up for a career which consists of making up. In the event his true self is seen to be as inert as all his other selves, but this fact is dealt out airily and without a sense of tragedy.
The matinee idol is Douglas Bysshe, also known as Rex Snowdon. His unkempt home is Ile Marie, somewhere up the coast and inland from Nice. Off the screen Bysshe can accommodate ants, bats, mice, a ruined garden, a taciturn gardener, a housekeeper who smells of onions, and the gooseboy, or rather the deaf and dumb adolescent who periodically herds the geese that protect the property. The pecu- liarity of this boy is that he is disfigured, one half of his face calcined by an unknown accident or fire. Bysshe and the gooseboy tolerate each other very well, since no communication is possible between them. Love and pity are absent and are not regretted.
The authorial voice now shifts into the first person, that person belonging to Dulcie Pike, née Bysshe, from Sidcup, in Nice to reclaim her husband from the clutches of his teenage mistress, who just happens to be the daughter of Dulcie's best friend. Pike is not worth reclaiming, but Dulcie learned that years ago. It also just happens that she is used to him: she has the instincts of a woman of property. In her remembered childhood she hated her twin, with his romantic actorish looks, and re- served to herself all the commonplace attributes that he was lucky enough to do without. Life in Sidcup with Pike was probably not what she wanted, but she went for it anyhow.
In an awful hotel in Nice Dulcie finds the errant lovers. Pike, true to form, has put his back out; Dulcie is the only one who can manipulate it. But this bedroom farce does not end in the expected way, with marital virtue triumphant. The lovers sneak off, leaving the bill unpaid, and taking the car with them. Before departing Pike, in his one moment of triumph, reveals that the teenage mistress, uncon- vincingly called Cherrimay, is pregnant. Dulcie's sensible defences are cast down by this news. And anyway she needs money to get home. She makes her way to her brother Bysshe's villa both to talk and to seek a refund. The two have never been close, but in the event it seems they only have each other.
Bysshe, of course, is absent, making a film about an Albert Schweitzer look-alike in Africa. The way Bysshe is miscast is wonderfully described, as is his whole empty yet complicated personality. All Dulcie finds in the desiccated swamp of the garden is the gooseboy, with his ruined face. Sidcup virtues are equal to this, banishing the disgust and astonishment that others might feel — that Cherrimay, who followed her, does feel — into simple relief at finding another human being. Dulcie's reward is the one you may im- agine, years of Pike vanishing in one unforgettable instant, all the better for it being entirely wordless.
She is gone before Bysshe returns from Africa. He comes trailing a photographer and a journalist who are to do a feature on him and on the film. The photographer, one of the nastier photo-realist school, is of course enchanted by the gooseboy, whom he obsessively photographs. The journal- ist, Hilda Latouche, also nasty, has it in for Bysshe because he once had an affair with her sister-in-law, now dead by her own hand. The description of this affair, tenta- tive longing on the woman's side, bleak politeness on the man's, is beautifully done, and in fact evokes memories of A. L. Barker's other writings, uncomfortable affairs in the south of France being some- thing of a speciality in her work. The wretched Bysshe, stirred to something like sentience by the exploitation of the goose- boy, sees his cracked paradise vanishing for ever. But the gooseboy restores order by damaging the photographer's expensive equipment. When last seen he was wearing the photographer's hat.
It is difficult to see just how and why this is good. It is almost entirely without emotion: common sense is never betrayed. The whole impossible scenario is dealt out so fairly that one even accepts what would otherwise pass for a happy ending: Dulcie and Pike in the cinema watching Bysshe as Albert Schweitzer. But of course nobody is happy; it is simply that things have turned out for a miserable but dignified best. A. L. Barker is a deadly writer who counts her words, leaving none to go to waste. I wanted to quote, but gave up the attempt. Although I prefer her at full stretch, as in Relative Successes, this will do very well to go on with. Not insistent enough to be labelled 'stoical', she catches perfectly the downside of events, their very lack of emphasis giving her the tone she needs. She is a quietly excellent and very English writer, who believes in fatalism as others believe in action. She deserves to be read, and read again.
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