Problems of keeping mum
Molly Guinness
GRANDMOTHER’S FOOTSTEPS by Charlotte Moore Penguin, £17.99, pp. 274, ISBN 9780670917068 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let you go?’, but Charlotte Moore actually asks more interesting questions, and is intelligent enough to show that it is rather up to those left behind to decide whether or not to let the past go.
Evelyn, Verity and Hester are all very different; Evelyn was a suffragette and a woman of letters, Verity a mouse-like woman of no particular intelligence or ambition, and Hester is tidy with cool intelligence. I know this because the author tells us, not really because she shows us. There is a slight sense that she doesn’t know her own characters very well; Moore spends a good deal of time establishing Verity as an uninteresting, unadventurous person and then suddenly sends her off on a hair-brained project with little purpose or explanation.
Hester’s motives are often similarly mysterious, but in this case it can work well. Hester is 40 and childless; as she sees her options narrowing, she finds decisions difficult and, because she has to choose the best of a bad lot, doesn’t know what she wants. Her relationship with her mother is amusing; Hester is obsessively inscrutable with Verity and has always refused to yield any information on inward or outward goings on. There is a good moment when she would like to walk round the garden of her old home one last time before it is sold, but cannot give her mother the satisfaction of discerning emotion in her. However, the times when a person is at their least expressive are not the best ones for gaining a sense of character, and Hester’s other appearances do not give much more guidance. She may be cool and impenetrable, but one would think that an omniscient narrator might give us a few more clues.
Character may be underplayed, but atmosphere certainly is not; in August there is a ‘syrup-coloured light that turns the afternoon into the best kind of childhood experience, like a Polaroid of memory’. Evelyn and Verity are very keen on gardening, so outdoor scenes tend to get a little lyrical: ‘in the orchard, the greengages were dropping off the trees like blobs of jam,’ and so on. Moore has a visual imagination, and is scrupulous about describing colours correctly; Hester buys a dress the colour of a
skinned peach, but with more colour in it. It was a colour you might see in a sunset ... not in the core of the sunset, but in the shiny sky above, for the little purple clouds to swim in. Or else it was the colour of a just-risen moon.
These flights of fancy are not too frequent, and for the most part Grandmother’s Footsteps offers some poignant portraits of women who are not quite happy, and tells their stories with sensitive restraint.
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