Dale A Helping Hand

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-914198-34-2
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

This is a tale of ruthless greed, exploitation and suffocating, skin-crawling terror. Middle-aged Josh and Maisie Evans lead a seemingly unremarkable life. When their elderly lodger Flo dies and leaves them her Estate, they head to Italy on holiday, to take in the sea air and let the sun soak into their bones. There they meet Mrs Fingal, a wealthy widow who lives unhappily with her grown-up niece. When Josh and Maisie bond with her over ice-cream and daily ambles, it's only natural that they arrange for her to move in with them once home. It suits everyone. For fans of Shirley Jackson, Roald Dahl and Muriel Spark, A Helping Hand is a sharp and nasty slice of darkness, and a reminder that beneath the suburban respectability of cups of tea and genteel chitchat another world lurks, and that the real horrors of this world can all too often be found behind discreet net curtains.

Celia Dale was born in 1912 to parents who were both on the stage. She was once a secretary to Rumer Godden, and also worked as a publisher's advisor and a book reviewer. Her first novel, The Least of These, was published in 1943, and she went on to write twelve others. She won the 1986 Crime Writer's Association Veuve Cliquot Short Story Award for 'Lines of Communication', which appears in her only short story collection, A Personal Call and Other Stories. She died in 2011.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dale, Celia

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Josh and Maisie Evans like to lend a helping hand, especially to vulnerable older women with nobody else to turn to. They’re full of ordinary, practical kindness: she’s a retired nurse, a wonderful cook and a skilled seamstress. He’s witty and patient, happy to listen to endless stories he’s heard before, to flirt a little, to offer a foot rub, to laugh at tired jokes that weren’t that funny the first time around. Together, they live in a featureless London suburb, have a nicely fitted-out spare room and know how to make an older woman feel part of the family. ‘Auntie’ Flo (no relation) lived with them for a short while, until she died – not unexpectedly – leaving them both a small something in her will as a thank-you for their kindness.

Which is why it is so lucky (unbelievably so) that they run into Lena Kemp and Cynthia Fingal while on a little break in Rimini, Italy, paid for by Auntie Flo’s legacy. Mrs Fingal has been a widow for some time and her only sister is dead. Her niece by marriage, Lena, has taken her in, but things aren’t working out. Lena finds her elderly aunt selfish, demanding and boring. She’s full of disgust at her digestive complaints. And anyway, there’s a man she’d like to invite around in the evenings without her aunt inflicting the same old reminiscences on him. Mrs Fingal loves a bit of male companionship, you see. When you find yourself a widow after a long and happy marriage, you miss, as she keeps saying, ‘the little attentions’. Josh is very happy to provide them, while Maisie in turn offers friendship and understanding to the resentful and put-upon Lena. The pieces line up as if on a chessboard: Lena’s patience is wearing thin, Cynthia’s vulnerability and loneliness is palpable, Auntie Flo’s room is newly empty. The obvious solution presents itself.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the heroes and villains would arrange themselves neatly on opposite sides of the room. But Dale’s novel is more subtle. One of her early critics described her work as having the ‘quiet wit of Jane Austen – with murder’ and it is in her evocation of the complexities of human nature that the novel really rewards the reader. Josh is mildly repulsive from the outset, his bowels not coping with Mediterranean food, his nasty habit of touching up the waitresses swiftly and mercilessly dramatised. Maisie is sly and manipulative, acting the pimp as she directs her husband’s attentions towards their latest mark. Lena is selfish and obnoxious, and the obvious pleasure she takes in humiliating her frail aunt in front of new friends who seem to care for her is only shocking to a reader who has never been exhausted by the needs of another. Poor Cynthia Fingal may be innocent, and when time starts to confuse her and she begins to re-experience fresh grief for a daughter lost decades ago our hearts break for her. But she is also – and in making us experience this, Dale makes us complicit – really, really irritating.

Dale demands that we share Maisie’s annoyance at Cynthia’s endless fretting, the circular and self-absorbed repetitions of her conversation, her girlish, sickly flirting with Josh. Cynthia suspects something is going on quite early, but she is not only helpless, she is resourceful, as all humans with genuine need are. While wondering why she’s no longer allowed to use the good bedsheets and where her suitcase has gone, she romances and woos Josh into her bedroom for the massages, rubs and flirtatious conversation her heart desires. There’s a nasty transaction here: she won’t ask awkward questions about her pension book if she gets the dose of attention she needs from Josh. It is not only the flirting, of course – the barter system between them runs deeper. Josh sees that ‘inside this heap of old flesh peeped a girl, a bride, a young mother, ridiculous and sad’. And Cynthia Fingal needs, most of all, to be seen. Josh plays along because he is in need too – his life is infinitely easier if Maisie’s plans go the way she wants. We can enjoy disapproving of Maisie’s increasingly cruel style of nursing, which has Cynthia locked up in her bedroom for days on end, subsisting on tea and bread and butter and never seeing a friendly face, yet Dale does not let us forget what it might feel like to be connected to someone who needs and needs but cannot give back.

A Helping Hand was published in 1966: the year of the Moors murders trial and the Aberfan disaster. Dale’s first readers, some of whom would have painful memories of the time when you didn’t call the doctor if you couldn’t afford to pay his bill, were keenly attuned to matters of vulnerability and responsibility. The novel was prescient, too: it would be another twenty years before the word ‘co-dependency’ became common parlance with the publication of Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More, the book that put a name to that sickly, self-serving kind of help that damages and controls what it pretends to cherish. Dale’s interest in the cold-blooded economics of care – the way the sums, if we insist on doing them, will never add up – is stitched into every scene and subplot of this disturbing novel. She never misses an opportunity to linger not only on the ways in which we belong to each other but how much the belonging costs in food and board and electricity bills and laundry and who owes who what and for which services rendered. Josh and Maisie refer to Cynthia as their ‘PG’ or ‘paying guest’ and the complexities contained in this phrase gesture towards Dale’s persistent interest in the hidden and explicit economics of hospitality.

Dale would return to these themes repeatedly. In A Dark Corner (1971), a married couple answer the door on a rainy night to a stranger with a fever and a cough. Against their instincts (this is not altruism), they provide a reluctant welcome to their unexpected guest, a young man who learns the hard way what kind of poisoned, self-serving generosity a racist London and a toxic household can offer to a Black man without family of his own. In her final novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), she gives the reader two gloriously characterised female ex-cons who, pretending to be bringing good news about a benefit back-payment to vulnerable old women living alone, break into their houses and steal their trinkets. Her short stories too are filled with sickly old women shut up in their bedrooms or left to rot behind their front doors, with self-satisfied nurses or carers, with mothering that curdles from soothing into smothering, with types of dependence that inspire violence. Dale understands all the ways in which help can hurt. In her vision of London, people generally get what they deserve and it is never enough, never even touches the edges of what they need.

The crimes committed in A Helping Hand are cruelly predictable and in this inevitability lies the horror. In some chilling asides, we start to understand that Auntie Flo wasn’t the first to linger and die in Josh and Maisie’s spare room and the contemporary reader, who has lived through the weeks during which a country in shock began to grasp the scale of Harold Shipman’s crimes, will shudder. War, the pandemic and the effects of the slow emergency of climate catastrophe have rendered so many homeless and dependent on the care of others. Never have we been more in need of this novel’s keen reminder of the shared responsibility of care, the nearness of vulnerability to violence and how easy it is for control to seep into our relations and for help to become polluted by harm. In this novel, Dale asks a question that remains urgent: how can we meet the relentless and overwhelming need of another and not turn into a Lena – miserable and resentful – or a Maisie – opportunist and cruel – in the face of it?

In the figure of Graziella, a Rimini waitress arriving in London in miserable circumstances, Dale might hint at an answer. When she knocks at the door (comically interrupting Josh at work on one of his grubbier hobbies) she’s alone and desperate. She is the only character in the novel with almost nothing to give and Dale has her desperately throw herself on the mercy of strangers, asking for charity from those who have no obligation to her. She is also the only character to bring a glimmer of light into the drab, nasty home that Maisie and Josh have created between them. In that dark spare room, she and Cynthia Fingal talk about the spring.

Graziella understands that care is not only about what you do for someone, but is about how you pay attention to them. ‘They seem kind, they take care of her – but they don’t care for her,’ she says, and through her Dale shows us that it is strangely possible to give what we don’t have and from this, we find some form of hope. Even creepy old Josh at times sees this young Italian woman as something almost more than human, her complexion illuminated by an otherworldly light: ‘Like you – the windows. The light coming through,’ he says. It is part of Dale’s artistry that this utterance is both a transparently sleazy chat-up line and a recognition of some essential...