E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten
Fremlin Possession
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31289-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-31289-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire, before studying at Oxford (whilst working as a charwoman). During World War Two, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter committed suicide aged 19; a month later, her husband also killed himself. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic summer holiday seaside mystery Uncle Paul (1959) - one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut The Hours Before Dawnwon the Edgar Award in 1960.
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“BUT IT’S MERVYN she’s marrying,” I said crossly. “Not his mother!”
“Famous last words,” Peggy observed. Her wry smile flickered in the firelight, and she drew slowly on her cigarette, staring into the heart of the fire like a seer gazing into a crystal ball. “Do you really imagine, Clare,” she went on, “That your Sarah, with all that bounce and vitality, is going to settle down contentedly with a Mother’s Boy? It’d kill her!”
I was annoyed. Peggy is my oldest friend, and of course she can say what she likes to me; but naturally she wouldn’t be my oldest friend if the things she liked saying weren’t, in general, the things that I liked hearing. I felt let-down, almost shocked. It had been with such total and uncomplicated delight that I had been telling her of the exciting news in Sarah’s letter. I had not doubted for a moment that she would take it as a matter for whole-hearted congratulation. What right had she to dampen my pleasure like this? Especially when—
“You don’t even know Mervyn!” I protested, with growing indignation. “How can you possibly say whether he will or won’t make a good husband for Sarah? You’ve never met him, any more than we have!”
“Meeting his mother was quite enough!” Peggy insisted doggedly. “Honestly it was, Clare; and you’d think so too, if you’d been at that party! I noticed her as soon as she came into the room—a tense little thing, wary as a weasel. And I promise you, Clare, I’m not exaggerating” (Peggy always introduces her more far-fetched recitals with these words, and usually they at once give me that sense of cosy expectancy that is the hall-mark of top-quality gossip) “—I promise you, Clare, that she never stopped telephoning home, the whole evening! Every time I looked into the hall, there she was, on the phone again, checking up on whether her precious son had got home safe from some jaunt or other! Honestly, Clare, she was looking absolutely green when he still wasn’t there by the dread hour of ten forty-five! Can you imagine it! A man of thirty-two!”
“Thirty-one,” I corrected her, quick as a lizard at the touch of a moving shadow. The tiny thread of truth there might be in what Peggy was saying was making me extra sensitive about the twelve years difference in age between Mervyn and my daughter; and I wasn’t going to stand by and have a whole year added to it gratuitously just to improve Peggy’s story.
“Mervyn is just thirty-one,” I asserted stiffly. “And if he is unlucky enough to have a very silly mother, I don’t see why we should hold that against him. He didn’t choose his mother—any more than you chose yours!”
“Don’t!” Peggy groaned, and covered her eyes for a moment with her hand. “That was real cruel, Clare, and you know it. You know she’s coming this weekend—again! If only she’d be her normal, bad-tempered self, I wouldn’t mind, but she keeps reading these articles about mothers-in-law and how they shouldn’t interfere, and it makes her so unnatural. You know—grimly approving of the children no matter how frightful they are!”
She laughed, but hollowly, and I pursued my advantage.
“You see? Even you can’t control your mother. No one can. Mothers are like what they are like, and there is not a thing anybody can do about it. So stop crabbing about our Mervyn. Because he is ‘our’ Mervyn now. We’ve got to get used to thinking of him like that—and so have you, if you want to stay on speaking-terms!”
But Peggy didn’t laugh. Her plump, pleasant face was still focussed in the direction of the glowing coals.
“What does Janice think about it?” she asked at last, slowly: and I hesitated, choosing my words.
“Well—naturally—there’s been a bit of a feeling of upset. The feeling—you know—the losing-sister thing. They’ve always been such close companions, she and Sarah. There’s bound to be a bit of that feeling about it, isn’t there?”
I heard my voice repeating the same phrases over and over again, gabbling on, defensively. Even to Peggy I wasn’t going to reveal the utter dismay with which my younger daughter had received the news of her sister’s engagement.
“Oh no!” she had exclaimed, as I handed her Sarah’s letter across the breakfast table. “Not marry him! She can’t!”
Her usual dopey morning pastiness had gone two shades paler; and she repeated, with hoarse emphasis, “She can’t!”
“But darling,” I had protested—just as I was now protesting to Peggy—“You don’t even know him! Wait till you’ve at least seen the poor man—”
And at that Janice burst, idiotically, into tears; and what with this, and with my husband, Ralph, coming in half-shaved to ask what the devil was going on; and what with showing him the letter, and then getting Janice mopped-up and presentable in time for school—where she is, if you please, a prefect, entrusted with the task of instilling rational behaviour into hundreds of small girls as they pour into the cloakrooms between nine and nine-fifteen. As I say, what with all this, I didn’t have any chance to thrash out with her what was really the matter—if, indeed, there was anything the matter other than the shock of unexpected news.
Ralph, thank goodness, took the whole thing much more sanely.
“I suppose the fellow hasn’t a job, or anything?” he enquired resignedly; and I rejoiced at being able to inform him that—in marked contrast to Sarah’s previous boyfriends—Mervyn not only had a job, but a permanent job, in a firm of accountants. Not a firm of psychedelic accountants? enquired my husband unbelievingly. Not a financial rave-in? A fiscal freak-out? No, I assured him, glancing again down the untidy pages: it seemed to be an ordinary firm of real accountants. It seemed too good to be true; and together we pored over our daughter’s letter, looking for the snag.
But, incredibly, there didn’t seem to be one. Mervyn had not only finished his exams without dropping-out at any stage; he actually liked accountancy. As far as we could gather from Sarah’s letter, he wasn’t planning to give it all up to become an abstract painter; it wasn’t destroying his soul or killing his creativity. Perhaps—here Ralph and I looked at each other in wild, incredulous hope—perhaps he hadn’t got any creativity! We could scarcely believe our good fortune. Could it really be that we, alone of all our friends, were to be blessed with a son-in-law who felt no impulse to free the human spirit from its chains? One who simply went out to work and earned money, unhampered by visions of a better world?
Of course, he was thirty-one, not twenty-one. That accounted for a lot of steadiness and sanity. It also presumably meant that he had ditched some other wife somewhere along the line; but who cared? If he had the tact to keep quiet about it, we certainly wouldn’t probe. We would simply sit back rejoicing at the prospect of our wayward Sarah’s reaping the fat benefits that accrue from marrying a man already broken-in to wedlock; a seasoned man, one hammered and tempered into acceptance of the fact that if he doesn’t pay the little woman’s rent, then she will, with all that this entails in terms of male subjection and tuna fish out of tins.
Thus Ralph and I reasoned on that damp, sunny autumn morning when we thought that what had happened to us was a wonderful stroke of luck. We reflected on the long procession of long-haired, despondent art students, big with complexes, who had hitherto sought out our pretty daughter to talk to her about suicide and the cultivation of the Real Self; and as it slowly dawned on us that the whole grisly bunch of them would now be vanishing from our lives for ever, we turned and hugged each other, right there by the abandoned breakfast table with its crumbs, and cornflakes, and smears of marmalade, all golden and glittering in the November sun. At last, we said to one another, Sarah has outgrown her tendency to take on the lame ducks of the world, to lavish on neurotic no-goods the bounteous overflow of her gay normality. At last, we thought, Sarah has found herself a real man, a man she can look up to. It’s all to the good, we said, that he should be twelve years older than she is: this is right for her, we said, it’s what she needs. And all that morning, after Ralph had gone to the office, I went singing about my work, thanking God that my beautiful, vulnerable, kind-hearted Sarah, about whom I had worried intermittently ever since she had left school, was after all to live happily ever after.
And that was why Peggy’s reception of the news was so disconcerting. It had all seemed so perfect, right up to the moment when I had mentioned our prospective son-in-law’s name, and she had said, in that startled, taken-aback sort of voice: “Mervyn Redmayne, did you say? And he lives in Bayswater? But, darling, I know his mother, and she’s frightful! She really is, Clare, I promise you: she’s ghastly! Listen, we must talk about this seriously. Put the kettle on.”
So I did; and we made a pot of tea; and now here we still were, staring unhappily into the fire. All this morning’s joy was draining out of me, and I felt defrauded and dull.
“You’ve spoilt it all for...
