If I didn't set the task of writing about the short stories that I'm reading, I probably wouldn't get around to reading them. That said I enjoy them when I do, but I find it hard to write about them in a way that's interesting without giving the plot away! This week's story from the NYRB Collection is a time slip story, though in the end it turns out to be something more. I'm going to give a brief description that will give away a bit of the plot, but I won't share the twist at the end (a little warning in case you want to read this one).
Mrs. Ellis is a fastidious woman, one who likes order and organization. I might note that this is a woman who does not think outside the box. A widow of two years, she keeps a respectable home with one maidservant, about whom she likes to complain.
"Mrs. Ellis was methodical and tidy. Unanswered letters, unpaid bills, the litter and rummage of a slovenly writing-desk were things that she abhorred. Today, more than usual, she was in what her late husband called her 'clearing' mood; it remained with her throughout breakfast and lasted the whole morning. Besides, it was the first of the month, and as she ripped off the page of her daily calendar and saw the bright clean 1 staring at her, it seemed to symbolise a new start to her day."
Most important in her life is her daughter, Susan, who is away at boarding school. Mrs. Ellis would love it if Susan would stay at home and attend a local day school, but Susan likes being with her friends all the time and doing exciting things, things she wouldn't get to do at home. So it's just Mrs. Ellis and Grace Jackson her maid. After such a busy morning, Mrs. Ellis decides a walk on the heath is just the thing to clear her mind and relax her. When she returns home, however, what she finds will make her anxious and worried. Unable to open her door, the lock seems jammed, she calls down to Grace to let her in and is met by a rather slovenly man hanging out her kitchen window. When she's let into the house she discovers a group of strangers seem to have taken up residence and removed all her furniture and knickknacks. What springs to mind is that a gang of thieves have broken and are in the process of robbing her.
It's obvious something weird is going on. And things get weirder after she calls the police. Rather than carting off the suspected thieves, she's the one brought round to the police station. The detectives and the doctors think she's possibly suffering from amnesia. While she can describe her neighborhood to a T, nothing quite matches up as neither she nor any of the people she knows seem to appear in the telephone directory. And these detectives keep referring to things and events she doesn't quite understand. Ration books and bombs falling. She seemed to have left her house one day in 1932 and returned to it twenty years later all in the space of an hour.
The introductions sums up perfectly what happens to Mrs. Ellis:
"Her appalling sense of dislocation is handled with empathy, no small accomplishment on du Maurier's part, for she made the woman quite insufferable. She foregrounds the intense distress the woman's predicament arouses, and once again supplies an elegant closure to this subtle tale of psychological horror."
This is another long story--over fifty pages, in which du Maurier slowly works her way up to the surprising denouement. Du Maurier never rushes her stories, she slowly builds them with careful attention to detail which winds up the tension that breaks at the last shocking moment.
Next week: "Kiss Me Again, Stranger".