I am adding Elizabeth Berridge to my list of "authors whose work I want to read all of". I see why Persephone Books has reissued a book of her short stories and why Faber Finds, well, found her again. After reading just one novel, Across the Common, I'm happy that I can continue to explore her work as a number of her books are in print and readily available. When I was browsing the Faber Finds backlist my curiosity was piqued when I saw that a few of her books, although listed as fiction, were also tagged crime and suspense. Across the Common was further described as 'paranoia', 'secrets', and 'suburbia'. That pretty well ticked my interests in a novel of suspense, so one short ILL request and a little patience for the book to arrive and the right book found its way into the hands of the right reader.
While this is not really what you would consider a conventional crime or suspense novel, it has the right elements all wrapped up in wonderful language and a careful eye for detail. She knows how to tell a story well, and it's not surprising that she won England's Yorkshire Post Award for Best Novel for Across the Common in 1964. There is an interesting article by Berridge on the Faber Finds website about her inspiration for the story. She describes the commons of her childhood, those leafy suburbs with wide open green spaces that have since been encroached upon, as the "lungs of London".
"The common haunted me as a child. I would cycle across it to school, skirting the big houses with their long gardens behind tall, brick walls, scanning the gorse bushes on the right for Men Who Lurked. I had one such fright, the flapping raincoat had hidden any impropriety. All I remembered was the man's thin, abstracted face, his eyes sliding away from mine. Sad."
"But the common made its way into my dreams. I would wake up with one of those silent screams, struggling to free my ankle from the senile clasp of an old gnarled hand that reached out from a seat as I ran past to reach the safety of a back gate. What horror lay just within those tall barred gates?"
It's the secrets behind that gate Berridge explores in her novel. Every family has secrets and the Braithwaite family prefers to keep theirs closely guarded and tucked away. Louise Yeovil doesn't realize just what bad memories her aunts have tried to forget. More than ten years married, she leaves her husband one day and returns home to her aunts, who await her at the door as if they had expected her all along. The Hollies is suffused with their nervous energies. Louise's own parents died when she was very young, so she was raised by her aunts, being especially close to Seraphina. Fina and Rosa, along with Gibby their dedicated housemaid, live frugally in that vast, echoing house, where females always seem to hold dominion. Only three dried up old women are left in what was once a seemingly thriving household.
Old memories are dredged up by way of a letter from Louise's father, which is passed along to her so many years after his death thanks to some old shares finally becoming profitable. His letter reveals a side to the aunts she had not sensed or didn't understand growing up.
"You are too young to know the atmosphere of this house. It is like living in a minefield; confined energy in tins buried and waiting for the unwary foot. Emotions, activities, all narrowed to a small compass, like a hospital ward or a prison camp. Nothing from the outside seeps in except, of course newspapers, but they disregard these. The fierce light of self-regard (without the objective sanity of self-analysis) beats down on them all. I wish I had time to tell you--."
Her father lets slip the fact her grandfather had committed suicide, an act that was hushed up and explained away as an accident, and only one of several incidents that went undiscussed by Louise's aunts who would never have revealed any of it to her. The Hollies is like a pressure cooker of secrets, unspoken hopes and unfulfilled dreams as well as past transgressions never forgiven or forgotten. It's only through a series of throwaway comments and Louise's insistence for answers that she finally discovers the disgrace wrought upon the family one night that began with a party celebrating the flowering of a rare Chinese lily that ended in tragedy occurring just outside the garden gate.
Berridge is superlative when it comes to creating interesting characters. Each woman is eccentric in her own way. Rosa, the strong sister, who married and went away but returned a widow. Seraphina has always been passionately interested in her niece. There's always one daughter who must give up her dreams and maybe even love to remain with the family. Instead of marrying she is left to tend to her plants, following in her father's footsteps, looking for the most unusual blooms. Aunt Cissy returns home to be taken care of by her sisters, but she returns home a success of sorts and throws the house into an upheaval.
It's perhaps the idea of home which causes Louise so much trouble. She leaves her (she believes) unfaithful husband to return home to her aunts, when she had already been home all along. She realizes she has been and perhaps will always be a little girl to her aunts, so this understanding of the secrets that are hidden behind the doors of the Hollies is her way of finding her own independence from these women who raised her. Her husband tells her the aunts represent security to her and believes she returned in order to grow up. Maybe it isn't the aunts and their secrets she wants to expose but herself.
Elizabeth Berridge is a marvelous writer--there is so much there under the surface to think about. She seems a real master of domestic fiction (well, maybe better to just say a master of storytelling), delving into he interior lives of her characters. Harriet Harvey Wood, in Berridge's obituary, says it best:
"Although she was, on the surface, a conventional master of conservative suburban fiction, her work concealed a deep subversiveness. The reader continually finds his expectations railroaded on to a completely different track. She was, par excellence, the celebrator of family life. There is, as she said herself, no substitute for the family: 'It is society's first teething ring, man's proving ground. When repudiated, it still leaves its strengthening mark. When it does the rejecting, the outcast is damaged. Within its confines, devils and angels rage together, emotions creep underfoot like wet rot, or flourish like Russian ivy. It is the world in microcosm, the nursery of tyrants, the no man's land of suffering, a place and a time, a rehearsal for silent parlour murder'."
Doesn't that quote make you curious about her? I've put in a request that my library order some of her other novels, but in the meantime I'm waiting for Touch and Go, the story of a divorcee--"a beautifully written evocation of a woman’s effort to rebuild her life".