I really love the work of Mollie Panter-Downes. I've loved everything I've read by her from her first novel written at the age of 17, The Shoreless Sea, to her wonderfully evocative One Fine Day (I think I've now read it three times) as well as her short stories collected in Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes also published by Persephone Books. Granted her first novel was very much a first novel, sweet and sentimental, her more mature One Fine Day is as good a novel as you'll find describing the mood of the middle class in post-war Britain.
I recall the stories In Good Evening Mrs. Craven fall somewhere in between but certainly closer to her more sophisticated later work. Each story is a perfect slice of life in wartime Britain. Although the lives of the characters are ordinary, their circumstances are anything but, and Panter-Downes trains a keen eye on her subjects. It's hard not to be impressed that in so few pages an author can bring to life the petty squabbles, the disappointments great and small, the sadness and anguish and the tiny joys of people living through a terrible war, and she tells her stories with great sympathy yet always with dignity.
Life is really messy. And whatever the circumstances, in times of peace or times of war people continue on dealing the with daily business that must be attended to, even in the case (maybe even more so in times of war) of the affairs of the heart. In "Good Evening Mrs. Craven", Mrs. Craven is not who you think she is.
"For years now they had been going to Porter's, in one of the little side streets off the strand. They had their particular table in the far corner of the upstairs room, cosily near the fire in winter, cooled in the summer by a window at their backs, through which drifted soot and the remote bumble of traffic." [...]
"Every Thursday evening, wet or fine, they would be dining in their corner under the bust of Mrs. Siddons, talking quietly, sometimes holding hands under the tablecloth. It was the evening when he was supposed to have a standing engagement to play bridge at his club. Sometimes he called for her at her flat; more often they arrived separately."
And now do you know who Mrs. Craven is? Yes, the "other woman". Life is messy. Affairs happen and my inclination is always to side with the wife as the wronged party, and I do feel for the wife in this story, if only from a 'this is bad/wrong behavior on the husband's side'. But in the hands of Mollie Panter-Downes, it's hard, too, not to feel a certain sympathy for this other 'Mrs. Craven'. What do you do when a likable person falls for a married man and gets herself into a situation from which she cannot and probably does not want to extricate herself?
A woman alone in times of peace but with a married lover is not such a sad situation. There is always the next rendezvous to look forward to. But in times of war? When her married lover goes off to Libya where rumors fly of fierce fighting, being alone is not such a good thing to be at all.
"There was no one to confide in; all these years she had been so careful that she had hardly mentioned his name to anyone else. She went out with other people, but she imagined that she wasn't so amusing or attractive as she used to be and that they noticed it. She began to stay home most evenings, reading in bed or writing him long letters."
They came up with a system of code words so she might know where he was and what he was doing. But the letters began to lag, perfectly normal under the circumstances, but what would happen if something terrible happened? How would she know and would someone contact her? The mistress? He has a wife and children, and she had never before hoped to break them up, but now? How does one carry on in a time of war?
And like women have done all through time, whether wife or mistress she must carry on. Such a poignant and beautiful story and I can't help but feel for this "other" woman.
Mollie Panter-Downes wrote exclusively for the New Yorker and she was better known to American audiences than British for this fact. Between 1938 and 1987 she published 857 pieces in the magazine ranging from poetry to short stories to book reviews to her weekly column. She considered herself a journalist first, which is perhaps why she never tried to preserve her short stories. I have read nearly all of MPD's fiction, but I still have yet to read the columns she wrote during wartime for The New Yorker. Eventually I will rectify that.
It's noted in the obituary that appeared in The Guardian that it was "divined that she was 'one of those writers who will, without doubt, be rediscovered'." I'm happy she's been rediscovered and hope that more of her work will be brought back into print.
Next week's story? Hmm. Let me surprise you (and maybe me, too).