Odd Girl Out
Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
HILARY MANTEL
PAN BOOKS
FOR A. D. PETERS
WITH LOVE FROM JANE
INTRODUCTION
I
F
you want to describe a marriage – and most novelists do at some point – there are three things to be
considered: the husband, the wife, and the marriage itself. Marriage is the island on which they flourish or not – cut off from the rest of the world, yet vulnerable to passing pirates and
sharp-eyed settlers.
Elizabeth Jane Howard knows this; indeed, perhaps she knows everything? Her piercing insights are, one feels, the result of experience examined, and of close observation. She never trades on the
easy assumptions of pop psychology and common cant; she approaches her characters with a blend of empathy and detachment which is unique to her.
Odd Girl Out
is the story of Edmund and Anne Cornhill and the cuckoo in their nest. They have been together for ten years, and their marriage has brought them great happiness. They are
financially secure, Edmund being an estate agent of a superior and socially respectable kind. They have a beautiful house on the river near Henley, with a garden where Anne deploys her passions and
expertise. They enjoy each other in bed, and their domestic life is precisely regulated in a way designed to give the maximum of pleasure and ease to them both.
An enviable couple – and one can hardly even accuse them of complacency, so gently does the author deal with their hopes and fears. She writes with amusing accuracy of how sweetly, how
persistently the halves of a loving couple give each other exactly what they don’t want. Edmund and Anne are very close, very attentive to each other’s needs. But they can’t
be
the other person, so inevitably they get it slightly wrong. Edmund brings Anne breakfast in bed every day, thinking he is pampering her; every day, she regrets to herself the waste of
time. Edmund is predictable, Anne thinks, but then that is what she likes; she has been married before, and her first venture showed her quite enough of the other sort of behaviour.
But at the end of the book Anne will look back on this idyllic decade, and ask herself:
‘But if everything about it had been so right for them, how could it be so easily disrupted?’
On the first page, the claims of th e outside world assert themselves; a happy marriage can be sabotaged easily and speedily, we find, if the right/wrong person comes along. And the danger may
be in proportion to the innocence of the third party …
Arabella is a poor little rich girl. Her mother Clara was once married to Edmund’s father – but since Clara has been married six times, and had many lovers in between, their
connection is tenuous. Clara, ‘a rogue elephant in velvet’, is domineering, manipulative, and just a little bit pathetic. She keeps in touch with Edmund sporadically; the telephone
usually rings when she has a favour to ask. Now she wants a billet – for an unspecified period of time – for her tiresome daughter.
Arabella is twenty-two. She arrives looking ill, with deep violet shadows under her eyes. No wonder: all her life she has been treated by her mother like a parcel that occasionally gets lost or
is misaddressed. The task of looking after her, of settling her into their lives, makes both Edmund and Anne recognize how secure they are, how bountiful they can afford to be.
One of the hardest things for a novelist is to create a character who has charm. One can’t do it by simply telling the reader that so-and-so is charming; that is deeply counterproductive.
Yet if Arabella did not charm us – a little, anyway – the book would not work. We have to understand why these fastidious and self-contained people fall under her spell, why they feel
incomplete without her. Miss Howard makes us see her casual and unstudied beauty and hear her witty and odd turn of phrase. When she is precious – she often hovers on the brink – we see
it as part of her eagerness to please.
She is patchily educated, kind-hearted, ignorant of the value of money because she has so much: she is desperate for love, and to be seen as more than a nuisance, an appendage. Over the years
she’s been propositioned by her mother’s collection of husbands and lovers, ‘horrible
casual
old Humberts … just experimenting’. Arabella is not always easy
company. She doesn’t seem to know any rules, even the rules of conversation; She gives considered answers to questions that were merely polite or rhetorical. There has been no continuity in
her life. Calm, to her, is merely the thing that follows a storm.
A lovely girl who does not know the rules, or chooses to ignore them: she must be dangerous? The reader picks up the danger signals, but Anne feels so lucky and happy in her own life that she is
disposed to be generous to others. We know Edmund is vulnerable. He is a man who lets things happen to him – yet not enough does. Arabella sees in him ‘the slightly haggard, unfinished
appearance of somebody who ought to be twenty years younger than he was’. When the inevitable affair begins – I am not giving away anything that the reader will not quickly guess
– Edmund broods on his situation:
‘All men of his age underwent some emotional upheaval, he imagined. He couldn’t actually think of anyone who had, but then, he didn’t know any man well enough to know that
about them.’
He can barely understand his own behaviour, and he certainly can’t understand Arabella at all. ‘… he had always thought of himself as the protector, the manly man who arranged
for the comfort and security of others … [But] it was he, who like a woman, wanted now to pick over their personal situation with no reference to the generalities of their lives.’ He
wants them to be put in a situation where every cliché about the
ménage à trois
is true; but Arabella defies clichés.
And of course, this is much more than a story about the eternal triangle. What we cannot guess at the outset is how Anne’s own feelings towards Arabella will develop. Then there are the
parallel stories: the frightful Clara and her current spouse, the ageing homosexual friend of Arabella’s who knows he is losing his looks and will lose his partner.
The most important of these secondary stories concerns Henry, a floundering, impoverished, and irresponsible actor who has been, briefly, a lover of Arabella. He deserts his wife Janet, and
leaves her almost penniless with their two children. Janet is not on the page very much, but we know her, because we have stood with her in the butcher while she tries to buy breasts of lamb and
the butcher complains he will have to cut them and offers her chops which she can’t afford. It’s the little details that take us to the heart of the cruelty and muddle and carelessness
of human existence, and Janet’s miserable end is the book’s darkest, deepest undercurrent. Just when you think that, after all, this is a fairly comfortable story, your comfort is
excised from the page.
In all Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels, there is an exquisite balance between the inner world and the outer, the sensuous and the intellectual. When you read about the Cornhills’
house, you feel: ‘Yes, I’d like to go there, like to be their visitor’ – to eat the salmon trout and raspberries so carefully bought and picked and prepared, to sip
Pimm’s under the summer trees. Equally, you shiver at the thought of Janet’s cold, damp maisonette, where the water is never hot and the children are always whining and despair settles
on Janet’s shoulder like a malign bird of prey. Miss Howard is exact about the details: the Eggs Benedict and cold roast beef that form a casual luncheon in Clara’s ménage, the
grim feat of penny-pinching that allows Janet to feed her children. This is the dilapidated country house that Edmund goes to view for his firm:
‘In the kitchen was a plastic bowl full of sprouting potatoes and a calendar about the beauties of Scotland. It had not been turned since February, where there was a dramatic and sinister
picture of Loch Ness … There were yellowing piles of newspaper, a croquet mallet – split – a photograph album, very small and old, with Victorian ladies sitting on basket chairs
out of doors, parasols poised. Under one was written “Miss Fawcett?” in pale ink.’
It’s the question mark after ‘Miss Fawcett’ that is the mark of special talent: the ectoplasmic query, drifting in from the long-dead. Who … where … and who asks
the question? And the melancholy realization that no one, any longer, wants to know the answer.
As in all Miss Howard’s books, the minor characters are sharp and memorable. There is the hairdresser who, razor in hand and sucking a Polo mint, ‘settles down to his usual monologue
upon sex crimes’. And the fishmonger who hands over the crabs for dinner with the remark ‘I’ve removed the parts we can’t fancy. Going away this year, are you? Oh well,
there’s nothing like home. Brian says the one thing he can’t stand is a new experience.’
There is no epigraph to this book, perhaps because the author needs no outside assistance. But an appropriate summary of the whole comes from Sydney Smith: ‘Marriage resembles a pair of
shears, so joined that they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.’ And if, in one word, you had to say what the book is
about, you might say ‘lies’. Youth nourishes many delusions, but the most destructive is the belief that all will be well if people are honest with each other. And Arabella’s
notion of honesty is a peculiar one: you are not obliged to tell people anything, unless they ask you directly. The book will end in one of those bitter salvage operations that, on the whole,
people who have passed the age of thirty-five know how to perform. It is Arabella, who offered so much love – and love without strings, she thought – who will suffer in the end.
A story by Elizabeth Jane Howard reads so easily that we are apt to overlook the fact that she commands a formidable technique. Her novels offer a unique blend of high comedy and acute
psychology; her stories are deeply involving, with an elegant and sometimes intricate structure. What is remarkable about the shape of her novels is the fine judgement she exercises when she moves
from one strand of the story to another. With each plot development, she leaves the reader wanting more. This is a difficult art to master: arrangement, timing, these are everything.
They are everything, too, at the level of the individual sentence and paragraph. Personally I find myself suspicious of those who say they adore ‘the beauty of words’; they are often
people who don’t get around to reading very much, and don’t think about what they do read. And yet I can’t care only for the content; I want to be surprised by a simile, swept
along by a rhythm; I want to be, as I read, a train-bearer to a mistress of language. In Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels it seems that content and form marry perfectly; no divorce is likely.
She is one of those novelists who shows, through her work, what the novel is for. She enables us to see when we are myopic. She enhances the power of our own senses and our own awareness, and helps
us attach our own small experience to the larger experience. She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our hearts.
Hilary Mantel, 1994
‘O
F
course
I don’t mind, my darling. Of
course
I don’t.’ She wore the top half of his
pyjamas and was putting cherry jam on a piece of toast. She thought for a moment, and then added, ‘It will be lovely for me to have someone to talk to while you’re in London.’
Edmund Cornhill looked at his wife for some time without replying. At moments like these, he told himself, his customary feeling of devotion for her was shot with something positively
erotic.
What he liked about her, he went on to himself – he was a man of incessant internal words, few of which reached the drum of human ear – was the way in which she always contrived to
be rational about any sacrificing attitude he called upon her to make. She did not simply say that something would be all right, she said
why
it would be, and then, of course, it nearly
always was. She was in bed, a place that he felt sure most wives did not occupy often enough: he never let her get up in the mornings until he had either set out for London, or otherwise begun his
day.
‘Stripes suit you,’ he said.
‘Do they?’
‘Or it may be the red and blue that is so becoming. You remind me of one of those delightful pre-war plays when the girl stays the night unexpectedly.’
She said instantly, as he knew she would, ‘I love blue.’
‘She’s been ill: or at least that’s what it sounded like.’
‘I thought you said that Clara said she just needed a rest.’
‘She did say that. But she talked away about strain and needing a change, and the line kept fading out.’
‘Where did she telephone from?’