Mary, like Floy, is a coper and carer. Thomas is romantic, feckless and self-absorbed. When he is shattered by the death in another car crash of his glamorous wife, Celia, Mary comes to his rescue and moves in to mother her three-year-old niece, Hatty, whose grief is expressed in tantrums, bedwetting and ‘orgies of destruction’. (All these aunts … perhaps this is what gives the book such a curiously old- fashioned feel. Where are the fictional aunts of yesteryear?) Celia’s brother, Francis, also gravitates towards Mary’s sphere. He is a would-be painter, afraid he will never come to anything, and in shock at the death of his sister, who shielded him from the bullying of his selfish father.
There are, as this synopsis suggests, almost no good parental role models in this novel. Even Admiral Connaught, a neighbour who is one of the carers and who adored his soldier son, was unable to tell him of his love before the boy was killed; he lives with a crippled wife and a pretty but selfish and indolent daughter for whom, guiltily, he feels little love. Favouritism is his secret sin.
Sharp moral judgment is passed on all Howard’s characters: clear, but not simplistic. They are judged, as Howard judged herself in her autobiography, by the extent to which they are ‘spoilt, selfish, needy’; yet she makes it plain that neediness takes many forms, and that unselfishness as well as selfishness may come from that primal ‘hunger for love’.
Occasionally, the themes are so strong that the characterisation becomes a little schematic. Jack Curtis, in particular, remains oddly sketchy (on p. 56 he is given a life-long aversion to whisky; on p. 123 he is sipping his Macallan). Perhaps property developers are not Howard’s forte. Yet the novel is always emotionally intelligent and extremely readable: fine old-fashioned virtues.
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