Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed

‘It was a nice way of living,’ huffs Grace, the fiftysomething anti-heroine of Celia Dale’s devilishly dark 1988 novel Sheep’s Clothing, republished by Daunt Books. Recently released from Holloway prison, and using a demure headscarf and twin-set as cover, Grace teams up with Janice, a former fellow inmate, to rob elderly women. Disguised as social workers, and armed with an illicit supply of sleeping pills, they are after pension money stashed under mattresses, trinkets in shoeboxes and polished candlesticks on mantelpieces. The victims, invariably women (‘even an old man could be surprisingly strong’) often welcome the thieves, happy to have someone to ‘talk at’ and a cup of tea made for them.

Dale, whose 1966 novel A Helping Hand was reprinted last year (and also features an old woman at the mercy of a young couple who have inveigled themselves into her life), has an eye for those on the margins of society: widows, women without any families, perhaps embarrassed to admit they are ‘no longer fit’ to live on their own. The terror and thrill of Sheep’s Clothing is not so much the crimes – drugging old ladies, filling holdalls with loot and fencing lockets and heirlooms in smoke-filled junk shops and tat markets – but something which, in Dale’s treatment, is far more compelling: the everyday fear of falls, forgetfulness and dependence; the ‘ultimate humiliation’ of a ‘shaming sodden skirt’.

Domestic horror, then, is Dale’s speciality, and the lives of her criminals are no different. Grace’s marriage was ‘mad’, while being abused as a child has made Janice as passive as ‘a jellyfish in a tepid sea’ and has led her to whore ‘in an amateurish way’. They now inhabit ‘a rather nasty room in King’s Cross’, with a bolster down the middle of the bed to keep the pair‘almost as separate as they would have been in single beds’.