The unease of the distant East

Defying the geographical promise of its title, The India House turns out to be set in Shropshire. Here, in sequest- ered, Eden-era retreat, two generations of a decayed rentier family — embittered grandma Mrs Covington and frosty daughter Evelyn — are doing their utmost to prevent any noxious post-war fall-out from contaminating the third. They are abetted in this mission by fey Mr Henry, a failed Georgian poet deprived of his school- mastering job after ‘The Incident’, whose educative brief it is to provide Mrs Covington’s grand-daughter Julia with a curriculum from which all traces of the 20th century have been removed.

Above this mirthless near-zenana hangs the penetrating scent of lost empire. Another of Mr Henry’s duties is to recite each lunch-time a little précis, culled from the morning’s Times, of the latest outrages committed on that abandoned carcass. Passing their days in moribund, gentlewomanly inertia, against a backdrop of Indian rugs and pictures, Mrs Covington and Evelyn muse endlessly on their former lives in the mysterious and consoling East. Inevitably, these visions of forfeited imperial comfort are wholly misplaced: Mrs Covington’s late husband is revealed as a plodding bank manager; Evelyn’s as an army sergeant whose ‘injuries sustained during the war’ came from an attempt to rescue a coolie from beneath a descending crate.

Unexpectedly, the door of this quaint, antediluvian world, where time is measured out by the arrival of the latest quarterly newsletter of the Friends of St George, opens to admit a pair of exotic newcomers: Roland, Mrs Covington’s raffish fortysomething son, and James, her 18- year-old grandson. ‘Roly’, on his uppers after a wifely desertion, is in hot pursuit of his mother’s money. James, on the other hand, morals apparently untainted by paternal influence, takes a wholesome shine to his pretty cousin.