I first stumbled across Elizabeth Myers at a book fair in Sherborne. Mum and I had gone on a day out there, travelling by train, just to enjoy a mosey around. While there, we spotted a sign to a book fair – and, naturally, went to have a look. It turned out to be one of those places for book dealers and rich folk, rather than the ordinary reader. I’m not particularly interested in whether or not the book I want to read is a first edition, and I’m definitely not interested in valuable books of topography – which seemed to make up quite a chunk of the stock. After a bit of browsing, I came away with The Letters of Elizabeth Myers – which ended up being my favourite book I read that year. Though admittedly it was while I was at university as an undergraduate, and the amount of non-course reading I managed to do that year was extremely low.
I later realised that the book was probably stocked there because Myers was an author of local interest – she lived in Sherborne. In, it turned out, the house next door to a friend we visited in Sherborne (albeit many decades earlier). She was married to Littleton Powys, one of the Powys brothers – including T.F. Powys and John Cowper Powys. They share with me the honour of having been the son of the vicar of Montacute.
Myers died very young, aged only 34, but did have three novels published during her life. I’ve read the most well-known of those, A Well Full of Leaves, and I don’t remember anything about it except that I wasn’t super impressed. But #ProjectNames encouraged me to get Mrs Christopher (1946) off the shelves. The copy I have is a presentation copy signed by Myers and her husband – to somebody who was apparently trying to dramatise the novel, though I don’t think that ever happened. (I’m assuming this Nora Nicholson is not the same as the actress, but who knows.)
That’s a long build up to telling you about this book. It opens somewhat dramatically – Mrs Christopher shoots a man named Sine through the temple. He has been blackmailing her, and she has had enough. At the end of her tether, she reaches into her purse – which for some reason has a loaded pistol in it – and does the deed. But she is not alone: three other people are also in the room, all of whom have been blackmailed by Sine.
Mrs Christopher is not your typical murderess. She is a quiet and conscientious widow in her 60s, and she is keen that nobody else gets the blame for her actions – and so gives her name and address to the three strangers in the room. And then off they separately go. But Mrs Christopher knows that she will confess – and, opportunely, her son is at Scotland Yard. She goes to him and tells him what she has done.
In an effort to test the resolve of human nature (or, let’s be honest, to engineer the plot), she offers up £1500 that she has in savings to see if the three others in the room will inform against her, if a reward is offered. She thinks they won’t; her cynical son thinks they will. Either way, she has confessed and looks likely to hang – which she takes in her stride.
The remainder of the novel is divided into three distinct sections. In each one, we follow another of the blackmailed people as they leave the scene of the crime – back to their lives. Myers does an impressive job at creating each of these worlds, so that they feel complete and well developed for the 50 or so pages in which they appear. There is Edmund, determined to rescue a woman he knows from life as a prostitute; Veronica, who has run away from her husband and desperately wants a baby with the man she is living with; Giles, a doctor who does illegal abortions and has only ever been fond of his studious younger brother. Each is fully realised, with positive attributes being constantly offset by their weaknesses and hubrises. Each section leads towards the question: will they betray Mrs Christopher for the sake of £500 – which was, of course, a fortune in the 1940s.
One of the things I appreciated about it was how faith is woven in. Myers was a Christian herself, and many of the characters in Mrs Christopher are either people of faith or people seeking God. I see sympathetic or accurate depictions of faith so seldom in novels that it is always a welcome feature!
And this novel is certainly thoughtful. The writing is occasionally a like workmanlike, and there are moments that it leans towards the melodramatic, but a whole lot less than you’d imagine from a description of the opening scene. Indeed, Myers uses the premise pretty elegantly – and it’s impressive to have such distinct sections to a novel, almost a series of linked stories, without it feeling disjointed. All in all, I thought Mrs Christopher was a pretty good contribution to my names-in-titles reading project.