I think my friend Caroline only ever gave me two books. One was A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau, and the other was Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos. Which goes to show that she had exceptional taste, and also knew my taste very well. Sadly, Caroline died eight years ago and I’ll never get to ask her for recommendations any more – but I loved spending a decade in book group with her, and her recommendation legacy lives on: twelve years after I read the original, I finally read the sequel to Abbie.
Abbie and Arthur, like the previous book, is really concerned with the extraordinary, monstrous, eccentric Abbie, and told through a mix of her letters and a narrative from the perspective of her nephew, Dane. The ‘Arthur’ of the title is her quiet, put-upon, secretly brilliant husband – he appears just as much in the first book, so it’s really a question of the authors needing to find a variant title, I suppose.
Dane is one of the few people that she cares about. For the most part, she is selfish and domineering, though with a soft spot for husband, nephew and (particularly) any and all of the animal kingdom. Here she is, intercepting a hunt:
“Butcher-in-Chief!” I retorted. “Your horse’s hooves are trampling sacred soil and your old grandmother, could she witness such sacrilege, would turn in her grave not ten yards from where we stand!” (A pardonable exaggeration, I consider, since the pink granite angel which surmounts her must weigh all of five tons.) “Call off your hounds!” I concluded.
He shouted again.
I shouted back:
“The colour of your coat, bloody as it is and matching your speech and, I am told, your politics, merely exaggerates the brutality of your so-called sport. A more appropriate colour for your cowardly pastime would be ywllow, a hue which only your colleagues of the Berkeley are men enough to sport!”
Her moral compass is wonky, though. In the course of this book, she (probably?) burns down the house of a friend in order to persuade her to move nearer, and (probably?) murders someone in the aftermath of an accident at sea. And yet…
What do I mean by ‘and yet’? I suppose I mean that you can’t help loving Abbie, despite all that. The novel plays out on a heightened level where these acts of ludicrous selfishness feel more like pantomime than malice. There is a neighbour with whom she has a lengthy feud – in the previous book, Abbie was thwarted while trying to steal her irises, and now Abbie considers this a theft of her irises – and yet, we are told, Abbie sat up with her for many nights when she was extremely ill. And this act of kindness does, somehow, seem to balance her bizarre excesses of immortality. Which is an impressive feat for an author. Abbie is exhuberant, irrepressible, and the success of the book weighs almost entirely on her character – and succeeds.
But my favourite scenes are when Abbie is outwitted. For the most part, in Abbie and Arthur, this is done by Arthur himself – and he is a star, the Richard to her Hyacinth Bucket, endlessly patient but not above a sharp word now and then, and manages to maintain his own moral path.
Perhaps my favourite moment in the book is a subtle jibe from the authors. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘that reminds me of Aunt Mame by Patrick Dennis’, then you’re not alone. It was published between the first and second Abbie books, and this is how Abbie ends one of her letters – for those not in the know, ‘Même’ is French for (among other things) ‘same’:
PPPS. – I am told that one of your dear Mother’s fellow-countrymen has written a book called, I think, Auntie Même, in which the central character seems to be oddly like me (or so Maud says). See if you can get me a copy (as soon as the book is remaindered), as I wish to look into the matter & sue if feasible.
