My first – and I hope not only – contribution to #SpinsterSeptember! It’s an annual event organised by Nora and is rightly very popular. Because there are so many interesting spinsters in fiction, whether joyful or miserable, deliberate or left on the shelf, adventurer or domestic.
I’ve read a couple of novels by Jon Godden (sister of Rumer Godden), and I thought Told In Winter was especially good – so when my friend Barbara offered me a copy of The House By The Sea (1948), I gratefully took her up on it. The title made me think it would be a cosy story of a beautiful location – and, after all, I had already loved a memoir of the same name by May Sarton.
Well, reader, cosy is not the word for this book.
It does start with slow, coldly beautiful descriptions of the isolated house and its coastal scenery. Edwina is a middle-aged, unmarried woman who has recently moved there, keen to get away from the oppressive friendship of a woman called Madge (though Madge also seems to have a room in this new house). We never meet her, but it’s clear that she has domineered Edwina in the name of protection. It did seem possible that she and Madge had been in a romantic relationship but, if this is the case, Godden only hints at it. It is clear that Edwina is starting to feel free – but it is also clear, even at this stage, that the house is not an uncomplicated idyll.
When Edwina opened the door the hall was full of chalky blue light which came through the staircase window across the white banisters and on to the slate floor. Although she had spent the last three days in the house, unpacking, cleaning, and arranging her furniture, going back across the fields in the evening to her rooms in the village, she now felt as if she were entering the house for the first time. It was, she felt, entirely unaware of her, entirely empty, altogether silent, without life or breath – in spite of the furniture she had arranged, the curtains she had hung, the fire laid ready in the grate, her clothes in the cupboard. She hesitated on the doorstep, almost afraid to go in and break the silence.
Godden’s writing is beautiful, and Edwina is an interesting character. In some ways, she fits some stereotypes of middle-aged, unmarried women in mid-century novels: a certain naivety, a yearning for the domestic. But she is self-aware too, and realises how her life has been lived in the shadow of others. Coming to this new house is a chance, she believes, for transformation.
She thought, “For years I have been filled with Madge and before that there was someone else, who, I can’t remember, and before that another – my father, Jenny my nursemaid. I take on the colour of the person nearest me, just as I have taken on the colour and character of all these clothes in turn. Yes, a change of clothes is enough to change me completely.”
“What shall I do now that I am alone?” she thought. “What shall I become? An empty shell waits for any tide to flow and fill it. That is asking for trouble. That is dangerous.”
One of the things about opening an old hardback you know nothing about, which doesn’t have a dustjacket, means you are entering completely blind. There is no publisher’s blurb to give you clues, or even quotes from other authors to give you a sense of tone. So I did not at all expect the actual trouble and danger that arrive.
Edwina is walking through the empty rooms of her house, as usual, when suddenly she realises there is a man in the kitchen with her. He is hungry, dirty, tired and aggressive. His name is Ross Dennehay, and he quickly takes control of the house.
It is such an unexpected turn for the novel to take, and suddenly the long, slow, perhaps slightly boring, initial 70 pages make sense. We, like Edwina, have been lulled into thinking this is a quiet refuge at the edge of the world. Any unquiet has been in Edwina’s own mind, trying to establish her sense of identity when this has never hitherto been welcomed. And suddenly this scary man appears – threatening violence if he is not obeyed, and effectively keeping her prisoner.
But this shock somehow doesn’t shift the genre of The House By The Sea – it does not become a horror novel, or anything you might expect from the home invasion trope. Instead, Edwina seems to find something that she has missed: a new experience, and new roles. Instead of being the needy one in her friendship with Madge, she becomes cook, housekeeper, companion to Ross. He remains untrusting and angry most of the time, throwing her one kind word for every 20 rebukes, but she doesn’t seem to quashable. Instead, she keeps trying to assure him he can trust her – and there is even a lingering eroticism to the way she behaves.
He isn’t a rough and ready man who is hiding a heart of gold, by any means. In one tense, ruthless scene, he forces Edwina to listen to his story – why he is on the run, and why he ends up there. It involves rape and murder. As I say, this is not a cosy book. The dark edges of Told In Winter are a more present foundation in The House By The Sea.
I almost gave up on The House By The Sea because I was finding it so slow. Even after Ross arrives, Godden doesn’t alter her pace – just the intensity of the narrative. It is still steady, steady, steady – the most langurous thriller you can imagine. Throughout, she makes space for beautiful and evocative descriptions of the natural world around the world, like this:
The wind was up and moving round the house. It came from the sea and with the rain tore inland across the fields, crying and calling as it went. It found the house and beat at the walls and roof and plucked at the windows. The house stood firm. It presented a smooth unbroken surface to the night; the wind streamed like water over and round it and rushed on defeated. In the black spaces of the night the lamplit circle in the sitting-room, where the two armchairs were drawn close to the fire, was an oasis of peace and warmth and strength.
I’m really glad I continued with the book, though I still can’t entirely work out what I thought of it. It has to be read slowly, and it requires a patient reader. Ultimately, I don’t know whether it was a triumph or needed significant restructuring. But I’m sure the characters, the voice, and the feeling of it will stay with me – and that is certainly an achievement. You certainly won’t come across anybody quite like Edwina, or any similar situation, in any other novels this Spinster September.
