3: Someone at a Distance (1953)

I've been looking forward to reading one of these Dorothy Whipple books - everyone seems to love them and you know I like an author who's derided as, ugh, middlebrow. (I have two entirely separate eyebrows, thank you very much.) Someone at a Distance is fantastic. (It's also available via Kindle, by the way.)  It's a story about family relationships that are upset by a visitor from abroad, and if you haven't read it and are precious about spoilers close this window now because I HAVE NOTES.


Seriously, go, I'm not kidding. My feelings on this are intense.



1. THAT FUCKING GALLIC VIPER



WITH HER NASTY LITTLE HORRIBLE GUEST MANNERS AND



HER O SO SMART CLOTHES HOW FUCKING DARE SHE



I SWEAR TO GOD IF SHE WERE A REAL PERSON SOMEBODY BETTER HOLD MY FUCKING WIG



HOW COULD SHE DO THAT TO ELLEN OF ALL PEOPLE THAT SNAKE IN THE GRASS THAT RAT FINK THAT








2. Men are trash.


It's going to take awhile to get myself put back together.


<deep breaths>


So there's a lot to unpack here and I would love to hear other people's thoughts in the comments. At its heart this is a keenly observed portrait of human relationships; the elderly bitchy old woman with her family and with an outsider, the parents who didn't have close relationships with their own parents doing better for their kids, the children growing up secure in a loving household (but with the echoes of war and rationing always there in the background), and most particularly the relationship between husband and wife. Whipple shows us how it works by taking it apart.

A happily married woman acquires the habit of referring everything to, discussing everything with, her husband.  Even the smallest things.  Like bad coal, for instance.  To be able to say, sitting across the hearth from him in the evening, "Isn't this coal bad?" and to hear him say, looking up from his book at the fire: "Awful.  Sheer slate," is to have something comfortable made out of even bad coal.   

A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence.  But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decision and action.  She either brings her husband round to her way of thinking or goes over to his, and mostly she doesn't know or care which it is.

It's so true that in a long term committed relationship you talk about these things not so much to inform your partner (I don't really think my husband cares about the fact that nobody can work the new coffee maker at work, and I hope he doesn't really think I care as much as he does about which Dark Shadows props are and are not coming up for auction, except the bats, I love the bats) but rather as a bonding mechanism.  I think chimpanzees grooming each other and eating the lice they find probably get the same happy reinforced relationship feeling that Ellen and Avery get talking about minutiae.  I'm not sure I agree with the second part, that your own opinions get rounded down this way - personally I always remember when I was right about something all along, don't you?

THAT INSULT TO HONEST WEASELS' attack on this genuinely happy relationship begins as brilliant social engineering.  It plays a bit like a horror movie, full of foreshadowing and just a few chapters giving L'HOMUFFIN's nasty little perspective as she leaves the country, comes back, leaves again, and decides to ruin a perfectly happy bunch of people.  There's a scene in the beginning where even Avery realizes she's set him up with a secret against his will - he brings her some marron glaces, which are evidently candied chestnuts - the kind of thing you couldn't get during the war or right after, and she suddenly runs them upstairs and keeps them a secret from Ellen, so my dumb boy Avery doesn't have the fucking sense to tell his wife about it.  It's this weird awkward thing, and some of the power that people like LADY VOLDEMORT have comes partly from not being afraid to be awkward, not feeling obliged to fill a silence, not needing to put people at ease.  And dumb fucker knows he should tell his wife in bed that night "oh honey you would not believe what our resident roundheels pulled today, I got her some of those chestnut things she seemed to want from the box we sent our daughter and she ran upstairs when you came home because she obviously wanted to make more of it than just a friendly gift.  Man, we need to pack her shitty fucking attitude back to France."  But he doesn't.  Well, then she's got him.

Anybody who has been through the death of a long term relationship can look back and know, yeah.  When you stopped talking to him, when he stopped pretending to care about your day, when one of you started keeping secrets, when one of you stopped filtering what you were saying in your head...  relationships die by communication.

So yeah, Louise is a monster, probably a sociopath.  (Whipple deliberately gives her enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life on Mrs. North's bequest, so she hasn't got the poverty card to play.)  But Avery ought to fucking know better!  This is a grown damned man, not a college kid.  And once he fucks up, he doesn't have the guts or the sense to do anything about it!  Yes, your daughter hates you.  She should hate you because you are a cheating piece of shit.  But if you don't have the goddamned courage and commitment to walk up to your beloved child and tell her you screwed the pooch,  big time, you're incredibly sorry, you wish you could take it back but you can't, you understand why she feels this way and you know you don't deserve it but you still love her and you hope that one day she will allow you to speak to her again, well.  Then you deserve to marry somebody who puts the same face of makeup on more than once a day (while hating you.)  Hate-makeup.  That's what you get.

Are we supposed to think that Ellen's life pre-HOMEWRECKER AU FRANCAIS was lacking something?  I really don't care for that trope, that until you've had something profoundly shitty happen to you that you're less of a well rounded person and don't appreciate the unshitty things in life.  Personally I feel that Ellen's happiness was genuine.  I mean, yeah, we've all known people who are obviously getting something emotionally out of letting people walk all over them and not having the help do what they're paid to do.  People do the things they do for reasons, usually emotional ones that they don't admit.  But she genuinely loved her garden, at least (harder to tell if she enjoyed the cooking or the other tasks) and by the way ew when SHE WHO PROBABLY FARTS IN ELEVATORS SILENTLY AND GETS OFF AT THE NEXT FLOOR won't say what kind of perfume she wears but it turns out to be the same scent as Ellen grows in her beloved garden (I don't even think that one was supposed to be a planned insult, just symbolism) man I could have slapped her.  But I certainly don't think there's something inherently wrong or limiting about being a woman who stays home and keeps house and is happy with her husband; feminism is about choices.  I mean, I get that in the end she has more agency (sort of - she rather gets told what to do with the rest of her life by another more dominant female) but she's just going to be doing the exact same things she's done at her own house, only now for other people and with less money.

And what do we think of Avery's scene there at the end?  I was glad for Ellen that she at least found out what was going through his head, but does it make it better that the husband you loved didn't actually fall out of love with you, he just fucked the HOUSE GUEST WHO DIDN'T ASK IF SHE COULD HELP IN THE KITCHEN AND LITERALLY WOULDN'T LEAVE WHEN TOLD TO GET HER SHIT AND GO and was too fucking proud to do anything but marry her.  MARRY HER.  That doesn't make you a better man, that makes you a fool and a patsy and now everybody knows how fucking pathetic you are, dude.  So he still loves Ellen. So what?  What the hell does that do for her?  He isn't willing to do anything about it, and he isn't willing to try to really fix what he did to the kids either.  He just wants everything to be like it was, and he doesn't know what happened or how it happened, and he knows it's HER fault but won't actually do anything.  Miss me with that weak shit, Avery.

So anyway: Someone at a Distance, awesome book, 5/5.  I didn't even get into all the great supporting characters.  Honestly reminded me a little bit of the Lois Duncan books I read as a kid, like Summer of Fear, where happy people are in grave peril that they don't know about at first and even when they do find out it's smarter and stronger than they are, except in this one evil does triumph and the consolation is that after it all goes down Ellen and her daughter find a way to move forward with their lives that they can accept.

This copy is another of the Classic editions with cover art and comes to me from the Mountain Regional Library System of Young Harris, GA, which I have to assume is a real place that actually exists.

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