The Serpent in the Garden
Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin
‘Good lord!’ he said, after a short silence. ‘You girls do know how to make the most of a humdrum seaside holiday, don’t you?’
Although new to me, Celia Fremlin was an author renowned for psychological thrillers in which she repeatedly subverted the illusion of the domestic idyll. Yet there is in fact very little idyllic about the stages on which Fremlin chose to set Uncle Paul, her accomplished second novel: an overcrowded seaside caravan pervaded by clutter and damp sand; the preternaturally impersonal hotel; and the brilliantly-realised lonely clifftop cottage, cold, damp and almost entirely consumed by a jungle of towering weeds. The descriptions of that cottage, in particular — its dark, oddly-furnished interior and air of creeping doom — are so chilling that one feels bound to wonder what possessed Mildred, the eldest (by some measure) of the three sisters central to Fremlin’s plot, to honeymoon there with her husband, the eponymous ‘Uncle’ Paul. But of course Mildred was a young woman, then, romantic and very much in love, which renders Paul’s arrest for bigamy and the attempted murder of his first wife all the more shocking and cruel.
‘Someone’s been here!’
Isabel, turned to face them in the doorway above, was looking shaken, and she clutched her bulging bags to her body as if for mutual protection. ‘Someone’s been sitting on my bunk!’
As Uncle Paul opens, fifteen years have passed. Fremlin’s protagonist Meg has grown from a child of six to a young woman, working in an office, pursuing an uncertain romance with a dashing pianist named Freddy, and summoned (as so often before) by her middle sister, the perpetually-muddled and unhappily-married Isabel, to resolve Mildred’s latest drama. For Mildred has chosen, on the eve of Uncle Paul’s release from prison, to take up residence in that clifftop cottage once again, close to the resort where Isabel and her two young boys, visited by husband and stepfather Philip whenever he can get away from his job in London, are holidaying in the dismal caravan. With Meg, we wonder what has possessed Mildred to return to the cottage; with her we judge that there must be a rational explanation for the footsteps which Mildred heard outside the cottage in the middle of the night; and with her we must wait for the surprising denouement, tying ourselves into knots of suspicion and wrong-headed deduction in the meantime.
Of all the vast and inexplicable capabilities of the human mind, perhaps the most remarkable of all is its power to encompass, in a few vivid seconds, such a variety of images and trains of thought as would take many hours to describe; and the fact that some of these coexisting thoughts may be quite incompatible, even directly contradictory to one another, only adds to the wonder of it all.
The psychological torment that Fremlin puts her characters through, in their anticipation of Paul’s reappearance, is contagious. Step by step, she builds a fantastic atmosphere of suspense, leading us onto the shifting dunes of their escalating fears and suspicions — sometimes, indeed, encouraging us to run on ahead, like excited children within sight of the sea, before waiting dutifully for them to catch up. It is an immensely satisfying narrative skill. And the fact that Fremlin’s writing is often wickedly funny only adds guilt to our deliciously agonised pleasure. How outrageous, to be laughing at a time like this!
Meg is a fantastic heroine: outwardly cool and competent, yet inwardly wrestling with the parameters of her new relationship with the somewhat older Freddy, with his good looks and sophisticated wit, she is darkly aware of malignant forces in the offing. Perpetually bewildered Isabel, for whom every domestic chore offers almost insurmountable challenges, and overwrought Mildred, irreversibly altered by Paul’s betrayal, clinging to her youth, and bizarrely unable to stay away from the cottage on the cliff, are splendid creations; the family dynamic between the three sisters feels utterly real, and Isabel’s unhappy marriage to Philip, a man whose frequently martinet conduct has the power to reduce her to shreds, makes perfect sense in terms of the young widowhood she had been facing with two small children. But Fremlin devotes just as much care to her cast of supporting characters, too, rendering each of them vivid and believable, from Isabel’s young sons and an infuriatingly perspicacious boy named Cedric, to the elderly hotel guest, Miss Carver, who harks wistfully back to the seaside holidays of her own distant childhood.
Fremlin is excellent at evoking place, too. The seafront hotel, though little more than a sketch, comes to our mind’s eye fully-formed, complete with shrimp nets in the porch and the polite, imagined thwump-wump of the swinging lounge door. The shabby caravan becomes an extension of Isabel’s ramshackle personality, lopsided and creaking at the seams with the crowding expectations placed upon it. And how gradually, inescapably, that jungle of weeds surrounding the lonely cottage takes on a claustrophobic life of its own as the story builds to its rewarding conclusion.
Uncle Paul is a wonderfully nostalgic read for us today. Its first publication, in 1959, coincided with the moment when the death knell for the great British seaside holiday was already sounding. Rising wages and rates of employment in Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ Britain meant that holidaymakers were in pursuit of more exotic locations, brought within reach by the next decade’s rise of the cheap flight and the package holiday. Seaside towns such as Fremlin’s fictional yet stereotypical Southcliffe, dependent upon a fresh influx of resident visitors every two or three weeks in summer, would fall by the wayside for ever. But even as we may yearn for that simpler bucket-and-spade time, every moment we spend with the sisters and their circle illustrates the literal and metaphorical ‘sand in the sandwiches’ of its limitations: the endless debates over whether or not to carry a raincoat; the pierhead café that promises much but is inevitably found to be shut; the figures huddled within seafront shelters for protection against the unseasonable weather; the completely unattractive ‘attractions’ to be found in arcade and sideshow.
This is the first time since I got here, she reflected, in some little surprise, that I’ve actually seen the sea. You can’t see it from the caravans at all, although it’s so close, because of all the other caravans; and further on you can’t see it because of the bathing huts; and after that you can’t see it because of the parked cars and the sweet kiosks.
It is irresistible to conclude that Fremlin was aware of the seaside resort’s terminal decline and exploited it to her advantage. Just as Mildred’s youthful romance ended in shattering disillusionment, Miss Carver’s recollections channel the lost happiness of childhood seaside holidays; the happiness which Isabel, in the cramped caravan, must surely have hoped to recapture twice over. The impossibility of regaining the past is Uncle Paul’s recurrent theme.
The French flap of Faber’s attractive reissue of Uncle Paul carries a quote describing Celia Fremlin as ‘the grandmother of psycho-domestic noir.’ It is not a label I had come across before, nor one which the author herself could have recognised: I have learned that the phrase ‘domestic noir’ was not coined until three years after Fremlin’s death in 2009. Yet, even without a name tied conveniently to its coat, Fremlin’s suspenseful and artfully-wrought narrative, with its emphasis upon the female experience of perils lying not-so-dormant within apparently safe spaces, the barely-understood ramifications of a backstory that threatens to unhouse, or unhinge, the valiantly bewildered heroine, the mounting sense of the Serpent in the Garden, will be familiar to anyone who has read Du Maurier’s Rebecca or its sister-successors.
Fremlin wove a tangled web, wefted with acute insight into the psychology of both character and reader. Uncle Paul is an entertaining page-turner, one that feeds our vicarious taste for imperilled figures in familiar landscapes with Hitchcockian finesse and which ultimately concludes with loose ends tied neatly — indeed, with a most satisfying bow. And the nostalgia for a well-realised seaside holiday that her novel has inevitably triggered in me will see me taking R. C. Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September from the shelf as this new month begins.
Thank you for a great post and recommendation. One to add to the list :)
I have been eyeing this in the bookshops and this has given me another nudge! It sounds a treat.