Uncle Paul

by Celia Fremlin

  Uncle Paul

  CELIA FREMLIN

  To Elia

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.

  One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.

  Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?

  Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls, and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.

  She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book War Factory (1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.

  In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a ‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of Women’s Own, Punch and the London Mystery Magazine. However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:

  The original inspiration for this book was my second baby. She was one of those babies who, perfectly content and happy all day, simply don’t sleep through the night. Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by lack of sleep; my eyes would fall shut while I peeled the potatoes or ironed shirts. I remember one night sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my baby awake and lively in my arms it dawned on me: this is a major human experience, why hasn’t someone written about it? It seemed to me that a serious novel should be written with this experience at its centre. Then it occurred to me – why don’t I write one?

  The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.

  Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing Uncle Paul in 1960 and Seven Lean Years in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover, The Hours Before Dawn and The Trouble-Makers have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’

  *

  By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.

  In 1969 she published a novel entitled Possession. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the
terrible events of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching Possession today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970) Fremlin did not publish again until Appointment With Yesterday (1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements. The Long Shadow (1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.

  Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called Duet in Verse which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was King of the World (1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’

  Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base and Possession right up to her penultimate novel The Echoing Stones (1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.

  To revisit the Celia Fremlin oeuvre now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.

  *

  Whenever I have read a Celia Fremlin novel it has always felt to me as if somehow I were intruding. Fremlin excels not only at creating an atmosphere of menace, sustaining it and then heightening it: she also makes me feel as though I am looking over someone’s shoulder, through another’s eyes – as if I am actually present in the story. And that is a great talent, not easily emulated. Her characters are not mere triggers for a plot: they seem real and tangible, and I, for one, feel a connection to them. I believe Fremlin achieved this intimacy with her characters because she delved so deeply and with such subtlety into the dynamics of family. She showed this in her debut The Hours Before Dawn and does so again (with even greater success, I’d say) in Uncle Paul.

  The novel gives us three sisters: Meg and Isabel and their older half-sister, Mildred, who married the dark, handsome Uncle Paul. But Mildred’s dream soon turned to ashes when Paul was arrested and convicted of his previous wife’s murder. Now, with the passing of time, Uncle Paul could be free again. Will he wreak havoc on the wife who deserted him all those years ago?

  Fremlin builds up the terror and fear in a picturesque setting: a family on holiday in a caravan park, Mildred nearby in an isolated cottage, the very cottage where she and Uncle Paul stayed just before his arrest. And this selection of location is one of the things I love most about Fremlin: she stages these dark tales of hers in such beautiful settings. By day the children run free and the adults sit on the beach licking ice creams and paddling about in the sea. However, it isn’t only darkness of the sky that descends in the late hours, but darkness of the mind, too, as Fremlin makes her characters see moving shadows in every corner of the cottage and think they hear footsteps outside on the cinder track.

  Uncle Paul is a terrific novel of paranoia and the harm it can inflict on people who already bear wounds of the mental-psychological sort. Every time I’ve re-read the book Fremlin has made me feel just as claustrophobic as Meg – as if the walls of that cottage were closing in upon me. The feeling of isolation and abandonment is acutely intense, especially in a pre-mobile/Internet era when TVs and telephones were still considered luxuries. The only elements Fremlin needs are that lonely cottage, that sense of the dark pressing against the windows, and the vivid imaginations of her characters and her readers. With these she conjures a wonderful atmosphere of isolation and fearful tension.

  Chris Simmons

  www.crimesquad.com

  CHAPTER I

  IT IS RARE for any catastrophe to seem like a catastrophe right at the very beginning. Nearly always, in its early stages, it seems more like a nuisance; just one more of those tiresome interruptions which come so provokingly just when life is going smoothly and pleasantly.

  Looking back afterwards, Meg could never be sure whether she had felt like this about Isabel’s telegram. For memory is a deceptive thing. It was so easy, later, when fear had grown into certainty, to imagine that she had had a premonition of it all. That she had known, all through that rainy summer day, as the typewriters clicked and pinged, as the top copies and the file copies piled up under the watery light, that when she got back to her lodgings there would be a message like this awaiting her. That a telegram would be stuck corner-wise in the letter rack just inside the great gloomy front door; that it would be from Isabel; and that, this time, the trouble would be real.

  Or had the whole thing, after all, only seemed like a nuisance? When she saw who the telegram was from, even when she read the message, had she still merely thought, with exasperated affection, that this was just another of Isabel’s things—a fuss about nothing? For Isabel was a worrier, always had been; and since marrying for the second time, setting up house all over again with a stepfather for her two little boys, she had seemed worse than ever. There was a tenseness about her now; a puckered, flustered look about her small, anxious mouth that Meg had not seen there before.

  Well, no, that wasn’t quite true. Meg had seen it before, of course, even in their nursery days. A sister can never really show you a new expression on her face. It is just that expressions which once came only in occasional unhappy flashes may become more frequent—habitual; while other expressions, once habitual, may now only flash out occasionally, in moments of lightness and snatched gaiety.

  High up in the grey London apartment house, Meg looked at the telegram again. In the past minutes it had become familiar to her, part of her environment. The very folds and creases it had acquired from its journey in and out of her pocket seemed to make it, uncomfortably, more and more a part of her, less and less easy to gloss over or ignore.

  “Mildred needs help. Please come.

  Isabel.”

  Meg knew already that she would go. Even if it was only one of Isabel’s ridiculous flaps, she would still go. She had always gone when Isabel was in any kind of trouble, particularly if the trouble concerned Mildred. Mildred was something that she and Isabel had to cope with together; it had always been like that,
even in the days when they were children, and it was Mildred who was supposed to be coping with them….

  But Meg did not want to think about her childhood just now. Such thoughts would lead, inevitably, to that bit of her childhood which mustn’t be spoken of in front of Mildred. Even after all these years, a reminder of those weeks could still throw Mildred into such a state of hysterical self-pity as might take days to soothe. In dealing with Mildred’s problems it was better not even to think about that time. Better, always, to think only of what to do—of the practical details.

  Such as looking up the trains to—where was it?—Southcliffe—this place where Isabel and Philip had taken the children for their holiday. Perhaps, Meg mused, as she scanned the columns of tiny, tightly packed figures, perhaps this holiday would be doing Isabel good—would be softening her mouth again, smoothing out the tiny, fluttering creases between her brows. Though how much of a holiday it could be for her, staying in a caravan with two little boys and an exacting and by no means youthful husband who still wasn’t really used to the children….

  Southcliffe. Only a two-hour journey, apparently. She could go down after work tomorrow—even get away at lunch time, perhaps—and, if it turned out that nothing much was the matter, she could be back on Sunday in time to go out with Freddy as arranged.

  But, of course, she must ring Freddy, just to warn him that she might not be there, and not to wait for her if she didn’t turn up. Not that he would be likely to wait for her in any case. Freddy didn’t seem the kind of man who would wait for anybody. Or was there, perhaps, some kind of a girl, quite different from Meg, for whom he would wait—for whom he might even arrive punctually himself—?

  Well, anyway, it would only be polite to ring him. And perhaps, having got him to the telephone, she might consult him about the whole business. Tell him about Isabel, about Mildred. Ask his advice about going to Southcliffe.