Possession Read online

  Possession

  CELIA FREMLIN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  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

  Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch

  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 o
f 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.

  Chris Simmons

  www.crimesquad.com

  CHAPTER I

  “BUT IT’S MERVYN she’s marrying,” I said crossly. “Not his mother!”

  “Famous last words,” Peggy observed. Her wry smile flickered in the firelight, and she drew slowly on her cigarette, staring into the heart of the fire like a seer gazing into a crystal ball. “Do you really imagine, Clare,” she went on, “That your Sarah, with all that bounce and vitality, is going to settle down contentedly with a Mother’s Boy? It’d kill her!”

  I was annoyed. Peggy is my oldest friend, and of course she can say what she likes to me; but naturally she wouldn’t be my oldest friend if the things she liked saying weren’t, in general, the things that I liked hearing. I felt let-down, almost shocked. It had been with such total and uncomplicated delight that I had been telling her of the exciting news in Sarah’s letter. I had not doubted for a moment that she would take it as a matter for whole-hearted congratulation. What right had she to dampen my pleasure like this? Especially when—

  “You don’t even know Mervyn!” I protested, with growing indignation. “How can you possibly say whether he will or won’t make a good husband for Sarah? You’ve never met him, any more than we have!”

  “Meeting his mother was quite enough!” Peggy insisted doggedly. “Honestly it was, Clare; and you’d think so too, if you’d been at that party! I noticed her as soon as she came into the room—a tense little thing, wary as a weasel. And I promise you, Clare, I’m not exaggerating” (Peggy always introduces her more far-fetched recitals with these words, and usually they at once give me that sense of cosy expectancy that is the hall-mark of top-quality gossip) “—I promise you, Clare, that she never stopped telephoning home, the whole evening! Every time I looked into the hall, there she was, on the phone again, checking up on whether her precious son had got home safe from some jaunt or other! Honestly, Clare, she was looking absolutely green when he still wasn’t there by the dread hour of ten forty-five! Can you imagine it! A man of thirty-two!”

  “Thirty-one,” I corrected her, quick as a lizard at the touch of a moving shadow. The tiny thread of truth there might be in what Peggy was saying was making me extra sensitive about the twelve years difference in age between Mervyn and my daughter; and I wasn’t going to stand by and have a whole year added to it gratuitously just to improve Peggy’s story.

  “Mervyn is just thirty-one,” I asserted stiffly. “And if he is unlucky enough to have a very silly mother, I don’t see why we should hold that against him. He didn’t choose his mother—any more than you chose yours!”

  “Don’t!” Peggy groaned, and covered her eyes for a moment with her hand. “That was real cruel, Clare, and you know it. You know she’s coming this weekend—again! If only she’d be her normal, bad-tempered self, I wouldn’t mind, but she keeps reading these articles about mothers-in-law and how they shouldn’t interfere, and it makes her so unnatural. You know—grimly approving of the children no matter how frightful they are!”

  She laughed, but hollowly, and I pursued my advantage.

  “You see? Even you can’t control your mother. No one can. Mothers are like what they are like, and there is not a thing anybody can do about it. So stop crabbing about our Mervyn. Because he is ‘our’ Mervyn now. We’ve got to get used to thinking of him like that—and so have you, if you want to stay on speaking-terms!”

  But Peggy didn’t laugh. Her plump, pleasant face was still focussed in the direction of the glowing coals.

  “What does Janice think about it?” she asked at last, slowly: and I hesitated, choosing my words.

  “Well—naturally—there’s been a bit of a feeling of upset. The feeling—you know—the losing-sister thing. They’ve always been such close companions, she and Sarah. There’s bound to be a bit of that feeling about it, isn’t there?”

  I heard my voice repeating the same phrases over and over again, gabbling on, defensively. Even to Peggy I wasn’t going to reveal the utter dismay with which my younger daughter had received the news of her sister’s engagement.

  “Oh no!” she had exclaimed, as I handed her Sarah’s letter across the breakfast table. “Not marry him! She can’t!”

  Her usual dopey morning pastiness had gone two shades paler; and she repeated, with hoarse emphasis, “She can’t!”

  “But darling,” I had protested—just as I was now protesting to Peggy—“You don’t even know him! Wait till you’ve at least seen the poor man—”

  And at that Janice burst, idiotically, into tears; and what with this, and with my husband, Ralph, coming in half-shaved to ask what the devil was going on; and what with showing him the letter, and then getting Janice mopped-up and presentable in time for school—where she is, if you please, a prefect, entrusted with the task of instilling rational behaviour into hundreds of small girls as they pour into the cloakrooms between nine and nine-fifteen. As I say, what with all this, I didn’t have any chance to thrash out with her what was rea
lly the matter—if, indeed, there was anything the matter other than the shock of unexpected news.

  Ralph, thank goodness, took the whole thing much more sanely.

  “I suppose the fellow hasn’t a job, or anything?” he enquired resignedly; and I rejoiced at being able to inform him that—in marked contrast to Sarah’s previous boyfriends—Mervyn not only had a job, but a permanent job, in a firm of accountants. Not a firm of psychedelic accountants? enquired my husband unbelievingly. Not a financial rave-in? A fiscal freak-out? No, I assured him, glancing again down the untidy pages: it seemed to be an ordinary firm of real accountants. It seemed too good to be true; and together we pored over our daughter’s letter, looking for the snag.

  But, incredibly, there didn’t seem to be one. Mervyn had not only finished his exams without dropping-out at any stage; he actually liked accountancy. As far as we could gather from Sarah’s letter, he wasn’t planning to give it all up to become an abstract painter; it wasn’t destroying his soul or killing his creativity. Perhaps—here Ralph and I looked at each other in wild, incredulous hope—perhaps he hadn’t got any creativity! We could scarcely believe our good fortune. Could it really be that we, alone of all our friends, were to be blessed with a son-in-law who felt no impulse to free the human spirit from its chains? One who simply went out to work and earned money, unhampered by visions of a better world?

  Of course, he was thirty-one, not twenty-one. That accounted for a lot of steadiness and sanity. It also presumably meant that he had ditched some other wife somewhere along the line; but who cared? If he had the tact to keep quiet about it, we certainly wouldn’t probe. We would simply sit back rejoicing at the prospect of our wayward Sarah’s reaping the fat benefits that accrue from marrying a man already broken-in to wedlock; a seasoned man, one hammered and tempered into acceptance of the fact that if he doesn’t pay the little woman’s rent, then she will, with all that this entails in terms of male subjection and tuna fish out of tins.