An inescapable image
14 September 2016 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI'm being haunted by the memory of a pre-war novel I flicked through in a station waiting room on holiday a couple of weeks ago: I skim-read it pretty rapidly (exceedingly rapidly towards the end, partly because I was in a state of shock and partly because I was severely running out of time) and I don't remember in the least what it was called or who the author might have been. And I don't imagine there's another extant copy in the country, so I'm never likely to encounter it again...
Apparently it was the last volume in a trilogy (yes, they had them back then) and in the previous two books the heroine had progressed from being a 'fallen woman' out to ensnare a rich elderly husband to falling genuinely in love with his son and eloping with the young man. And they conduct a sort of tentative courtship during their honeymoon (which begins with her being horribly seasick for days on the trip up to Scotland on a slow tramp steamer!) while her husband tries to convince her that she is safe and he really does return her love, no matter who she was in the past and no matter what her original intentions towards him were. But all the time there is an unexplained trouble hinted at in the background.
And then just when they seem to have come together and be happy at last, a package arrives in the post from one of her old associates whom she now regards with hatred and fear. Her husband sees this as a sign of reconciliation to their marriage and insists on sending back a friendly letter, but she refuses even to open it. And when she finally does, late at night and some time later, it contains a loaded gun and a note saying 'You know what to do with this'.
And she does. She goes upstairs, she whispers goodbye to her adored sleeping husband, leaves a long letter of explanation on the dressing-table... and then she puts the muzzle of the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger to turn him into a mutilated 'thing' on the pillow, that for a moment she is horribly afraid is still moving.
OUCH. It's a sudden scene of madness and horror that comes completely out of nowhere, and shocks even the man who sent her the gun; she was intended to use it on herself, of course, being utterly unworthy of a good man's love.
For the ticking timebomb that has been hanging over the story, and is now revealed, is that she is carrying the child of one of the other characters, a feckless wastrel whom we have met briefly elsewhere in the book. And her agonized logic, it turns out, is to kill the man she loves instead to spare him from having to experience her own suicide and the shame of learning why... only then she is unable to kill herself as she had intended because she is terrified of having to face him again in the afterlife. (The farewell letter she spends her last evening writing -- trailed to the reader as being a preparation for suicide or leaving her husband for his own good -- turns out to be intended instead for the chambermaid who had befriended her, trying to explain what had happened to an apparently loving couple.)
So the heroine spends the rest of the book as as a self-hating murderess until she too finally dies in an ironic accident (and her dying words indicate that they forgive each other; the author has an unflinchingly literal approach to life after death).
It's... not a theme one expects from what appeared to be a pot-boiler romance, and is made more shocking by the fact that the murdered man is one of the most straightforwardly likeable characters in the cast, and that the plot at that point appears to be leading up to his reconciliation with his father and the young couple moving into a house in France where no-one need know of his wife's spotty past; an apparently predictable happy ending is suddenly devastated. (And the clues *are* there in advance, once you know -- it's just that they don't lead where you think they're going at the time.)
But it's that murder scene that I can't get out of my head, because it's so random and hideous in its effect... and shockingly graphic, for something that, given the period, is depicted entirely via the impact on the viewpoint character rather than by any description of what she actually sees.
Apparently it was the last volume in a trilogy (yes, they had them back then) and in the previous two books the heroine had progressed from being a 'fallen woman' out to ensnare a rich elderly husband to falling genuinely in love with his son and eloping with the young man. And they conduct a sort of tentative courtship during their honeymoon (which begins with her being horribly seasick for days on the trip up to Scotland on a slow tramp steamer!) while her husband tries to convince her that she is safe and he really does return her love, no matter who she was in the past and no matter what her original intentions towards him were. But all the time there is an unexplained trouble hinted at in the background.
And then just when they seem to have come together and be happy at last, a package arrives in the post from one of her old associates whom she now regards with hatred and fear. Her husband sees this as a sign of reconciliation to their marriage and insists on sending back a friendly letter, but she refuses even to open it. And when she finally does, late at night and some time later, it contains a loaded gun and a note saying 'You know what to do with this'.
And she does. She goes upstairs, she whispers goodbye to her adored sleeping husband, leaves a long letter of explanation on the dressing-table... and then she puts the muzzle of the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger to turn him into a mutilated 'thing' on the pillow, that for a moment she is horribly afraid is still moving.
OUCH. It's a sudden scene of madness and horror that comes completely out of nowhere, and shocks even the man who sent her the gun; she was intended to use it on herself, of course, being utterly unworthy of a good man's love.
For the ticking timebomb that has been hanging over the story, and is now revealed, is that she is carrying the child of one of the other characters, a feckless wastrel whom we have met briefly elsewhere in the book. And her agonized logic, it turns out, is to kill the man she loves instead to spare him from having to experience her own suicide and the shame of learning why... only then she is unable to kill herself as she had intended because she is terrified of having to face him again in the afterlife. (The farewell letter she spends her last evening writing -- trailed to the reader as being a preparation for suicide or leaving her husband for his own good -- turns out to be intended instead for the chambermaid who had befriended her, trying to explain what had happened to an apparently loving couple.)
So the heroine spends the rest of the book as as a self-hating murderess until she too finally dies in an ironic accident (and her dying words indicate that they forgive each other; the author has an unflinchingly literal approach to life after death).
It's... not a theme one expects from what appeared to be a pot-boiler romance, and is made more shocking by the fact that the murdered man is one of the most straightforwardly likeable characters in the cast, and that the plot at that point appears to be leading up to his reconciliation with his father and the young couple moving into a house in France where no-one need know of his wife's spotty past; an apparently predictable happy ending is suddenly devastated. (And the clues *are* there in advance, once you know -- it's just that they don't lead where you think they're going at the time.)
But it's that murder scene that I can't get out of my head, because it's so random and hideous in its effect... and shockingly graphic, for something that, given the period, is depicted entirely via the impact on the viewpoint character rather than by any description of what she actually sees.
