Read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Online
Authors: Elizabeth Taylor
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
‘Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor’s novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I’ve returned to her too – in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it’ Sarah Waters
‘Always intelligent, often subversive and never dull, Elizabeth Taylor is the thinking person’s dangerous housewife. Her sophisticated prose combines elegance, icy wit and freshness in a stimulating cocktail – the perfect toast to the quiet horror of domestic life’ Valerie Martin
The unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction … In all of Taylor’s novels and short stories, there is subtle humour, acute psychological perception and great tenderness … But it is her unflinching dissection of what goes on beneath the surface of people’s lives that makes the worlds of her novels so magnetising. The very English art of seeming is both respected and satirised. Again and again, the world of objects, routines and domestic necessities is expertly drawn, and beneath that the world of half-conscious feelings, suppressed longings, denied impulses, stifled resentments … She is adept at capturing the ways people interact – and how they fail to; how words, thoughts, actions glance off each other in unpredictable directions; how even those closely related can live curiously parallel existences’ Rebecca Abrams,
New Statesman
‘Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen- soul-sisters all’ Anne Tyler
‘How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time!’ Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘Her stories remain with one, indelibly, as though they had been some turning point in one’s own experience’ Elizabeth Bowen
‘I envy those readers who are coming to her work for the first time. Theirs will be an unexpected pleasure, and they will – if they read her as she wanted to be read – learn much that will surprise them’ Paul Bailey
‘Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’ Rosamond Lehmann
‘One of the most underrated novelists of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor writes with a wonderful precision and grace. Her world is totally absorbing’ Antonia Fraser
‘Elizabeth Taylor has an eye as sharply all-seeing as her prose is elegant – even the humdrum becomes astonishing when told in language that always aims for descriptive integrity, without a cliché in sight. As a result, Taylor excels in conveying the tragicomic poignancy of the everyday’
Daily Telegraph
‘How skilfully and with what peculiar exhilaration she negotiated the minefield of the human heart’ Jonathan Keates,
Spectator.
MODERN CLASSICS
83
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor, who was born in Reading, Berkshire, in 1912 and educated at the Abbey School, Reading, worked as a governess and librarian before her marriage in 1936: ‘I learnt so much from these jobs,’ she wrote, ‘and have never regretted the time I spent at them.’ She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life. Her first novel,
At Mrs Lippincote’s
, appeared in 1945 and was followed by eleven more, together with short stories which were published in various periodicals and collected in five volumes, and a children’s book,
Mossy Trotter.
Taylor’s shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle- and upper-middle-class English life soon won her a discriminating audience, as well as staunch friends in the world of letters. Rosamond Lehmann called her ‘sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit’. Elizabeth Taylor died in 1975.
At Mrs Lippincote’s
Palladian
A View of the Harbour
A Wreath of Roses
A Game of Hide-and-Seek
The Sleeping Beauty
Angel
In a Summer Season
The Soul of Kindness
The Wedding Group
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Blaming
Short Story Collections
Hester Lilly and Other Stories
The Blush and Other Stories
A Dedicated Man and Other Stories
The Devastating Boys
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-13100-6
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © The Estate of Elizabeth Taylor 1971
Introduction copyright © Paul Bailey 1982
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
I
HAVE to begin this appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel on a personal note. I was working as an assistant in Harrods when my first book,
At the Jerusalem,
was published in 1967 – a fact which, for some reason, struck the diarist of
The Times
as being of interest to the paper’s readers. A year after publication, I met Elizabeth Taylor at a party. She told me how intrigued she had been that a man in his late twenties should have chosen a home for old women as the setting for a novel, and that she had gone to Harrods’ magazine department to see what such a curious creature looked like. She went on to say that she had watched me at work for about an hour, from the vantage of a chair in the adjoining lounge. She smiled as she made this revelation. She had not anticipated seeing someone with a youthful appearance: she had expected me to be just a trifle wizened.
When I read
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
in 1971, I remembered Elizabeth Taylor’s confession. Ludovic Myers, the young man who comes to Mrs Palfrey’s aid when she falls in the street and who subsequently befriends her, is a novelist
manqué.
Throughout the course of
Mrs Palfrey,
he is writing a study of old age which – altering a phrase uttered over a pre-dinner sherry by his new, elderly friend – he gives the title
They Weren’t Allowed to Die There.
He works at Harrods, in the sense
that he takes his manuscript into the (now vanished) banking hall, where he scribbles away happily, surrounded by Honourables on their uppers and tired county ladies resting their feet before the train journey back to the shires. Ludo, like me, is an ex-actor, who has done his stint in a tatty repertory company and has no desire to repeat the experience. In other words, I am flattered to think that I gave Elizabeth Taylor a little bit of inspiration for what is undoubtedly one of her finest books.
Laura Palfrey, the widow of a colonial administrator, is what is known as a ‘handsome woman’. She has ‘big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl’. The description continues, without a trace of sneering on the author’s part: ‘She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.’ Thus, wittily and vividly, Mrs Taylor establishes her heroine’s presence on the second page of the novel. She also establishes Laura’s resilience: ‘Even as a bride, in strange, alarming conditions in Burma, she had been magnificent, calm – when (for instance) she was rowed across floods to her new home; unruffled, finding it more than damp, with a snake wound round the banisters to greet her. She had straightened her back and given herself a good talking-to, as she had this afternoon in the train.’ That accurately placed cliché – ‘a good talking-to’ – immediately informs the reader that Laura Palfrey and self-pity have never sustained a relationship; that here is a human being prepared to endure or surmount whatever
inconveniences or obstacles life puts in her path.
But Laura isn’t making the journey to some snake-infested outpost. She is entering the portals – the pompous term seems appropriate – of the Claremont Hotel in Cromwell Road. She is about to join the ranks of the rejected: Mrs Arbuthnot, crippled with arthritis; Mr Osmond, forever dashing off outraged letters to the
Daily Telegraph;
Mrs Post, constantly knitting; the bloated Mrs Burton, reeking of whisky by lunch time. These fellow survivors would be in a state-supported home were it not that they have money enough to fortify their pride by living out their days in a residential hotel. It is the reader who acknowledges that they have been cast aside, not they. Of the five ‘regulars’, only Mrs Burton seems to have a continuing contact with the world outside the Claremont, in the person of her brother-in-law who dines, and drinks, with her as often as he can. The others, particularly the latest inmate, are all waiting for someone or something to turn up. Soon after her arrival in this genteel hell, the proud and plucky Laura Palfrey hears herself praising a considerate grandson who does not exist. She has a grandson, of course, but Desmond’s disposition is not of the kind that warms to the upright and independent woman who happens to be his mother’s mother. In her anxiety to remain a cut above (another apt cliché) her companions in reined-in distress, Laura transforms Desmond into the grandson of her imagining – a lively, interesting, charming youth; not the dull, pedantic, quickly bored young man whose company she as quickly finds unendurable. It is a measure of Elizabeth Taylor’s
art that it suggests that Mrs Palfrey should be pained at having to practise this harmless deception.