In a Summer Season

In a Summer Season / Elizabeth Taylor
London: Virago, 2006, c1961.
224 p.

Another novel about marriage, but this one is a bit different from the more modern ones I've read lately. This was published in 1961, in England, and it does reflect the social expectations of that time, and how these characters are upsetting the equilibrium. 

Kate Heron is a widow, and ends up marrying a man who is the opposite of her former husband - ten years younger than her, serially unemployed, not very interested in the arts and literature, but very physically compelling. 

Dermot is about halfway between the age of Kate and her oldest son, Tom. And sometimes Dermot seems more attuned to Kate, and at others more so to Tom's generation, especially with music, drinking and the horses. He's always on to some scheme to make money; as the book opens he's trying to grow mushrooms in the shed. And his mother is also continuously trying to involve him in schemes of her own, to the benefit of her friends. This mother is something; so self-absorbed, so entitled. Kate has to run interference and try to be the grownup, as it's her money that would be used by any of these schemes. 

There are happy times between them, even if the neighbours and the countryside are scandalized by this strange relationship, especially those who knew her first husband. They believe that Dermot has only married her for her money but within the book we see Dermot acknowledging that he is really in love with her and that has made him into more of a man. Still, his resentment at not having work, and his drinking habit, combine to make him unhappy and rude a lot of the time. 

As his drinking gets worse, their relationship struggles - but of course they try to hide that from everyone else. But when Kate's old friend Charles returns home, now widowed, with his late teen daughter, things begin to really go off the rails. 

I found this book to be a quiet, sad read. The hopes of each person as to what they wanted to be, and how they wanted their lives to work, were never based in honest appraisal of reality. There was so much stagnant energy in so many of the characters - Dermot, Kate's two children, Charles' daughter - lots of them unable to stir or accomplish anything. Lots of doomed love affairs and misplaced longings too. 

And Taylor can be quite piercing when it comes to relationships, especially romantic ones, and the lies a person is comfortable with - or the truths they understand but won't admit to anyone, even themselves. You could see the fallout of this one from the start, although I did find the actual conclusion a bit startling and unexpected in the details. In some ways this feels like a book from the 60s but some elements also feel contemporary. It was a train wreck of a read; once I'd begun I really had to finish it to see where she was going with it. I won't forget it quickly.