Jumping the Queue

 

Jumping the Queue / Mary Wesley 
London: Penguin, 1988, c1983.
208 p.

I picked this book up recently while thrifting, and decided to read it immediately. Mary Wesley is hit and miss for me; there are intriguing bits to her stories, great settings and lots of realistic, complex female characters. But there are also outdated social mores, particularly when it comes to gender relationships. 

This book has flaws of that sort, from taboo sexual relationships to rape that's glossed over. Without those elements I would have liked this much more. The story is fascinating - Matilda Poliport is a widow, with four grown children whom she's mostly estranged from. She's described on the back cover as "elderly" -- she's actually just on this side of sixty. 

Matilda has decided she has nothing to live for. No husband, children who don't care about her much, well, I guess she has no role in life if not a wife and mother. She has a lovely cottage in the country, nice community, a favourite goose, and time to do anything at all. But what she decides to do is to take some pills and swim out to sea. 

She is foiled in her plans by a rowdy group of young adults on the beach, and in turn she foils the suicide attempt of a man on the bridge, who turns out to be the matricide on the lam that has been in all the papers. She takes Hugh home, and between them they spark something in each other again. They start living, Matilda going up to London briefly, Hugh figuring out how he can leave the country discretely. He doesn't ask for details of Matilda's life and she doesn't ask why he killed his mother. 

This is a story of a woman's life, and what gives it meaning. It questions what we live for and what we value. It mixes the appearance of  a bucolic country life with black humour and bitterness. I liked a lot of it, mainly for its look at how women are squeezed out of everything as they get older. Matilda is overlooked by her own children, patronized by some of the locals, and she's a lonely woman with no real friends to speak of (her two old London friends are nasty and competitive with her). But there is so much bleakness here - murder, suicide, incest, petty cruelties. I found it depressing, and a little unpleasant overall. Wesley certainly skewers this family's psychology without holding back. Well written but no pleasantries to be found here.