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She has a dowry large enough for them to buy a handsome-sized house in which to bring up their family.
Theirs is an upholstered but continuously tense Pharisaism, little affection on display and not much in inner reserve either. Their religion, like their politics, is more a matter of following respectable custom than of private conviction. They have a maid they want to address by her surname but dare not, who serves a high tea that tells its own joyless, anti-sensuous story: ‘cold ham, tongue, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, beetroot in malt vinegar, and bread and butter, followed by tinned peaches and tinned milk.’
John Goodwin, university graduate and secondary-school science teacher, is fond enough of his parents and three sisters, yet knows — even if the law of the land were otherwise, an improbability beyond his dreams — that he could never share with them his sexual predilection. He has difficulties accepting it himself. In London he has a male lover, Bertie, a feckless drifter, but decides that he would do best to give this relationship up, and find himself a job in a milieu with fewer sexual opportunities.
He therefore accepts a post at Ashburton Grammar School on the edge of Dartmoor. His move there coincides with a family event of such magnitude nobody knows how to handle it. Maud, aged 15, is pregnant by a friend’s brother who cannot be considered her boyfriend. To this dilemma John finds a solution of breathtaking simplicity and boldness. Maud will move with him to Devon as his wife; everybody will think her baby is his. He will live uxoriously, chastely, converting his vice into convention-blessed virtue.
His plan is carried out — with surprising initial success. But it doesn’t work. John cannot renounce his sexuality, and Bertie disastrously re-enters his life. Nor can Maud cope with the realities of her enforced situation. All this is Vine/Rendell at her most brilliant and subtle. For what we watch is the deterioration of Maud, from attractive, unfortunate victim into a monster of resentment. And yet no easy judgment is passed. Temperaments unfortunately often fail to develop as we hope: too many hidden factors are at work.
Vine has framed ‘The Child’s Child’ — supposedly an unpublished novel by a well-known writer, the late Martin Greenwell — within a first-person narration by university lecturer Grace, working on a PhD about illegitimate women in English literature, and sharing a Hampstead house with her gay brother and his partner.
Though we can find interesting parallels between 2011 and the 1930s, including an eruption of vicious homophobia, for me these two outer sections lack the intensity and vitality of the novel proper, and could even deter readers from the main, richly worked excursion into obscure, sympathetically rendered lives.
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