Saturday Lunch with the Brownings Read online

  ‘No one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life or how to undermine domestic life’s apparent security.’ Sunday Times

  ‘Mortimer’s style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel … She is so good. I can’t think of a writer more attentive to emotional weather.’ Rachel Cooke, Observer

  ‘Devastating on domestic atrophy, flawed people, feminine rage that can barely find its words but she shows it somehow anyway, warring couples, gloom and glamour. Aggressively perfect.’ @jessieburton

  ‘Mortimer peels several layers of skin off the subjects of motherhood, marriage, and monogamy.’ Nick Hornby

  SATURDAY LUNCH

  WITH THE

  BROWNINGS

  PENELOPE MORTIMER

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LUCY SCHOLES

  DAUNT BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SKYLIGHT

  SATURDAY LUNCH WITH THE BROWNINGS

  SUCH A SUPER EVENING

  THE KING OF KISSINGDOM

  I TOLD YOU SO

  LITTLE MRS PERKINS

  THE PARSON

  THE MAN WHO LOVED PARTIES

  THE WHITE RABBIT

  SECOND HONEYMOON

  THE RENEGADE

  WHAT A LOVELY SURPRISE

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  SELECTED WORKS BY PENELOPE MORTIMER

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks are due to the editor of The New Yorker, in whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.

  p. m.

  PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

  This book was originally published in 1960. It is a historical text and for this reason we have not made any changes to its use of language.

  INTRODUCTION

  During the late 1950s, when she wrote the twelve superb stories included in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings (the majority of which first appeared in The New Yorker), Penelope Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer. Profiles of the couple featured in magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping to Tatler, often accompanied by photographs with their picture-perfect six children. Wife and mother were the identities that defined Mortimer, even as a writer. She had a regular parenting column, ‘Five Girls and a Boy’, in the Evening Standard, and her fiction, both her short stories and the four novels she’d published thus far – Johanna (1947; under the name Penelope Dimont, as she was then); A Villa in Summer (1954); The Bright Prison (1956); and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1958) – dealt predominantly with the subjects of marriage and motherhood.

  She wasn’t writing twee, cosy tales of domestic bliss though; instead Mortimer penned sharp, shrewd portraits of marital infidelity, strained, unhappy housewives and their insensitive husbands, impotently railing against the draining demands of parenthood, more often than not drowning their sorrows in drink. Much of this material she drew from her own life, especially when it came to her short stories, for which there was ‘no need to look for ideas’, as she put it in About Time Too (1993), her second volume of memoirs: ‘I mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest of days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.’ The cracks in her and John’s marriage, and the conflicts associated with finding much of her worth and value in her role of caregiver, while at the same time feeling stifled by domesticity, all provided rich fodder for her fiction. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, for example, the book that precedes Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, depicts a suburban mother’s attempts to procure an abortion for her student daughter (a situation Mortimer had recently found herself in when her eldest daughter, then at university, fell pregnant). It was a daring topic for its day, as evidenced by the resistance and disgust with which Mortimer’s protagonist Ruth’s attempts are met: ‘You would really advise her to do this thing? Your own daughter? Good God Ruth, I’m sorry. You make me sick,’ expostulates the family GP when she turns to him for help. The reviews, however, were excellent. ‘A remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement,’ declared one.

  Mortimer – who, by the time she died, at the age of 81 in 1999, had published nine novels, this one story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism – drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. Family life is her subject, and in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, which was first published in 1960, she picks it apart with precise, swift, agile strokes. ‘No one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life,’ admitted one critic admiringly when the collection was first published, ‘or how to undermine domestic life’s apparent security.’ Mortimer has a keen eye for the horror underneath the banality of the everyday, in particular that moment when someone familiar and benign turns monstrous.

  In ‘Little Mrs Perkins’, for example, a seemingly sweet, vulnerable, young mother-to-be is ensconced in the bed next to the narrator, who is in a nursing home recovering from the birth of her third child. The roommates don’t speak across the curtain that separates them – ‘a fixed, insurmountable barrier dividing our two lives’ – but the bored narrator watches and listens, first with sympathy, then with morbid fascination and shock as Mrs Perkins is put on strict bed rest and told she won’t be able to take the forthcoming trip to Tenerife that she and her husband have scheduled:

  slowly, cautiously, she was pushing back the blankets with her feet […] Then, very carefully, she raised one leg into the air; its shadow through the curtain was long, thin, wavering. She bent her knee, pushed the leg straight again. Afterwards, still very slowly and carefully, the other leg. She was testing something – but what? One leg. Then the other leg. No noise, no unusual creaking of the bedsprings. Both legs circling, faster and faster. She was trying not to make a noise. She was bicycling.

  Despite being ‘appalled’ by what she’s witnessing, the ineffective narrator watches the antics of the other woman in horrified silence. ‘I did, I said, nothing,’ she shamefully confesses.

  Powerless protagonists appear regularly throughout the collection. In ‘The White Rabbit’, an eleven-year-old child is given a bunny by her estranged father, but is so disgusted by what the pet stands for – a rift in the intimacy between herself, her mother and her stepfather – that she creeps out of bed during the night and drops the creature over the balcony of their tenth-floor London apartment onto the busy road below. Both here and in ‘The King of Kissingdom’ – a warped fairy tale of a family romance about the neuroses of a guilt-ridden child of divorced parents – Mortimer demonstrates the keenest understanding of the interior world of childhood. Find a better sketch of sibling rivalry, for example, than that given by the narrator, who, looking back on her relationship with her elder brother, describes him as ‘an impression of grey-flannel violence, a pair of stocky knees, a whiplash decapitating nettles’. Mortimer’s empathetic, expert grasp of the child’s perspective has often been overlooked, the emphasis put instead on her adult protagonists and the tantalising insights they offer into her own very public marriage.

  Regardless of whether she’s writing from the point of view of a child or that of an adult, she continually depicts family life as a fraught battleground. In the story from which the collection takes its title, husband and wife Madge and William Browning find themselves at each other’s throats, arguing about their children (their youngest, Bessie, and her half-siblin
gs: William’s stepdaughters, Melissa and Rachel). It’s a domestic scene permeated with violence; from the ‘holocaust of cornflakes and burnt toast’ amongst which the children breakfast, to the vehemence of William’s outburst after Madge furiously berates him for striking Melissa: ‘You think I’d stay with you and these delinquent little bitches of yours?’ he screams at her. ‘Get their father to keep them. Go on, go and find him. Tell him to keep the lot of you on his five pounds a week.’

  When she and John met in 1948, Mortimer was already the mother of three daughters and pregnant with her fourth (the oldest two were fathered by her first husband, Charles Dimont, whom she married in 1937, when she was 19, and divorced twelve years later; her third by Kenneth Harrison; and her fourth by Randall Swingler). She and John then had two children together, another daughter and a son. In ‘Saturday Lunch with the Brownings’ – based on a very real argument in the Mortimer household, as Valerie Grove confirms in her biography A Voyage Round John Mortimer (2007) – William dotes on Bessie, ‘his darling’, but is short-tempered with her half-sisters. Yet even at his most unpleasant, William is more than just the one-dimensional villain of the piece. Mortimer takes pains to acknowledge how the demands of family life make victims of them all: called upon to referee Rachel and Bessie’s breakfast-table squabbles, William is left feeling ‘foolish and unhappy. Why did his days have to begin like this? What had he done to deserve it? What the hell was it all for?’ As Grove perspicaciously notes, ‘Penelope did more than milk their domestic life; her stories reflect how deeply and sympathetically she understood her children and how she also felt a fundamental empathy with her beleaguered, over-burdened husband.’

  So too ‘Such a Super Evening’ gives readers a sneak peek behind the facade the Mortimers put on for their adoring public. In it, the Mathiesons – both ‘fantastically successful writers’ and the parents of eight children – are invited to dinner by a self-effacing housewife. Over the course of the evening their hostess is astonished to discover that the supposedly golden couple are actually bickering bores. Mortimer’s fictionalisation of her own life allowed for some dramatic licence, but the underlying principal stands: her and John’s marriage was not as perfect as it looked. Mortimer was struggling with depression – she took an overdose in 1956, and would do so again in 1962. She was worn ragged by motherhood and domesticity, writing in fits and starts between bouts of excruciating writer’s block, her miserableness exacerbated by John’s thoughtless infidelities. So much of Mortimer’s identity was caught up in maternity and motherhood, but like many women of the era, she felt trapped in her role.

  Nowhere are these contradictions more powerfully and cleverly explored here than in the opening story, ‘The Skylight’. A masterclass in tension, it sees an unnamed mother and her five-year-old son arriving alone at their rented holiday home in the French countryside only to find the house locked and unassailable by any route other than a tiny open window in the roof. Despite the heat – which ‘sank with the resonant hum of failing consciousness’ – the story is steeped in dread from the start. The house is ‘grey’ and ‘mean’, its shutters and doors all ‘heavy black timber’ locked shut with ‘iron bars’, surrounded by ‘dead grass’ through which slinks a rat the size of a cat. Worn out by their journey and unable to think what else to do, the woman climbs up to the roof and lowers her son through the skylight into the attic, giving him strict instructions to make his way downstairs and unbolt a window – but the little boy disappears into the gloom. When mother and son are eventually reunited, her relief is tempered by frustration and rage at the distress he’s caused her: ‘With one hand she pushed him upright. With the other, she hit him. She struck him so hard that her palm stung.’ Mortimer would later realise that this story was actually about a miscarriage she’d suffered shortly before writing it in 1959.

  Two years later, in February 1961, Mortimer found herself pregnant again. At first she was excited. This was in large part due to the rather lukewarm reviews Saturday Lunch with the Brownings had received when it had been published the previous year. One especially hostile critic in the Sunday Times declared her unhappy couples ‘trivially embittered, chronically quarrelling about nothing, filled with a fatigued desperation’, and suggested they should just take fifty aspirin and end it all. Mortimer thought that a new baby might bring her the contentment the book hadn’t. Instead, however, she had a termination – and a permanent sterilisation – at the encouragement of both her doctor (on medical grounds – she was 42) and John (who argued that their marriage, which was struggling, should come first). Devastatingly, while she was still in hospital recovering from the surgery, Mortimer discovered that John was having yet another affair, this time with the actor Wendy Craig, who shortly thereafter became pregnant by him.

  Anyone who’s read The Pumpkin Eater (1962), the work for which Mortimer remains most well known today, will be familiar with these events. When, after months of depression, Mortimer began writing again that November, she poured every last drop of her anguished experience into the novel, the story of a middle-class housewife’s breakdown following the collapse of her marriage. The result is raw, vivid and utterly magnificent. ‘Almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book,’ raved Edna O’Brien on its publication, and it was quickly adapted into a film (the screenplay was written by Harold Pinter, and Anne Bancroft was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the lead). Although much deserved, The Pumpkin Eater’s success immediately overshadowed the comparatively meagre attention given to Saturday Lunch with the Brownings. Indeed, the collection undoubtedly suffered for having been published between Mortimer’s two strongest works; it didn’t quite live up to the obvious audaciousness of Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, then it was swamped by the formidable success of The Pumpkin Eater.

  But more broadly, Mortimer’s story is that of the struggle of survival. While critics were lauding The Pumpkin Eater as a masterpiece, Mortimer was recovering from the overdose she’d taken shortly before the novel’s publication, and her subsequent hospitalisation for ECT treatment. Had this attempt on her life been successful, The Pumpkin Eater would have been one hell of a suicide note, destined to have been read alongside the likes of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965) and Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (1966). Gavron, a comfortably middle-class, intelligent working wife and mother like Mortimer, took her own life in a Primrose Hill flat in 1965, in eerily similar circumstances to Plath, two years earlier, just one street away. Today, Plath and Gavron are both widely regarded as casualties of a particular time, on the cusp of second-wave feminism. Plath especially has been canonised as a feminist saint lost in battle. Mortimer’s is a different story: she’s the woman who didn’t die, who got the divorce, went through the menopause and lived on, alone, into old age, her fame slowly and steadily diminishing. In short, she survived but her career and subsequent reputation didn’t. Had Plath or Gavron also lived, one can’t help but wonder whether they too would have suffered fates similar to Mortimer. Instead, death has embalmed them as figures of tragically untapped potential.

  Mortimer and John divorced in 1971, when she was 53. But reinventing herself – both as far as she was concerned and in the eyes of others – proved an all but impossible task, however hard she tried. Her four final novels – My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof (1967), The Home (1971), Long Distance (1974), and The Handyman (1983) – are each candid explorations of middle-aged women starting over, whether after illness (mental and/or physical), divorce or widowhood. The most daring is Long Distance, a fragmentary and hallucinatory account of an unnamed woman’s desperate journey through an unspecified institution – part rural artists’ retreat, part hospital – that clearly draws on Mortimer’s experiences of being hospitalised for depression. Her narrator is ‘a blank slate, an empty glass’, someone who’s doomed to ‘repeat experience until it is remembered’. It’s Mortimer’s boldest bid to rehabilitate herself, both as a woman and as
a writer. As the critic Ronald Blyth noted, ‘The sexual and spiritual progress of female middle age has rarely received such an excitingly imaginative treatment.’ Yet despite such praise, and the fact that it was published in The New Yorker in its entirety – something the magazine hadn’t done since J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, in 1955 – the novel failed to have the wider impact Mortimer hoped for. The figure of the broken housewife was clearly one the public could rally around, but that of the middle-aged divorcee battling her demons in order to secure for herself a fresh start apparently less so.

  Although The Pumpkin Eater had resonated so poignantly with O’Brien, the Irish writer was twelve years younger than Mortimer, and that age gap, slight as it was, made all the difference. O’Brien’s debut, The Country Girls (1960), kicked off the decade that brought us the sexual revolution and women’s liberation. The invention of the Pill offered women reproductive choices previously unheard of, but so too the new narratives about motherhood that were being written by a younger generation of women – The L-Shaped Room (1960) by Lynne Reid Banks, for example, or Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965) or The Waterfall (1969) – bore little resemblance to those Mortimer had been writing.

  The world in which Mortimer wrote her first novels had been a very different place: as a consequence, she found herself trying to fight her way out of the sexual stereotypes of the 1950s long after she’d left those years behind. This, combined with her lifelong inability to escape from the shadow of her and John’s very public marriage, sealed her fate. Following her divorce Mortimer spent a lot of time in America, including two residencies at Yaddo (during the first she wrote Long Distance, and during the second, her first memoir, About Time: An Aspect of Autobiography (1979), which went on to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize), and stints teaching at The New School in New York and at Boston University. She also made a host of interesting friends, including Kurt Vonnegut, Edmund White, and Bette Davis. Yet despite these many achievements, she continued to be stalked by depression, along with a gnawing sense that she hadn’t achieved what she should have in terms of her writing. She felt stifled by the woman she’d once been. When she died in 1999, sadly the legacy that remained was the same one she’d spent the previous four decades trying to escape. As she wrote in About Time Too, which was published only six years before her death: ‘The outside world identified me as “ex-wife of John Mortimer, mother of six, author of The Pumpkin Eater” – accurate as far as it went, but to me unrecognisable.’ With this in mind, reading Saturday Lunch with the Brownings is a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, it takes us back to a time before this identity had been foisted on her; but on the other, these excellent stories show a writer already wrestling with the issues that would continue to plague her for years to come.