Lucy Atkins’s follow-up to her fourth novel, Magpie Lane, will please that book’s many admirers. Once again she serves up vivid, slightly unhinged characters, a plot tangle worthy of a kitten in a knitting bag and a richly atmospheric backdrop. In this case the setting, an ancient windmill and cottage on the South Downs, is brought to life in such detail – from its trapdoors and untrustworthy upper storeys, to its damp patches, ghosts and secret tunnel – that it threatens to upstage the humans who live in it.
In the present day these are two apparently mismatched women in hiding from the wider world. Astrid, the mill’s owner, was once an RSC star in the vein of Judi Dench and Glenda Jackson: regal and commanding, a noted Lady Macbeth. Her career was cut short by scandal when she was framed by her ambitious actor husband in cahoots with an abusive Hollywood director. Since being tabloid-hounded into hiding, she has clung to her beloved, impractical retreat, eking out a sparse living offering haunted house B&B and spirit writing to wealthy eccentrics, working as a paid mourner to the unloved, and making do on less and less. Her companion in sordid chaos is Mrs Baker (not her real name), a sturdily capable woman in hiding from a dangerous criminal husband. She entered Astrid’s life as her cleaner, but is now bound to her by deep loyalty, shared secrets and a grudging respect. Woven through their story is that of Constance Battiscombe, a free-spirited Bloomsbury-style aristocrat who once filled the mill and cottage with scandalously free-loving friends, then remained tied to the place by tragedy.
The present-day spine of the narrative follows Astrid – confused, penniless and suffering from neglected heart trouble – as she journeys to Scotland to prevent her film star ex-husband once again blackening her name in a memoir. But this is constantly interrupted by strands of backstory as the particulars of the 1960s scandal and the more recent “Awful Incident”, involving Mrs Baker’s murderous husband and some dressmaking scissors, are slowly let slip. Atkins relishes the details of Astrid and Mrs Baker’s odd menage – their mad fashion choices, the multiple dachshunds, the ingenious mechanisms by which the dogs are hoisted from floor to floor. She delights in their bourbon-muddied arguments and grimly parsimonious meals, and as Astrid shamelessly charms and muddles her way across the country with her dachshunds-ate-my-hearing-aids excuses and ready empathy, it’s easy to imagine the book adapted for screen as a festive vehicle for a pair of national treasures.
If there’s a problem, it’s one of balance. The chaotic present, all bad backs and geriatric unworldliness, feels far more realised than the sense that Astrid was once an important actor. She was at her professional peak at a time when British theatre was blazing a trail and reinventing itself, and yet we get little sense of that era. It’s also a pity that the more distant historic backstory, in which a domestic tragedy is played out against EF Bensonish conflicts between outraged locals and druidic re-enactors in the woods, is confined to snatches of hoarded correspondence rather than being fleshed out into a full narrative.
But perhaps this is unfair carping. Windmill Hill is enormous fun and Atkins delivers an emotionally satisfying climax, finding ways to plait present and historic elements together and catching up the few characters who deserve it in an extended authorial hug.
• Patrick Gale’s novel Mother’s Boy is published by Tinder Press. Windmill Hill by Lucy Atkins is published by Quercus (£14.99) in the UK and will be out in Australia in August. To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
