Philip Larkin summed up the trouble with long relationships in his poem “Talking in Bed”, a snapshot of a grim nightly intimacy in which it becomes “still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind”. Kathy Page brings this deadlock into sober focus in her portrait of a 70-year marriage. Harry Miles, born between the wars to working-class parents in south London, is a scholarship boy with a literary bent and an ambition to escape the “sooty little terraces” of his childhood. When he meets Evelyn Hill, from a background very like his own, he is instantly attracted to her “appetite for the better things” and her acerbic qualities: “quick judgement, a very strong will, a dislike of doubt and ambiguity, and a way of making her words count”.
The early years of their marriage coincide with the outbreak of war, and by the time Harry ships to Cairo in 1942 as part of Churchill’s North Africa campaign, they’ve had their first child, a girl. Afterwards Harry takes a white-collar job in municipal construction and the couple settle down to life in the suburbs. Two other daughters follow, clever young women who have choices of which their mother, who was “let go” from her secretarial post on marrying, could only dream. As the Mileses grow older, Evelyn becomes increasingly domineering and Harry, the more accommodating partner, is increasingly resentful, until they are left in a mutual stranglehold, “with the essentials of who they were, along with a collection of sometimes contradictory memories”. This, the book’s downbeat rhythms seem to say, is a life. This is what there is.
Page’s eighth novel is many things: a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a brilliantly evocative sketch of Britain in the 20th century. There are shocking reminders of the casual daily humiliations women endured before the wake-up call of feminism. Evelyn, on reporting to the family GP with a heart problem, is subjected to an intrusive and completely unnecessary gynaecological examination. It is also a story about the peculiarly British pathology of class, captured in Harry’s determination to provide his wife with that middle-class totem, a “big and clean and light” modern house boasting a garden, Formica worktops, a stainless steel sink. When Harry’s parents visit them for the first time, he notices that his father’s jacket “has been pressed to a shine” in honour of the occasion.
Harry, too, becomes shinier and more worn through the constant pressure of trying to keep Evelyn happy. Though his marriage to her is a success in material terms, there is a sadness to the book that wells from a grasp of how pursuing such ordinary aspirations can cost us our vital self. In middle age Harry is a man Larkin would have recognised: disappointed, and indefinably diminished.
He was no longer that boy who had sat on the back step, his heart thudding as he read the sonnet his teacher had assigned to him:
‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom …’
And he was no longer the young man coming home to his wife after years of war, vowing not to be ground down by routine, to stay open to the possibility of an ecstatic life.
But Dear Evelyn is more than just a lament for the inevitable failure of youthful ideals. Its picture of Evelyn herself is authentically troubling, a study of a woman in the grip of terrible compulsions. The warning signs are there from the start, in her panicky housekeeping (“things were much better after she’d spoken with Harry about the accumulation of books and the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room, especially since his book jackets did not match”), her rigid washing and vacuuming schedules, her obsession with hunting down missing pillowcases. Later she is prone to sudden explosions and to punitive silences that last for days: “There was a line between strong-minded and outrageous that Evelyn now crossed with increasing frequency.” Harry, going into contortions to pacify her, says that while “he could bend, she could not”, but Page is after a darker truth. Under the cover of a domestic history, she has ambushed us with a chilling account of a disordered personality. Evelyn, trapped in her trophy house, is every bit as much a casualty of her time and place as her browbeaten husband. Page’s measured, intelligent novel treads nimbly around this bleak terrain.
• Elizabeth Lowry’s Dark Water is published by Riverrun. Dear Evelyn is published by And Other Stories. To order a copy for £8.60 (RRP £10) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
