20 Books of Summer 2022: The End of Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher

In other hands I know I would have loathed this book. In Rosamunde Pilcher's, however, I enjoyed it. 

Jane - who narrates the story - lives with her widowed father in a remote beach house on the Californian coast. They are originally from Scotland, but her father is a scriptwriter working for studios in Los Angeles - he hated the city, so his agent has parked them here. Jane has very little to do all day but watch the surfers, keep house for her father, and walk her dog, Rusty. 

Then she discovers that her maternal grandmother, who lives at Elvie, a grand lochside house on her estate in the Highlands, wants her to come back to Scotland for a holiday. Her father has been trying to keep this news from her, but eventually her grandmother's lawyer, David Stewart, turns up on their doorstep and says he can take her back with him if she is willing to go. When she discovers that her father has a new girlfriend she feels released from her obligations, so off she goes with David, flying to London and taking the night sleeper north. 

The one person Jane wants to see apart from Grandmother (does anyone really still call their grandparent by this name?) is her cousin Sinclair, whom she has idolised since they were both children. Aylwyn, Sinclair's father, had married unwisely, and as soon as Sinclair was born his wife had left him. He had then deposited the child with his mother and departed for Canada, whence he never returned. Sinclair now works in London, but periodically rocks up at Elvie, and of course he zips up north in his yellow Lotus Elan (Grandmother, need you ask, has a Daimler...) just as soon as he knows Jane is back in town. 

That, really, is the essence of this very short book. Jane thinks she's in love with Sinclair, but David the lawyer is a much better bet. Jane eventually finds out some very unsavoury facts about Sinclair (and Aylwyn), there's a rather convenient disaster, and Jane and David live happily ever after. She even gets a new dog (her father and his new partner being happy to take on Rusty as their own - I'm always so glad when animal threads are safely tied up.)

So really The End of Summer is pretty trite in its plot. I liked David, who is kind and thoughtful, but I really couldn't work up much of anything about Sinclair, who is clearly big trouble but actually rather boring. Grandmother is the archetypal Old Money woman (think the Duchy in the Cazalets, Susan Hampshire in Monarch of the Glen,  or even Aunt Sadie in The Pursuit of Love), ie well dressed in that faded upper class way, obsessed with gardening, forever discussing meals with the inevitable cook, never showing her emotions.

Rosamunde Pilcher - image: Goodreads

But if there's one thing Rosamunde Pilcher is good at it's descriptions. So many people write about the Highlands with no apparent experience of them at all; Pilcher lived outside Dundee (not the Highlands, but near enough to know them) during the later part of her life, and it shows. Houses are her particular forte; Elvie with its polished tables, peat smoke from the hall fire. roses in a big bowl (NB not a vase) on 'the chest by the clock', and spaniels all over the place, reminds me of every big old Scottish house I've ever visited. 

Jane's bedroom has not been touched since she left;

Still the white-painted bed stood, pushed in the bay of the window, which was where I always preferred to sleep....a pin cushion on the dressing table and lavender bags in the wardrobe, and the blue rug, covering the worn patch of carpet.

Breakfast consists of bacon, eggs, hot floury rolls and Cooper's marmalade. Obviously. 

And here's Grandmother herself;

She was...dignified and very good looking, her white hair always immaculate, her eyes, deep set beneath finely arched eyebrows, were a bright and piercing blue. (At the moment their effect was charmingly youthful, but I knew that she could register a world of disapproval with a single lift of those eyebrows, accompanied by a chilling blue stare. Her clothes were ageless too, and entirely becoming. Soft heathery tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters or cardigans. In the day-time she wore constantly her pearls, and a pair of coral earrings...In the evenings a modest diamond or two was likely to spark from her dark velvets, for she was sufficiently old-fashioned to change each evening for dinner, even if it was Sunday and we ate nothing more exciting than scrambled eggs.  

And Grandmother - of course - has Mrs Lumley, a Wonderful Woman who does practically everything and is only too pleased to do even more now than Miss Jane and Master Sinclair have pitched up. 

Similarly, although Grandmother spends most of her time gardening, this consists mostly of picking things - the real work is done by the full time gardener, Will. And there are other staff dotted about the estate, eg the aged keeper Gibson, who lives with his wife in a tied cottage;

...there was a cacophony of barking from the kennels...an old Land Rover parked by the side of the house with half a dozen white Leghorn hens pecking round its wheels, and a line of breeze-stiffened washing.

Having now lived in Aberdeenshire for many years, I can tell you that such estates still exist, and that although their owners now have to work harder to make them viable (weddings, corporate entertainment, fishing, shoots...) they still run these places on feudal lines, and their employees (often the latest generation of families who've worked on the estate for decades) are careful to tow the line and vote as they know the laird would wish them to. And I'm pretty sure there's still Cooper's marmalade on their breakfast tables.

Jane's visit to the local town reminded me of Ballater as it was when my son was small, and we used to go there for our shopping. These days Ballater has rather more cafes and gift shops, but it still retains that traditional Highland atmosphere (no doubt aided by the 'By appointment to' plaques on many of the shop fronts, for Balmoral is just 24 miles away);

There were butchers' shops, and grocers, and game merchants, and a gunsmith's and a garage...

Jane finds a clothes shop - Isabel McKenzie Modes - and again this took me back to shopping in Banchory maybe 25 years ago - shop windows lined with transparent plastic to keep the sun off the displays, and inside a woman in a twin set standing guard over a counter under which were wooden display drawers for sturdy underwear and pastel cardigans;

I found myself in a small room full of unhelpful-looking clothes....There was a glass counter filled with underclothes in peach and beige, and here and there were tastefully draped sad, string-coloured, pullovers,...soon I was picking my way through sweaters in old rose, moss green and dead-leaf brown.

And it is these descriptions that redeemed The End of Summer for me, because they felt so very real. The story is short and contrived, but if you want to get an idea of what the Highlands were like in the 1970s - and they are still almost the same today - it's well worth a read.

The End of Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher is published by Hodder.