20 Books of Summer 2022: The Garrick year by Margaret Drabble

 

I seem to have read quite a few 1960s novels lately, and now here comes another one. 

I first read Margaret Drabble when I was still at school. We trawled the pages of The Millstone (in which Rosamund is landed with an unplanned and 'illegitimate' pregnancy), desperate to read about lives more exciting (or at least more eventful) than our daily round of prayers, school dinners and Latin. I hadn't read Drabble since, and coming to The Garrick Year (1964) now, it seems to hail from a different world - both in time and in social milieu. It reminded me of Penelope Mortimer's Saturday Lunch with the Brownings and The Pumpkin Eater, and to a lesser extent Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room. It also made me think of a photograph I once saw of Nigella Lawson as a child, with her father and her glamorous mother, Vanessa Salmon; the very epitome of the London chattering classes. 

Emma Evans is a former model; she is now, however. the frustrated and bored wife of David, an actor, and the mother of two young children. Emma comes from a solidly middle class background (her father was a Cambridge academic), David from a Welsh working class family. This, of course, was initially part of his attraction;

I think I married David because it seemed to be the most frightful, unlikely thing I could possibly do. I could not imagine what life with him would be like, I imagined that it might be a nightmare, an adventure, but whatever else exciting; I thought that at the least he would go at life hard with his head down and his fists clenched, forever. I did not want an easy life, I wanted something precipitous...

They married young - she was 22, he 25 (although that perhaps wasn't seen as so young in the 1960s.)

After our marriage David and I got ground down...once married, distance was no longer possible. Our passion for each other had been rooted...in our foreignness; in him, his flashy, commercial, charming, drunken, photogenic selfishness, and in me my cool professional aesthetic privileged photogenic eccentricity. And in bed and at breakfast selfishness is not charming and eccentricity is not even eccentric.

Emma hates the way David leaves his clothes all over the floor, he hates the hours she takes getting ready to go out and the 'Victorian junk' with which she fills the house.

Despite this, Emma does not regret their marriage. David is unpredictable, volatile and self-centered, but Emma is pretty self-centered herself, critical of David and indeed of almost everyone who crosses her path. She admits to having few friends, perhaps by choice. They set up home in London, spend money like water, and soon have baby Flora - whose arrival infuriates her unwilling mother;

I was furious: she was David's responsibility, we owed her to his carelessness...

Emma hates being pregnant, loathes the 'messiness' of birth - yet once Flora is born, things improve. They are both besotted with the baby, and;

we fell once more into each other's arms

Despite continuing to bicker (their standard modus operandi, as it is, of course, of so many couples), they remain faithful to one another. They have another baby, Joe. 

Then David drops his bombshell. Just as Emma has been offered a temporary job as a newsreader - a job only newly open to women;

I was to have been a pioneer in this field, and I fully expected to succeed where others had failed...I have a face of quite startling and effective gravity...people automatically trust what I say...

he wants the family to move to Hereford for seven months, while he acts in a play directed by the famous Wyndham Farrar. Emma is incandescent. Her entire life is in Islington. David refuses to negotiate, he has already signed the contract, and so - Emma only with great reluctance - off they go. 

The rest of the book covers Emma and David's stay in the provinces, and is a fascinating and entertaining account of a group of actors stuck together in a rural town, egos and tempers clashing at every opportunity. Meanwhile both Emma and David play with the idea of having affairs, she with the charismatic Wyndham, he with the voluptuous Sophy Brent.

Emma - who has considerable freedom, since the au pair, Pascal (a sixties' study in herself) has decamped with them - wanders about Hereford, observing David's colleagues and feeling increasingly pointless, angry and fed up. Yet the reader cannot feel as sorry for her as one might for Penelope Mortimer's Mrs Armitage, because Emma really does not have many redeeming qualities. She is permanently horrible to David (as he is to her), and she's not much nicer to anyone else. Despite this I found myself enjoying her; she speaks the truth about life with small children and a preoccupied husband whom everyone considers 'marvellous.' She wants more from life, and why shouldn't she?

It is only when Flora is involved in a near fatal accident that things change. Emma and David are brought back together - though to be honest, there was never any real chance that they would part. Emma never follows through with Wyndham, now realising that;

These things had been against my nature and against my situation, and I had not been able to go through with them

- and at the end of the season they decide to go to the East Indies, where David has been offered another part.

This is the story of two people and a marriage. It highlights the frustrations and limitations of life in the 1960s, perhaps especially for clever, educated women, few of whom ever worked again after having children. It is, however, a story not without hope. At the end of the book Emma does know herself a good deal better than she did at the beginning, and David also comes to realise what he has put her through;

'I'm sorry Emma, it was very selfish of me, I didn't realise how boring it would be for you here. Or if I did realise, I didn't care.'

'Oh', I said, 'it wasn't that. it wasn't only that.'

'It really was Wyndham then, was it?'

'Oh I don't know. I don't know what it was. I don't know anything about Wyndham. He's gone now anyway, hasn't he?'

'Yes he's gone. Emma, I'm sorry about Sophy.'

'Oh that's all right. Don't bother about that. Fair's fair. You had to have something, didn't you?'

We had too much in common by now, David and I, ever to escape

And we are left with the impression that they will be fine, though they will never stop bickering because that is who they are;

Had David and I been two different people we might well...have been entirely happy; and even being what we were, we did not do too badly.

I enjoyed The Garrick Year - for its insight into the behaviour of actors thrown together in a provincial backwater, but most especially for its honest depiction of a 'modern' marriage, one in which neither party is really the winner or the loser, and both just keep muddling along.

The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble is published by Penguin.