Book Review : Farce 10 Gale Shakes Up the Tempests of Rural Sussex

Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington (William Morrow: $15.95; 224 pages)

Mary and David Tempest are enjoying a well-earned holiday in Sussex when their rural peace is shattered by a tense young American voice on the phone, saying “I want to see what you’re like. You see, I’m your daughter.”

When she was about to enter Oxford, Mary had become pregnant by a married man twice her age. Sensibly and calmly, she gave the infant up for adoption and put the episode firmly behind her. Eventually she married a rising young barrister, raised their daughter Lucy, and established a career for herself. In that recent but simpler era, adoption was a straightforward and final matter. Regrets were before the fact, not after.

Elizabeth Crocker, however, has grown up in America, exposed to all the controversy of the last two decades. A medical student with a particular interest in psychology and about to be married herself, she decides that finding her natural mother is essential to her own self-knowledge, never giving a thought to the impact she might have upon the life of the Tempests.

An Omen of Turmoil

Caught off-guard by the call and stunned by the urgency in Elizabeth’s voice, Mary agrees to the visit, determined to make the encounter brief, polite and final; an agreeable but never-to-be-repeated afternoon. She has no choice; Elizabeth hangs up before Mary can invent an excuse, appearing on the doorstep while Mary is still trying to sort out her feelings.

Her arrival is an omen of the turmoil to come. Jet-lagged and unused to driving on the left, Elizabeth forces the car immediately ahead of her off the road. Not quite by coincidence, the driver is David Tempest, on his reluctant way home after a beery afternoon in the local pub. Though he had known of Mary’s adolescent indiscretion, nothing has prepared him for the abrupt materialization of the result. The visit gets off to a shaky and awkward start, despite Mary’s efforts to be the perfect hostess under extraordinary circumstances.

Though all the ingredients for domestic melodrama seem inherent in the situation, the novel maintains a brisk comedic tone veering perilously close to farce. Unstrung by Elizabeth’s presence, Mary embarks upon a quest of her own, seeking her illegitimate daughter’s father and finding him conveniently listed in the phone book. They meet, and history seems destined to repeat itself.

Additional Entertainment

Meanwhile, back at the rented Sussex house, a neglected David Tempest is comforted by the aggressive wife of his landlord and neighbor. Unsatisfactorily married to a stuffy Foreign Service officer who gets all the worst postings, Helen is only too eager to entertain David during Mary’s increasingly frequent forays to London. Elizabeth, trapped in the Tempests’ house by the supremely English device of bad weather, quickly establishes an excessively sisterly relationship with Lucy, unsettling their already disturbed mother still further.

By the time Elizabeth mercifully departs for her real life in New York, she has left the once-stable Tempest household in wild disorder and the reader convinced that the characters have been capriciously misnamed. Elizabeth Crocker is the tempest; Mary and Richard the unwitting teapot in whose lives the storm takes place.

Billington has written this novel in a peculiarly exaggerated parallel action style, cutting from one character and location to another in disconcertingly brief segments; some only a sentence long. Obviously intending to create the illusion of simultaneity, she succeeds only in befuddling the reader, who becomes involved with David only to be thrust immediately into bed with Lucy and her undergraduate lover Jo. After a brief cuddle in their messy Oxford digs, we’re whisked off without notice to the posh West End hotel where Mary is rekindling her passion for Richard Beck, Elizabeth’s father, while frustrated Helen is seducing guilt-ridden David in the country cottage.

These contemporary Britons seem to have wandered off their native heath onto the set of a Feydeau farce with all its furiously slamming bedroom doors, convenient closets and strategically placed screens. Though there are moments of pathos in the story, the general tone is brittle as bone china and not nearly as durable. A provocative premise that always seems on the verge of developing into a witty exploration of the differences between fundamental British and American attitudes slips away, leaving only a mildly diverting novel of middle-class manners.