Hatchett and Lycett
Nigel Williams Viking, 429pp, £10.99
ISBN 0670912557
Dennis Hatchett and Alec Lycett are old schoolfriends who have become teachers at their former school, a grammar in "Crotchett Green, a few miles south of South Croydon". The woman they both have their eye on is Norma Lewis, whom they first knew as a tomboy and who is now a teacher at the girls school down the road.
Dennis jokily proposes to Norma while they are mustering their pupils at the Gare du Nord at the end of a joint school trip to Paris - probably the last outing for a while, as it's August 1939. Norma brushes off his proposal, and only later, on the train, do they each start half wishing that he'd done it properly. But by then, Miss Everett, the lesbian Spanish teacher, has dropped dead in her compartment, poisoned, and they have to concentrate on sneaking the body past Customs so that they can at least report the matter to British rather than French police.
Norma has another problem. Doing a headcount on the boat, she discovers that she has 30 girls instead of the correct complement of 29. The extra teenager is Rachel, a Viennese Jew. Her father is a scientist and, because adult Jews can't leave Nazi Austria, she has to reach certain men in England and tell them a certain something about atomic physics.
Back home, while Norma farcically passes Rachel off as a niece with a mislaid passport, a couple more of her colleagues are murdered by methods reminiscent of the Agatha Christie stories that the girls are always reading. More importantly - Norma never liked the victims anyway - on the day war breaks out, Alec, resplendent in the dress uniform of the 4th Croydon Light Infantry (Territorials), makes her a genuine proposal, which she accepts.
Nigel Williams lets us know that Alec is not the better man. Superficially decent, or at least possessing "the ratio of decency to low cunning in his character that was completely acceptable in middle-class society", he "knew himself, deep down, to be a bad person". He took up teaching only for the holidays and sport, whereas Dennis and Norma have a true vocation for it.
Then there are those childhood flashbacks throughout the book, anatomising the afternoon when Alec's identical twin, Lucius, was sent away to live with relatives because he'd done something so bad that the neighbourhood must never know about it. The reader is bound to suspect that Lucius took the blame for Alec's crime. Oddly, however, Williams does not implicate Alec in the school-marm murders, even as a red herring.
The three central characters are fairly well drawn, which gives the love triangle a certain amount of interest, but most of the other portrayals are overblown caricatures. The lecherous chemistry master is actually shown "licking his lips" when discussing women. The airhead domestic science mistress talks about men in terms of food - "delish and moreish" - for whole tiresome paragraphs at a time. When Alec is caught up in the retreat to Dunkirk, all the soldiers around him go melodramatically mental: Williams is perhaps trying for something like the Crete sequence in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour, but doesn't manage it.
To point up the novel's artificiality, Williams throws in jarring names such as Jacqueline Rissett and Helena Bonham Leach, along with the usual trendy anachronisms. All of this might work better if one didn't get the nagging sense that, despite the black comedy, the whole book takes itself really rather seriously. The excessive length and the lapses into censorious comment suggest that the words "Booker Prize" may have lurked at the back of the author's mind, upsetting his customary lightness of touch.
Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic
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