Comedy of Eros

Published 14 August 2008

The Good Plain Cook Bethan Roberts Serpent's Tail, 320pp, £10.99

Bethan Roberts's second novel is a meditative, sensual and largely restrained piece of writing that is set in rural Sussex in 1936. It tells the story of Kitty Allen - the cook of the title - who goes to live with and work for Ellen Steinberg, a rich bohemian American, her communist lover George Crane and their two young daughters. It is told from many points of view but it is Kitty's that is most insistent. In an explanatory note at the end of the book, Roberts says that she "realised that Kitty's point of view - as that of the character so often written out of the bohemian dramas of the period - was a crucial one for me. Perhaps this is because my own family's stories are full of Kittys, whose work enabled the moneyed classes to indulge their passions in art, literature, partying (and politics) without having to worry about the washing-up or incinerating the fish."

Roberts is true to her words. Throughout the novel the naive Kitty is afforded a sympathetic ear. Similarly Arthur, the resolutely unremarkable handyman, who takes a fancy to Kitty and escorts her to the Crown and Thistle for dancing, tea and cake, is treated with considerable care. By contrast, the members of the "moneyed classes" are given an unequivocally bum authorial rap. George Crane, for example, works for the Party:

"He thinks the working classes should be - equal with us. Or like us. Something like that. He went to Russia a couple of years ago."

"What for?"

"To see how they do communism there. He said the ballet was very good, and everything was clean and the people were happy."

George's shirtsleeves are "folded up close to his armpits, the way Arthur's often were". He is a poet. It is observed that:

"Crane doesn't know anything about the working classes, Kitty. Have you ever seen him do any actual work?"

Ellen, meanwhile, is a bohemian. This has not gone unnoticed among her neighbours:

"The girl calls her Ellen."

"She doesn't call her Mother?"

"Not as far as I've heard."

"How peculiar."

"Perhaps it's an American thing."

"Don't be idiotic."

"They've lived all over, Lou, in France and everything."

"She is her mother, isn't she?"

She is an awfully modern woman, asking Kitty for "a savoury tart, a quiche - like the French eat, you know the sort of thing". She also sunbathes naked: "'Nudity,' she said in a loud voice, 'is the magician of the genders.'"

So far, so funny. The tone may be mocking, but it is subtly so. It starts to grate, however, with the suspicion that Roberts's response to the milieu into which Kitty has been thrust is more an indication of her own disapproval of the moneyed classes than an authentic portrayal of how Kitty may have been stimulated to deal with her exposure to this brave new world.

This is a pity. I'm not talking about Crane and his communism, here. That's a hoary minefield. But although bohemianism is now considered a fur-coat-no-knickers lifestyle choice, the preserve of rich kids slumming it, playing at non-conformism and staking little, time was when elements of this ill-defined credo were genuinely progressive. From the vantage point of a culture in which women's freedom to express and explore their sexuality is largely taken for granted, it is sometimes easy to forget that this freedom had its modern genesis in the behaviour and novels of 1930s writers such as Rosamond Lehmann. And, by extension, the behaviour of characters like Ellen Steinberg.

Roberts doesn't seem to acknowledge this. Rather, the fact that Ellen is wealthy and middle-class seems justification enough to continue her relentless mockery.

At one point, Ellen encourages George to have sex outdoors: "Back to nature, darling, close to the earth, isn't that how the proletariat procreate?" She has qualms about the experience until "she remembered who they were: Ellen Steinberg and her lover, outside, not caring who knew or who disapproved . . ."

Eventually, it is almost as if Roberts has written herself into a corner. In the latter stages of the novel, Ellen begins to visit a male prostitute in the back room of a hairdresser's. Despite being told that she finds this experience "vigorous and refreshing", we are soon sitting in peculiarly conservative literary judgement as she is punished for her non-conventional attitudes to sexual politics, 1930s-style.

None of these attitudes brings her any closer to happiness. More importantly, none has anything other than a negative effect on anyone else. By the end of the novel, Kitty, for all her strangely bloodless sensual curiosity, is no nearer to discovering a satisfactory alternative to a life of Arthur, tea, sexual repression, ignorance and cake.

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