By Horror Haunted
Stories
CELIA FREMLIN
“Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted,
On this home by horror haunted….”
The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch
Her Number On It
Tuesday’s Child
Don’t Tell Cissie
The Sunday Outing
Lilac Time
The Blood On The Innocents
The Savage Heart
Place In The Sun
The End Of The Road
Gate Of Death
The Combined Operation
An Unsuspected Talent
Ephemerida
The Intruder
Barry Findlater
Copyright
Celia Fremlin: A Biographical Sketch
Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.
One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.
Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?
Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls, and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.
She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book War Factory (1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.
In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a ‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of Women’s Own, Punch and the London Mystery Magazine. However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:
The original inspiration for this book was my second baby. She was one of those babies who, perfectly content and happy all day, simply don’t sleep through the night. Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by lack of sleep; my eyes would fall shut while I peeled the potatoes or ironed shirts. I remember one night sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, my baby awake and lively in my arms it dawned on me: this is a major human experience, why hasn’t someone written about it? It seemed to me that a serious novel should be written with this experience at its centre. Then it occurred to me – why don’t I write one?
The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel, The Hours Before Dawn (1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.
Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing Uncle Paul in 1960 and Seven Lean Years in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover, The Hours Before Dawn and The Trouble-Makers have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’
*
By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.
In 1969 she published a novel entitled Po
ssession. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the terrible events of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching Possession today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark (1970) Fremlin did not publish again until Appointment With Yesterday (1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements. The Long Shadow (1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.
Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called Duet in Verse which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was King of the World (1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’
Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base and Possession right up to her penultimate novel The Echoing Stones (1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.
To revisit the Celia Fremlin oeuvre now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.
Chris Simmons
www.crimesquad.com
HER NUMBER ON IT
JUST CATCHING SIGHT of the woman for a second time didn’t prove that she was a Store Detective! Well, of course it didn’t! Clutching the carrier-bag with a hand already slippery with sweat, Martha forced herself to maintain her strolling, leisurely pace … past the glittering rails of cocktail dresses … past the sumptuous evening skirts of velvet or brocade … slowly … slowly does it!… If she once let herself quicken her steps by no matter how small a fraction, she knew that she would be lost. Panic would seize her, she would break into a run, make a dash for the escalators … and by that time it would be the whole shop that would be after her, not merely this slim, elegant woman in the oatmeal trouser-suit….
“After her!” How ridiculous! Martha struggled to control her galloping imagination, to think beyond the wild hammering of guilt in her brain, and to consider, coolly, the factual, commonsense reality of her situation.
No one had seen her take the dress. Indeed, in the raucous, blood-red darkness of Young Ideas, with pop-music blaring out, and the long-haired boys and girls roaming the gangways between the clothes like herds of jungle-creatures—in such a setting it would have been hard enough for anyone to notice anything, let alone to bother about such a dull, middle-aged customer as herself. She had been all alone behind the tight-packed rail of maxi-dresses at the far end of the room, out of sight of everyone, and even with time to make her choice. No one had seen her, either, as she slipped out from behind the rail with her spoils; and now here she was, already half the length of the store away from the scene of her crime, in a different department altogether. And as to the woman in the oatmeal suit—why, it was coincidence, sheer coincidence, that she should have turned up in this department as well! She wasn’t even looking in Martha’s direction—hadn’t been, either, on that earlier occasion, when they’d encountered each other on the way out of Young Ideas.
What would the woman have seen, anyway, even if she had looked? Just one more plump, smartly-dressed, middle-aged woman strolling through Cocktail and Evening Wear with a carrier-bag in her hand. Exactly like all the other middle-aged women who had come shopping in their thousands this winter Thursday afternoon. All of them smart … all of them with carrier-bags in their hands … and all of them—well, an awful lot of them, anyway—with lines of tension round their mouths and a look of furtive anxiety in their eyes, even though they hadn’t—well, Martha presumed they hadn’t—stolen anything at all.
So there was nothing to mark her out from the rest of them. Absolutely nothing. Stupid to allow her heart to race like this, her hands to sweat! All she had to do was to keep dawdling along—she was in Day Dresses now—pausing to examine a neckline here … a price-tag there … just keep her nerve, and all would be well!
At last, the escalator! As she set foot on the moving track, and saw the Ground Floor gliding up to meet her, Martha felt the kind of thankfulness and gratitude that the pilot of a damaged plane must feel as he catches sight of the perfect spot for an emergency landing. For the crowds down there on the Ground Floor were so vast, and packed so tight in all the aisles, that surely all possibility of detection would soon be over! Down, down she sailed, diving towards that milling anonymous sea of humanity like a fish escaping back into its native element.
Safe! Safe! In her relief, Martha almost skipped off the end of the escalator, and as she began to battle her way through the crowds towards the main entrance, she was aware of an exultation that went far beyond the satisfaction of having successfully acquired an £8.50 dress without paying for it. It was as if what she had done was some kind of a triumph of the human spirit; a slap in the face of middle age. It was even an argument of sorts—a clinching, final argument in the dreary, long-drawn out conflict with her husband.
“See, Leonard?” her theft seemed to be saying to him, in gleeful triumph. “See? That’ll show you!”—though what he was to “see”, and how the theft was going to “show” him, she had no idea. Especially since—God willing—Leonard was never going to know anything about it at all!
Already the entrance doors were in sight. Beyond them she could see the glittering dusk of Oxford Street, lit up like fairy-land against the coming night. “I’ve done it! I’ve done it!” she found herself exulting, in wordless joy, as she pushed and squeezed her way towards the jam-packed entrance. “It’s worked! It’s succeeded!”—and in that very moment, just as the revolving doors were drawing her in, she became aware of the woman in the oatmeal suit, not a yard away from her.
*
Martha did not know how far along Oxford Street she had been running before her breath gave out. Not very far, probably, for her muscles and her wind were not what they had been once. Not what they had been before—well, before security, and Leonard, and a nice home, had got their grip on her. Before television, and chocolates, and o
ver-lavish cocktail parties had become the pattern of her days. “Everything a woman could want!”—Leonard had once launched the hackneyed reproach at her in the course of one of their weary rows; and of course he had been right. She had got everything—and how, over the years, it had sucked the strength out of her muscles, the zest out of her soul! The strength and the zest which once, long ago …
“Excuse me, Madam….”
Maybe the words were not addressed to Martha at all. Or maybe, even if they were, it was only some stranger asking the way to Selfridges…. She would never know. For before the sentence could be completed, she was off and away, battering her way once more through the crowds, pushing, dodging, worming her way through the interstices of this human maze, until, at last, she found herself at the entrance to an Underground station.
Which station it was, she did not know and did not care. Headlong, she plunged into its seething, anonymous security; and in almost no time at all, it seemed, she was on the train, standing, wedged tight against her fellow-passengers, and with the carrier-bag still clutched grimly in her left hand.
But the sense of exultation was gone now. The triumph—the exhilaration—the excitement—had all drained out of her, and she felt sanity returning, like a recurrent illness.
Why?—Why had she done it? She’d had plenty of money in her bag—Leonard had never been mean. It wasn’t as if she’d even wanted the dress—it was ridiculous, four sizes too small at least, and years and years too young for her, with its frilly, scooped-out neckline and little puff sleeves! Why had she done such a thing—risking the career of her hard-working lawyer husband, at the same time as bringing total, irremediable humiliation upon herself? She could almost see already the headlines in the papers … “WIFE OF WELL-KNOWN BARRISTER IN COURT FOR SHOP-LIFTING”—and she could almost quote by heart the article which would follow … “victim of a neurotic compulsion …” “psychiatric treatment” … “not uncommon symptom among women who feel themselves useless and unloved….”
By Horror Haunted Page 1
