The carer is 50 year old Mandy, from Solihull, with a Brummie accent, thick body, plain face, and no dress sense. She is working-class; which as Moggach would have it, watches daytime TV and goes to Nandos. She is hired by Phoebe and Robert to look after their 85 year old father, retired professor of particle physics, James, replacing two previous unsuccessful carers who had not lasted long in post. Of course, one cannot help but suspect, given so many plots start this way about carers and au pairs, that there must be something sinister about this much too perfect carer who rapidly becomes indispensable, does such a sterling job, and is so well liked by her patient.
Although they come from different classes and hail from different political standpoints, James gets on well with Mandy. It is Phoebe (60) and Robert (62) who seem full of angst – about their own lives, and about not getting the attention and favour of their charming, intellectual, universally adored father. Phoebe is unmarried, an unsuccessful artist, and feeling undesirable and discontented. Robert, although he had had a successful career in the City, and is a failed novelist, misses his dog, feels his glamorous newscaster wife, Farida, holds him in contempt. Brother and sister have not been particularly close:
Theirs was a turbulent relationship. In adult life it had been flimsily cling-filmed with good manners but skirmishes could still erupt, especially when alcohol was involved.
p7
However, they are united by a suspicion of Mandy, whom they find prying into their family’s affairs, and whom they begin to suspect of wanting to benefit from their father upon his death.
Moggach brings out the pathos as well as petulance of domestic situations:
He’s noticed this with terminal cancer. It creates a subtle sense of rivalry between the relatives – who saw the patient the most frequently, who brought the most thoughtful food, who had been given the most information about their medication, who had become the favoured visitor who had a long, intimate and revelatory conversation with the loved one just before they passed away, who grieved the most copiously.
p14
Spoiler alert: Part 1 ends with the carer, Mandy, dropping dead all of a sudden, and turning out to be James’ daughter, from a 4-year affair with a working class woman called Stella.
Part 2 of the novel is about this affair, and also about Stella’s quiet, sweet-natured husband, Kenneth, who knowingly loves the child who is not his. Part 3 is when James is dead and an old letter from James’ wife surfaces, detailing her awareness of his affair. Part 4 is about how Phoebe and Robert change their lives radically and find fulfilment. The novel cracks through at about the same pace as my review has done, of parts 2, 3, and 4. Somehow, it feels rather like having set up the scene, and killed off Mandy at the end of part 1, the rest of the novel (parts 2, 3, and 4 are much shorter) is just to play out the rest of the storylines.
Moggach writes in a semi-humorous tone, but also attempts to insert some folksy wisdoms:
The solipsism of the elderly is something she hadn’t anticipated, not with a man of his calibre. How had the mighty fallen. And it was happening so fast. Each time she visited, he seemed to have slipped further away.
p125
The writing and sentiments in this novel are a bit cliched, a bit predictable, but still mildly touching and mildly amusing, and executed in a very practised manner. Overall, a perfectly pleasant read, but if you don’t read it, don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything significant.
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