When the “old” and “tottering” widow Rachel – she is in her late 60s – hosts Christmas at her Sussex seaside home, comfort and joy fail to show. This acidic novel, first published in 1951, tackles an important subject to which many modern readers will relate: the murderous claustrophobia of a family Christmas. It is also a novel about post-second world war Britain: the nostalgia, grimness and traumatic memories, the fear – of nuclear annihilation and shifting gender roles – and the desperate hopes of this shaken land.
The setup is gorgeously Agatha Christie, with a nod to the locked-room mystery as disparate family members gather in a large and draughty house. It is Christmas Eve and the house belongs to the tyrannical matriarch Rachel. She is bitter, nostalgic and prone to lashing out at her “limply resigned” niece, Bess, who is over 30 – a fatal age for a single woman – and has spent her adult life as Rachel’s unpaid companion. These two are joined first by “spitfire” cousin Kate, Bess’s age, a cocktail-drinking ball of rage in red lipstick who is also single, but lives and works in London. Rachel’s overbearing middle-aged daughter, Marion, arrives next with her pallid husband, Thomas, who mostly hovers, waiting for instructions, and then the rakish nephew Piers. A narcissist with one eye on his inheritance, Piers takes sadistic pleasure in raising and dashing Bess’s desperate hopes of marriage. Finally, Rachel’s son, Adrian, appears very late, straight from Italy, with a skinful, in an inappropriately colourful suit. Since he was last seen several years previously, extorting money out of everyone for a fake business, his reception is as bitter as the coastal winter weather.
