Eternity Ring by Patricia Wentworth

Eternity Ring  by Patricia Wentworth

 

published 1948

 

 

 

She herself wore a pink blouse with her grey coat and skirt, and some rather tired pink cotton roses pinned to the lapel. Her bushy grey hair bulged in every direction under the black felt hat which was, like the curtains, a survival from the past. None of the young people in Deeping had ever seen her in any other hat.

This is a very Wentworth clothes description, for a very Wentworth character. This book also contains a sentence with some extreme Miss Silver geography, in an archetypal Wentworth village:

“I think [the lamplight] is rather nice for anyone coming down the path off the Common—such a lonely road, especially where it runs through Dead Man’s Copse.”

Can you see what's coming here? And, if you don’t guess the murderer in this one you shouldn’t really be reading crime stories. Or perhaps you should.

The traditional falling out between the two romantic leads is more than usually stupid, even in the long  history of Wentworth problems.

In a throwback to Agatha Christie’s 1944 Towards Zero, we are looking for a man with something noticeable about his hands. Something very noticeable in a faint light when his face is not visible – TWICE. I am trying not to judge.

Given it is such a classic example (even though Miss S has no standing in this case, she is just a friend, briefly takes on an official role, but in the end refuses any fee), from here I am going to go straight in to the Miss Silver Patent Checklist: 

 

Odd names a man called Grant (though this turns out to be his middle name, he is Edward), and Alvina. Splendid discussion of the merits of being called Mabel vs Alvina, ending up with ‘She took the last iced cake, and remarked that village children were all called after film stars nowadays.’

There is a Frenchwoman called Louise, and I am going to claim that the incidence of French women called Louise in detective fiction far outnumbers them in real life – particularly maids. (This one is not a maid)

 Miss Silver coughs 34 times – she coughs ‘in a hortatory manner’, and gives an appreciative cough. A minor character says ‘that silly cough again’ – lese majeste, surprising she didn’t get herself murdered.

Knitting  Nothing special, just a couple of matinee coats for a baby.

Clothes  too much description of lower class women who are vulgar and don’t know how to behave themselves.

It might have been the effect of the artificially brightened hair, the artificially heightened complexion. It might have been theway the hair was done—the last and extremest London fashion, looking a good deal out of place on a country farm. It might have been the hard royal blue of an equally unsuitable dress, or the brooch which glittered quite as brightly as if its stones were real. Probably all these things contributed to the impression made by Mary Stokes.

And there are also a too-tight, too-bright tweed suit  on another character and a tight-waisted coat on yet a third. The combo of Miss S and Miss Wentworth is far too snooty in this book.

There is this:

Cicely hung over the piano, talking, arguing, animated, in a house-coat the colour of rowan-berries.

Rowanberries and hanging over the piano, really? Wentworth ladies don’t usually makes themselves so cheap.

The wedding dress here is not important, but I did find a nice picture…

Mrs. Abbott brought her old Lady Evelyn Abbott’s wedding-dress…The folds of deep creamy satin had filled the room. That was the long Court train with roses worked on it in pearls, but the dress was plain, to show off the flounce of Brussels point which draped it.

 

 

Ladylike & other strange occupations

‘She’s strong enough to be out till all hours, and she’s strong enough to go round with the eggs and butter to any house where there’s a good-looking young man.’

A song writer - ‘his music matters, and nothing else does. He writes revue tunes’. Miss silver thinks ‘There was no doubt that he had a great deal of charm, and that his playing was clever—oh, yes, very clever indeed, though according to her old-fashioned standards sadly lacking in melody.’ That’s him at the piano in the quote above, with Cicely in her housecoat.

And there’s an excitingly experimental farmer, though it’s a bit vague what that constitutes.

Unusual words   ‘peter-grievous, poor thing’. (already noticed in a previous  - or peter-grievous - Wentworth book The Case is Closed by Patricia Wentworth (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com)

Invited in for an Elevens – used twice, apparently a version of elevenses? Checking this out, it seems to have been the word up till the mid-20^th century,when elevenses became more general…

Not unusual but a nice bit of description about a cleric writing local history: ‘the Reverend Augustus was unsparingly diffuse’.

Jewellery: Miss Silver has her bog oak rose brooch  – see earlier post. The eternity ring of the title is a misnomer. The jewellery items are a pair of earrings, made like eternity rings (picture of something similar from etsy)

Miss Silver is also revealed as wearing ‘one of those heavy Victorian lockets with a pattern of deeply cut and interlaced initials, a pious relic of the long dead parents whose A (for Alfred) and M (for Maria) formed the design. In the days when it had reposed on Maria’s bosom it had contained a lock of Alfred’s hair. To this had now been added a soft grey curl of Maria’s. To Miss Silver Alfred and Maria were “Poor Papa” and “Dear Mamma,” and she thought the locket very handsome.

(We recently looked at hideous mourning jewellery in a post on Mrs Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior  - many examples pictured there)

There is a housekeeper who wears an unexpected brooch with the head of the medusa on it, for no important reason. 

She is also the subject of one of the great lines of the book: 

Cicely would rather have slept in any other room, but the mattress was against her. You can’t fling an aired mattress back in a housekeeper’s face, especially when she’s been thirty years longer in the house than you have.

Sociology & etiquette 

Miss Silver criticizes someone’s behaviour:  “That was sadly imprudent. A woman should have more self-respect.” What do you think she might have done, this imprudent person? The answer is: married a younger man.  

And in another show of sisterly solidarity, the cook says “The way you girls carry on I wonder there isn’t more of you get yourselves murdered. A young man’ll stand just so much and no more.”

Times have changed for the better, somewhat.

Wedding dress portrait  from the Smithsonian Institute collection.

Smithsonian Institute collection.

Blue dress is from 10 years later, but seemed to fit: NYPL.

Lady in hat from Smithsonian Institution.