The Watersplash by Patricia Wentworth

The Watersplash by Patricia Wentworth

 

publication date usually given as 1951, but listed as 1954 in this copy

 

 

[excerpt] The sewing-party at the Vicarage was breaking up. It had been started rather humbly and tentatively by Mrs Ball, who was interested in the Save the Children movement, but it had proved quite a success. Friday evening found most of the available women in the neighbourhood plying a charitable needle in the Vicarage drawing-room. It was a magnificent opportunity for the exchange of news and views, and every woman nourished the hope that to her, and to her alone, there would some day be imparted the secret of the really delicious cake which always made its appearance at half-past nine.

 

 

comments: Such a lot to say! My long post will match its subject: The Watersplash is quite a discursive and full book, taken a leisurely pace in a good way, with more details of village life than normal.

The real surprise is that the plot is not obvious – it seems it to begin with, and then you think - inverted mystery? Is it more like, say, an  Anthony Berkeley book (not something I expect to think about Wentworth)? Things clear up later (there really aren’t many people left), and there are un-crime-related clues as to who might be pushing people in the titular watersplash to drown.

 Don’t want to SPOILER, but.

 

In a recent review of a Jilly Cooper book I said that no-one who was kind to animals or quoted poetry was ever a villain. Something similar here, though it is not those features in the negative that gave it away.

There are literary matters to discuss - one character is looking at Victorian novels including East Lynne (a key part of this post), and blog favourite Charlotte M Yonge ( specifically The Heir Of Redclyffe, known to generations of young women as ‘the book that made Jo March cry’). And then Wentworth turns snooty:

She read one sentimental novel after another with the pleasure which comes from a comfortable familiarity. She liked to know exactly what was going to happen. There must be no unpleasant surprises, no unforeseen developments. The lovely ward must marry her disagreeable guardian who is not really disagreeable at all but merely hiding a romantic passion under the cloak of austerity. The unjustly accused hero must be vindicated. Cinderella must have her Prince, and wedding bells must ring with a deafening persistence.

 

At one point Miss Silver is the recipient of some confidences:

Hearsay word of a dying man, a hypothetical will, a pretty girl who couldn’t even say that she had seen it, and who was doing her best to marry the beneficiary – the story was thin to vanishing point.

Not sure that this is thin, and it sounds very much like those novels being sneered at… which in turn would remind you of whose books?

We get another look at the photos in Miss Silver’s working area:

The photographs, framed in silver, in plush, in filigree upon velvet, which thronged the mantelpiece, the bookshelves, and every other available place except the writing-table, formed a record of more recent achievement. They were the gifts of people whom she had assisted in perplexity, freed from unjust suspicion, rescued from some unendurable predicament, and even saved from death. There were young men and girls, and babies who might never have been born if Miss Silver had not intervened to protect or exonerate their parents.

My contention is that the key difference between Miss Silver and Miss Marple is that  Christie’s sleuth doesn’t care about lives being shot apart – again, it doesn’t behove Wentworth to criticize happy endings.

About that ‘lost’ will - for once people are very sensible, unlike most Wentworth books, the whole subplot is surprisingly well done. I like this (SLIGHT SPOILER)

It was about half an hour later that she found the prayer-book. It was behind some more sermons, those of a still older Vicar, the Reverend Nathaniel Spragge, 1745 to 1785. There were three volumes, ‘Printed by Subscription’, and the prayer-book was wedged behind them. Susan looked at it with something approaching dismay. If Arnold Random couldn’t be more convincing than this, he had really better stick to being honest. Who on earth was going to believe that a dying man had climbed to the top of a book-ladder and taken out three heavy volumes in order to hide something which he had no possible reason for wanting to hide? She wouldn’t put it past Arnold to have left his fingerprints on the leather cover. Why on earth hadn’t he just poked the prayer-book in amongst the Victorian novels? The answer, of course, was that it might have been found.

The alleged hero, Edward, is a particularly unpleasant specimen: I could not see any redeeming features. He was very rude, and even his friend says ‘It wasn’t only the words, it was the way he had said it, with a kind of savage exasperation.’ He almost deserves to hang for a murder he didn’t do, he’s awful.

Moving on to

The Patent Miss Silver Checklist

 

Coughing Miss Silver coughs 16 times – quite a low figure, but there are wide-ranging descriptions: gently, in an interrogative manner, absent-mindedly (surely not?), hesitating, reproving, hortatory. And her policeman friend Frank Abbot finds her cough ‘familiar and welcome.’

Unusual names  Ora, Clarice, Emmeline, Verona (who never actually appears), Kezia (presumed long dead). There are two quite separate characters  called Cyril.

How many people were out and about in the vicinity of the murder? A healthy six, in quite a remote and unlikely place.

Occupations – as in the recent post on The Eternity Ring, there is experimental farming again: There is to be a new agent. ‘Old Barr is retiring. He has only stayed on the last six months to oblige me. Edward can take right over. I told him he had better have a refresher course – latest up-to-date methods and all that kind of thing. Must produce more food for the nation – everyone’s duty.’

Clothes

He turned by the signpost and saw Susan walking along the lane in front of him with a suit-case swinging from an ungloved hand. The glove and its fellow had been thrust into the pocket of a blue swagger coat. She walked well, and she pleased the eye in the sort of impersonal way that it is pleased by any other agreeable feature of the landscape.

This lordly perception (very much in the mode of Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy) is from the awful Edward.

In blogposts, in Wentworth, in my talk on Agatha Christie, I often look at the ‘correct’ clothes to wear in the country, and the perils of being too smart. The question arises here too:

What a pity her brown coat and skirt were still at the cleaners. It would be just the thing for Greenings. The red was much smarter, and it was very becoming, but people in the country were so stuffy about what you wore. Any old rag of a tweed and you were all right, but the minute you put on something a little more up-to-date they looked down their noses and said you were overdressed.

She’d have been better sticking to her nurse’s outfit: ‘her cap and a highly becoming blue uniform with short puffed over-sleeves of white muslin.’

There’s even a bit of clothes detection or perhaps laundry detection – Miss Silver says:

It was of the same dark grey colour, but the material was not the same. What I noticed was that this item had recently been very wet. The stuff had cockled, and there were traces of clay upon it. An attempt had been made to remove them…

This was new to me, but cockled means to form wrinkles or puckers:

"thin or lightweight paper cockles and warps when subjected to watercolour”

Knitting mentioned a lot, but nothing interesting – pink vests for infants and a dress for young Josephine.

Etiquette/sociology in my most recent Wentworth entry, The Eternity Ring, we looked at the question of women marrying younger men, a subject about which the author seems to have felt strongly. Or is it just Miss Silver? Read the comments for more input, and speculation on Wentworth's own life. It comes up here too:

She might look young, but she must be several years older than Edward.

‘Ten years younger than her if he was a day!’

Emmeline lives in a house owned by her brother-in-law Arnold: her husband Jonathan is dead. This is a very similar setup to that in my recent Trollope read,  The Small House At Allington – again, the brother is nominally kind, but the widow knows she has no actual rights.

I thoroughly enjoyed this entry in the series, it was full of interest, and a rattling good read.

Photograph shows dressmaking class during WW2, part of the Make Do and Mend campaign, from the ever-wonderful Imperial War Museum collection.

Red flashy outfit from the Vivat tumbler.