The Good Husband by Pamela Hansford Johnson

The Good Husband by Pamela Hansford Johnson

published 1978

 

 

A new category is needed: Least likely sentence about a cosmonaut in an English comedy of manners of the 1970s.

Talking about Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space:

‘I’ve seen him,’ Ann said, ‘when he was being driven through Kensington High Street. And he is a handsome young man, albeit small.’

Well! That sent me down the rabbit-hole: It just sounded so unlikely. I was absolutely astonished to find that three months after his expedition to space - and remember this is 1961, at the height of the Cold War - Gagarin visited the UK, (Manchester and London) where he was greeted as a hero, with crowds lining the streets, and he was received by the Prime Minister (Harold MacMillan) and the Queen. This picture shows him with the Lord Mayor of London. He seems to have been accompanied everywhere by the bespectacled minder who may have been diplomat or translator or secret service, but who has a curious look of the poet Philip Larkin… You can see photos and newsreel of all this, and the Wikipedia entry about Gagarin’s life is well worth reading, full of surprises. And this article gives a lot of detail about the UK trip, which was controversial at the time.

Anyway. This book is the sequel to The Good Listener, recently blogged on: it opens in around 1960 and takes us through the next five years in Toby Roberts’ life: his socializing and career rise woven in with reports from his other friends, and references to current events like this one. (Not always accurately – drivers mention their fear of being breathalysed, but this was not introduced in the UK till around 1967. And people refer to jetlag – a word which was not in use till the late 1960s)

I feel the title is spoiler-esque, so I can say that Toby gets married -  

And after that I will be including information which could SPOILER the first book, should you be inclined to read it

 

-though not to anyone from the first book, but to Ann, an older woman, a widow with two sons. They have their ups and downs. He still sees a fair amount of the characters from book number one, they are all forever having dinners and attending parties together. You do wonder if they have no other friends, and also sometimes it is not at all clear why X should have been invited to Y’s close family dinner, except to further the plot. Such as it is – this is a comedy of manners, and not a great deal happens. People have babies, get annoyed with each other, become jealous.

The most serious events involve Adrian the good-looking vicar, who has given up celibacy and married. He should be enjoying life with his perfect partner, but the disturbed Rita, from the first book, begins stalking him in a convincing and quite terrifying way.

Nobody is sure how seriously to take this, and there is this excellent conversation when Toby and Ann are invited for the weekend to the Rectory of Doom:

‘Do let’s go,’ said Ann. ‘I long to meet the dramatis personae of the Rita story.’

‘Not till it gets a bit warmer. Adrian may think his rectory is cosy, but I very much doubt it.’

There are more good clothes: Ann wears a yellow dress for their first dinner date - top illo. And, as would be normal for a woman of her status in life, she wears fur coats frequently.

As would also be normal then – she doesn’t let her sons attend her second wedding.

Later she wears a fur-trimmed suit of lavender tweed, which Toby likes very much but which will suffer an inglorious fate after a social event goes wrong.

 

It’s hard to know that the author wanted us to make of Toby.

In the first book, an older writer, Edward, tells him: ‘Men can hurt women so terribly. If the women don’t cry, the men think they’ve got away with it; and if they do cry, then they regard it as intolerable behaviour which frees them from obligation.’

Quite recognizable. But Toby doesn’t have it all his own way by any means, and the women around him are a stalwart crew. There is mention of a ‘secret planner’ – it’s not spelled out, but this would seem to be an inner voice which makes him act in a certain way, to try to get what he wants. But not much is made of this, and he doesn’t – on the whole – succeed in his machinations, although (non spoiler) nothing too terrible happens to him.

At the end of this second book, he ‘marvelled  at his own social rise…he had eventually made a social place for himself. A young man of his time, he thought.’

Although I did enjoy these two books, they were not as good as an earlier novel by her, An Avenue of Stone, or the murder story she wrote with her then-husband under a pseudonym: Murder’s a Swine by Nap Lombard.

Yellow dress from NYPL

Tweed suit from Clover Vintage.