Long hot summer and Victoria Gosling

Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling

published 2021

 

I loved Victoria Gosling’s Bliss and Blunder, really top tier, so I sought out Before the Ruins, her earlier novel, and was not disappointed. It is set in the West country of England, and features a young woman trying to find out what really happened in the deserted country house where she and her mates used to hang out many years earlier.

Well – there’s a plot we’ve seen often, and I will be sucked into it every time. This is a compelling and beautifully-written book. There’s a ‘now’ strand, there’s the past summer of 1996 where the young people ranged around the countryside, and something went horribly wrong, and then there is a yet earlier time (1936) in which there was a diamond theft:

a famous theft, a prominent local family, an unsolved mystery. Mrs East remembering the newspaper reports from the year she was twelve, the gossip raging for months in town, the sightseers who came down from London to stand at the manor’s gates and gawp, before heading to The Polly Tearooms for scones.

Always such an asset to a book – as I said last year:

All those jewel robberies in big houses in the past – it’s a wonder anyone had a diamond left to bless themselves. Dorothy L Sayers had The Nine Tailors, Christie’s oeuvre is full of jewel thieves, even one of Enid Blyton’s Five Finders Out book features one: The Mystery of the Strange Messages.

There is also a death in the past which has never been resolved, and now, years later, one of the survivors, Peter, has gone missing. That kickstarts the action, and Andy tells us the long winding story as she goes about trying to find Peter.

I loved her visit to a private enquiry agent:

a half-eaten box of fried chicken sat on his desk next to a couple of laptops and a phone. The detective clearly outsourced the honey-trapping.

And when she thinks about the earlier crimes, there is a murder story classic:

‘Have you ever thought it was you they were after?’ 

'She was wearing my coat.’ I hadn’t expected to say the words. They just came out. It had always stayed with me, that [she] had been wearing my coat.

I said in the post on Victoria Gosling’s other book:

There’s a lot to be said for Jilly Cooper (and I said it here), and her Rivals on the TV last year was a great source of ridiculous joy, but this is a much better and more balanced picture of life in the West of England for both rich and poor.

… and I felt the same way about this one.

There is a line: ‘she spent most of her giro on cans’,

Which means ‘she spent her welfare/benefit money on drink’: it has the ring of authenticity, and you wouldn’t find it in Cooper. The teenaged Andy has to use the phone box near her house – this has some importance in the plot – because they have no phone.

And more class-consciousness – here the narrator, Andy, is contrasting her own future with that of Peter, the nice boy from the vicarage:

A sudden and horrid vision – us bumping into one another in a supermarket many years in the future. Peter, all expensive, braying, ‘Well, if it isn’t dear old Andy,’ while lifting an enormous bottle of champagne into his trolley, and me in tracky bottoms and rags clutching a packet of value fish fingers. Or two litres of cider. Or the sticky paws of snotty triplets.

I love Gosling’s writing so much. Her heroine goes into a dark period after those difficult teenage years, and I thought the description of that was very well done:

There were no fresh starts now, the days were a pack of cards wiped clean of their faces. A pack of days to come, and among them the possibility of a black Jack…

Weekends spent like coins thumbed hard into slot machines, which paid out with blaring jingles and a dazzle of lights, three-day come-downs, strangers’ bodies, the grasped-for moments of self-forgetting always just beyond reach. Moving from one circle of people to the next. Two weeks is how long it takes to shrug a friend, unless you owe them money, of course. I owed everybody money. I didn’t wear a warm coat. I was a knife, a blade. I cut. I was cut. I didn’t know the difference. A new address, a new agency, a new sim card. A set of friends abandoned. Another adopted. Rinse and repeat.

But there are plenty of more cheerful moments.

There’s a clothes scene as two of the girls are getting ready to go out:

I tried on all of Em’s dresses then we hit her mum’s wardrobe. June had been a teenager in the sixties and had the miniskirts to prove it. Em was swishing this way and that in a long number as her mum came up the stairs. ‘You put everything back afterwards.’ She stopped and leaned against the doorframe. ‘God, I used to be thin. Looks good on you, Em. Very romantic, very Joan Baez. You found anything, Andy?’ I shook my head and she went over and rifled through the rails. ‘How about this?’ It was violet, very short… ‘Go on. Try it on. It’ll go perfect with your colouring.’

These two dresses are actual 1960s dresses, from the Vivat Vintage tumbler. Though somehow I’d rather think of them more like these Ralph Lauren girls from a few years later:

This is a very literary crime novel, and deserves to be better known.

Top picture is a fashion ad from 1996.

Second picture, Ralph Lauren again, 1995.