The Late Mrs Prioleau by Monica Tindall

 

The Late Mrs Prioleau by Monica Tindall

 

published 1946

 

 

daughter/daughter-in-law in mourning

I wish I could remember how I came to buy this book – it’s been sitting on my Kindle for a couple of years. Perhaps it was just that it was a Furrowed Middlebrow/Dean St Press book. Always  a sign of quality – this is my goto sentence:

And, shoutout as ever to the Dean St Press who have made it available to us and earn my gratitude every week, it seems.

The Late Mrs Prioleau is hard to categorize, and this I vaguely remember from when I first heard about it. Another comment I like to make is that 'this author wouldn’t have done well in a modern creative writing class', as the structure is strange and patchy to say the least. (It is always just an observation about the class, I don’t necessarily think a creative writing course is the last word).

Anyway. I think I vaguely thought it was a crime story, but it is more of an investigation, with unlikely details. The narrator, Susan, has married a naval officer, Henry Prioleau, but doesn’t  know his family: the first line of the book is very striking:

The first and only time I saw my mother-in-law was when she lay dead in her coffin.

Later:

No one seemed to be particularly sorry that Mrs Prioleau was dead, nor to expect that anyone else should be.

Susan becomes aware that her new family is dysfunctional, verging on toxic, and that her mother-in-law was – to use a technical term – a piece of work.

There are telling vignettes from minor characters:

“When your poor Aunt Louise died I married again, and your mother took up a most offensive attitude. She said that everyone was talking and that it was tantamount to committing . . . er . . . adultery. Why, I never discovered, except that it was maybe a little . . . soon.”

“You were probably not very comfortable as a widower?” suggested Melissa, with the expression of one prodding a rat to see if it was dead.

And this about Henry:

He had heard far too much about being made worthy, and his faith in prayer had been badly damaged some time previously when he was given Southey’s Life of Wesley for Christmas instead of a bicycle.

Susan doesn’t set out to find out  more, but circumstances lead her to the dead woman’s story: she helps with some house-clearing, she spends a summer with a new sister-in-law, she meets an aunt in Oxford. And eventually she reads a diary and letters. One part of me thinks this is a very jumpy way to tell a story, and that it doesn’t all fit together, but the rest of me was rather seduced by the beautiful writing, the creation of atmosphere, the details of life in the various eras of the book.

There is the summer of 1939, waiting for WW2 to begin. Then Susan is taking civilian jobs in London in the Blitz, then she is in Oxford. During her various encounters she sees more and more what a terrible mother Helena Prioleau was, one whose dread hand affected all her four children. A deeply unpleasant person, who made life miserable for those around her.

And then in the second half of the book she reads letters and diaries to find out what made her that way.  There is a long description of the life of Anglo-Irish poshos before and after the turn of the century – a subject, always, of great interest around here. (See for example the works of Molly Keane). The crumbling big house, the dances, the army officers, the Dublin Horse Show,  the fear of ‘trade’. Everything goes wrong, although Helena is so awful that it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for her. Her story was not a cheerful one, and the final revelation is not a surprise, and has its ironic side.

Helena was, on the whole, a careless and unloving parent. Her daughter Melissa takes this to startling extremes with the next generation – though it wasn’t clear to me how far Tindall approved of this.

Her son, with the impulsive bravery of his five years, was walking deliberately into the sea. I scrambled up, but she clutched my arm, holding me back. “Let him learn,” she whispered, white-faced and rigid. We must have been some fifty yards away from the children, yet she watched without cry or movement until Peter was swept off his feet and rolled over in the inevitable wave. She waded in then, and fished him out.

Shortly afterwards Peter climbs to the top of a dangerous rock formation and is told to get himself down. These incidents bothered me more than some of the more blatant bad behaviour. He’s five years old.  Melissa says ‘Mother made such a terrible hash of everything . . . her own life, us, being married to Father . . . that I determined I’d do quite differently.’

This is tied up in the upbringing of Austin, Helena’s first and favoured son, who was ‘adored and spoilt’, unlike the others. Helena is devastated when he lies about his age and joins up as a soldier in WW1. Not everyone has quite so much concern:

And Dr Prioleau gave him a special mention in family prayers as “Thy servant Austin, who is now numbered among Thy Crusaders.”

“Most of the time,” Austin’s sister commented acidly, “he was crusading on Salisbury Plain, but that made no difference to either of them.”

But Austin is eventually sent to the front, and suffers from shellshock. In the contemporary sections, he is what we would call Special Needs, although no-one has much sympathy for that either.

The other children got out of their home as fast as they could, basically running away from their mother, but Austin and his dogs were there till the end.

This is a strange book, beautifully-written and compelling: it seems such a shame that Monica Tindall did not write any more novels. Yes, it could have been better structured, but I was very much struck with the moments, the phrases, the descriptions that I know will linger in my mind...

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