The Sleeping Beauty

Book 362: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, David Baddiel

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

INTRODUCED BY DAVID BADDIEL 'Elizabeth Taylor is finally being recognised as an important British author: an author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth. As a reader, I have found huge pleasure in returning to Taylor's novels and short stories many times over. As a writer I've returned to her too - in awe of her achievements, and trying to work out how she does it' SARAH WATERS Vinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a seaside town, his task is to comfort Isabella, a bereaved friend, and and he is prepared for a solemn few days of tears and consolation. But on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at the sunset and catches sight of a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for the first time in his middle-aged life. Emily, though, is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past.

Release date: November 3, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 172

Sample

In a newspaper once, I described Elizabeth Taylor as ‘the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike’. I felt chastened
soon after this when I read a piece on Taylor by the estimable writer Philip Hensher, who said (in an undoubtedly Austenian
tone) that: ‘Any woman novelist who writes grammatically, it sometimes seems, will sooner or later be compared to Jane Austen,
but in Taylor’s case, the comparison is peculiarly inappropriate.’


I still think my missing link idea is true, though. Let’s begin by drawing the relationship between Austen and Updike: the
canvas of both is always a small, provincial section of the middle-classes; their narratives explore love and marriage and
its breakdown within that canvas; and they both subscribe to the need to, in Updike’s words, ‘give the mundane its beautiful
due’. They both, in other words, find art in the everyday, rather than the fantastical. Or perhaps they find the fantastical
in the everyday.


Elizabeth Taylor operates along all these lines. The Sleeping Beauty is a novel entirely committed to finding the fantastical in the everyday:


It looked a sad, unwelcome garden with its yellowing leaves. Rotten fruit lay in the grass. A mist was breathed upwards from
clumps of rusty leaves and the mauve flowers. Remote, pervasive, so Englishly moody, with its muted colours and still air
and medlar-scent, it appeared expectant, ready to match itself to an intruder, to be in tune with the nostalgic or the romantic;
with magic for lovers; and echoes for the forlorn.


The story of The Sleeping Beauty is like this garden: very small, very English but, at the same time, strange, exotic, disturbing, and wreathed in a kind
of rich melancholy. Vinny Tumulty is a repressed, and, when we first meet him, rather creepy figure, who derives pleasure
from comforting the recently bereaved. He is in the aptly named seaside town of Seething, out of season, performing this task
for Isabella, whose husband Harry, an MP, has recently drowned. Staring out of the window of Isabella’s house, he sees a shadowy
female figure walking by the sea, about whom he develops a mystical certainty: ‘It was too dark for him to see the woman’s
face, but he was certain, from her walk, that it was beautiful.’ This figure turns out to be Emily, a woman whose beauty may
or may not have survived the plastic surgery performed upon her following a car crash. As a kind of penance for the mysterious
and possibly scandalous background to the crash, she has buried herself within the life of her sister Rose, spending all her
time helping to look after Rose’s mentally disabled daughter, Philly.


Like Austen, and like Updike, Taylor is interested in whether or not love can survive damage, and the damage that pervades
Seething is everywhere. The debris of scattered relationships lies around the town like flotsam and jetsam from its grim sea:
Isabella’s husband is dead, as is Rose’s, both through strange accidents, both with some shadow of scandal hanging around their lives; Vinny has his own secret, hidden away in another, equally grey, town; Laurence, Isabella’s son, is at
once hateful towards and completely dependent on his mother, a cycle he repeats towards a local children’s nurse, whom he
thinks of simply as ‘the girl’; the hilariously sure-of-herself Mrs Tumulty, Vinny’s mother, appears to have driven her husband
to an early grave through such strictures as, when they were on safari, expecting ‘him to make an effort of standing up when
she entered his tent, even if he bent double in doing so’. And Vinny and Emily themselves are perhaps two of the most emotionally
shut-down people ever to form the basis of a love story. Vinny, ‘nearing fifty’ and feeling ‘more than ever the sweet disappointments
only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration’ experiences his first meeting with his beloved not as most writers
would teach us he should, as an intense attraction, but almost the opposite, almost revulsion: ‘He could only feel the shock
of it, the inexplicable recoil from, her beauty – as if a moth had brushed his cheek and terror had driven him to beat it
off; a terror ridiculous, instinctive and humiliating.’ Emily, meanwhile, is so closed off that she doesn’t speak until a
third of the way through the novel, and even then we learn nothing of her internal life until much later; up to that point,
we, like Vinny, can only imagine her ‘lying under the spell of her alien beauty and Rose’s devotion enclosing her like a thicket
of briars’.


The most moving part of The Sleeping Beauty is the way that love gingerly breaks through all this dead matter. It is not fast, or swooping, this love: to reach Emily,
Vinny requires ‘patient drudgery’. It necessitates small steps, awkward meetings on landings, long semi-silent sea walks around
Seething. Even in a fantasy, a picnic Vinny imagines taking her on, ‘He still could not find any dialogue for them. Emily
remained monosyllabic.’ Desire is complex, nuanced, a thing that is to be deconstructed: ‘Desire, of itself, had scarcely existed for him, obstructed, or obliterated, as it so often was, by his sense of personality.’
But eventually, tentatively, love emerges from the shadow of all this uncertainty: ‘He watched, as if it were the most surprising
and exotic revelation, her pink heels lifting from her slippers as she climbed the stairs.’


This tentativeness never quite leaves them. Even when most of their obstacles have been overcome, there is no joyous coming
together for Vinny and Emily – rather they are left ‘at last with the burden of one another’s personalities; the terror of
striking a false note; or none’. And crucially, their love – this very Elizabeth Taylor type of love, love found unexpectedly
in middle-age, after the point at which the idea of it happening has been forsworn – does not permeate the world of the book.
Vinny and Emily’s love lights up only each other’s soul, not the soul of Seething. It feels to all the other characters –
Rose, Isabella, Laurence – that something has been reborn, but, in their own lives, what that something is remains obscure:
‘They felt anticipatory; but nothing happened … no miracle happened.’ Taylor hangs on to the reality of love, which is that
its effects are intense but small. Love changes only the lives of the lovers; for the rest of us, as Mrs Siddons says, ‘We
shall soon be putting the clocks back or forward.’


This reality, this keeping the backdrop mundane, is what separates Taylor from the stereotypical ‘Women’s Writer’ she is sometimes
mistaken for. An author who writes so much about love and its travails can easily be mistaken for a Mills & Boon maven, but
her great art is not to make love into a fairy-tale, even when, as in The Sleeping Beauty, she is using the paradigm of a fairy-tale. Her strokes are never broad, always detailed, and the more intense for it. Read
again the sentence above where Vinny is moved by Emily’s heels emerging from their slippers. This miniature noticing of detail is radical and modern. It may now be a common idea, that the tinier and sharper the descriptive focus, the more powerful the significance, but not in Taylor’s
day. By 1960, in Rabbit, Run, possessed even in that short time by a very different idea of men and women, Updike can write ‘her eyebrows stretch up,
showing the bumps her eyeballs make under the thin membrane’ but Taylor preceded him, in realising the power of the microscopic.


She cannot, however, precede him in other ways. Sex is a driving narrative force in all three of my great literary triumvirate,
but in Austen the act itself remains, of course, unspoken, while in Updike it is shouted, screamed and rendered in minute
detail. Taylor is, as missing links should be, somewhere between the two. The erotic world she depicts has moved away from
overly restrained gentility – she can announce, perhaps startlingly, of Rose, that she is ‘obsessed by sex as only those who
fear it can be’ – but it is still too constrained, too English, perhaps, openly to embrace any kind of illegitimate desire.
What in Austen would be some unnamed act whose consequence is social shame and exclusion, and in Updike would be wife-swapping,
in Taylor is bigamy, a very 1950s way of dealing with anti-monogamous urges, and a crime, a crime whose consequence the novel
leaves unresolved. But sex is always there, hinted at, behind the thinnest veil of comic politesse: ‘He had seen too many
mothers like her … to wonder how she had ever come to have a child. He now took that miracle for granted, supposing that everyone
has his informal moments.’


This observation of Vinny’s about Isabella – like Isabella’s later unabashed, possibly tipsy confession that she had wanted
more children but ‘after Laurie there was all that bother with my Fallopian tubes, whatever they may be’ – makes me laugh.
Which is perhaps the last and most important reason to group Elizabeth Taylor with Jane Austen and John Updike; she is able
to look into the vagaries of love and romance and passion and desire and sex and delicately pick out the comedy of it all.
And like all the greatest comedians, her comedy is of a type that often makes the reader feel as much like crying as laughing
– laughter in the dark, or perhaps more accurately, in Taylor’s case, laughter in the gloom.


David Baddiel, 2011

‘There’s Vinny going in with the wreaths,’ Isabella had once said.

Now that her own time to be consoled had come, she was glad of him. The wreaths she had mentioned were a figure of speech
– her way of associating Vinny with condolences and gloom; for disaster could always bring him to a scene. He went with sympathy
professional in its skill; yet adept, exquisite. More personal than the professionals whom he excelled – doctors, priests,
undertakers – he fired his reliability with talent and imagination. His letters to the bereaved never expressed inadequacy
on his part: they seemed simply to be the reason for his existence. Flippant people – Isabella was one – felt that his presence
was a foreboding, or a dismal signal, like drawn blinds: but behind the closed doors where sorrow was, he sustained and comforted.


Seeing him standing in the parlour, looking stouter, greyer than she had remembered, she felt remorse at never having treated
him seriously, and she went quickly to him; first took his hands and then put her head against his shoulder to hide the distortion
of her face.


One thing Vinny never said was ‘Don’t cry’. He waited patiently for her to finish, standing quite still, his glance directed
about the room which he had not seen for ten years. Without moving, he could not take in more than an edge of the bay-window
and none of the sea beyond; but seaside light is always noticeable and on this early Spring evening the room was washed with
it.


‘Forgive me!’ Isabella wept. ‘I have not cried before – I was too sad.’

A large part of Vinny’s usefulness was the coaxing forth of such tears as are better shed. He stroked her untidy hair, until
after a while she steadied, gathered herself together, dabbed her eyes, disengaged herself and gave the usual rueful smile.


‘You are so good to come.’

While she tried to patch up her poor face, he walked over to the window and then felt tactless at going too soon to look at
the sea, which had so recently claimed Isabella’s husband and had nearly claimed her son at the same time.


The window gave immediately on to the sea-front. The terrace of little houses were close to the jetty and the road ran behind
them. The lavender paving-stones were patchily wet. The low sun broke into the puddles in a great dazzle. All steamed and
shimmered. A row of iron chairs stood by the sea-wall.


Out on the sands, two children ran at the water’s edge, trailing seaweed, bending for shells. Behind them came an elderly
lady with a large umbrella, which was shut up but not furled. It stabbed the sands like an arrow, sometimes knocking aside
pebbles or spearing pieces of seaweed for the children. They moved along like a frieze against the brown sea, with the grey
beach to themselves.


‘The Tillotson children,’ Isabella said, coming to stand beside Vinny. ‘And Nannie,’ she added.

‘Who are the Tillotson children?’ Vinny asked, putting his arm through hers.

‘They had whooping-cough,’ Isabella said vaguely. ‘I was thinking, Vinny, that “inevitable” can mean nice things, too. It
had never occurred to me before.’


‘What has been inevitable?’

‘Why, you! I waited for you to come. I thought “Vinny at least will come.” Although we never heard from you all these years,
only the card at Christmas.’


‘I was busy. You didn’t need me. I thought of you often, and imagined you three here for your holidays, and Laurence growing
up.’


‘I was simply convinced you would one day walk in. One is left so much on one’s own. People are shy of the bereaved. They
don’t quite know what to be. And they feel that they must not flock down, like vultures …’ Vinny frowned … ‘They say: “Other people are nearer to her,
it is not our place to presume or intrude.” And because they all say that, in the end no one comes – from nicety, of course;
not cruelty. Or are they just too embarrassed and waiting for death to blow over? Time heals everything, especially embarrassment.
But perhaps you think I am bitter?’ she asked, with a little pride in her voice.


‘You, Isabella! Oh, my darling, no one less, ever.’

‘You are so fatherly,’ she said coldly. Yet his laughter had made the room more normal. No one had dared to laugh before.

‘There they go, up the steps!’

The children had crossed the sands and begun to ascend some rustic-work, zigzagging steps up the cliff. Sometimes Nannie urged
them on, shooing at them with her umbrella as if they were geese. They plodded upwards in their wellington boots. One threw
down her seaweed in despair and seemed to be coughing.


‘Where do they go?’ Vinny asked.

‘Up to Rose Kelsey’s guest-house.’

At the top of the cliff, but mostly hidden in trees, he could see a gabled Victorian house of tremendous ugliness, ivy over
its dark walls and one upstairs window glinting evilly in the sunset.


‘How is Laurence?’ Vinny asked, reminded by the sight of the children that the last time he had stayed with Isabella her son
had been a boy, out on the sands all day. Vinny had built castles for him and dug channels to let in the tide, the soapy water
like ginger-beer.


‘I can’t help worrying. There is the question of what one calls his future. In fact, how to scrape together two halfpennies for himself when he has finished his military service.’ She tried hard not
to feel aggrieved with her husband for leaving her before they had settled anything.


‘It might be a chance for me to help. Where is he now?’

‘He is upstairs in his room, sulking. What am I saying? Studying, I mean. Studying.’


‘What is he studying?’

‘Well, reading then. I always say “reading” when people are lolling in a chair, or lying on the sofa, or in a train. But studying
when they sit up to a table.’


‘What does he read?’

‘Books and papers and magazines.’ She turned her cuff back secretly to glance at her watch, thinking of the meal in the oven.
‘And library books,’ she added.


‘Pretty comprehensive.’

‘Yes. It was such an ordeal for him. He seemed quite stunned. Unimaginably horrifying: and so brave of him, trying to save
Harry like that. It was hopeless. He barely saved himself.’


‘I know. I read of it,’ Vinny said, glancing at her.

‘He seemed ill for days, chilled and dazed and exhausted, poor boy … and talking in his sleep, though nothing one could hear; and being so very difficult. Antagonistic.’


The children were at the top now: they disappeared behind some macrocarpa trees. The sunset had struck a different window
of the house, and fell differently into the little parlour, which had a selfconscious, but charming, marine atmosphere – sea-green
wallpaper, and furniture inlaid with mother-o’-pearl; on the chimney-piece, ships in bottles and spiked and curly pink shells.
The pictures were of steamers, and paddle-boats painted on glass and having a darkly thunderous quality. By the window was
the telescope on its stand. Isabella had often turned it on Harry’s yacht as he set off from the jetty, swinging round at
first uncertainly, then settling to the water and at last disappearing round the cliff. She had probably watched it on the
last day, Vinny thought, when Harry and Laurence were late returning. She had always been particularly anxious when Laurence
had gone, too. He wondered how she could bear to keep the telescope there: then he realised that, sometimes, to take action
over a thing can make it seem more real.


‘I may appear inevitable,’ he suddenly said, ‘but no more than that – not, for instance, punctual. I wanted to come earlier,
but could only write. Now is really too late. All I can do are practical things … what to arrange for Laurence, for instance.’


‘You came just right,’ Isabella said. ‘When one is too shocked, one cannot …’ She put her rolled-up handkerchief to her mouth,
and then went on: ‘After when one begins to feel the emptiness … and being so unpopular, because grieved … and then practical
things I never could do … nor had to … not now, really … there wasn’t even a funeral, you see.’


‘No,’ said Vinny reverently. He tried not to imagine Harry’s body dragged to and fro on the sea’s floor, with no tide ever
sweeping him to rest.


‘Oh, we ought to have some sherry,’ Isabella said, remembering. She had grown careless about such things, and often, when
she was alone, did not bother.


When she opened the door, a dismal smell of cooking flew in. Vinny could envisage some dreary, woman’s meal – cauliflower-cheese,
he thought – placed in the oven by the daily-help who had admitted him – a frantic-looking woman, who stood by the door, skewering
in hatpins, to show she was just off.


There was dust on the stopper of the decanter Isabella brought in. She handed him his glass triumphantly, as if she had brought
off a conjuring-trick.


‘I will call Laurie,’ she said. ‘You can have a drink together while I make up your bed.’

‘But I shall not stay here,’ Vinny protested. ‘I mean to take a stroll into the town and find a room at The Victoria.’

‘The Victoria! Out of season! It is half shut up, and no staff, and you would be much better off here, and are so wanted.’


For a minute or two, they played their game of doubt and reassurance. He threw to her protestations and got back overriding
assertions, as he expected. In the end, she went away to prepare his room, and to fetch Laurence. At the door, she asked:
‘How long can you stay?’


‘Over the weekend, I could … but are you sure …’ but bef. . .