The plot is quite involved so I’ll endeavour to explain the set-up. In the first chapter, we meet wealthy Barry and Vanessa Bone as they return home late from a posh party, arguing about the cheque for £2,000 that Barry has just given Roger Maple. The money, insists Barry, is as an investment in a new railway in an eastern European country called Ardania, where copper has been found; Maple is a friend of the local king.
A young woman called Kate Browning returns home from the same party and admits to her sober, level-headed sister Julia that she overheard Maple and the Bones, got mixed up in their conversation after she claimed to know the king as a friend of a friend, and has herself invested £100 in the scheme. Yet Kate believes that the money is an investment in a deal to distribute Ardanian oil.
Vincent and Frances Roydon were also at the party. Vincent is features editor of the Vigilant newspaper, which is ironic as he, too, has been hoodwinked by Maple, investing £250 that he can ill-afford in what he thinks is a paper-making scheme to exploit Ardania’s plentiful soft woodlands.
In the second chapter, we meet Maple himself, calling in on his old friend Duncan Stewart, an impoverished documentary film-maker who finds £250 to invest in what Maple describes as a scheme to dam Ardania’s Lixaman Falls and supply hydroelectric power across the border.
By now the reader is sure of what Duncan only suspects: that all of this is a scam. Maple conspicuously leaves the remains of a letter from a mystery woman, Elvira, in Duncan’s wastepaper bin and then heads off to meet his wife, Jenny Maple, so they can leave the country.
He promptly disappears. Jenny tells Duncan that her husband stood her up but she refuses to go to the police, even as days turn to weeks without word from him. Duncan instead meets the other hoodwinked investors and together they investigate what has been going on. Their first move is to try and meet up with Ardania’s former king, now living in London under the name Mr Forster and busy trying to agree the sale of his unrivalled collection of paintings by Vermeer…
Even so, the novel is full of brilliant details and Bennett shows her usual sharply observational eye. Roger Maple, before he disappears, is a beguiling rogue with a neat line in tradecraft. For example, he advises Duncan Stewart not to buy beer on credit from his local shop:
“It gives you a reputation of being hard up, and in your own street, too.” (p. 22)
It doesn’t matter that Duncan is hard up; the important thing is appearance. Maple instead recommends being bold and try cashing a cheque for £100 in the same establishment to give a contrary impression. Then there’s the artful way Maple gives the names of his other investors — Bone, Browning and Roydon — to sufficiently impress Duncan that he wants to put in money himself, while thinking this is his own idea (p. 28). In doing so, the author also provides Duncan with leads to follow when Maple disappears, bringing the different investors together to compare stories and so form a bond. That is elegantly, effectively done.
Speaking of bonds, I wondered at first why Duncan was so easily taken in by Maple, given he’s such an evident rogue. How did these two so very different men ever become friends? Just as I wondered this, the answer came: on p. 34 we’re told that they were in the army together. The implication is that this formed an unshakeable bond between two people otherwise from completely different worlds. Now I wonder how relatable that would have been to readers of the time, so soon after the end of the war and with National Service ongoing. I’m aware that the services threw together people from different backgrounds and classes who might never otherwise have met. But I’d never thought of the lasting relationships so created, akin to friends made on holiday that you can’t then shake, but with a stronger, faced-death-together connection.
Another contemporary insight is Duncan’s own frustrations. As a filmmaker, he’s keen to find truth, avoid cliche and to document ordinary, real life. There's a sequence late on where he’s being briefed on an advert for serial. When he offers his view on how to lift this above cliche, he is told “This is meant to be an advertising, not an art film” (p. 166) — though the implication is that his suggestions will be taken on and will prove effective.
This and the sequence where Roydon is faced with the sack, apparently on the whim of the publisher, may reveal something of the real-life experience of the author, or her husband who was editor of Lilliput between 1943 and 1950, when Margot wrote regularly for it. How much could the Bennetts do what Roydon does here, his threat to take a scoop to a rival publication earnings him promotion and a raise? My guess is that this was wish fulfilment, even revenge for real life.
On another occasion, Duncan rails against the nannying welfare state, in much the way as might the protagonist of novels from the same year such as Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Nevil Shute’s time-travelling In the Wet.
“‘I can’t leave the country, drive a car, open a shop, buy a pound of butter, not without permission. There are places where I can’t cross the road until a policeman lets me. I know I’m a man and not a unit,’ he said satirically, ‘because I’m allowed to register a vote for Holborn Borough Councillors. I’d like to do something more. I’d like to find Roger and not just run bleating to the police. I’d like to be a man on my own.” (pp. 62-63)
But Duncan isn’t alone; the whole wheeze of the book is that it’s an investigation by a group of amateur detectives, all from different backgrounds but linked by common cause. Though Duncan crave adventure of a John Buchan/Richard Hannay sort, it is Roydon who enjoys racy antics abroad.
There are lots of fun supporting characters, best of all Derek Vaughn, the burglar battling with his own conscience. Here’s a typical monologue from him, all sex and violence and comedy:
“When I was a lad, I was one of the roughest types on God’s earth. I’ve done five years for rapping a harmless old woman on the head. But I used my time to educate myself, and before the end I was the prison librarian. Some of the least educated men used to be great readers They’d get me to mark off the dirty bits for them, and even if it was just the lights going out or a description of a woman’s brassiere they’d read it till the page dropped off. That way, sir, I gradually got a lot of them interest in literature for its own sake.” (pp. 73-74)
Something of this echoes in a later sex scene just kindling as a chapter ends:
“She drew his hard, reluctant body closer to her and held his head against her soft, generous breasts. She soothed him with her loving, expressive hands until he was utterly relaxed in the ambience of her kindness. He was weak, and knew for the first time the peace that comes from abandoning the painful disguise of strength.” (p. 217)
How different, I thought, to the gruff, masculine perspective of bonking in Fleming or Shute, sex as surrender rather than attack. And yet, this sex is also victory, an accomplishment and something got away with for the lover who is married to someone else.
That is more interesting than the way the novel ends for Duncan, rejected by one woman so he immediately proposes to another. We leave him and his fiancee on an ostensibly happy note, but the cold exchange of one woman for another simply doesn’t sit right. The Widow of Bath neatly tied up all the threads of its plot and added an unsettling coda to haunt us after the close of the book. The ending here is is unsettling because it is unsatisfactory, not quite tying things up. The basic trick behind this novel isn’t as clever or as satisfying as her last book, and it’s not quite so well done.
Bennett followed Farewell Crown and Good-bye King with two novels both published in 1955 which I’ve already read: unconventional mystery The Man Who Didn’t Fly and the science-fictional The Long Way Back; my friend Matthew Sweet calls the latter her masterpiece. I’ll be back to read what’s considered the best as well as the last of her detective novels, Someone From the Past (1958).
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