The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

I’ve briefly touched on Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels, specifically Tipping the Velvet, but The Little Stranger, although still in the realm of historical fiction, sees her in the twentieth century, an area she has also visited in The Night Watch. With its sense of dread and litany of things that go bump in the night, I was put in mind of my favourite of her books, Afinity, although this is a very different beast, with elements of the country house thriller, and a knowing analysis of the decline of the upper class in Britain immediately after the Second World War.

Rural GP Dr Faraday is called to the Georgian pile in his village, Hundreds Hall, which has been the home of the Ayers family for 200 years. The remaining Ayers, mother, daughter Caroline and son Roderick, are living in penury, the house collapsing around them, as death duties, taxes and the new Labour government of Clement Atlee do their best to drive them into the ground. The stress has started to get to them, especially Roderick, badly wounded in the war and already of a distinctly nervous disposition. The gradual build up of seemingly unexplained events – objects moving around, ghostly sounds – has served to finally tip him over the edge, or at least to the bottle.

Faraday has been invited to supper at Hundreds Hall, but he notes with disdain that Roderick has been at the sauce:

There was something else, which troubled me more. His whole manner had changed. Where before he’d carried himself in the tense, hunted way of someone braced against disaster, now he seemed to slouch, as if barely caring whether disaster struck or not. While Mrs Ayers and Caroline and I chatted together, with an attempt at normality, of county matters and local gossip, he sat the whole time in his chair, watching us from under his brows but saying nothing. He rose only once, and that was to go to the drinks table to top up his glass of gin and French. And from the way he handled the bottles, and from the stiffness of the cocktail he mixed, I realised that he must have been drinking steadily for some time.

After a dreadful dinner when the young man insults their guest, Faraday insists on seeing him in his room before he goes. It’s for medical reasons, of course, not just so that he can give Rod a piece of his mind:

“Why are you doing this to yourself? The estate’s falling to pieces around you, and look at you! You’ve had gin, vermouth, wine, and,” – I nodded to his glass, which was sitting on a mess of papers at his elbow – “What’s in there? Gin again?” He cursed quietly. “Jesus! What of it? Can’t a bloke get lit up now and then?” I said, “Not a bloke in your position, no.”

He leaves in a foul mood, and Roderick goes back to the bottle. But the spooky goings on are about to take a turn for the worse. As Faraday sleeps off his supper that night ...something dreadful happened out at Hundreds Hall.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

Last week’s post on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trek through Mitteleuropa prompted me to mention Joseph Roth and Jaroslav Hašek, so I thought I’d carry on the theme and return, once again, to Drunkard’s Tales, Hašek’s boozy stories from old Prague...

Mr. Motejzlík’s Fatherly Delights concerns the eponymous new father and reprobate, who in the run up to the arrival of his son and heir, has been putting it about in the bars and shops around town that he’s already got a little boy at home. Realising that his wife might give birth to a girl, he back pedals and tells everyone it’s a daughter, then twins, then...

Finally, when the moment came that he was to become a father, he disappeared in the neighbourhood even though his in-laws were present, and at the pork butcher’s, the baker’s the chemist’s, in two pubs and one wine house claimed that it is a done thing, and again in his lying ways – a girl, boy – boy, girl – twins, triplets – boy, girl – girl, boy – to cut along story short he left himself a back door open. And when in the wine house he had his fifth glass of vermouth tucked inside, he exclaimed, “You don’t know how happy I am!” and went home.

Back at home, the drunken father is presented with the newborn:

When the midwife brought in the red infant, Mr. Motejzlík took hold of him and was in the hallway in a jiffy. He wanted to show it to the neighbours next door. They wrestled it away from him, and Mr. Motejzlík, shouting at the whole house in the quiet of the evening, “I have a son!” ran down and out to the restaurant opposite. There he ordered ten beers and told everyone he has a son. Since he told them half an hour ago that he had a daughter, an argument arose while Mr. Motejzlík was shouting, “I know better, it’s mine!”

The in-laws aren’t happy and show him the door, so Motejzlík spends the night on the toot, before trying to kip at a friend’s house. When this goes wrong (he sneaks in through a window and startles the man’s wife...) he creeps back home and sleeps on the sofa.

Still, Motejzlík is a doting father, if a little prone to festivities:

When somebody becomes a father, there are many little delights... What a great joy to note into your diary every gram that your offspring gains, slowly but surely, according to the implacable rules of nature. Then a new pleasure – your boy wants to drink. You take him to his mother and get back to your guests, take another bottle of cognac out of the cupboard, and while your little dear drinks, so do you and your guests to his health.

Once again, the in-laws show him the door and he ends up out on the pop. He comes back with a hare-brained idea that he wants his lad christened Hector, after the Trojan hero, but the family put the kibosh on that pretty quickly and tell him there’s no way the boy is having the same name as a butcher’s dog. Motejzlík storms off in a huff, but comes back a couple of days later, seemingly repentant:

Then he got ignored, shut in a room and when he spoke up at the door all contrite, “Could I please see my dear little son,” he received a curt answer, “When you sober up!” – “Sorry, I am really not drunk today, I would really like to see my own blood, dearest madam." The dearest mother-in-law did not answer and started to whistle an aria from the Huguenots, the part when they are starting to slaughter the Huguenots.

Father-in-law decides that Motejzlík is sober enough to make himself useful and sends him out to buy a pram, furnishing him with 150 crowns to fund the purchase. Motejzlík dutifully shops around, comparing prices and finally sits in a coffee shop working out which one is best value. Unable to decide, he goes back out to the street, only to find that it’s eight in the evening and all the shops are shut. The shadow of opprobrium has been cast on the night and he doesn’t dare go home:

All of a sudden Mr. Motejzlík began to feel the need to distract the thoughts of a hunted man with a jovial talk with his true friends, whom he saw daily at the restaurant U Zvěřinů in Košíře, whenever he managed to escape from home. So there he tried to banish his dismal thoughts with good beer, but still it was not the real thing, some excitement was needed to forget his sad lot.

Some wiseguy suggests a nightclub where they play cards, and before he knows what he’s doing, Motejzlík is changing a 100 crown note. Before long he’s down to his last 20 so he goes all in – “Everything for my little son!” – and scoops a monkey:

It was the next day around ten o’clock, when Mr. Motejzlík came back to his family and home. But in what condition!

Couples by John Updike

I’ve enjoyed Updike in the past, but for some reason struggled with this one, his 1968 novel about the adulterous affairs between a set of ten families living in a small Massachusetts town in the mid 1960s. Apparently, it’s frank depictions of the sexual act and the post-pill paradise garnered it some notoriety; maybe I’m jaded, but I found it overwritten and below the author’s usual standard.


Anyway, this is a booze blog, not a sex blog, so on to the drinking. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book, which describes the far too long a cocktail time before lunch. Foxy Whitman is a newcomer to the town of Tarbox, having just arrived there from Cambridge with her husband Ken:

To put herself at ease she had drunk too much. Under the mechanical urging of her inflexibly frowning host she had accepted two martinis and then, with such stupid false girlishness, a third; feeling a squirm of nausea, she had gone to the kitchen seeking a dilution of vermouth and had whispered her secret to her hostess, a drunken girlish thing to do that would have outraged Ken, yet the kind of thing she felt was desired of her in this company.

Ah, diluted vermouth. Perfect for morning sickness... All manner of social convention can be observed when alcohol is produced:

Frank Appleby was given two bottles to uncork, local-liquor-store Bordeaux, and went around the table twice, pouring once for the ladies, and then for the men. In Cambridge the Chianti was passed from hand to hand without ceremony.

Well, we’re not in Cambridge anymore...