I’m always willing to take a punt on a cheaply priced mid-century novel by a British woman, and that’s how Fever of Love by Rosamond Harcourt-Smith ended up in my hands on a trip to Hay-on-Wye a while ago. That was despite a title that seemed quite melodramatically romantic, and quite an ugly cover of a faded flower against a grey background. But when I flicked through it, the writing seemed quite good – and I thought it was worth a shot. It might never have left my shelves, of course, if it weren’t for the club year getting it off my shelves.
My initial thoughts were that, yes, I could see why I’d picked it up. Harcourt-Smith writes wittily and well, clearly choosing her words carefully for their comic effect. Here’s one of the main characters, Virginia, going to a hairdressers:
When Mr Frank came back and started hacking about as if he were pruning a hedge, Virginia had no heart to remonstrate. All the other women in the saloon were pleading, arguing over every hair that fell, like money-lenders haggling about interest. Week after week these persecuted creatures sat for two hours or more while Arnolph’s assistants insulted, humiliated, bullied, but sent them home almost in tears of thankfulness at their own beauty. Put the customer in the wrong, give her the works, but fix her up looking a dream and she’ll come back for more. Arnolph had made a pile playing duets on the masochism and vanity of women.
Virginia and Jane are the main two women in the novel; Sebastian and Richard are the main two men. The gist of the plot is very simple. Virginia is married to sexy, thoughtless Sebastian; Jane is married to staid, dependable Richard. Both women are dissatisfied with their marriages and think that finding a more reliable (or, alternatively, more animalistically amorous) man would solve their problems – and, without realising the other is doing the same, they husband swap. (I’ve described the differences between Sebastian and Richard, which are obvious because they are so exaggerated – while Virginia and Jane get more space on the page and more attempts at psychology, I would struggle to define how they differ.)
Here is Virginia and Richard at the moment their affair begins:
Sebastian’s love-making was as formal as the peacock’s dance. Events followed each other with an order, a rhythm, which might have been taken from Kama Sutra. In these moments he resembled a brilliant tennis player winning a difficult match by never losing his head. The technique of love, the beauty of women, his own vigour, made love as he saw it a work of art as ordered as a great painting, a Bach concerto. Richard’s utter abandonment, his desire to immolate himself in his passion, struck Virginia as touching, unfamiliar. He knelt beside her in the hay, face transfigured, running his hands over the moulding of her body as though he himself had created it and found it his masterpiece. Like a Brahmin flinging himself beneath the Juggernaut’s car, he pressed his face against her body, eyes tight shut, here, there, losing himself in her. She lay quiet, caressing him where she could, his head, his shoulders; then as Richard’s mood of absement changed she felt as though she were sinking to the bottom of a pool, half suffocated by the sudden impact of his domination. Now she was the sacrificed, imprisoned in a bubble, drowning. Slowly the bubble began to rise up through the water-weeds, up, up, gathering speed until it reached the surface of the pool where it burst in a wide glitter of iridescent vapour. Then, as it seems drowning people feel, the suffocation cleared suddenly, leaving them floating, body to white body, drowned.
I thought that was exceptionally good writing, particularly about something as notoriously difficult to write as a sex scene. And it confused me a bit about the audience for this book – because the plot, and to a large extent the characters, are the schlocky sort of things you’d expect in a novel by Ethel M. Dell or Ruby Ayres – or whoever the 1950s equivalents of those early-20th-century powerhouses might be. But would someone looking for a racy, lowbrow romance (and no judgement if that’s what someone is after) really expect references to Bach and Brahmin in the middle of a love-making scene? And yet would someone looking for this richness in writing expect a plot as torrid as this husband-swapping one?
There isn’t much else to say about the plot, because it is just a protracted tale of adultery with some side characters thrown in. Nobody has any real moral compunction about cheating, or about cheating with the husband of a dear friend. And, I’ll be honest, I grew pretty bored of their assignations – but I kept reading for wonderful lines like this:
She had been four times married. Her first three husbands she wore as if they were expensive handbags – to be carried everywhere, insured against loss, locked up when not in use and lent to no third party.
And, as for the title – late in the novel, we learn what the simile is:
You loved deeply only once. The initial stages might be like some high fever, distracting you shamefully from your chosen route, distorting your life until you recovered or came to terms honourably – a field-marshal endorsing an armistice. Even then, like small-pox, it left you scarred, marked for life in fact. But one love, and one alone, did this to you, it could not happen twice.
I finished Fever of Love feeling very confused about what I thought. It’s rare to find a book where the writing is so much better than the characters or the plot. Adultery stories bore me at the best of times (it’s my main problem with writers like Margaret Drabble) and, even within an adultery storyline, Fever of Love would have been much more interesting if there had been more at stake – more moral questioning, or enquiry about what would happen to the women’s friendship. As it is, the characters feel quite flimsy, it’s hard to care what happens to any of them, and the story had cheap melodrama and yet no consequences. And yet, and yet, the writing was often so adept and so witty. I spent much of the time wishing Rosamond Harcourt-Smith had turned her evident talents to something more worthy of them.
If I ever stumble across another novel by her, I’d definitely snap it up. As for Fever of Love – I honestly can’t decide whether or not I’d recommend it someone. But if the quotes here appeal, then I recommend you keep an eye out.
