In the final afternoon of the 1937 Club, I’m writing about the most obscure of my choices this week – Ursula Torday’s No Peace for the Wicked. It’s one of three novels that Torday wrote under her own name in the 1930s – and she started writing again the 1950s, turning then to gothic romances and mysteries under the pseudonyms Paula Allardyce, Charity Blackstock, Lee Blackstock and Charlotte Keppel. Having gleaned that from Wikipedia, I wondered what her early novels would be like – particularly with a title like No Peace for the Wicked.
As it turns out, the title doesn’t seem to have any particular significance for the characters. The heroine is Lynn. As the novel opens, she is 16 years old and living with her Aunt Beatrice and cousin Stephen, who is not her contemporary (he’s 29) but behaves rather like a slightly resentful older brother. Lynn has been there for many years, because her parents were killed in an accident. Beatrice has provided for her material needs, and offered some affection – but strictly on her own terms, which are laden with expectations that Lynn will be ladylike, respectful, and grateful.
Stephen and Beatrice often squabble, but they are united in ridiculing Beatrice. She has pretensions to art patronage, forever inviting promising young musicians to the house whose promise never seems to come to much. Beatrice gathers the local great and good to concert parties, which nobody besides herself seem particularly to enjoy. Torday is often a very funny writer, and I enjoyed the close observation she uses in highlighting the absurdities of Beatrice and her circle.
Aunt Beatrice sat still and upright, her hands folded on her lap. There was a faint smile on her mouth; once perhaps it had really been a smile of pleasure, now it was merely an expressionless elongation of the lips. Miss Martin also clasped her hands, but her head was thrown back, displaying her corded throat and flat breasts to the utmost disadvantage. She always tossed her head back when listening to music; Stephen once remarked that she seemed as if she were gargling with melody. Colonel Ingelby had shut his eyes. This looked like concentration, but was actually acute boredom. On one memorable occasion he had fallen asleep, and a Chopin nocturne had been cut short by a huge snore. Lynn had laughed so immoderately at this that she had been sent up to her room in disgrace. The Colonel’s wife, a plump little woman whose main interest lay in bridge parties, cared as little for music as he did, but to show that she knew how to appreciate it beat an audible tattoo on the arm of her chair, in the wrong tempo.
Lynn is at an age where she is starting to push against the bounds that Aunt Beatrice has put on her life. In this, she is sometimes aided and sometimes thwarted by Stephen. One of the main things I wish Torday had done differently in No Peace for the Wicked is Stephen’s age. He is 13 years older than Lynn, and it’s important for the dynamic that he is older and has more independence – but he could have done that at 21. It’s not clear how he has spent his 20s, living with his mother and not developing very much – and he acts so much like Lynn is a contemporary that the disparity in their ages feels a very odd decision.
The first half of the novel is a lot about the dynamics between this three characters – usually with a comic tone, and occasionally a bit more melodramatic. The melodrama overtakes the comedy around the halfway mark: it is the eve of Lynn’s interview to study at Oxford (where Torday studied herself), and… Stephen has run away with a vampish young woman.
One thing leads to another, and Lynn (now 21) and Aunt Beatrice move unhappily to a boarding house. Beatrice is hurt and angry, but continues so determinedly to idolise Stephen that she turns her ire on Lynn. Everything she does is wrong and wicked. And Lynn continues to push against these restrictions – particularly when she meets an egotistical young pianist, Richard, and falls suddenly in love with him. Much of the second half of the novel is about the on-again-off-again of their relationship, which is tempestuous and slightly ridiculous, in the way of many romances for 21-year-olds.
Melodrama again takes over, and the dialogue and responses sometimes feel a bit borrowed from the more hysterical reaches of 1930s cinema. It makes sense because they are so young, and I don’t think the reader is expected to think either Lynn or Richard is behaving very well. I read the whole novel on the train to and from London, so I think it would have felt less repetitive if I’d read it over a longer period.
I think the plot and character development could have done with a bit of finessing, but I still really enjoyed reading No Peace for the Wicked because of Torday’s style. It reminded me a bit of Stella Gibbons non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. It’s often very amusing and wry. Here, for example, is a funny bit about an incidental character who only appears for a couple of pages:
Mr Crane had fed his imagination for many years on the kind of novel where the hero beats the heroine with a sjambok, and after he has so dealt with her, covers her face with passionate kisses. He was a vehement preacher of the creed that all women like to be ill-treated. (At the age of forty-six he was still unmarried.)
Alongside the humour and melodrama is also a certain darkness. Lynn is often occupied with the limits of her own morality, and what wicked acts she might consider doing (and perhaps that is where the title comes in). Whether or not that comes to anything, I shan’t spoil – but it introduced a note of tension that it’s unusual in a 1930s domestic novel.
My 1937 Club reading has been a bit sub-par overall – but I’ve ended on a high note. I think Ursula Torday is an interesting and enjoyable novelist, and it’s a shame that her novels under her own name have disappeared so much. If you spot one in a bookshop, grab it and give it a chance.