The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore – #1976Club

Sheila Redden has come to France to celebrate her anniversary with Kevin, the doctor of the title. She has come ahead of him, as he has been caught up with work – and they’ve returned to the place where they had their honeymoon fifteen years earlier. Before heading to the very same hotel in Villefranche, she is spending a short time in Paris, visiting an old friend and her current boyfriend. Her life is painfully ordinary. She loves her teenage son Danny, though not all-encompassingly. She supposes herself to love her husband and her life, because that is what one does. Sheila is an introspective woman who manages to avoid looking too close.

Coming back to France isn’t just stepping back into a past of their early romance, it is escaping the Troubles in Northern Ireland. That term has been used in our earliest ‘club’ years and in our latest, though here it is different than in the ’20s, of course. Sheila is a ‘Catholic’, very much inverted commas in place, and has no strong political leanings – just a horror of the death and destruction that is happening in her homeland.

In Paris, Sheila gets talking to a young American called Tom. He is charming, funny, and – most unusually of all for Sheila – interested in her. They share an evening of conversation, walking around the sights of Paris, discussing their pasts, presents, futures. It is a perfect evening, and Tom tries to persuade Sheila to stay longer – particularly as her husband is further delayed. But she insists she has to go to the hotel in Villefranche.

Moore is very good at moments that illuminate a life: that tell you enough in a microcosm that you can understand the broader dynamic of a relationship or state of mind. Even rarer, he is good at doing it unshowily, letting the moment be an ordinary part of a day and letting the reader recognise its significance.

Ninety minutes later, the plane began its approach to Nice, flying along the coastline over Saint-Raphael and Cannes. Through the window she saw villas on cliffsides, emerald swimming pools, white feathers of yacht sales scattered in the bays. When she had first looked down on this coast long ago on her honeymoon, she had turned in excitement, saying: ‘Oh, Kevin, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to live here all the time?’ only to have him take her literally and answer, ‘I suppose it would, if all I wanted to do was water-ski the rest of my life.’ She remembered that now, as the plane wheeled, pointing down toward land. Below her, cars moved, slow as treacle on the ribbon of seafront road. The plane skimmed the tops of a row of palm trees, came in over a cluster of white rectangular hangars to land with a jolt of its undercarriage and a sickening rear jet thrust.

She hasn’t been at the hotel for very long when the reception call and say there is a gentleman waiting for her in the lobby.

When the lift reach the ground floor and paused for that little airbrake moment before it finally settled, all at once she knew. The lift door opened, showing the lobby, him standing there, throwing his head up at sight of her, very excited, smiling, awaiting her reaction. ‘Hello, Sheila. Mind if I join you?’

It was then she saw how nervous he was.

‘But what on earth are you doing here?’

‘I hate to be left behind at airports.’

It sounds a bit manipulative out of context, but Moore goes out of his way to make Tom kind, selfless and respectful of Sheila. She is so unused to being put first, and to be found vital as a woman – and she quickly falls in love with this younger man. It is mutual, and they quickly find themselves in bed together. As we had known they would from a prologue at the beginning of the book.

The Doctor’s Wife then treads three lines, I think. One is Sheila finding a new world before her, and her new relationship with Tom. One is Kevin trying to resurrect his marriage from Northern Ireland – enrolling Sheila’s brother, who is also a doctor, to try and help plan how best to overcome what he sees as a temporary insanity. And one is Sheila dealing with the collapse of her marriage through a series of phone calls and a lot of personal reflection. Each is captivating, and the reader feels a constant whirl of pity, hope, and compassion.

Moore is such a sensitive and subtle novelist. It’s one of those plots that could come across quite tawdry, but there is a beauty to this novel – because it is concerned most deeply with people, not with their actions. While the plot is about adultery and its aftermath, it’s really ‘about’ Sheila and her being shaken into a fresh development as a person.

As in his best-known work, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore gets deep under the skin of an unhappy and unfulfilled middle-aged[ish] woman, and does it brilliantly. If that is his masterpiece, then The Doctor’s Wife isn’t too many paces behind it.