The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson – #1952Club

I bought The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson in Canada back in 2017, based on her being a Persephone author. Since then, I’ve read another couple of novels by her – but I think this overlooked gem might be her masterpiece. Or perhaps I was just in exactly the right mood to read the sort of brilliance that Wilson is? Either way, it’s my new favourite by her. (NB: when I call it ‘overlooked’, that is true in the UK – for all I know, every Canadian schoolboy and schoolgirl is reading The Equations of Love.)

The Equations of Love is actually two novellas which, as far as I can tell, have no point of connection: Tuesday and Wednesday and Lilly’s Story. They don’t seem to have appeared separately, but rather have always been together under this title. I thought they were both excellent but preferred the first, shorter, of the two – let’s all concentrate on that one.

The novella is about Mortimer and Myrtle Johnson, living in a small, shabby apartment in Vancouver. Mort makes a fragile living at whatever handyman work he can get – though he quickly considers himself too good to be looked down on, and either quits or is fired within a few days or even hours. Myrtle is a cleaner and she holds the power in the marriage – she holds, indeed, the power in almost any relationship with any other human. Wilson lovingly describe her tyranny:

When she slowly raises her heavy eyelids as she soon will, but not until she feels inclined to, you will see their power. Myrtle’s eyelids, and her small amused smile, which is not a turning-up but a turning-down of her lips, induce a sudden loss of self-confidence in the individual towards whom the look or non-look, the smile or non-smile, is directed. She can make you, or Mort, feel insecure and negligible, just by the extra quarter-inch of her dropped eyelids and by that amused small turned-down smile. It is not fair. If you should in your beauty, your new hat, and your recent tennis championship appear before Myrtle, she can by her special look and without saying a word, intimate to you and your friends that, for some reason obscure to them and to you but well known to her and to the rest of the world, that she thinks very poorly of you.

Tuesday and Wednesday is only 129 pages long in my edition, but there are worlds of richness in it. You might expect so short a novella to keep to the canvas of this marriage and this apartment (and – hurrah – the feisty cat, who fools them she is a tomcat). But Wilson widens the scope. Mort goes to work as a gardener, and we see the power jostles with his distracted, kind, unsure employer – with enough feminity to raise Mort’s oafness flirtation, and enough money to make him feel angrily inferior. There is a memorable scene where Mort meets an old friend who takes him to visit his workplace, which is an undertakers. We follow Myrtle to her work, where there is no power imbalance because Myrtle holds all the cards. Other friends and relatives appear – we even see the world from an anxious niece of the couple, who feels she must visit the only people she knows in Vancouver, but desperately doesn’t want to be there.

In each scene, what makes Tuesday and Wednesday so good is Wilson’s control of tone. She is so insightful in the way people behave, particularly around the numerous power dynamics that are constantly in play. She’s brilliant at what people no longer notice because it is part of the furniture of their life – from an unclean home to an unhappy marriage. And she balances all of this with a witty, ironic tone that she judges perfectly. We remain invested in the characters’ lives, but always aware that they are being observed. The detachment means we don’t get too overwhelmed by pathos – these are people under a microscope, intensely real but not necessarily to be loved.

I suppose the only way for you to discover how brilliant Tuesday and Wednesday is would be to read it – but I’ll finish this section with a quote about the cat, because I can’t resist anybody who writes well about cats:

The kitten, who was not a tom, felt her way about in the dark which was, to her, transparent, and learned the room. Feral, wise, with her inscrutable little hunter’s nose and whiskers she felt and explored and recorded each chair leg, each table leg, each corner. She prowled and prowled on silent paws, and sometimes she stopped to wash. When she was satisfied, she accepted and adopted the room. Then she slept fitfully. She slept anywhere, lightly yet deeply, waking and moving often. Chiefly she slept on Mort and Myrtle who lay deep in sleep, warm and approved by her. But sometimes she awoke, remembering something pleasant. Then she jumped lightly down and ran to her box. She scrambled up the side of her box and sat down, quivering, still, looking into the transparent dark with bliss.

The second of the novellas is Lilly’s Story, and yet it starts with a pair of sisters – ‘old Mrs Hastings who was a widow, a saint and a mystic’ and ‘her younger, elderly sister Miss Edgeworth’ – who live together with sundry other relatives. We learn a lot about the Chinese cook, Yow, which regrettably includes some attempts to transcribe his accent – even down to ‘oily [early]’. If you need to include square brackets in your dialogue to make clear what you’re writing, maybe don’t bother.

It all feels like we’re setting up a family dynamic with these sisters, hangers-on, and the rather unlikeable Yow – focused around a bicycle which Miss Edgeworth whimsically owns without riding, to be seen walking it around, and which Yow less whimsically borrows. But it turns out this is all a detailed prelude to kicking off Lilly’s story – as perhaps we might have guessed from the title.

Lilly had a sort of flirtation with Yow, more on his side than hers, and lives in a world filled with potential dangers. She is haunted by the possibility of the police – who once came to her home, when she was 11 years old, and have remained a threat in her mind ever since. Years later, and as the timeline of the novella truly begins, it’s partly this fear that sends her out into the world alone, to earn her living.

The rest of the novella follows her employment in various places, marked more by kindness than you might expect, and the raising of a daughter, Eleanor, for whom she fantasises a legitimate background – styling herself as a widow. The mother/daughter relationship continues for many years in the short novella, though with Eleanor herself less vivid – seen really in relations to Lilly. Except when she is very young, and more present on the page, where she seemed more individual:

By the time Eleanor was six years old she had three gods and her mother. Her mother was not a god, she simply an extension of herself. She had a slave, and she had a companion who refused to be owned and could not be coerced – the cat. Eleanor’s gods were Major and Mrs Butler and Leo, the big dog. As Leo sat upon his haunched looking majestically around him, Eleanor, standing, could look into his face, caressing his ears. Her slace was a nondescript faithful little black and tan dog who could be dressed in doll’s capes and hats, and would sit, miserably, in the doll’s pram that Mrs Butler had given to Eleanor.

Wilson has the same tone as before, and I also really liked and admired Lilly’s Story, but I think there’s a reason I preferred Tuesday and Wednesday. In Lilly’s Story, there are many characters but Lilly is undoubtedly the central point. And I found that Wilson’s detached, observational style worked better for a couple and their world than it did for an individual and her world. When a writer puts one person front and centre, maybe we need to be more deeply buried into their mind and heart. I knew a lot about Lilly by the end of the book, and I was fascinated by her, but I don’t think I ever really cared for her. Wilson’s characters, in The Equations of Love, are infinitely detailed, thoroughly real, and very memorable – but I think the style works best when we see them constantly in relation to each other, and not to be loved as individuals.

If I had only read Lilly’s Story, I’m sure I’d have raved about it – and it is excellent. But there was something so exceptionally well-realised in Tuesday and Wednesday that it had to suffer by comparison. As I said at the beginning, it may just be that I was in exactly the right reading mood for Wilson’s particular acuteness – but, to me, Tuesday and Wednesday is a miraculous little gem.