Edith (73) lives alone on the west coast of Ireland. Alone but not lonely. She has friends, like Gunter (with whom she has benefits) and Meabh (with whom she swims and drinks coffee). Gunter is an incomer like her, but Meabh is local born and bred. It’s a good life, settled in the wild, windy and wet landscape.
When Meabh confides in her that an unknown, unsuspected, illegitimate half-brother has tracked her down and wants to visit from the US and connect with his past, learn about his birth mother, it brings to Edith’s mind another illegitimate baby parted from its mother over fifty years previously.
Seventeen-year-old Edith, had her plan for a gap year in Europe (a place awaiting at Oxford) amended to take in a trip to Lake Como where her elder (by some years) sister, Lydia, is holed up to have her baby away from prying eyes. Edith, armed only with A-level Italian and experience of birthing lambs on the family hill farm in Derbyshire, rolls up her sleeves and pitches in.
Lydia is a ballerina in a top company; the pregnancy is an inconvenient interruption in her career; the baby, when it comes, is to be shipped off immediately through a convent network to a “good home”.
Edith’s two
narratives, half a century apart, are related in Moss’s unfussy prose that beautifully
captures the distinctive landscapes of the two locations. The character of
Edith, in youth and experience is finely drawn and provides for a thought-provoking
and elegiac read.
No comments:
Post a Comment