The Living and the Dead

PART 1
Chapter 1: 1939. It is nighttime in London. Elyot Standish has just said goodbye to his sister Eden, leaving on a train across the channel to Paris. He watches her go, wondering why she’s chosen to put on gloves for the journey, wondering about this little moment of his sister’s life that he doesn’t quite understand. Next to them, a German Jewish couple say their farewells. Elyot watches, wondering why this man is going back to the continent under the circumstances. As the train pulls out, Elyot ponders that he will never know the answer to the Jewish man’s life any more his sister’s gloves. Leaving the station, Elyot walks home. A drunk stumbles past him and collapses in the path of an oncoming bus. Elyot has the instinct to jump out and rescue him but doesn’t do it in time. The bus hits the man, who falls. Police are called, an ambulance, onlookers .The man is not dead but badly injured. Elyot sees the face with blood streaming out of the lips. He knows he could have done something. He chose not to act, and he doesn’t quite know why. He continues homeward, along Ebury Street. Inside, the maid Julia is gone for the night. There is some bread and cheese out for him. Elyot and Eden live in the house of their deceased mother. It is full of her possessions, of the things that they have accumulated as a family. Mrs Standish hosted parties, bought nice things when she could find them cheap, separated herself as much as possible from the humdrum side of life. Elyot is a researcher, an academic, a would-be writer, frustrated by his mother before her death, by the way she would insert herself into his life. Elyot wanders the empty house, thinking about the various ways that Mrs Standish and Eden and Julia have all made an impact on the house: the ways in which even when they are not there, their personalities, their beings infiltrate the items. He thinks about guests, and how their ambitions and dreams have melted into it too, especially a Connie Tiarks. He loses himself in memories, trying not to think about the drunk man. He is alone, but surrounded by many other lives.

Chapter 2: Flashback time. The mid-1900s. Kitty Goose is a young woman discreetly walking away from her lodgings. Kitty is meeting a man but doesn’t have the courage for him to collect her in front of people she knows. Kitty doesn’t always like to admit it but she is a snob. She likes nice things. She would like to be a creature of luxury. Her father, Mr Goose, is a Norwich harness maker, well known for his wares but also an avowed socialist. Mr Goose says the most shocking things about the system and society. Mr Goose is respected professionally but politically he’s most unusual. Kitty grew up reading poetry, such as Swinburne and William Morris, even wrote a little herself. She determined to be unorthodox, and once borrowed a biography of Christina Rossetti to teach herself how to express her strangeness and discontentment in affected ways. She joined the Society for Arts and Letters, a place to discuss politics and culture although, she has to be honest, she liked it primarily for the attention she got from boys. Her father recognised her intelligence, and this led her to becoming a teacher at an elementary school. She wants to help the children but she has begun to see them as yet more people to rely on her, to drag her down. One day recently, Kitty was at the home of the wealthy Mrs DeVere, who likes to entertain young people at her house and keep her bumbling son Edide in the loop. There, Kitty met Captain Willy Standish, on leave from the army. Rich, cultured, handsome, everything a man should be. Willy doesn’t have a taste for the military; he wants to be a painter. He is rich enough to just enjoy painting but it’s quite a statement among his milieu, and ot one that his mother, the very posh Mrs Standish, would accept. It’s not the kind of thing one does, to lower oneself to actually make art as a career! Willy and Kitty have had a few dates, and now they have decided to get engaged. To Mrs Standish, this is another strain: her daughter-in-law will be a school teacher whose father is a notable socialist! Willy picks Kitty up in his carriage and the pair, both nervous, head to his elegant family home for the inevitable meeting of the parents. Colonel and Mrs Standish are there, along with one of their other sons. The conversation is impenetrable to Kitty, and not welcoming or warm in any way. At the same time, she’s excited by the trappings by the possibility that one day she could be lady of this house if everything goes well. Kitty does her best not to embarrass herself but even talking about her job is humiliating in this rarefied and strained environment. The pair leave after tea. Holding each other in the carriage, clearly in love, Kitty is more certain now that this is what she wants. Kitty Goose will become Catherine Standish. Not many Standishes attend the wedding. The lovers don’t care. They buy a house in Ebury Street, not too expensive and stuffy, near Chelsea where Willy can have a studio and live the life of an aesthete. The first year of marriage is wonderful. They love each other, finding each other attractive. Kitty enjoys wandering the house, looking at furnishings, ordering maids around, buying nice things. Willy is out a lot painting. When he’s home they are blissful. Most of their friends are his, notably Aubrey Silk, a patron of the art whom Catherine adores (yet who reminds her of an anthropomorphised lizard you might find in a Tenniel drawing). There’s also Maudie Westmacott, a chorus girl whom Willy clearly has a long-held affection for. (Maudie is charming but perhaps a little too competitive for Catherine’s liking.) As 1908 begins, they live a life of bright young things. Catherine occasionally tries to recall her old days of reading poetry but it seems more like a way to fend of the pain of being alone when Willy is out. There is a part of Catherine which just acts out social occasions, worlds where she has to figure out the etiquette that does not always come naturally. At a restaurant one night, she becomes sick. The cloakroom attendant assures her she’s pregnant. Willy is delighted but their relationship begins to strain. She goes to Brighton for the summer and he visits her on weekends. Their marriage was a game and now is becoming something in earnest. Willy doesn’t have a head for business. She becomes involved in the household finances. With Aubrey, Catherine can enjoy the sensation of man she doesn’t have sex with, and develops an especial closeness with him. As the pregnancy goes on, Willy takes to sleeping in the next room. One day, out for a walk in the middle of the day, Catherine sees Willy and Maudie in the park together. There’s nothing to prove they’re having an affair but when she asks him later how his day was, he doesn’t mention it. She is certain something is going on but can’t quite bring herself to discuss this. Late in her pregnancy, Willy comes with some bad news. He’s made some bad investment decisions and they’ll have to cut back in life. She suspects this has to do with Maudie. (Eventually she will discover it was genuinely a financial crisis in the city and she misread the situation.) At this point, Catherine Standish chooses a cloud of vagueness, helping her “blur the emphatic line”, choosing not to engage too much with the negative side of reality, and it’s a decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Catherine has her son, Elyot, named after her mother-in-law’s maiden name in the hope that will bring about some rapprochement. (It does not.) The situation with their funds has only worsened. They lease the bottom floor of their house to a Madame Adoree, a milliner whose girls do their work in the basement. The Standishes try to convince themselves that living above a shop is bohemian, but they gradually send away their maids, then their cook. Eventually, they can only afford a young general housemaid, 16-year-old Julia Fallon from Northumberland. A staunch, dignified, direct woman who takes over most of the care of Elyot, so that Catherine can use the baby only when she wants something to play with or someone to give her affection. The little boy will spend his days with his nurse, wandering the park, listening to her stories in the kitchen. Willy and Catherine take a weekend getaway to Dieppe (they can’t afford Paris). They wander the streets, rediscovering a little of their earlier romance, although she can’t quite get rid of the question of Maudie Westmacott. One evening, they get drunk at a cafe and go back to the hotel where they make love. Afterward as he sleeps she stares at the face of this man, who is still rather impersonal, rather far-away from her. The next morning they agree Dieppe is rather miserable and cut their holiday short. Shortly after their return, a second child is on the way. Catherine names the baby Eden for no particular reason. At 3 years old, Elyot is a solemn child; Eden becomes a tantrum thrower. Catherine is surprised how quickly the children begin to have personalities of their own, closing her off from some of their thoughts and identities. Willy and Catherine continue to grow apart, becoming two separate people. One evening Madame Adoree calls Catherine down to the shop and confesses, seemingly reluctantly, that she has seen Willy visiting her girls in the basement, giving them presents, wooing them. To the French woman’s annoyance, Catherine does not create a dramatic scene, instead quietly thanking her. The Standishes are having guests over that night, Malcolm and Eve Wilcox, who are thoroughly dull, the kind of people one has over every few months to run through conversation you already know and can already guess. The whole evening is a charade for Catherine and, as soon as the Wilcoxes leave, she makes it clear to Willy that she knows about his indiscretions. She even brings up Maudie Westmacott. They fight, brutally, and Catherine is clear that there is no return from this. He storms out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

Chapter 3: Young Elyot may only be a little boy but he’ll never forget that night. He can’t quite understand the yelling, the slammed door. His mother comes in, holds him close, taking him into her room that night. Then father is gone. He usually brushes the thoughts aside over the coming months but sometimes questions arise: what did it all mean? He’s also frustrated by his sister, the little blob in her pram who never wants to do anything fun. Occasionally he hits her just to see what happens… and of course get in trouble from Julia. Elyot’s fifth birthday comes as the boy discovers the world. He’s confused by the Frenchwoman on the ground floor who always wants him to sing songs for her. He decides he wants material things, even though mother says they’re poor.There are moments when mother uses him, hugging, holding; he never wants to query but he knows it has something to do with that dark night. He meets his communist grandparents once, liking them quite a lot, but it’s clear from the way his grandfather acts that they are not the same kinds of people as his family. He sees the difference in his mother when her old friends visit as opposed to people from polite society. Shortly after his sixth birthday, something changes. World War I has come. It is strange as a child to know this big, all-encompassing thing is happening and yet not quite comprehend it. Eventually Catherine sends the children and Julia away to Somerset to live with the Macarthys, a couple with a large house and a garden near the sea. He discovers a new world, a house that is not his own. Now he and Eden are developing a sibling friendship-cum-rivalry.

Chapter 4: After sending her children to Somerset, Catherine Standish went to France to become a nurse. After several months, the country that was once exciting and new has become familiar. Passing through Paris on the way to two weeks’ leave, she unexpectedly runs into Willy, who has been serving. The couple separated after that fight, gradually became amicable, and now write each other letters irregularly. Catherine tries to avoid further contact but Willy pleads with her to have dinner with him. The night is painful; Catherine does not want to bring up the tough subjects but the drink takes hold. She can barely hold herself back from asking questions. What she realises, as they dine and he walks her back to her lodgings, is that Willy does not need her approval; he will not be affected by the memory of her in the same way she is by him. They say their goodnights. She walks up the stairs to the room, convincing herself that the only reason she feels sad is because of the wine.

Chapter 5: Connie Tiarks arrives at the Macarthy’s, a lumpy and pale little girl whose mother is a family friend with the Standishes, although the children have not previously met. Connie is to stay with them. Eden, quite a spiteful brat, takes an instant dislike to Connie, refusing to share her bed on the first night (before a bed has been arranged for Connie). Eden puts up such a fuss that Connie is relegated to the dining room sofa. The nervous little girl has a bad night and wets the sofa in her sleep. This becomes a point of embarrassment for her, something for Eden to bring up teasingly in future. Connie’s arrival changes the dynamic at the Somerset house. When the kids play, Eden and Elyot play English and French soldiers while Connie has to be the Germans: tied up and put in “prison” (a garden shed) for hours at a time, which she complacently accepts. Elyot is given to wandering; he finds Ard’s Bay, an isolated spot which he keeps to himself, somewhere he separates in his mind from the house. A place that can be his without explanation or external context. For the first time, adults start asking Elyot what he’s going to be in life. The fact that he doesn’t know yet upsets him. Mr Macarthy’s interest in language, history, encyclopedias is appealing to the boy. One day, he and Connie are playing when he asks her if they can climb a mulberry tree. On the way back down, Connie falls, landing on her back. Elyot is terrified that she is badly injured, but ultimately she is only winded. In that moment something passes between them, a genuine moment of connection which neither is familiar with. For them both, this is a key moment, but they will interpret it differently as the years go on . After some time, Connie leaves, as her mother is in reduced circumstances and they are to live together. Mother comes to visit after many months away. She brings with her an officer, Charles, who is clearly the man she is seeing at present. She has bad news: father (Willy) has been killed in the War. Eden doesn’t remember him, and Elyot recalls him only as a blur, but the news is distressing nonetheless. Elyot continues to feel distant from the world, noticing more now his mother’s manipulations. He follows the script for son and mother but he doesn’t quite connect. Her leaving to return to the continent is a somewhat formal affair. One day after years have passed, the war ends. For the adults it is both joyous and heartbreaking. The celebrations take over the town.

Chapter 6: Ten years pass. Eden and Elyot and their mother are reunited in the house in Ebury Street. By 1928, Elyot has completed his schooling and is preparing for Cambridge, being paid for by his father’s brother after a year in Germany staying with the Fiesel family, also funded by his uncle. Connie Tiarks writes him a letter after all this time to reconnect. She’s clearly a plain and rather empty girl who enjoys reading a lot. Elyot is in his last year at school and has no desire to reply to this figure from his past but also feels guilty at not replying. He keeps the letter for some time, agonising over whether to reply, and ultimately tears it up to rid himself of the obligation. This only makes him feel more guilty. His relationship with Eden is no stronger than it has ever been. They have gone in different directions: her intensity, his desire for silence. Elyot gradually adjusts to Germany. The daughter Hildegard is attractive and interested in him. Much time is spent in the family with discussion of the German fatherland, and what it means to live in Germany after a war where they were absolutely beaten down. Walking through the forest one day, the pair kiss and have a limited sexual interaction. Hildegard is anti-Semitic, disdaining her Jewish employer, and doesn’t think outsiders (who didn’t experience the war) can understand. Elyot, naive and young, thinks that this relationship with Hildegard might be a great love (he has been reading Werther), having no frame of reference, and honestly feeling a rather minimal interest despite her passions. Yet this world of culture and emotion of which he is not a full part sometimes suffocates him. At Christmas, his mother writes to say that Grandmother Standish is dead. Catherine cannot even feign sorrow in her letter The good news is Elyot will start receiving 400 pounds a year which will certainly help matters. Hildegard continues to allure Elyot but, when he gives in, it is out of obligation, and she is usually melodramatic when he rejects her. When at last Herr Rosenbaum, the Jewish dentist whom Hildegard works for, and his wife come to dinner, Elyot is surprised by how normal they are, nothing like the villains he has heard tell of. Indeed, Mrs Rosenbaum is an artist; they are music lovers. Later, Hildegarde assures him they were putting on an act. When his year in Germany comes to an end in the spring of 1929, Elyot wraps up his affairs, says his goodbyes, and is cold to Hildegard and others because they no longer figure in his narrative.

Chapter 7: Kitty Goose, now Catherine Standish, has entered middle age. Although she is no longer pretty she is determined to be interesting. She has her antiques, her quirks, she may be a bit shabby and rundown without money but she’s carrying on fine. She has Julia who has remained as housekeeper now that the children are grown. Her children are her passion, Mrs Standish often stays, although she isn’t close with either of them. Eden is finished school, not sure what she’s going to do with her life. Aubrey Silk, now deaaling in antiques, propses to Catherine every now and then; she politely declines. She wonders sometimes about his nice house in Regent’s Park, but ultimately seems to prefer her status as a genteel divorcee rather than the obligations of a relationship that would be one of requirement rather than love. Eden finishes school, and determines to get a job, reminding Catherine of her socialist father. Eden is interested in the writings of Marx, but Mrs Standish decides to get her a job with Aubrey as his secretary. Eden begins her adult life: working for Aubrey, and using her spare time to read about politics and philosophy and wander the streets as a flâneuse. Elyot, meanwhile, has studied at Cambridge and commences doing critical writings on Buchner. (His mother hopes he will be a writer, which will give her some street cred.) Connie Tiarks reappears in their life. She lives with her mother in Cheltenham. The women survive on comparatively little. Connie loves literature, and copies passages from Whitman or Tagore into her notebook. Connie becomes “poor Connie” in the lives of the Standishes, recurring at their home every now and then. Eden meets a young man, a divorcee, Norman Maynard, in a tearoom. They begin seeing one another. He wants sex which she’s not sure of, but ultimately one night she gives into him. She’s intrigued by sex, but for her with Norman it is something to be got through, something the woman brings to the relationship. Eden and Maynard go to Dieppe, unknowingly echoing her parents all those years ago. Dieppe is a failure; Eden cannot connect to Maynard, cannot pretend to be more than she is. He gets a job with an architecture firm in NYC and leaves in the spring. Too late for her to discover that she is pregnant. With the help of her friend Valerie, Eden seeks out an illegal abortion clinic. She rejects the first one but ultimately attends another run by a Mrs Moya Angelotti, which is reasonably upmarket. Aubrey lends her fifty pounds and gives her the week off, not knowing the truth but perhaps suspecting it. She tells the family she is staying with Valerie, but instead spends a week at this facility for the procedure and its aftermath. Only after the abortion does Eden begin to think of the child’s own significance, what its life might have been if she hadn’t ended it. When Eden comes home she is noticeably different. Her mother will always blame this mysterious Valerie for that time her daughter changed irrevocably. In the house on Ebury Street, these three bodies live separately in their separate sections, connected by Julia’s swishing skirt as she goes between them doing her duties. Mrs Standish wanting more and never satisfied; Eden in pain for something she has lost; Elyot up in his attic room, determined to write.

Part 2

Chapter 8: Ten further years pass. It is now 1938. The Spanish Civil War rages. Nothing much has changed in a way. Connie Tiarks still visits every third Sunday. Connie burns for the people of Spain, as she loves a lost cause, but outwardly her conversation is still inane, something to be tolerated, even if a vital part of the routine. Even Connie acknowledges sometimes that she’s very silly. She works as a companion for an old lady, supporting her mother’s downtrodden life. Connie has learned to be happy with the small things. Elyot has written several works on continental authors, critical monographs, doing what he can in his work, taking refuge in the mild praise and appreciation. One day out of pity, Elyot – who has made a career out of his academic writings – takes Connie to the National Gallery where they view the paintings of Raphael. He remains underwhelmed by her intellect. However we realise now that Connie has been in love with him since that day, twenty years ago, under the mulberry tree. Eden is now working in a left-wing bookshop where she has made a friend, Lady Adelaide Blenkinsop. After her abortion, Eden had a breakdown and Aubrey gave her three weeks at a Swiss resort where she met Adelaide. Everyone talks about how good it must have been but Eden could not connect with herself there more than anywhere else. Lady Adelaide is a large, white-skinned woman, an institution in these kinds of places: wealthy, determined to find interesting people around her, knows everyone. Eden has a mind that is sharp; it scares people, but she has nothing with which to put it to use. Adelaide invites Eden and Elyot over for dinner regularly. Catherine Standish, now comfortably into middle-age, is jealous that she is never invited. Sometimes Eden goes; sometimes Elyot. In Catherine’s eyes her daughter is washed out, used up, thin and haggard despite being under 30. In the bookshop on Bedford Street, Eden is an institution herself now, although she has little time for most of the people frequenting the store. While she’s there, Eden meets a young man interested in her politics: Joe Barnett. They start seeing each other. Strangely, Joe is Julia Fallon’s cousin. Julia lives with him and his mother, and thus Eden and Joe have heard about each other for twenty years. Now they have met, and neither is quite what they seemed through Julia’s portrayal. She especially is not the arrogant, prissy Eden that Julia spoke of.

Chapter 9: Julia heads home one afternoon. The life here is very different. Faded tea-cups from Woolworth’s that are beloved by the family; smells of damp tea leaves and drying clothes. It is a world where Julia can be a part of the conversation, where she can dominate things with her doubts and conspiracy theories about life. (Intellectual Joe mocks them). Joe works in a cabinet maker’s workshop, Crick’s, near the house. His political awakening makes him suspicious of the rise in right-wing politics but he’s also suspicious of politicians in general, He’s a utopian thinker. Eden visits him now at the workshop sometimes, secretly, for their classes don’t match. Julia’s relationship with Mrs Standish, meanwhile, is always strange. Catherine is always thinking of letting her go with one hand; needing her with the other. One day on Julia’s afternoon off, Catherine has a headache and cannot find the French tablets Julia keeps for her. She pleads with Elyot to go to Julia’s house and find them. He agrees to do so, to avoid his overbearing mother. He takes the bus, arriving to find that Julia and her aunt have gone to the pictures. He wanders down to Crick’s, where he is directed, and finds Joe. They meet, experiencing the strange feeling of meeting someone you’ve known about all your life. Joe tells Elyot that the women will be back soon; Elyot decides to wait. Only then for Eden to arrive, casually, obviously a regular visitor…

Chapter 10: Adelaide and Gerald Blenkinsop hold a dinner party. Adelaide is never confident of her own intelliegnce, feeling quite rejected by Eden’s routine decline of her invitations. Nevertheless, Elyot is among the guests, among them: the overly demonstrative Irish Mrs Mouncey, Juan the conservative Spanish loyalist, the spiky posh art curator Muriel Raphael, and pompous Desmond Harcourt. Lady Adelaide is a swaggering figure in white, moving rapidly through the party. She knows how to be the ideal upper-class woman even if her husband’s fortune only comes from his grandfather having been a brickmaker, which is a point of contention but needs must. Elyot is seated next to the Jewish Muriel, who runs Raphael and Kiev, an upscale art dealer. He feels he bores her – this woman who always knows what to say – yet there is clearly a sexual connection between them. Topic turns to Spain. Juan is conservative; Adelaide is a fence sitter since other friends like Eden are progressive. Later, Elyot and Muriel bond over a Poussin painting but Elyot is thinking instead about the day he discovered Eden and Joe’s affair, and the disconnect between he and his sister. Elyot leaves the party. It is a foggy night, and he is leaving at the same time as Juan. The Spaniard tries to make a genuine conversation, discussing how the English always seem to avoid connection with others. Elyot wants to bridge the divide but he is unable to bring out his real personality. For all his cleverness and his finger on the pulse of modern literary criticism, he is unable to mimic the actions of the “living” in the way in which Adelaide or – to a lesser extent – his mother do. Instead Elyot utters pleasantries and disappears into the fog.

Chapter 11: One day Mrs Catherine Standish visits Raphel and Kiev, the Bond Street gallery. She can’t afford any paintings, but the looking is part of the joy, trying to understand modern art, making excuses for why she won’t buy today. Mrs Standish no longer connects with the modern world and its artistic trends, but it is not fashionable to admit her outdated tastes. She feverishly invites Muriel to visit one Thursday, learning that Muriel knows Elyot. On her Thursday afternoon salon at Ebury Street, Catherine hosts Connie, Adelaide, and Muriel, these incredibly different women attempting to bond over their shared feminine experiences. Connie and Muriel discuss Elyot; Catherine realises both of them have feelings for her son. Connie clearly recognises Muriel as a rival early on: savvy, intellectual, shameless, where Connie is lumpy, silly, focused on the petty tangible moments of everyday existence. Elyot pops his head in and invites Muriel for supper one day, casually.

Chapter 12: Connie Tiarks’ life is underwhelming, to say the least. She writes letters for Mrs Lassiter, she supports her mother. She has been seeing a young man, Harry Allgood, a medical student – they were setup by their respective aunts. He is dull. His conversation anaesthetises her. She has declined a proposal from him. She is losing her patience with life, the automated gratitude she has been raised to give to the world. Only movies fulfill her fantasy emotions. One day while running errands, Connie has a sudden desire to buy a present for Elyot. She’s feeling the need to express herself and he represents the fantasy she will never achieve. Connie buys a small glass decorative box with opaque lining and golden stars. She frets quite a bit and decides to deliver it herself, unsure what message that will send. Embarrassingly, she leaves it in a fruiterer’s on the Kings Road. The box is later found by Wally Collins, a lower-class saxophonist who discovered a new personality on a visit to America. He now speaks in an American accent, wears a bright mauve suit in keeping with the times, and plays a sax at a gin joint, the Café Vendôme. He finds the box, labelled for Elyot with his address, and decides to deliver it out of kindness. Wally walks the rest of the way, musing on his life and his personality, his confidence and his consciousness of class in spite of his popularity within his own world. Ebury Street is not his world. It is Julia’s day off and so Catherine answers the door. She politely invites this man in for a drink as recompense for delivering the present, not really thinking he’ll accept. Thus the cocky seemingly American saxophonist has a drink with this seemingly posh lady. He finds her attractive for an older lady, he likes her full figure and the scent of her perfume. When Elyot arrives home later, he is surprised that his mother had this man in the house. Elyot opens the package, examining the box but there’s no indication of who gave it to him. Elyot assumes it must have been Muriel, given their flirtations.

Chapter 13: Joe Barnett visits the Standishes, ostensibly to see Julia. She’s annoyed by his relationship with Eden, thinking it unreasonable. Elyot asks for Joe to come up and visit his room. The two men stand there, victims of a strange tension. But, whatever passes between them, they cannot find the words to say to each other, and the moment dissipates.

Chapter 14: Catherine casually invites Aubrey to take her to the Café Vendôme, not telling him that she plans to casually run into Wally in his native element. Elyot invites Muriel and the four take their seats, enjoying the atmosphere. We get the sense that Elyot is doing this partly because this is the feeling of what is appropriate with a woman. You invite her out, you go home with her, you may never fully understand her motivations, but that is having a relationship, and it must be done. Catherine too is acting out desires she thinks she feels for human companionship but not quite able to do them calmly and rationally like others. Catherine conspires to accidentally meet up with Wally, and agrees to buy him lunch one day. Afterward, Muriel takes Elyot home and the pair make love. After it is done, he feels her letting him go, removing him from her night. He has achieved what desire told him to achieve. He wanders home in the early morning light, realising he forgot to thank her for the box.

Chapter 15: Joe and Eden spend a long weekend at the seaside. Out for walk, they come upon a dead dog, its innards lying out on the beach. Joe is strangely moved by this interaction with death, a tangible end. Stopping at a distant inn for lunch, Eden on a whim decides they should stay the night. Joe is taken aback but agrees. They take a room and make love. In that moment, on a briskly cold night, Eden feels warm, revitalised. She has at last achieved a real connection; their separate existences have merged. In the morning, however, it doesn’t feel right. Joe resisted sex, didn’t think it was appropriate, and Eden senses that the barriers are back up. Neither of them can really see through to the person underneath. The sexual moment was the only connection.

Chapter 16: Catherine and Wally have been seeing each other. She is well known in his circle as his bit on the side, watching rehearsals at the Vendôme during the day – a world so differen from at night, with waiters setting up in the grey and dust rather than on show. Wally finds her compelling and attractive, a ‘good sort’. Catheirne sometimes gets jealous that her younger lover looks at other women. He can’t always understand her. She knows its rather rundown to have ended up like this but she’s filled with that desire. Catherine has to play the little games and routines, as all do. She understands the language, the pantomime of love that one has to play out. Catherine goes back to his building, Godiva Mansions, to make love. Home life is becoming tougher. Julia is always there- Catherine’s conscience, her watchful shadow. Catherine Standish seems ill and Julia tells her to see a doctor, but the older lady is concerned with deeper desires. On a weekend trip to Brighton, Mrs Standish feels more disconnected from her lover than ever. This is a world where many of his people exist – younger woman, artists, a network of people living the modern existence of the late 1930s – and she feels like a traveller lost out of time.

Chapter 17: Elyot, now 30, has been seeing Muriel semi-regularly. Muriel takes what she needs from him while remaining self-sufficient, keeping emotion at a distance. One day he finally remembers the box she gave him. At her house he thanks her only to learn that it wasn’t Muriel in the first place. It instantly seems as if this whole relationship was an error in deduction. He was responding to her perceived social interaction, and now his feelings quickly dissipate. When he comes home that evening Connie is there for dinner. They dine with Catherine. The relationship between Elyot and his mother has reached a new strange phase. She fears that because she still can’t quite see into him, yet he has begun to see through her. Elyot sees death behind his mother’s eyes. Connie has become fervently obsessed with the Spanish loyalists and this lost cause. She is the patron saint of lost causes. Connie feels that losing the box was a symbol of all the things she wants to do but never does, and this has taken her further from her desire for Elyot. Elyot feels lost: he thinks of the Spaniard after Adelaide’s party, a night that he sees as presenting him with two choices: the living and the dead. But he wanted to close his eyes, to shut out all the other people in Adelaide Blenkinsop’s world because the perils of connection are too much. One morning, Julia is upset when Joe Barnett visits; Joe is going away to Spain to join the war. During his relationship with Eden, he has become very compelled, perhaps partly because of Eden, by her notions of what is right and wrong, to fight for something even at his own risk. (Little can Joe know that within months the war will be over, and his side will lose brutally.) Joe and Elyot have a restrained farewell, and Elyot agrees to tell his sister on Joe’s behalf. Jostled by the crowd, Elyot finds Eden on the street and they go into a cafe where he tells her that her beloved is going to war. In that moment, Eden reaches out to him, and the chance of connection becomes clear at last.

Chapter 18: Wally has been absent lately and Catherine is fuming. He invites her to a party in Maida Vale hosted by a couple of girls he knows, Kay and Molly, to make up for it. He still finds Catherine appealing but at the same time she doesn’t always make sense, nor is she always up for spontaneous fun like his contemporaries. He’s been stepping out on her with a woman he knows named Alice. Catherine sees it as a night where she can prove herself to Willy. Like all parties, Catherine overdoes her preparation. She knows on some level she’s still that uneducated girl from Norwich, inventing her life as she goes along from things that she’s read or heard. The party is a typical bohemian event. Kay’s partner, Arthur Chance, welcomes them. Catherine feels the centre of attention as a figure from outside their world. Kay befriends Catherine – we realise she pities Catherine as everyone at the party knows Wally is stepping out on his old woman. Another young woman downs two pints of beer to cheers of the crowd. Everyone’s having a gay old time. Arthur dances with Catherine and flirts with her. In this world, sexual barriers are loose and free. Catherine becomes quite drunk, her primary concern when she is intoxicated is keeping her behaviour secret from Elyot. Finally, after an increasing cavalcade of troubles, Catherine breaks down in her drunken state, demanding to tell the story of her own life to those around her. And then vomiting all over the carpet and collapsing.

Chapter 19: Spring 1939. Elyot was home when Catherine was brought back to the house by Wally, a drunken wreck, and it has further broken down her facade in front of him. Eden drifts now, determined to retreat into herself, reflecting on all she has lost from her father to her aborted baby to Joe. She takes up knitting as a distraction from thinking. Connie, meanwhile, is again proposed to by her young man Harry, who is now graduated and setting up a medical practice in the Midlands. She declines again, citing the difference in their age. Connie is committing herself to being an old maid, driven by her lifelong lack of self-worth. To Elyot, the night he saw his drunken mother come in, he started to realise that if he had not taken refuge in his shelter he might have understood her more, and known what his mother was going through. Since that day, Catherine Standish has seemed exhausted. She lies in bed reading or looking at the wall, decaying slowly. She realises before anyone else does that she’s dying. Julia calls for a doctor, who prescribes an in-house nurse. It is a waiting game for death. Julia is distressed by the nurse’s formality toward illness and death, by the latter’s professional ability to switch off and treat this as a standard event. Catherine’s febrile mind wanders. One day she looks up at Elyot, asks him if her hair is tidy. The next day she is dead. In the aftermath of death, everything must be sorted. Elyot considers selling the house. Connie is shocked that he would want to sell the house with all of its precious memories and its place in their routine. (And its wealth). Connie visits Elyot’s attic room for tea. She sees the glass box on his mantelpiece. She reveals that she’s the one who bought it for him. In the moment, buoyed on by what she sees as her last chance, Connie is emboldened and tells Elyot that she wants more from him. She makes it desperately clear that she’s in love with him and always has been. Connie races forward unguardedly as if to hold him in her arms but she stifles him. Elyot is shocked, pushes her back, telling her that it can’t be the right way forward for either of them. On some level Elyot still feels the obligation that maybe marrying Connie would be appropriate but he doesn’t tell her this. Connie, unsurprisingly, takes it quite badly. She rushes backward, trips on the claw of the armchair, and falls over against the skirting board. It is deeply embarrassing. Despite Elyot’s protestations, Connie gathers her things and goes. In the street, the sun has gone down, the lights are coming on. People are hurrying home. Connie moves in the opposite direction from crowds. Anger and upset lead her to fume but then she sees a light. She calls Harry from a payphone, deciding at last to accept the role of doctor’s wife and potentially mother. Back at the house in Ebury Street, Elyot sits in his room watching a growing storm outside. He has rejected so many options in life and feels like there is something he hasn’t grasped yet, somewhere he can’t reach.

Chapter 20: Before too long, old Mrs Barnett receives the news that Joe has been killed in the Civil War. The news is a shock in her community, played out in a series of rituals as death always is: people visiting to sit and reflect, stories told. Julia breaks down but holds it together in public, keeping her grief only in her private space. In spite of her pain – which perhaps we can intuit was love for Joe – she must continue on with her duties. Julia and Eden share grief over Joe but it is too intimate for Eden to reach out to the other woman, to share their loss. In the coming days, Elyot comforts his sister. The pair go to a film and watch= people on the screen, so close and yet still untouchable through that screen. At last, Eden determines to go to Spain. It seems futile to Elyot, especially with so much else happening in the world, but Eden tells him it’s not just about Joe. Joe may have been futile but many Joes together are not. The siblings walk to Victoria Station one evening. Elyot wants to rush to meet the train but Eden is strangely patient; she knows now the value of time. At the train station as he says farewell, Elyot ponders the reality of these moments. When you’re at the end of a journey with someone -even a stranger you have just met on that journey – you can be frank. There are no barriers to recognition, you can cry and hug. The train pulls out. Elyot watches his sister go, realising he may never see her again. Another departure from his life.

Chapter 21: As we saw at the novel’s beginning, Elyot wanders home, past a drunk man getting hit by a bus. He stands in the empty house at Ebury Street, pondering the way it has been infused with the possessions and desires of people over the years. The way he has collected the lives of authors in his writing, and the stories of real people in his memories: people gone, people he will not see again. Elyot wanders out of the darkened house into the street, this strange house that no longer fully represents him. In the darkness of evening, he ponders the disparate nature of the city: the way that buses pick people up and take them to places unknown, with faces inside that you can never know, faces passing by, the eternal darkness of the city. But now he also sees something else: the way the buses connect the city, provide linkages of light in the darkness, that the faces of the buses are not just so close they are so close. The unity of the city is as endless as its darkness. In daylight, you live a life of segregation, you must keep up the barriers between people. But at night those connections sometimes merge. He gets on to a bus, any bus, bound nowhere in particular. He feels like someone who has fallen asleep on a journey and then woken on arrival. He has awoken at last.

• Viking (US, February 1941, 383pp)
• Routledge (UK, July 1941, 383pp)
• Macmillan (Canada, July 1941)
• Eyre & Spottiswoode (UK, 1962)
• Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (Poland, 1966, “Żywi i umarli”, trans: Maria Skibniewska)
• Penguin (AU, 1968), seventh reissue published in 1992
• Sander Yayinlari (Turkey, 1973, “Yaşayanlar Ve Ölüler”, trans: Belkis Baysal)
• Barral Editores (Spain, 1974, “Los Vivos y Los Muertos”, trans: Idalia Cordero)
• Hear-a-Book (Audiobook, 1983, read by Harry Dodson, 11 audiocassettes)
• Gallimard (France, 1990, “Des morts et des vivants”, trans: Jean Lambert)
• Vintage (UK, 1996)
• Random House (eBook, 2011)
• Bolinda (Audiobook, 2019, read by Deidre Rubenstein)

“His work had evolved out of his innate diffidence, the withdrawing from a window at dusk, saying: I must do something, but what ? Out of his bewilderment he had taken refuge behind what people told him was a scholarly mind. He hung on gratefully, after a month or two of uncertainty, to remarks made by tutors at Cambridge and the more wishful and hence more helpful remarks of his mother. So that he became before long, forgetting the process, a raker of dust, a rattler of bones.”

“The whole business was either a mystery, or else meaningless, and of the two, the meaningless is the more difficult to take.” (13)

“Since she came to them before the War, Julia had woven her own theme in and out of their concerted lives. It was never obtrusive. Sometimes it lost itself, lapsed for sulky, sultry days, to recur in its inevitable undertone. She had all the intuition and lack of rational understanding of the attached servant. Events in other parts of the household elated or depressed her as a matter of course. As Mrs Standish once said, Julia is a thermometer of everything I wish I didn’t feel. At night when she left for Clerkenwell, where she boarded with an aunt, Julia lingered, perceptibly, in the objects she had touched. There was a correspondence between Julia and the form of the yellow table, more than an echo in the cheap alarm clock. In the ticking, creaking, groaning night-life of the deserted kitchen, the old depressed house shoes carried on a deputy generalship.” (16)

“This is my sister, he had once said of a child in a white dress at a country party. Then he looked at her sideways. He resented her, as a small but fierce searchlight on many moments that he wanted hidden. As a relationship, it was like that. It was full of sullen, unshared, misunderstood passions. Looking at the picture of Eden on the drawing-room wall, she became the surprised child of a period earlier than the party dress. He remembered coming into the room, seeing her reading a book, seeing her turn, close up the book, and blush. Nothing was said. There was seldom very much said. You continued on different paths in the same wood. In time she was the
sulky flapper, who also stared, in the bourgeois convention, out of the drawing-room wall. In the evening she closed her door on a typewriter and cigarettes.” (18)

“Alone, he was yet not alone, uniting as he did the themes of so many other lives.” (20)

“Back there, she knew, they were watching, would have seen, on turning the head, the forms of the two Miss Spaldings, stiff as the parlour furniture, black and upright as horsehair chairs, and about as charitable as these. It was too much, the emotional parsimony of the two Miss Spaldings, just when you were ready to give more than you possessed. At least you could have offered the breath that was bursting in your lungs, the words that were waiting for expression in your mouth. But the street was unappreciative, if not exactly blind. Over the way a Mrs Hicks slowly wiped at a dusty plant. Kitty Goose composed her face to meet the world’s inquiring eye.” (21)

“Because Elegance was a secret ambition. At night she lay with her hands above her head, so that her fingers, on waking, would look long, and interesting, and white.” (23)

“That was the trouble with Mr Goose. In spite of material evidence, he had almost ceased to exist. Except as a concentration of theory. Whipped into action by a sense of justice, he remained too selfless to exist as a man. His physical existence exhausted itself on rage at a social system and an economic lie.” (24)

“It was nothing and everything to do with Elyot Standish. Doing the things they told him to, it was a matter of overcoats and dynasties, of toothpaste and broccoli. This was what he amounted to, a recipient of food or learning or the rules of hygiene. But this did not account for the sensations that went on inside him apart from the Macarthys and Julia. There was something that fumbled out of his own body, as he walked against the sky, becoming as much wind as body, or when he lay on the shore, and the sound of the water lapped across the chest, a blaze of sun shone between the bones. Later he began to wonder about this. Now he only accepted it in surprise. At night he would wake for a moment, to wonder, before he found it was too late, he was sinking in the sea of turned faces, just before or after the event.” (111)

“Après moi le déluge, Mrs Standish was fond of saying, not quite knowing if this had been heard or read, or if it were one of those vague but sometimes pregnant phrases that she found floating in her head. Anyway, it pleased her, its melancholy, prophetic tone, it was something to turn on the tongue, alone on winter afternoons, reviewing all time in what had become a slightly shabby drawing-room. Noticing the dimmer colours, the encrustations of virtu in her once pretty room, Mrs Standish decided the effect was less shabby than interesting. Her mind was nimble with saving phrases. Because this, she had realized, was the only way. If she was no longer pretty, witty Kitty, she was the interesting Mrs Standish, a label that stuck to her with all the dignity of middle age. She moved well. She had explored the ultimate possibility of her own setting. She listened sympathetically to men, and gave them the impression she enjoyed it, the yawn caught somewhere in her handsome throat. It was a technique taught her by economic necessity. She could be very gracious at a supper table. And afterwards. She would accept a cheque, after protest, in which she never went too far.” (131)

“Connie passed you a remark, and it always limped upward, somehow questioning itself at the end. She laughed much too much, startling a silence, protecting her own inadequate remarks. She looked up at you hopefully out of a large and lumpy face. When he asked her what she was doing, she said that she was passing through, which was not altogether surprising in Connie Tiarks. He remembered her chiefly as a creature of transit, an incident on a sofa, another under a mulberry tree. Connie Tiarks would always be this. Her hands were always on the verge of reaching for gloves.” (142)

“Eden listening to Maynard talk: There was not much room for disagreement. Out of the monologue grew foreign sounds to which Eden tuned her ear, the collapsing phrase on the accordion, the Arab selling peanuts. She clung to these. She wanted not to criticize, not to destroy. So that she forced herself to accept, whether it was words or the sexual act. She became a kind of dog-like silence. There was much of the dog’s attitude in the relationship of women with men, she decided. The acceptance, the waiting for the next move. For this reason you lay waiting on the beds of cheap hotels. You waited for a sign. You held the weight of an exhausted body stretched upon your own, with your hands you comforted the skin of a withdrawn and scarcely sentient being. This was the right attitude perhaps, that ignored personal distaste. Regrets were the footsteps that retreated down hotel corridors at night, but, there, recognizable.” (144)

On Catherine: “She sat there indolently in the remnants of her beauty, fondant, with a head of spun caramel, her hand resting with distaste upon a ladle.” (167)

Desmond Harcourt: “Out of his bewilderment he had taken refuge behind what people told him was a scholarly mind. He hung on gratefully, after a month or two of uncertainty, to remarks made by tutors at Cambridge and the more wishful and hence more helpful remarks of his mother. So that he became before long, forgetting the process, a raker of dust, a rattler of bones. (197)

“Yes, Elyot Standish wanted to say, the Elyot Standish who sat upon the edge watching the
charade, would have spoken, without the warning of the shadow that participated. Instead, he
switched flippantly. At least the dinners are sometimes good, he laughed. Even in England.” (204)

Catherine looking at modern art: “You began to feel sentimental, a little bit out of it, in a world of Picasso and Contemporary Movements. As a girl Mrs Standish had never realized she was contemporary with her period. She suspected that contemporaneity was an invention of the thirties, a term coined by your children to keep you out. It made her raise her chin sharply at the dissolving guitar on Raphael and Kiev’s red damask. And the Movements. By middle age, these had become either incomprehensible or irrelevant – Communism, Surrealism, the Oxford Group – but at the same time still a source of irritation, of knowing you were caught in the backwash, were fixed there irrevocably, that the unattainable was a dissolving guitar.” (206)

“Under the skylight there was a hard, clear gloss on the table spread with papers, the operating table on which you dissected other people’s minds. To lay bare their faults, the little manias, the unsuspected vices. To behave in the convention of a clever age that encouraged corrosiveness, destruction. This was also necessary, you liked to think, afraid to stand looking at yourself, afraid your own turn had come with the forces of destruction.” (209)

“Julia’s whole existence, past and present, was very real and tangible. She had an unconscious respect for the substance of things. Wiping the dribble from the baby’s mouth was a gesture of humility, and deep respect.” (259)

“People were so dependent on what you made them, lapsing through lack of attention into a state that was almost non-existence. Out of such a state, with a shock, he received a chalky, cardboard face. It was quite dead, and the words dead that fell from the dry lips, these fluttered in a chalky dust. He noticed the bluish veins in the eyeballs. She put up a hand from habit to touch her hair, that was glued round the forehead in little whorls. The curls made him sense a degree of effort he had never suspected in his mother’s life.” (280)

“Then her mouth stuck in a smile, just so far and no farther, she couldn’t get it back. She began to push into her mouth, to hide it, what she believed was a sandwich, but some pale, anonymous food that had lost its identity from lying about at a party.” (301)

“Am I telling this story, or aren’t I? Biddy asked.
I shall tell the story of my life, announced Mrs Standish.
We want new ones, Biddy groaned.There is nothing new, said Mrs Standish. Or does that sound Chinese? Translated from the Chinese.
Listen, dear, Biddy said, I should just say plain Chinese.
You’re the one who drank the beer? Well, I shall tell the story of my life without standing on my head. There are a great many stories, but this is the one story, the authentic version. Even if it’s dull. Even if I’m drunk. Did, did you know, Wally, I’m drunk? You needn’t tell me because I know. I know all the answers before they’re made. Yes, even on the telephone. From sitting in a room. Have you ever sat in a room and heard your joints crack about five o’clock? Because that’s the story of my life.
Psssss! Biddy said. Throw out the body, someone, do.
Say, she’s sick, said Wally. Don’t take no notice. She ain’t well.
I’ve never been more lucid, said Mrs Standish.” (305)