It seemed as if she could put out her hand and touch thousands of lives which had never ended but had broken off into a silence that hung more heavily than any noise. [p. 56]
Set in Yorkshire in the 1950s, this short novel is, I suppose, a ghost story: except that the ghost is more alive than most of the living.
A prologue set on an air base during the Second World War shows us the crew of a Lancaster bomber preparing for their twenty-seventh mission, with all their superstitions and songs and the knowledge that if they survive this and the next three missions, they'll be stood down. The body of the novel, though, focuses on Isabel, newly married to Philip, living in a rented flat in a town where Philip is the new GP and Isabel knows nobody. Their landlady, Mrs Atkinson, is a malevolent grey presence, her footsteps audible overhead all night: Isabel suspects that she noses around the flat when Isabel is out. It's a cold winter, and Isabel, looking for another quilt or blanket, finds an old RAF greatcoat in a cupboard. She spreads it over her bed. Then there's a tapping on the window...
The shadow of the War hangs heavily over this novel: Isabel's parents died in a Japanese labour camp, Mrs Atkinson lost her whole family, and everyone is accustomed to bad food and not enough of it. The old 'hostilities-only' airfields are running wild, overgrown with brambles. Isabel, lonely and isolated and inevitably self-centred, is as lost as Alec, who was tapping at the window. 'He had missed so much. He’d been outside for so long, in the dark and cold. Why not let him come in?'
Dunmore's prose is clear and unsentimental, and she doesn't attempt to explain everything, simply sets out the story with an implacable inevitability. I should ration her novels -- there will be no more -- but I've read three in the last year (The Siege, The Betrayal and The Greatcoat), all very different, all set in WW2 or its aftermath. And I think I own all the others...
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