2018/79: The Silent Companions - Laura Purcell

All those toys, the memorabilia of childhood. Perhaps it was different if you grew up happy, with memories of your father dandling you on his knee and your mother kissing your tears away. But for Elsie there was nothing but fear. Fear for the baby. Fear of the baby. [p. 58]

Elsie, pregnant and recently widowed, makes her first visit to her late husband Rupert's ancestral home, The Bridge. She is accompanied by Rupert's cousin, the mousy-locked Sarah, who provides a shred of human contact in an inexplicably hostile household. The servants are resentful and uncooperative, whilst the villagers are actively unpleasant. Something about a skeleton in the garden, and a lady of the manor who was a witch ... Elsie, pragmatic and tough, has little time for their superstitions. But then a locked door is briefly left open, and she discovers the journal of Anne Bainbridge, who lived in the house two centuries before Elsie's time. She also discovers a Silent Companion -- a painted, two-dimensional wooden figure that Elsie finds strangely captivating.

The framing narrative is set some years later, when Elsie is in an asylum and has come under the care of a new doctor: we know from the first page that she survives, and that something terrible happens to her. The frisson of terror comes from the gradual unfolding of events: this is a very atmospheric read, a novel of Gothic sensibilities and familiar tropes. (The shop that sells something dangerous and cannot be found again; the moving eyes of a painted figure; the erratic behaviour of the cat, Jasper, who I am happy to say survives the climax of the novel.) And the story revealed in Anne Bainbridge's diary -- what a shame they only have the first volume! -- felt oddly familiar...

I did not especially like Elsie, who seemed bitter and cold, though I very much admired her survival instinct. She's an orphan, her only family being her brother Jolyon, who's twelve years younger than her. (Like a secret compartment or a locked room, that detail opens up a subtly-hinted plot element.) She could, she thinks, have come to love her husband, but they were married only for a month. The men in the story are mostly absent: although the local vicar seems a pleasant chap, we barely meet him. Elsie's brother has no time for her increasing anxiety; her husband is, of course, dead (in somewhat suspicious circumstances); and Elsie's father met a gruesome end in the family's match factory. Elsie is very much alone, except for Sarah: except for the Silent Companions, and the story they can't speak.

Well-paced and creepy, with an excellent twist and that secret compartment of a plot complication: I didn't find the backstory wholly convincing, but I greatly appreciated the structure.