It's a pity this didn't cost the cover price of £1.80 but if you can't have what you want at my age you're never going to get it. The cost of this wasn't exorbitant but since it lived up to, if not exceeded, all expectations, I've broken the transfer record twice since in acquiring copies of two more of Rosemary's six novels. She might have disowned them, as she disowned everything else of her past life, but by any other than her own unworldly, disowning standards, there was no need to.
Reading so retrospectively, pruriently invading privacy like an academic poring over the finer details of their subject's inner life, one can't help but look for clues or early signs of Rosemary's subsequent disavowal of her literary life.
There's a visit to a clairvoyant, there's mention of mysticism and there's plenty of the finely-tuned world-weariness that drenches her poems in glorious despair,
You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies (your own, of course. Talking about other people's babies isn't selfish enough. Therefore it's unnatural.)
Sophie is besotted with high-powered, careerist Philip but the relationship is in crisis. In a hotel room he tells her,
'I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can't promise you there won't be an emotional bust-up in five years' time. And then you'll be less well off financially than you are now'.
What a charmer.
Like Sophie with Philip, I desperately want to love this book but thankfully the book, unlike him, gives me every reason to.
Guy is the sensible option and much nicer but the compulsive nature of attraction doesn't comply with common sense,
Isn't buying new lampshades a form of slow death? And I remembered that even while I was doing that last week, I said to myself: 'How can I go out and buy lampshades when my heart is breaking?'
If The Halt During the Chase, its title most sophisticatedly taken from a painting by Watteau (who else), is comic, it is a dark sort of suffering comedy and comedy needs to be more than just funny if it is to be any good. The action, or inaction as it mostly is, moves to highly fashionable Paris, ever renowned for its 'taste' . Sophie had been quite taken with the clairvoyant,sitting in a room papered with brown Victorian flock, crammed with brass and silver ornaments with so little taste that you could begin a whole new idea of taste from the tastelessness, all alone in a damp suburban house outside Brighton, he was happy!
And if all of that sardonic world view isn't good enough, the novel is only 158 pages (always a good thing), and Sophie is left with the prospect of a new life to make, perhaps, back with her mother, with who we had first seen her, them both reaching for 'a splash of vodka'.
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Rosemary Tonks Studies is gathering momentum here, having thought the novels were beyond parsimonious finding and Neil Astley's Bedouin of the London Evening having been thought as far as one could sensibly take it.
Copies of the two poetry books had been changing hands for up to £1500, so it says on the internet, before Neil did his fine work on that.
Having made three trips to Warblington Church, where Neil's book says she was buried with her mother, I gave up because I couldn't find it but we have it on the good authority of the Bournemouth Echo that,
One who got to know her was Alec Evans, maintenance worker at the Piccadilly Hotel in Bath Road, close to her home.
He remembers a woman who was: “Very British, beautifully educated, speaking French and Italian. Sometimes she would be talking and I’d stop her because she’d strayed into Italian,” he says.
He understood she had been a writer and referred to her as ‘Mrs T’: “But only because she wore a baseball cap everywhere, like Mr T from off the TV.
“She liked to help in the garden here so I would give her a few jobs to do and we’d chat,” he says, although he still won’t break her confidence.
“She was a very private person.”
What they never did was talk about her former life; “She was done with that” and Rosemary eventually moved into the hotel.
“She knew she was dying and made clear arrangements for her burial – she bought the plot beforehand,” he says. When the end came he believes she was ‘at peace’.
I'm not sure that 'buying the plot beforehand' lines up with being buried 'in her mother's grave'. It isn't really any of my business.
However, with The Halt having been such a gladsome acquisition, the budget was made available for more such and as I came back from the shop this morning (milk, yoghurt, raspberries, San Mig), I waved across the road to our cheerful postlady and well I might. She'd just delivered not only a Beethoven Anniversary edition of Gramophone but also Businessmen as Lovers, which is just as good, and another is on its way. Acquiring the other three novels is going to need a seriously successful day at Newbury next month.
But this is exciting stuff for the ardent book lover. You don't know how much further you can get until you try and there's nothing quite like finding your soulmate who is so much better at doing everything you wanted to do, more chic, so much classier and who chose to throw it all away.
