Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.
The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.
While Jane is in London, Valentine Ross and Sir William Adeane, Jane’s father, employ Clorinda Morrissey to make them pies after their cook leaves. At this time Ross also thinks of his younger brother, Edmund, a naturalist suffering from malaria in Malaysia. Edmund Ross’s most recent letter to his brother relates that he is recovering in the home of Sir Ralph Savage, ‘self-styled Rajah of the South Sadong Territories’. As he sleeps, Edmund Ross, we are told, ‘reminded Sir Ralph of nobody so much as Jesus Christ himself, and this strange likeness brought into the rajah’s heart complicated feelings of wonder and yearning’.
Sir Ralph’s favourite Malay servant, Leon, is his primary bed companion at this stage and the rajah reflects on the ‘physical fights they sometimes indulged in, both of them growling with anger and mortification and conflicted desire’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in