It is a mark of how various are Jane Gardam’s interests that this collection of short stories does not read as a collection at all, but more as a very agreeable hotch-potch. Only place unites them, for several take place in leafy London suburbs, Hampstead, perhaps, or Wimbledon. The stories are unalike in subject, length and form: there are ghost stories, tales of quiet revenge; what might, in heavier hands, be called social commentary. Inevitably, some are better than others. Flights of fancy, jokes and telling moments spill across the pages.
If there is a common thread, it might be described as growing old disgracefully. The first four stories are about old people, and the aged turn up in other stories, but in Jane Gardam’s hands this does not mean knitting in front of daytime telly. One tale begins:
At three o’clock in the morning over a hundred miles from home in a hotel I’d never heard of before that weekend, I broke my ankle in the bathroom of the ensuite bedroom where I was spending the night with my lover. He was my first lover. For thirty years I have been married to my husband, Ambrose.
One old lady falls in love — actually in love, not just a vague fondness — with a gorilla at the local zoo. Every day she goes and sits by his enclosure, becoming as much of an attraction to the visitors as the primate himself. In a wonderful penultimate scene, she realises with sudden clarity: ‘I bore him. All these years I have bored him. I have literally bored him to death.’ This, of course, is very funny and a less adroit writer would have left it at that. But Gardam manages instead to end the story, only a paragraph later, in such a way as to leave a tear in the eye.
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