Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite going to hit the heights, she devotes herself to playing for the residents of an old people’s home. She’s also acquired a boyfriend, Callum, a teacher several years her senior, for whom, when Christmas comes round, she buys an electric vegetable slicer that he’s had his eye on. The couple holiday in a run-down B&B in Ilfracombe. They are not exactly living la vida loca.
But Tamsin is also suffering from a kind of arrested development — still occupying her childhood bedroom in Holland Park, where she keeps a watchful eye over her mother, Roz, since Tamsin’s father, a celebrated conductor, quit the family home for another woman. (Roz, in fact, is doing rather well; having been through the dyeing-your-hair-black phase, she is coining it in giving lectures on the healing power of revenge.) Far more significant is Tamsin’s acceptance of Callum’s near-total and apparently inexplicable impotence; the couple develop a limited sexual repertoire in response to it, but their general emotional state is one of tacit and occasionally uneasy acceptance.
Claire Lowdon’s serious-minded but nevertheless sparky debut novel can be seen as an extended rebuttal of the secret but abiding anxiety — especially among the youth — that everybody is having more, or better, sex than they are. What if, she asks, nobody is? Not even Chris Kimura, the charismatic soldier Tamsin spent a (chaste) evening with years previously, who suddenly arrives back into her and Callum’s life. He might be able to pull after a blind date in Bella Pasta — Lowdon is unobtrusively good on the non-glamour of London life — but once he’s hooked up with Callum’s obsessionally self-controlled flatmate, Leah, his sex life plummets too.
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