The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century Metroland, joins the local tennis club, where he dismisses all the girls his age as wholesome ‘Carolines’ but falls for Mrs Susan Macleod, a spirited, sarcastic woman in her forties. Paul shocks the village by taking her for drives (both are soon barred from the tennis club) and then starts taking her to bed in her marital home.
Here he manages to become a familiar presence. Though Susan’s husband mocks Paul as her ‘fancy boy’, he also teaches him to do the crossword and only occasionally lashes out at him with peculiarly sudden moments of physical violence. Paul, drunk on love and seduced by his own and his lover’s charms, floats on a tide of happiness that precludes anxiety or introspection. ‘When I look back at my youth, I see it as a time of cock-vigour so insistent that it forbade examination of what such vigour was for.’
Immediately, this compelling narrative of happiness is delicately undermined by an equally compelling narrative of unhappiness. This feels both familiar and inevitable as well. Paul and Susan, we learn in the first narrative, use her money to escape to London, where they defy convention and their families, living openly as lovers. He starts training as a lawyer; she keeps house; his friends come to visit, even if hers stay away.
This becomes the period described in the second narrative, where Paul, in old age, has to return to memories less willingly recalled. Susan starts drinking more than she should and over the months or years develops into an unacknowledged alcoholic. Paul colludes with her out of loyalty to their love.
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