‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods.
The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father, Rowan Anderson, who spends most of his time in London, writing a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton and feuding with his possessive girlfriend, Gloria. He periodically visits his daughter and his wife, Cressida, in their country cottage. Cressida busies herself with domestic chores in the cramped space, compulsively ironing sheets, painstakingly preparing elaborate meals (which Rowan flushes down the lavatory), and ‘stuffing Mary Rose with iron and vitamins, with cod liver oil, wheat germ and yeast and various other nutritional supplements’ to counter the child’s sickliness.
Rowan dislikes Cressida’s beloved Kent cottage, but praises it out of ‘polite hypocrisy’, while despising the way they have ‘learned to skate so gracefully on the ice of [their] own politeness’. He copes by escaping to the village pub to drink vast quantities of whisky. Troublingly, it transpires that he was so drunk on the night that Margaret was abducted that he has no memory of his actions.
First published in 1981, this is one of three novels by the late Caroline Blackwood that Virago are reprinting. A wealthy Anglo-Irish socialite, Blackwood was perhaps better known as the wife and muse of the painter Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. She began writing in her thirties, and this horrible, wonderful tale is testament to the fact that she had as much creative talent as her men.
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