Lovely, gentle Isabel, just 40, makes masks. Her husband Dan, erstwhile ‘student of the Classics’ and playwright manqué, is ‘bored by the import-export business’. Enter long lost, lonely Bert, who ‘left soldiering, a distinguished colonel, and went to work for an oil company in New York’, plus Isabel’s unlikely friend and marriage-predator, thirtysomething Carlotta, who boasts a red dress, Mercedes coupé, unspecified high-powered job and ‘amazing (yes, amazing, I know) breasts’.
Carlotta finds everyone ‘absolutely dementing’, but neither Dan nor Bert can resist — while suspecting ‘she just might have been one of those women who think it quite in order to go to any lengths to get what you want in a competitive world’.
Garnished with ‘Pipers and Nicolsons and the lovely Gwen John that Isabel picked up for a song’, this is an emotionally shadeless, grand but apparently contemporary world in which intentions are ‘nefarious’, reactions ‘perfidious’, paper comes in ‘quires’ and Cole Porter lyrics spring usefully to mind.
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