Nothing in Moderation

‘Oh, Alex.’ I suspect many readers of E. M. Delafield’s fourth novel, Consequences (1919), have said this aloud at least once. They may have said it in sorrowful sympathy; they may have chuckled it knowingly; they may have shrieked it in exasperation. They may have varied its emphasis: ‘Oh, Alex.’ But they will have said it – probably – as I have, in a range of tones and volumes. Consequences is one of the most frustrating books I know.

It wasn’t always like this. At first, it was all pleasure. Is there anything better than an unexpected book? A dear friend posted me Consequences for my birthday. Wandering in Bloomsbury she’d come across a bookshop heaped with beautiful dove-grey paperbacks which, when opened, revealed a flash of bright endpapers, with a different design for each title. Since 1999 Persephone Books have been reissuing neglected classics ‘by women, for women and about women’. I think my friend’s choice of book had less to do with the publisher’s admirable principles and rather more to do with the Liberty print she found inside, where chartreuse thistles scratch their way across the endpapers. Persephone admit that this particular endpaper was deliberately chosen to warn the reader of the book’s spiky contents. Foolishly perhaps, I ignored the warning. It probably says something damning about me that I read this novel at least once a year. I am in good company, however, as the introduction to my edition notes that Consequences was Delafield’s favourite. A photograph of her in the 1930s reveals a seated but determined-looking figure sporting the most fabulous Homburg hat with a fur flung over her right shoulder. The resonance between this quietly certain figure and her complicated, tentative book is not immediately obvious, but in the figure of Alex the author created something extraordinary. To read Consequences is to give yourself over to a series of small irritated explosions: ‘Oh, Alex’ inevitably gives way to ‘Why, Alex?!’ Alex: shy, awkward, so lacking in confidence that when it makes a rare appearance she overwhelms and domineers completely. She has five emotional states: rattling over-exuberance, peevish jealousy, sick dismay, worshipful adoration and utter inertia. She is ‘incapable alike of asking or of bestowing in moderation’. Her ability to observe convention is non-existent. She makes no friends; she breaks off her hard-won, never-to-be-repeated engagement. She enters convent life; finding nothing there, she leaves a decade later determined that the family who offered nothing years earlier may do so now. Inevitably they do not. The opening pages betray none of this. At first glance, the novel seems as simple as the parlour game after which it is named. To describe it in the game’s vernacular: Francis Clare meets Isabel in the white froth of the London Season. What he said to her no one knows – what she said to him is similarly unrecorded – but the consequences are a wedding that makes Isabel Lady Clare and subseqently mother to Alexandra, Barbara, Cedric, Archie and Pamela. The family resides in a large house in London. The world, it seems, approves of this story and would very much like Francis and Isabel to replicate it with the little Clares. To this end, there is a predictable rhythm to life’s intersecting orbits. In London, the nursery revolves around the drawing-room, where something called ‘coming out’ is mentioned every so often. There is High Mass at the Brompton Oratory every Sunday, with Lady Isabel ‘At Home’ on Sunday afternoons. Francis and Isabel spend August in Scotland while the children go to the seaside with Nurse. The Clare children only really come to the attention of adults if they are overheard. No matter which adult scolds them, the lesson is the same: the need for order. I can’t have been the only disorderly and fidgety child, with a voice that carried and a tendency either to forget clear instructions in a rush of enthusiasm or to ignore them entirely if I could not see their immediate relevance. Standing a good head and a half taller than my classmates and friends, however, meant that my (always minor) transgressions were easily spotted. When left to my own devices I had no interest in anything much other than books. A mildly perturbing sense of awkwardness filled my days; I could never quite achieve the comfort that stems from confidently negotiating life’s daily exchanges. So as someone perpetually plagued by the fear of placing my foot very firmly in my mouth, I have always felt envious of the Victorians’ rigidly structured social interactions. If only I had been born a Victorian, I need never worry about the right thing to say. Though life’s crises may bewilder and befuddle there is much comfort to be had, I imagine, from knowing precisely which words to use, which gloves to wear (or whether to wear them at all) – even, in the very worst case, how much black crêpe to order. A childhood accident reveals that the comfort I imagine in such rigidity might be wildly misplaced. Alex’s first catastrophe is the most vivid. A combination of ordinary childhood petulance and an eldest child’s propensity for wanting its own way ends in unexpected disaster: ‘She nearly killed Barbara.’ Certainly, attempting to tightrope walk across a flight of stairs using a skipping-rope (one end tied round a newel post, the other held in Alex’s hand) is foolish, but Barbara insists on being the first. Alex is being kind, not cruel – but it is Barbara who falls. Rereading the comments of a grave Lord Clare just after the accident sends me straight back to a wriggling, shame-filled encounter with an incandescent headmistress who wanted to know precisely why I had nearly knocked a fellow student unconscious. Lord Clare can scarcely believe that Alex would deliberately endanger Barbara’s life. What a charge to lay upon a child! Alex is speechless to learn that she is something close to a murderer. While I went home weeping to my mother, who reassured me it was all an accident, Alex’s belief in her inherent wrongness stays with her for the rest of her life. Consequences is a novel that explores in painful detail what it is to be someone who not only fails to reach the ideals of her class, but cannot even appreciate that they exist. Faced with any choice at all, Alex’s choice is always the wrong one. Not a bold wrong, mind; not a devil-may-care rebellion as attractive as it is frustrating. No, Alex is destined to fail in a million small ways. Any of us who has ever put our foot in it or made the wrong choice will find at least one instance where they sympathize deeply with Alex – and this is the novel’s cleverest trick. The system against which she struggles is as hateful and pointless as Alex herself can be. Sent to school with Lord Clare’s maxim ‘friendly with all, familiar with none’ ringing in her ears, Alex proceeds to lavish inarticulate, unreasoned adoration on individual girls. Each love object is regarded with blind wonder, and with fatalistic apathy Alex wordlessly accepts the fact that they ignore her utterly. The adult beauty Alex expects to attain in her débutante season never materializes. Instead, the white dress that is supposed to bring about a transformation merely emphasizes her red elbows, thin neck and rounded shoulders. Where Alex had been led to expect wonder, success and romance, the Season itself is a round of dull dinners and awkward dances. Alex never attains social confidence and, in consequence, never finds peace. Annoying as I find Alex (and I do: oh, I do) I can never bring myself to condemn a young woman whose only real failing is to have less-than-perfect looks and an inability to make small talk in a drawing-room. Why blame Alex for failing to land a husband when the real blame must fall on a society that will not allow her to earn a living and which passes family fortunes to the boy children only? Why exact such a terrible toll? ‘I never asked to be born’ is the most teenage of cries, but in Alex’s case it takes on reverberations that stay with the reader. Looking at the copy beside me now, it strikes me that placing Consequences at no. 13 on the Persephone Classics list probably wasn’t an accident.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Louisa Yates 2015