None of Her Business

Sarah Caudwell is the author of some of the most gloriously entertaining comic novels written since the war, but she seems to be almost unknown in this country. My relatives and friends have not heard of her, she is not to be found in bookshops and she may well disappear from public libraries once their present copies disintegrate.

Caudwell is regarded as a writer of crime fiction and this has meant that, despite critical acclaim, her books have seldom come to the attention of those who might appreciate their wit and elegance, their wide range of literary reference and interplay of character. It is rather as if Jane Austen had been published by Mills & Boon. Like Austen, Caudwell bears reading and rereading. This is as well since she was even less prolific than Austen and her books are considerably shorter. Sarah Cockburn, who wrote under the name of Sarah Caudwell, was the daughter of the crusading left-wing journalist Claud Cockburn and of Jean Ross who, according to Isherwood, was the model for Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin, though her family can see very little resemblance. After taking a Classics degree at Aberdeen, she read Law at Oxford and played a major part in securing the admission of women to the Oxford Union. She practised for some years at the Chancery Bar at Lincoln’s Inn before becoming an adviser on international tax planning at Lloyds Bank. She makes full use of this background – classical, legal and financial – in her novels. The narrator in all four is Professor Hilary Tamar, Fellow and Tutor in Legal History at St George’s College, Oxford. Through a former pupil, Timothy Shepherd, she has come to form close friendships with four of his fellow junior barristers at Lincoln’s Inn. Hilary believes that to one trained in the techniques of scholarship no mystery is impenetrable. She is, however, hardly diligent. The great work on Causa in the Early Common Law which is to consolidate her reputation makes little progress in the course of the novels, and on one occasion she escapes to London to avoid the disapproval of her colleagues after she has refused to help mark the summer examinations – ‘Who am I to sit in judgement on the young?’ Much of Hilary’s time seems to be spent at Lincoln’s Inn and in coffee shops, wine bars and restaurants where she socializes with her young friends and scrounges on them unmercifully. (Though her gender is never specified I refer to Hilary as ‘she’ on the grounds that no man could ever get away with never standing a round.) In addition to Timothy, the group is made up of Desmond Ragwort, Michael Cantrip and Selena Jardine who form the Nursery at 62 New Square, and Julia Larwood at No. 63. Except for Cantrip the members of the group are all Oxford graduates, and Hilary loses no opportunity to allude to the deficiencies of a Cambridge education. Ragwort and Cantrip are both slender, good-looking young men but they differ widely in character. Ragwort has the highest principles and always takes the moral high ground, though he can unbend on occasion. Cantrip, on the other hand, is an inveterate practical joker who is invariably called on when some mildly criminal activity is necessary – Hilary goes so far as to suggest that lock-picking may be an option in the Cambridge Law syllabus. Though an able student and holding his own professionally, Cantrip pretends to cultural illiteracy. Selena Jardine, a pretty young woman, owes a great deal of her considerable success to a voice that is the envy of rival advocates. Threatened with death by a young woman who believes that she intends blackmail, Selena, though ignorant of the grounds of the suspicion, sets out the advantages of being blackmailed so convincingly as to divert the attention of the potential assassin for long enough to save herself. Selena acts as nursemaid to Julia Larwood and is tolerant of her weaknesses. Julia is Junoesque, messy, hopelessly uncoordinated and ‘incapable of learning even the simplest of the practical skills necessary for survival’. She also has a weakness for slender young men with perfect profiles. As a member of a small set of Revenue Chambers she ‘sits all day advising quite happily on the construction of the Finance Acts and doing no harm to anyone’. No one is better at arranging ‘a straightforward property transaction which happens to involve a bank in Amsterdam and one or two companies in the Netherlands Antilles’, thus avoiding any tax liability. However, her failure to submit her own tax returns for four years has left her with a bill which she sees no hope of paying. Each novel is centred round a member of the group. The first in the series, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, opens when Hilary, carrying out research in London, calls on her friends at Lincoln’s Inn and is horrified to learn that Julia has gone to Venice on a week’s Art Lovers’ Holiday. The news that the tours will be escorted does little to reassure her: ‘the qualifications of a guide are not those of a nursemaid or guardian of the mentally infirm’. Speaking of the holiday, Selena says, ‘She will return to London spiritually refreshed and able to cope with life.’ ‘Spiritually?’ says Ragwort. ‘My dear Selena, we all know exactly what Julia is hoping for in Venice and there is, I regret to say, nothing spiritual about it.’ Ragwort and Selena tend to take the roles of opposing counsel, especially where Julia is concerned. In Caudwell’s second novel, The Shortest Way to Hades, they learn that Julia has gone to a nightclub called Vashti’s House. ‘Vashti’s has a most unsavoury reputation,’ says Ragwort with austere disapproval. ‘I have heard it spoken of as a place frequented by females of unnatural propensity seeking companions in disgraceful conduct.’ ‘And I have heard it spoken of ’, says Selena, ‘as an agreeable little establishment where single women may enjoy one another’s company. Still, we’re clearly thinking of the same place.’ Julia has undertaken to write regularly from Venice to Selena to inform her of her doings. However, before her first letter arrives her friends learn that one of her group has been murdered and that Julia is the main suspect. Her innocence is clear: it was a perfectly competent murder. Letters covering the period before the murder arrive with a regularity unprecedented in the history of the Italian post office. On the flight out Julia is captivated by one of her group, ‘the beautiful Ned’, and resolves to seduce him. Though she discovers that he is a lawyer employed by the hated Inland Revenue, her resolve is unshaken and, guided by the advice on seduction techniques offered by various classical authorities (Catullus, Plato, Shakespeare) and her friends, she is successful. However, her letters, the last written just before her arrest, do nothing to explain how she can claim to have apparently been making love to a man several hours after the time established for his death. It is up to Hilary to demonstrate Julia’s innocence. Hilary is a legal historian with little knowledge of the law after the seventeenth century. This allows her friends to explain to her and the reader the legal complexities on which most of the novels depend. She is an expert in textual criticism or the removal of the errors that have accumulated when ancient documents have been copied and recopied over the centuries. Surprisingly, this skill proves useful in all the novels, though it probably counts for less than her ability to pick up odds and ends of gossip and uncover things that are none of her business. Coupled to these is her ability to reconstruct events from disparate pieces of information, for ‘few mysteries are impenetrable to the trained mind’. Hilary purports to believe that her abilities are underrated at Lincoln’s Inn, but it seems unlikely that she really believes this. She can always depend on her friends, admittedly under protest, to provide any support she needs, whether it is in persuading the Venetian police to participate in an elaborate plot which will confirm Julia’s innocence, or in lending her the money for a first-class flight to Corfu when she says Selena is in danger there (The Shortest Way to Hades) or in asking Julia to go to Jersey when Hilary believes Cantrip’s life is at risk on the island (The Sirens Sang of Murder). Is it possible that her friends, in apparently underrating her, are pricking her considerable vanity to pay her back for sponging on them so relentlessly? Like Hilary’s gender and Cantrip’s cultural illiteracy this is a tease which remains unanswered. There are many other delights. In The Shortest Way to Hades Sebastian Verity, a young Classical Fellow at Hilary’s college and Selena’s weekend companion, speaks, before leaving for a sailing holiday among the Greek islands as crew to Selena, of the harsh and inhuman treatment he expects to experience at her hands. He is enduring this, he claims, to gain insight into the privations which would have been experienced by the ordinary Greek seaman in the fifth century BC. Ragwort observes that ‘rough words and harsh discipline were not the worst that an Athenian sailor – a young and personable Athenian sailor – might have had to face at the hands of his officers: advantage, we fear, would sometimes have been taken of his subordinate status to make him the instrument of sensual gratification.’ ‘Hilary will confirm’, says Sebastian, ‘that in the cause of Scholarship no sacrifice is too great.’ Then there is the orgy to which Julia and Selena are invited by a grateful client who has misconstrued the nature of their relationship. Surrounded by naked, writhing bodies they remain fully clothed (Selena, in fact, reads Pride and Prejudice throughout). And there is the attractive countess cum investment adviser in The Sirens Sang of Murder who re-enacts the plot of All’s Well that Ends Well to enjoy Cantrip’s favours without compromising herself. Sex is a recurrent theme, though it is never explicit. It amazes me that so gifted an author as Caudwell should be so little known in this country. She seems to be better appreciated in America. In a review of The Sybil in Her Grave – published after Caudwell’s death in 2000 at the age of 60 – the writer Amanda Cross paid her the following tribute: ‘This is the last novel we shall have from Sarah Caudwell; like all her marvellous books it combines wit, forbearance, intellect and passion, above all, humour and perfection of language . . . with Hilary Tamar and the brilliant, sexy young lawyers at the Chancery Bar. I hardly know whether to cry for joy at their return, or to weep for the finality of this bittersweet adventure.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © Simon Lawrence 2009