When Miss Doxy, the spinster at center of Barbara Jefferis’ novel Undercurrent, sits down to breakfast in her boarding house dining room, she notices a strange man sitting at a table near the door. “They have so much,” she thinks. “So much money, so much power, so many people. They can change their man three times a day if it suits them.” As she travels by train to work this morning, she sees the man on the platform of a station along the way: “Clever to use a car and pick up the train two stations ahead of where she had caught it.”
She is being followed, of course. The reason is clear: her work involves the care of important documents, highly sensitive material related to a secret project underway at Duncan & Son, a consulting engineering firm. The consulting part is just a shell designed to hide the real work going on in the laboratory. Something of profound importance, more important than the atomic bomb itself.
Miss Doxy spends much of her time in reflection, remembering her happy times with her beloved Papa and her misery suffering the unjust torments of her hated mother. Papa was a talented and charming man, misunderstood by his wife. Only Miss Doxy — Blossom — understands and comforts him. He needs a lot of comforting, usually in the mornings after he goes off for one of his long nightly walks.
Through her reflections and her interactions with people at work, Jefferis gradually and deftly reveals Miss Doxy as profoundly disturbed — a functional but deeply traumatized schizophrenic. While showing us the world through her strident and conspiracy-filled eyes, Jefferis also gives us glimpses of the mundane realities of which her grasp is quickly slipping.
Undercurrent is a lean, efficient novel, a tight and satisfying entertainment — barely 150 pages, and hardly a word out of place from start to finish. This may be explained by the fact that Jefferis wrote the book — her first — in the space of three weeks to compete for a prize offered by the Sydney Morning Herald for the best unpublished novel. She shared the award but was unable to find an Australian publisher interested in the book. So she contacted publishers in the U.K. and U.S. and sold the book to J.M. Dent in London and William Sloane Associates in New York. Dent published the book with its original title, Contango Day, which is a term used on the London and Sydney stock exchanges for second day before payment of a contango debt — a debt incurred from paying a higher futures price for a commodity than it ends up selling at (its spot price) — is due. As much as the title might offer an analogy for Miss Doxy’s situation, I’d have to say Sloane made the right choice in changing.