“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”
Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”
And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:
“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.
Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”
With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.
Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”
Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.