In the Dark by Deborah Moggach

Deborah Moggach's latest novel begins in 1916, when an urban housewife, Eithne Clay, discovers that her ineffectual husband, Paul, has been killed in action. The lack of animal passion in their marriage proves the counterpoint to her subsequent wooing by the local butcher, Neville Turk, a man full to brimming with everything that her husband lacked: ambition, direction, a love of material wealth. Just like Blazes Boylan did for a lonely Molly Bloom, he too knows how to show his lady-love a good time. This apparently austere and respectable house is full of headboards banging, bodies thumping up against doors and furtive fumblings in the drawing-room when nobody's looking, the minute Neville Turk shows up.

The sexual awakening of the widowed Eithne is only part of the story. Moggach uses the war as the backdrop for her story about the complications of sex and love, but she eschews easy hero-villain dichotomies in what is ultimately a bewitching, if stylistically unexciting, tale. Nothing is cut-and-dried in this new world of blackouts and soldiers and meat rations. Neville Turk may be ruthless but he is also able to make Eithne very happy for a long time.

To emphasise this complexity, Moggach takes the love story "below stairs" as well. To make ends meet while her husband was away fighting, Eithne had turned their home into a boarding-house, and employed a maid, the lonely but loyal, little horse-faced Winnie. Her boarders are a shadowy lot: one has been shell-shocked by the war so he never leaves his room; another, Alwyne Flyte, has been blinded in action and has a minor erotic flirtation with Winnie. However, she is not as pathetic as she appears, and he soon finds himself falling in love with her. Like her mistress, Winnie experiences an awakening that benefits her, gives her confidence in herself, even if it is at the hands of a flawed man. That "bad" men can do good things is something the novel repeats throughout, but it is a lesson that Eithne's teenage son, Ralph, struggles to learn.

Ralph, too, is ready for sexual awakening, but this seems to be thwarted by the other pairings in the household. He refuses to accept Neville Turk, even after he has married Eithne and is installed in the house for good. Outwardly, everything begins to change, reflecting the changes taking place in the hearts of both the mistress of the house and her maid. Electricity is brought in, and a telephone (Moggach makes a nice point of stressing how much more strongly the new lights shine, exacerbating Winnie's worry about the standard of her housework, and emphasising Ralph's ever bigger spots). Ralph resists these changes, clinging instead to an idealised version of his dead father and a hope that the past, somehow, will prevail.

The sexual elements of Moggach's tale suggest that the past will not. Women's liberation, in the form of the vote, is only a few years away and then everything really will change for ever. Eithne and Winnie get to experience their liberation, of a sort, earlier than the suffragettes. But it is every bit as valuable.

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