Annabel is psychologically unstable: ‘a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl with a narrow face and hair so straight it fell helplessly down around her as a mute tribute to gravity. She had prehensile toes that could pick up a pencil and sign her name. She stole’ (p27).
Her husband is Lee: ‘Annabel was quite incomprehensible to him and he already knew she was unbalanced; yet his puritanism demanded he should be publicly responsible for her. He was overcome with conflicting apprehensions’ (p30).
Lee’s brother Buzz ‘had been grievously exposed to his mother’s madness’ (p13) and lived with the married couple. ‘Their mother’s madness, their orphaned state, their aunt’s politics and their arbitrary identify formed in both a savage detachment’ (p11).
It’s a distinctly destructive love triangle tainted with infidelity, self-loathing, suicide, jealousy and a split from reality for impaired souls. The kind of fractured relationships Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine indulged in most effectively.
At one point Lee is interviewed by Annabel’s psychiatrist, ‘She was dressed entirely in black and lavishly hung about with hair of metallic yellow. Her eyes were concealed behind tinted glasses and her voice was as if smoked also, dark-toned and husky’ (p55).
With few pen-strokes Carter effectively inhabits the damaged trio. And of course her prose is always readable, the writing of an astute and acute observer:
‘... and old men sit outside in shirtsleeves on kitchen chairs, as if put out to air upon the pavement. On the low window ledges, one might find, here, a pie set out to cool or a jelly to set, there, a dreaming cat’ (p11).
‘the peeling walls, bare and lopsided staircase, fissured linoleum underfoot, foetid accumulated reek of years of greasy cookery’ (p91).
‘He felt nothing but the absence of feeling which is despair’ (p100).
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