An Imaginative Experience

A traveller on an InterCity train returning to London smells the burn of brakes as it hisses to a stop in the middle of the countryside. He sees a white-faced woman leap from the train and race to the aid of a sheep stranded on its back in a field, unable to rise. Righting it, the woman turns, and he sees her face is full of tragedy. Considering tragedies of his own, he does not intrude, but the image lodges in his mind: a strange but familiar despair, unable, despite itself, to ignore the desperation it recognizes in others. From these seeds Mary Wesley draws out a plot of an unforgettable impact: of loss, of release, of a necessarily comic acceptance of fate, of love — “the imaginative experience.” Rich in character and wit, and powerfully moving, this is a novel of the heart’s pain and deliverance.

WESLEY, MARY.

Literature & Fiction

Vintage Books

'Rose, don't leave me. Promise never to leave me,' said Ned on their wedding night, revealing an unexpected chink in his perfect armour of wealth, good looks, and country estate. Rose promised. Before the wedding, Mylo had said, 'In bed, with Ned, you will wonder whether this curious act of sex would not, with Mylo, turn into something sublime - When I send for you urgently to come and meet me - just come.' For the whole of Rose's respectable married life, she had kept faith with both men. To Ned she was a perfect wife, mother of his son and elegant hostess of Slepe. To Mylo, Rose was an impetuous and unconventional mistress, answering his erratic and impassionate calls throughout fifty years of tactful duplicity. After Ned's funeral Rose looks back on a life of dual constancy, passion, humour, and the ambiguities of love - and chooses her future.

Not That Sort of Girl

Contemporary

A Sensible Life

She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language.  Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926--leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures--Flora was a ten-year-old misfit.  Ignored by her self-absorbed parents, unloved, and pitied by the pleasant, stylish people in Brittany that summer, Flora was--peripherally--included in their gracious circles.  And there, meeting kindly civilised people for the first time, she fell in love--with Cosmo--with Hubert--with Feix.  It took forty years for the love affairs to be explored, consummated and finally resolved.

A vivid picture of wartime London and Cornwall through the eyes of five cousins. Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house for their annual ritual of a holiday. For most of them it is the last summer of their youth, with the heady exhilarations and freedoms of lost innocence, as well as the fears of the coming war. The Camomile Lawn moves from Cornwall to London and back again, over the years, telling the stories of the cousins, their family and their friends, united by shared losses and lovers, by family ties and the absurd conditions imposed by war as their paths cross and recross over the years. It is an extraordinarily vivid and lively picture of wartime London: the rationing, imaginatively circumvented; the fallen houses; the parties; the new-found comforts of sex; the desperate humour of survival — all of it evoked with warmth, clarity and stunning wit. And through it all, the cousins and their friends try to hold onto the part of themselves that laughed and played dangerous games on that camomile lawn.

The Camomile Lawn

Recently widowed, Matilda Poliport’s meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is foiled. Later she foils the suicide attempt of another lost soul, Hugh, on the run from the police, and life begins again for them both. But life also throws up nasty secrets and awkward questions, both from Matilda’s past and her present.

Jumping the Queue

The vacillations of Poppy Carew

This lively and entertaining romp through England and Africa.The Vacillations of Poppy Carew opens with two key events: the departure of Poppy’s thoroughly detestable lover, Edmund, for a richer woman, and the death of her father who, to the irritation of the nursing staff, dies in the midst of raucous laughter. Poppy follows her father’s dying wish and organizes a “fun” funeral complete with black-plumed horses and a suspicious number of glamorous women. Present at the funeral are three men who are determined to become her suitors. However, the treacherous Edmund shows up as well and, discovering that Poppy is now heiress to a fortune, abandons his new love interest and whisks Poppy off to Africa, where she embarks on a series of chaotic adventures. Will she escape Edmund’s clutches? If so, with whom of her three suitors will she escape?

The Vacillations of Poppy Carew

A compartmentalized life becomes entangled.Hebe listens in the darkness of the hall to a family conference. Her stern grandfather and the others are discussing Hebe’s unexpected pregnancy. The decision, unanimous, is that it be terminated. Hebe, dissenting, flees into the night.Twelve summers later she is living happily alone with her son in a seaside town where he is receiving an expensive education. Hebe has organized her life oddly but well. She has two chief talents in life — cooking and making love — and these she has exercised with dignity, in privacy and for profit. It is when separated strands of the web of Hebe’s life becomes entangled that the even tenor of her days is threatened, and her life changes.

Harnessing Peacocks

A Dubious Legacy

Henry brought his new bride, Margaret, to Cotteshaw in 1944. On the threshold she gave him a black eye and went straight to bed where she remained, apart from the occasional malevolent outburst, for the rest of her life. Two young couples became regular if uneasy house guests over many years, listening, speculating, keeping a watchful eye on Margaret’s door until finally, piecing together the gossip and the rumours, they found themselves tangled in the web of Henry’s life.

About the Author\nMary Wesley was born in 1912. Her education took her to the London School of Economics and during the war she worked in the War Office. Her first novel, Jumping the Queue, was published at the age of seventy.\nEarly in 1941, seventeen-year-old Juno Marlowe is hurrying down a London street. Planes thunder overhead; a battery of guns opens up. She is rescued from this nightmare by a gaunt stranger who offers her the protection of his house. Given this respite from the bleakness of an existence where she has no home and family, June encounters a series of events that take her to a house in the West Country, where war only occasionally intrudes, where she may find peace, and no longer just be part of the furniture.

Part of the Furniture

Second Fiddle

Laura Thornby, independent, individual and slightly exotic, manages her life with exquisite control. Her affairs are brief but delightful, her career fulfilling. But when she meets struggling writer Claude Bannister, she is swept by an irresistible desire to interfere, manipulate and experiment with him — for his own good, of course. What she does not foresee, however, are the possibilities that he may one day write well, and that she might fall in love.

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