Literary Meals: Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

 

Admittedly this 25p bargain might at first glance be taken for a Mills & Boon offering. However, when I saw it I remembered that my mother and her friends used to love Mary Stewart and, whatever their other faults, they weren't happy to read trash. So I bought the book, despite its lurid cover, curious to find out what it was that they had enjoyed about the author. I am so glad I did.

Madam Will You Talk? is set in an English person's dream of France, where it is extremely easy to find inexpensive, quiet and comfortable hotels, where Provencal towns are not choked with coaches full of tourists and where the kinds of restaurants Elizabeth David seemed to find waiting round every bend are indeed waiting round every bend. I had begun to think lately that David had been romanticising France in much of her writing, but Stewart describes the same world as David vividly and convincingly. By the end of the novel, my faith was restored and I believed once again that for a decade or two after the war that lovely French world did indeed exist. 

The book is a thriller but a highly literate one. In one conversation, characters casually swap lines from Macbeth; in their milieu, it seems, such things are part of the average person's normal store of knowledge. Additionally, at the start of each chapter the reader finds a quotation:  Stewart chooses to recruit for this purpose Chaucer, Spenser, Browning, Coleridge, Marvell, Blake, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare, among others. I suspect that fragments from such authors rarely grace the pages of contemporary "chick lit". 

When I finished the book, I looked up Mary Stewart, to find out more about her. She was a vicar's daughter who seems to have been a brilliant English literature student, which explains the quotations. The poor woman had an ectopic pregnancy, which led to infertility. Whether that alone led to the writing of many novels, I don't know.

Anyway, Madam, Will You Talk?, despite a slightly unconvincing plot twist you can sense coming almost from the first page, is charming and enjoyable. It also has a scene with an hors d'oeuvre trolley in it. I have never forgotten the hors d'oeuvre trolley in a station hotel in Scotland my father took us to one evening while we waited for a train to travel further north. It was as delightful as Stewart's and, like the setting of her book, it belonged to what was very shortly to become a lost world:

"Presently at my elbow I heard the chink of silver, and opened my eyes to see the big glittering trolley of hors d'oeuvre, with its hovering attendant...The man served me from the tray. I remember still those exquisite fluted silver dishes, each with its load of dainty colours...there were anchovies and tiny gleaming silver fish in red sauce, and savoury butter in curled strips of fresh lettuce, there were caviare and tomato and olives green and black, and small golden-pink mushrooms and cresses and beans. The waiter heaped my plate and filed another glass with white wine. I drank half a glassful without a word, and began to eat...The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetising, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee...and...liqueur brandy...swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses. For a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam."

Madam, Will You Talk?, which was Mary Stewart's first novel was published just after the end of rationing in Britain, which, given the long time between manuscript completion and publication, makes me wonder whether Stewart wrote it hungrily, in the midst of Britain's austere rules.