A Helping Hand

‘The queen of suburban horror … a sharply observant writer with a great eye for detail, her accuracy, understanding and quiet wit made her writing a cut above the run-of-the-mill crime novel.’ The Times

‘Celia Dale’s writing is quiet, clever, subtle – and terrifying. I can’t think of anyone whose stories of suspense I appreciate more.’ Ruth Rendell

iii

A HELPING HAND

CELIA DALE

With an introduction by Jenn Ashworth

daunt books

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT

v

INTRODUCTION

Josh and Maisie Evans like to lend a helping hand, especially to vulnerable older women with nobody else to turn to. They’re full of ordinary, practical kindness: she’s a retired nurse, a wonderful cook and a skilled seamstress. He’s witty and patient, happy to listen to endless stories he’s heard before, to flirt a little, to offer a foot rub, to laugh at tired jokes that weren’t that funny the first time around. Together, they live in a featureless London suburb, have a nicely fitted-out spare room and know how to make an older woman feel part of the family. ‘Auntie’ Flo (no relation) lived with them for a short while, until she died – not unexpectedly – leaving them both a small something in her will as a thank-you for their kindness. vi

Which is why it is so lucky (unbelievably so) that they run into Lena Kemp and Cynthia Fingal while on a little break in Rimini, Italy, paid for by Auntie Flo’s legacy. Mrs Fingal has been a widow for some time and her only sister is dead. Her niece by marriage, Lena, has taken her in, but things aren’t working out. Lena finds her elderly aunt selfish, demanding and boring. She’s full of disgust at her digestive complaints. And anyway, there’s a man she’d like to invite around in the evenings without her aunt inflicting the same old reminiscences on him. Mrs Fingal loves a bit of male companionship, you see. When you find yourself a widow after a long and happy marriage, you miss, as she keeps saying, ‘the little attentions’. Josh is very happy to provide them, while Maisie in turn offers friendship and understanding to the resentful and put-upon Lena. The pieces line up as if on a chessboard: Lena’s patience is wearing thin, Cynthia’s vulnerability and loneliness is palpable, Auntie Flo’s room is newly empty. The obvious solution presents itself.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the heroes and villains would arrange themselves neatly on opposite sides of the room. But Dale’s novel is more subtle. One of her early critics described her work as having the ‘quiet wit of Jane Austen – with murder’ and it is in viiher evocation of the complexities of human nature that the novel really rewards the reader. Josh is mildly repulsive from the outset, his bowels not coping with Mediterranean food, his nasty habit of touching up the waitresses swiftly and mercilessly dramatised. Maisie is sly and manipulative, acting the pimp as she directs her husband’s attentions towards their latest mark. Lena is selfish and obnoxious, and the obvious pleasure she takes in humiliating her frail aunt in front of new friends who seem to care for her is only shocking to a reader who has never been exhausted by the needs of another. Poor Cynthia Fingal may be innocent, and when time starts to confuse her and she begins to re-experience fresh grief for a daughter lost decades ago our hearts break for her. But she is also – and in making us experience this, Dale makes us complicit – really, really irritating.

Dale demands that we share Maisie’s annoyance at Cynthia’s endless fretting, the circular and self-absorbed repetitions of her conversation, her girlish, sickly flirting with Josh. Cynthia suspects something is going on quite early, but she is not only helpless, she is resourceful, as all humans with genuine need are. While wondering why she’s no longer allowed to use the good bedsheets and where her suitcase has gone, she romances and woos Josh into her bedroom for the massages, rubs and flirtatious conversation her heart viiidesires. There’s a nasty transaction here: she won’t ask awkward questions about her pension book if she gets the dose of attention she needs from Josh. It is not only the flirting, of course – the barter system between them runs deeper. Josh sees that ‘inside this heap of old flesh peeped a girl, a bride, a young mother, ridiculous and sad’. And Cynthia Fingal needs, most of all, to be seen. Josh plays along because he is in need too – his life is infinitely easier if Maisie’s plans go the way she wants. We can enjoy disapproving of Maisie’s increasingly cruel style of nursing, which has Cynthia locked up in her bedroom for days on end, subsisting on tea and bread and butter and never seeing a friendly face, yet Dale does not let us forget what it might feel like to be connected to someone who needs and needs but cannot give back.

A Helping Hand was published in 1966: the year of the Moors murders trial and the Aberfan disaster. Dale’s first readers, some of whom would have painful memories of the time when you didn’t call the doctor if you couldn’t afford to pay his bill, were keenly attuned to matters of vulnerability and responsibility. The novel was prescient, too: it would be another twenty years before the word ‘co-dependency’ became common parlance with the publication of Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More, the book that put a name to ixthat sickly, self-serving kind of help that damages and controls what it pretends to cherish. Dale’s interest in the cold-blooded economics of care – the way the sums, if we insist on doing them, will never add up – is stitched into every scene and subplot of this disturbing novel. She never misses an opportunity to linger not only on the ways in which we belong to each other but how much the belonging costs in food and board and electricity bills and laundry and who owes who what and for which services rendered. Josh and Maisie refer to Cynthia as their ‘PG’ or ‘paying guest’ and the complexities contained in this phrase gesture towards Dale’s persistent interest in the hidden and explicit economics of hospitality.

Dale would return to these themes repeatedly. In A Dark Corner (1971), a married couple answer the door on a rainy night to a stranger with a fever and a cough. Against their instincts (this is not altruism), they provide a reluctant welcome to their unexpected guest, a young man who learns the hard way what kind of poisoned, self-serving generosity a racist London and a toxic household can offer to a Black man without family of his own. In her final novel, Sheep’s Clothing (1988), she gives the reader two gloriously characterised female ex-cons who, pretending to be bringing good news about a benefit back-payment to vulnerable old women living alone, break into their xhouses and steal their trinkets. Her short stories too are filled with sickly old women shut up in their bedrooms or left to rot behind their front doors, with self-satisfied nurses or carers, with mothering that curdles from soothing into smothering, with types of dependence that inspire violence. Dale understands all the ways in which help can hurt. In her vision of London, people generally get what they deserve and it is never enough, never even touches the edges of what they need.

The crimes committed in A Helping Hand are cruelly predictable and in this inevitability lies the horror. In some chilling asides, we start to understand that Auntie Flo wasn’t the first to linger and die in Josh and Maisie’s spare room and the contemporary reader, who has lived through the weeks during which a country in shock began to grasp the scale of Harold Shipman’s crimes, will shudder. War, the pandemic and the effects of the slow emergency of climate catastrophe have rendered so many homeless and dependent on the care of others. Never have we been more in need of this novel’s keen reminder of the shared responsibility of care, the nearness of vulnerability to violence and how easy it is for control to seep into our relations and for help to become polluted by harm. In this novel, Dale asks a question that remains urgent: how can we meet the relentless and overwhelming need of another and not turn into a xiLena – miserable and resentful – or a Maisie – opportunist and cruel – in the face of it?

In the figure of Graziella, a Rimini waitress arriving in London in miserable circumstances, Dale might hint at an answer. When she knocks at the door (comically interrupting Josh at work on one of his grubbier hobbies) she’s alone and desperate. She is the only character in the novel with almost nothing to give and Dale has her desperately throw herself on the mercy of strangers, asking for charity from those who have no obligation to her. She is also the only character to bring a glimmer of light into the drab, nasty home that Maisie and Josh have created between them. In that dark spare room, she and Cynthia Fingal talk about the spring.

Graziella understands that care is not only about what you do for someone, but is about how you pay attention to them. ‘They seem kind, they take care of her – but they don’t care for her,’ she says, and through her Dale shows us that it is strangely possible to give what we don’t have and from this, we find some form of hope. Even creepy old Josh at times sees this young Italian woman as something almost more than human, her complexion illuminated by an otherworldly light: ‘Like you – the windows. The light coming through,’ he says. It is part of Dale’s artistry that this utterance is both a transparently sleazy chat-up line and a xiirecognition of some essential goodness. Graziella’s predicament is significant: she is unmarried, pregnant and finds no room at the inn. Dale uses her to remind us of much older myths of radical welcome and generosity. When the sums of need and just deserts do not add up, the novel suggests – and they never will – what we have is grace. ‘Gracie’, Josh insists on calling her – a name that means thank you.

Celia Dale is an author who deserves to stand alongside Stella Gibbons and Muriel Spark for her unflinching look at the relentless banality of domestic cruelty and at the ridiculousness of human vanity, and for her fearless acknowledgement that all of us will always need more than we deserve.

Jenn Ashworth, 2022

1

A HELPING HAND

3

ONE

MRS MAISIE EVANS CAME into the lounge, pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan. ‘She’s gone, poor soul.’

‘Mm? What’s that?’ Her husband started from the doze into which he always fell immediately after breakfast, the newspaper before his face, waiting for the interior message which, in ten minutes or so, would send him along the passage.

‘She’s gone. Quite peaceful.’ She crossed to the window and drew the curtains so that the sunlight no longer fell on Josh or the colours of carpet and tapestry footstool.

He sank back, crushing the newspaper untidily against his paunch. ‘Poor soul. Poor old soul.’

‘It was a blessed release.’4

‘Yes. Yes, I know that. Still, just the same, when it comes …’

‘It comes to us all, sooner or later.’

It was a nice morning. From the London Road the sound of traffic had settled into its daytime murmur, and across a sky which was May now although it might revert to March later on, a Caravelle from some far city screeched down on London Airport. If the window had been open Mrs Evans would almost have fancied she smelled blossom, although none was out yet.

Behind her, Josh was wiping his eyes, but put the handkerchief away sheepishly when his wife turned towards him. ‘I’ll go for the doctor, shall I?’

‘There’s no hurry.’ She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘He’ll be doing his Surgery now. It’s only a formality, after all.’

‘Is she …? Do you need any help?’

‘I’ll get the breakfast things washed up first.’

The television set stood on a low cupboard, the bottom half of a sideboard from which the top had been removed in order that it should better suit the small bright bungalow into which they had moved three years ago. Mrs Evans went to it now and with a little grunt bent down and opened the doors. Half the shelves were neatly stacked with women’s magazines, knitting and embroidery patterns, and two volumes entitled respectively The Home Doctor and 5The Home Lawyer. On the other shelves were Mrs Evans’s sewing basket, knitting bag and embroidery frame, on which was a half-finished garden scene of a cottage and crinolined lady, destined for a tea cosy. There was also a shabby leather dressing case marked with the initials F.B.B.

Mrs Evans lifted this out and set it on the table, and fishing at the neck of her jumper brought out from between her square breasts several keys strung on a chain. With one of these she opened the case and began to check through its contents. Still holding the newspaper, Josh hauled himself out of the chair and came to stand beside her.

There were half a dozen pieces of Victorian jewellery loosely wrapped in yellow tissue-paper, a few yellower photographs. Mrs Evans did not bother with these, but busied herself with documents – Birth Certificate, Insurance Policy, Will. Her grey eyes intent behind her spectacles, she checked each one silently. Beside her, Josh idly picked up a photograph: the girl in it was swathed in serge and lace, waisted like a Christmas cracker. She had a lovely bust. Her hair was looped in wide bay windows either side of her face, which was plain and very young. Very young.

He put the picture down quickly as his wife stated rather than asked, ‘You drew her pension Friday?’

‘That’s right. As per usual.’6

‘Give me the book, then.’

He fished in his breast pocket, found it and gave it to her. She put it with the other documents, replaced everything but the jewellery and locked the case, removing the key from the others round her neck and leaving it in the lock.

She was a thickset woman and he a tallish man. She suddenly grinned up at him and punched him lightly on the arm. ‘Cheer up, Boy! You look as though you’d lost sixpence and found a penny. Perhaps you’d better get out in the sunshine after all.’

His pink face lightened beneath its silver hair, thick as a cat’s fur. ‘Shall I go to the doctor, then?’

‘May as well. He can please himself whether he comes or not. It’s not as if he hadn’t expected it. I’ll put this in her room.’

She turned and moved briskly to the door, the leather case under her arm, but he still stood by the table. ‘You’re sure she’s …?’

‘Don’t be soft! Of course I’m sure. You’d better put on your mac, it’s treacherous out.’

He heard her in the kitchen, running water for the washing-up, stacking the breakfast crockery. In the shadow of the drawn curtain his chair stood temptingly, the embroidered cushions squashed where he had leaned peacefully against them, a bar of sunlight warming the carpet where his feet had rested. 7No good going along the passage now, he had missed his moment.

He changed his shoes, walking gingerly past the shut door of the other bedroom, put on his mackintosh and hat; then, recollecting, took the hat off again. He opened the kitchen door.

‘I’m off, then.’

‘Right-o. Don’t hurry yourself, it’s a nice morning.’

‘Do you want anything at the shops?’

‘No, I’ll see to that after the undertaker’s been. The doctor’ll ring them for you. Tell him she went breakfast-time this morning, very peaceful – say I just found her gone. He can come in after his rounds if he wants to, or he can just make out the certificate straight away.’

‘Okeydoke.’

He closed the kitchen door, tiptoed past the other, let himself out. The sun was warm, the privet was all in bud; it was indeed a lovely morning. Straightening his shoulders, his face falling into its customary folds of innocent good humour, Josh stepped out cheerfully along the road.

9

TWO

THE PLAIN STRETCHED AWAY below the town’s terrace to the rim of the distant sea. The air was so clear that the skyscraper at Cesenatico far to the north could be discerned. The long balcony which is San Marino’s town centre seemed to hang in the balmy light, kaleidoscoped by tourists who leaned over its wall, posed against its fountain, clustered before the Town Hall at the far end with its small sentries in green and red. Plodding up the steep streets from the charabancs, the tourists wondered about their hearts, had longed to pause for the placarded ‘Tea as Mother makes It’, had been unable to catch all the guide’s recital of dates and heights and liberties. To emerge on to the terrace was a reprieve and they scattered, light-headed in the 10limpid air, clicking their cameras, calling to one another in the accents of Manchester, Bermondsey or Berlin, arms, thighs, sometimes even midriffs naked to the warm sun and the cool gaze of the townspeople who passed through them on their own affairs in sober grey or black, or waited within the caverns of their shops, impersonally sharp.

Along the town side of the terrace the tablecloths at the cafés flapped in the breeze. In the shade of the awnings waiters in white coats teased the dogs that came and went among the tables, gossiping