He wants to turn her into a Klimt painting, to adorn her naked body with feathers and jewels – to turn her into an objet d’art.įrancine’s personality, her tastes and interests, are of no interest.
Incapable of love, and impotent (except when talking about murder), Teddy’s attraction to Francine is aesthetic. That may have been the reason or he might have been born that way. He had never received any, he didn’t know what it was. Neglected he might be, though he always had enough to eat and no one ever hit him, but he had no craving for affection. No one ever cuddled him or played with him or talked to him… The television was always on, so there was something to look at. There was always abundant food in the house and large meals of the TV-dinner and chip-shop variety were served, so Teddy was amply fed. When Teddy’s born – without any physical defects – his parents neglect him. She had smoked about ten thousand eight hundred cigarettes and drunk many gallons of Guinness, cider, Babycham and sweet sherry.” Teddy’s pregnant mother guzzled on “croissants with butter, whipped-cream doughnuts, salami, streaky bacon, fried eggs, chocolate bars, sausages and chips with everything. Teddy’s family is a more adult version of the Wormwoods in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. And all this sitting on a greyed and stained crocheted lace mat, rumpled in the middle and curled at its fringed edges, like an island in a dusty sea after a nuclear explosion. 6 of the Brexes’ house is rancid, like Swift’s ” Dressing-Room”.Īn old Mason-Pearson hairbrush, its stiff black bristles clogged with Eileen’s equally wiry but greying hair, a scent bottle in which the perfume had grown yellow and viscid with age, a comb whose teeth were gummed together with dark-grey grease, a cardboard box that had once held Terry’s All Gold chocolates, a glass ashtray containing pins, hairgrips, scraps of cottonwool, a dead fly, the top of a ballpoint pen and, horribly, a piece of broken fingernail. (Are there any positive depictions in her books?) They’re hardly likely to lead the revolution. This time, there’s something like a happy ending (or not too unhappy a one).įor a Socialist, Rendell writes of the working class with disdain. This is Rendell – and we expect a catastrophe. She has her eye on Teddy, but he’s more interested in the house. She’s not happy, then, when Francine and Teddy fall in love (or a reasonable facsimile.)Īnd Harriet Oxenholme – once a rock musician’s groupie, now unhappily married – seduces working-class youths. (“Insanely”, in Rendell, is not an exaggeration.)
Middle-class Francine Hill’s mother was murdered, and her stepmother Julia is insanely over-protective. Working-class Teddy Brex’s parents neglect him – and produce a psychopath, who prefers objects to people.
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