CAN a man love two women at the same time? With a nod to the politically correct age in which we live, one must also mention the possibility of one woman and two men, but we'll leave that for another day and another book.
In this one, television director Simon is married to Flora. They have three children: Janey, 13, Nell, nine, and Thomas, five, and they all live together in a house in Hammersmith. The children are beautiful, but they have the modern youth oriented execrable taste in clothes, music, food, etc.
Flora is also beautiful, but is becoming a little ragged around the edges. She is uneasy, but is not sure what she is uneasy about. Raised a Roman Catholic, she begins a dalliance with High Anglicanism and meets Vicar Freddie and his wife, Phoebe.
While Flora is off on holiday in France with the children, Simon meets accountant Gillian Selkirk and they begin a relationship. Gillian is cool, blonde, thirtyish and believes in autonomy with her, dependence on anyone or anything is out. Simon has that plastic kind of intelligence that enables him to pass smoothly through the world, but where deep down, emotional blood letting is concerned, he is as immature as a pre pubescent boy.
He loves Flora and the children and wishes for his ordered existence to continue, but the physicality of his couplings with Gilli an holds him in thrall "Sex, after all, is an awful lot more than it's cracked up to be." They meet in her flat, they make love, they talk, but things, as they have a habit of doing, become complicated:
She lay her head on his chest.
"What shall we do now?", she said.
"I'll think of something."
"I knew I could depend on you.
Could she? Should she? What had happened to autonomy . . .?
Ms St John is dealing with a subject that is as old as . . . well, adultery. Her handling of it, however, is as light, true and exact as a finger gliding down a lover's back. Much of her story is conveyed in dialogue, and it is the dialogue of evasion, little curlicues of nuance, hint hinting and nudge nudging, snail track loop de looping around threatened flowers.
The danger of actually saying something has never been better put, as Simon again and again has to bite his tongue to prevent himself telling his mistress that he loves her - yet he does, while still not falling out of love with Flora. And although the understanding between them is of a free relationship, the thrust of sexual jealousy transfixes him when Gilli an mentions other men friends of her acquaintance: the American stockbroker who leaves his Cartier lighter in her flat, and Rupert, who gives her an orchid that refuses to wither.
Around this almost formal sexual dance circle the other characters: the children, beautifully realised and much, much more than stereotypes; a spinster friend of Flora's named Lydia Faraday, who becomes the deus ex machina of the roundelay; the Vicar, his wife her hope that Flora would become a regular church goer instigated by the thought that she would be likely to come up with "absolutely first rate jumble"; the various TV types with whom Simon associates; and a number of other married couples in their own states of tension.
The subject of marital infidelity is a deeply painful one, but as in all human involvements a sense of the absurdity of things is never too far away. Ms St John has had the temerity to build a souffle that teeters and wobbles but never deflates, and she necklaces it with sparkles of conversation of the rarest taste and piquancy. And although Simon is a pompous pig, she still manages to imbue him with tracings of finer feelings and the stirrings of a guilty conscience.
As for Flora, she is the wife who, like all wives, has to try to pick up the pieces or decide to call it a day. In her case - at least by the end of the book - she is content to sublimate her unease into the tenor of her existence: to go on in spite of all. Now, where have I heard that before?
