A Secret Garden Affair
Suffolk, 1981: whilst the entire country seems gripped by Royal Wedding fever, Libby, the heroine of James’s 25th novel, wants to get as far away from it as possible, for on the brink of marrying her fiancé, she has discovered him in flagrante with her best friend. Libby takes refuge with two eccentric old ladies one can imagine on screen played by Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. One is her great-aunt Bess, a former lady’s maid, and the other Elfrida, a society beauty in the 1920s but a deeply unconventional one, who eschewed marriage to build a satisfying career as a garden designer, in the footsteps of Norah Lindsay and Gertrude Jekyll. Its blurb describes the novel as a ‘love story from long ago’, referring doubtless to Elfrida’s clandestine relationship with a glamorous White Russian – for this novel is really her story, entwined with that of the loyal Bess, who being of a different social class has had to face threats of another kind. However, it could equally well refer to Libby’s emotional troubles.
‘Only’ forty years or so have passed since the doomed wedding of Charles and Di, but the past is indeed a foreign country. Libby’s mother urges her to take back her fiancé, on the principle that male infidelity should be overlooked because the man was a catch and a better one mightn’t be found. The fiancé himself is a pitch-perfect portrait of the thrusting 1980s City male. A Secret Garden Affair is an immensely enjoyable novel – feel-good is also an accurate description – the tension maintained through its switching from past to nearer present. It is also a paean to the healing power of a beloved garden.
