Nuns and Soldiers

Chatto and Windus lotd, London, first edition, 1980. Cloth, 8vo, 21 cm,. [2], 505 pp. From the blurb: "This is a story about honour and innocence, lost and found, and about the vicissitudes of a deep friendship between two women. Guy Openshaw, dying, begs his wife Gertrude to remarry and be happy after he has gone, but Gertrude feels this to be impossible. She is consoled by the arrival, fresh from years in a convent, of her old college friend, Anne Cavidge, who is returning to the world: 'Mary Magdalene in reverse,' says Gertrude as she decks Anne with jewels. Will they settle down together and 'do virtuous things', now that Gertrude is a rich benevolent widow? Gertrude is surrounded with love, and also with eligible single men, among them the Count, son of a Polish exile. The Count, obsessively reliving his father's patriotic anguish, is a Conscript in the army of duty and in the imaginary forces of a “true Poland”. A soldier of a very different sort is Tim Reede, a hanger-on of the Openshaws, painter, scrounger, story-teller and lost soul. He and his mistress Daisy Barrett sit in pubs and curse the world and dream of rich marriages. The Count, who is also dreaming of marriage, is paralysed by honourable scruples, and meanwhile Anne mourns her lost God and discovers her private and personal Christ. Desires and obligations, guilt and money, bedevil the issue. Tim commits a crime, Anne encounters the snares of the world, both hope for a renewal of innocence. There is an ordeal by water. All the characters are forced into some degree of heroism, and at last muddle and lies are cleared away, and sins are forgiven, though not everybody gains his heart's desire. Spine slightly creased, textblock edges slightly dust-stained with some marks, otherwise Good in a used dustwrapper with a faded spine and light foxing to the inside flaps.