A woman not so much drifting as drowning

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews By Battersea Bridge By Janet Davey Chatto Windus, 293pp. £12.99

LIFE HAS NEVER been easy for the now thirtysomething Anita, and it shows no sign of improving. She spent her childhood in the shade of two older, brighter brothers. Both were successful at school, unlike her, and both pleased Veronica, their mother, whose style of parenting tends towards the briskly professional. Anita’s failures, which extend from her exams to her fashion sense, have routinely been pointed out. She has always been the outsider in her family.

Janet Davey’s poised, intelligent fourth novel is an authentic portrait of modern endurance. It is funny and real as well as impressively sympathetic, as is Anita, whose wistful apathy is brilliantly conveyed: “Of her two brothers, Mark was the one whose love Anita most wanted. Barney, the first-born, jollied Anita along and talked like a young, inexperienced uncle. Mark, the middle child, was aloof.”

A fringe existence is the state that Anita knows. She “grew up believing she was behind and would never catch up”. As a little girl she was excluded from the brothers’ games unless they needed a fall guy who could be relied on to weep on cue. “She accreted small-scale possessions to assemble a personality.” Poor Anita was not even capable of gaining admittance to her mother’s old school.

Within a few pages Davey has established a vivid sense of an English middle-class professional family, based somewhere in Hampshire and possessing a bolt-hole in London and a holiday home in France; people who name their dogs Saxon and Viking. Anita’s formidable mother, a solicitor, appears to be “a kind of honorary boy”. But Anita is very feminine, wears fragile, floating garments, and is not without charm, though she certainly lacks guile or luck, and probably both.

There have been many literary portraits of men drifting through life; Anita is a woman who is not so much drifting as drowning. Her CV consists of a series of half-hearted jobs and disastrous relationships. She has a meagre post in an art gallery and owns a south London flat only because her parents bought it for her. From her position of lonely trauma, she now watches as the couples around her begin to breed and multiply, as aware of her solitude as she is. A chance meeting with a man who has always fancied her brings her to Bulgaria on a mission.

She is to photograph properties, not necessarily on the market, for a business portfolio. Laurence of the gooseberry eyes is not exactly a saviour, but he does like her, rather more than is strictly comfortable. And Anita would like to miss her brother Barney’s second wedding.

The mission to Bulgaria never gets going, as Anita suffers a panic attack while trying to park the rental car: “She was somehow freewheeling, but in a way that was highly stressful . . . she tried to unglue her hands but they wouldn’t budge . . . The car interior was caving in . . . The air began to spin, slowly at first then faster, circling like a cat in a diminishing basket.” Anita is trapped in her own inertia.

Davey’s prose is exact and understated, which makes her vivid imagery all the more effective. It is obvious that something more specific than a domineering mother and academic failure has reduced Anita to a nonperson. The details are released slowly, just as they might emerge between people who have had to deal with such an experience. Chance sentences here and there explain a great deal. The tragedy brought Anita to group counselling sessions in which most of the participants have had difficulties with their parents.

Living on the margins dulls the senses yet also enlivens them. Anita watches the counselling facilitator, finding it “distracting that he had trouble with his contact lenses and would abruptly turn to one side, as if about to vomit over the side of the chair. Then his hand would go up to his eye. He grimaced, pulled his bottom eyelid and let the tiny lens fall invisibly into his hand . . . mostly he sat for the rest of the session with the lens perched on his open palm.”

Anita’s observations tend to achieve the bizarre clarity associated with the moments immediately following an accident. Her disconnectedness is as real as is the entire narrative. When she has a brief affair with a man who, more than 20 years earlier, she had fantasised about when he was friendly with her brother, the man, now married with a child, wants to stay in touch. She understands this “connection with the past”.

Davey never idealises her, yet Anita is a kind of ordinary heroine, albeit one who attempts to pass off pictures of English country houses as Bulgarian. “She thought about lost years: not the undocumented time of famous types like Jesus or Shakespeare, but the stretches that people go through . . . because something has gone so wrong that they just mark time, waiting for the pain to go away.”

That pain is evident throughout a most unusual narrative that is nonetheless firmly and convincingly rooted in the ordinary. Davey’s intelligence and prose share the fluid assurance of Justin Cartwright, while this perceptive, engaging little novel says a great deal about human vulnerability, resilience and the passivity that too often goes unnoticed.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent and author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber