Imogen Gresham is 37, her powerful lawyer husband, Evelyn Gresham is 52. He is everything she desires and admires, with his handsome chiseled features, at the height of his masculine powers in her eyes, successful, accomplished and virile. The reader, however, gets another view of him, seeing a domineering alpha male who is entirely self-serving and self-absorbed, although he can be charming if he chooses. Imogen, on the other hand, is emotional, sentimental, loving old things for the wear on them, history which shows in cracks on mugs or missing silver finishes on platters. She is afraid to stand up to him for fear of upsetting the tranquility of his home life, a life which has unfortunately come to include their eleven year old son treating her just as his father does. At the point where we intersect with her, she has become effete and useless, unable to drive or to engage in the usual rural pastimes of hunting and fishing, purposeless and inept. She is not, however, unintelligent. Rather the opposite. It is just not a kind of intelligence which her husband appreciates or understands.

Imogen has her admirers, some fervent, and loyal close friends, partly because she is beautiful, gentle and considerate but also because those people aren't particularly powerhouse types themselves. But we see early on in the book that she does not have her husband's deep love or admiration because she lacks certain qualities which their frumpier middle-aged neighbour, Blanche Silcox, has in spades. Enter the femme fatale in a most unlikely guise of tweeds, portly middle and bad hats.

This is the tale of the dissolution of a marriage and the start of an affair, held up to the light and put under the microscope by Elizabeth Jenkins somewhat in the manner of Barbara Pym (although without the same depth of wry wit). Quietly and inevitably, we watch everything unravel, knowing what the ending will be but unable to stop watching the impending train crash. Only it never really is a crash because everyone is too civilised and genteel for that. I was interested to read in the Afterword that the book was somewhat autobiographical, as Jenkins sought to write out a similar betrayal in her own life.

There are quirky neighbours in the form of the Leepers, whose siren sister Zenobia becomes the representation for the most extreme manifestation of female sensuality. Jenkins is looking at what makes relationships tick, playing with characters like Zenobia to help Imogen understand what has happened to her marriage, to herself. Woven throughout the story is Gavin Gresham's friend Tim Leeper. Tim is, as best as I can understand him, the thing with feathers which perches in the soul, an alter image of Imogen herself, her shadow which slides and bends along walls.

This is excellent writing, which drew me in and kept my interest to the end. I don't know if it would appeal to an alpha male like Evelyn Gresham, however.

Imogen Gresham is the old-fashioned kind of 'ideal wife' - beautiful, loving, submissive, and on the face of it the perfect wife for her older husband, the successful barrister Evelyn Gresham. They have a large, elegant home and an 11-year-old son, and life seems perfect.

Their near neighbour is Blanche Silcox, an inelegant tweed-wearing woman of fifty, who enjoys fishing and horse-riding, and drives a Rolls Royce. At first, Imogen cannot believe that Blanche is any kind of threat to her marriage. But as Imogen's friend Paul points out, 'Do you know what men fall in love with?' and Imogen begins to question her assumptions.

At the start of their marriage, Evelyn was attracted to Imogen's femininity, but at heart he is a man's man. What he sees in Blanche - apart from shared interests - is a similar no-nonsense kind of worldview. Both strong personalities, they begin to shut Imogen out, to the point where she finally must realise the truth about their relationship.

I think this novel would be quite tedious if Imogen was no more than the paragon of stereotypical femininity. However, although she is not brilliant, and the reader might wish she took a firmer line with her pompous husband, she is neither stupid nor small-minded. Jenkins does not palm the reader off with a romantic happy ending, but she does allow the reader to see Imogen's generosity and loving spirit. Her husband might not appreciate her, but her friends do. I think most readers will be left with the feeling that Imogen is better off without a repressive husband who takes her entirely for granted. [January 2008] ( )