‘Safer Than Houses’ by Frances Fyfield

Published by Little Brown. 6 October 2005.

ISBN 0-316-72764-4

Henry Brett, a neurotic, inhibited, fifty-five-year-old bachelor, has a problem. He has a beautiful ground floor flat in Bloomsbury, exquisitely decorated and furnished, where he lives the solitary ascetic life that suits him. But upstairs is the neighbour from hell; noisy, interfering, inconsiderate Mrs Celia Hornby. So he turns to an old friend, Mrs Dulcie Mathewson, and asks for help.

Sarah Fortune (a self-styled ‘tart’ but more of a poule de luxe), the heroine of this particular series, also has a problem. She too has a beautiful flat, this time in Marylebone, left to her by a former lover, now deceased. She has been receiving anonymous letters, threatening in tone, accusing her of having obtained the flat for sexual favours, saying she has no right to it. She also knows Dulcie who introduces her to Henry and they decide to swap flats to see if their respective problems will go away.

This novel is full of connections, just as London is, as those who live there know very well. Sarah’s friend Eleanor is a masseuse and one of her clients is Mrs Hornby. Eleanor can’t stand Mrs Hornby, she finds her physically repulsive, as much for her personality as her appearance, but she can’t afford to turn her away. Sarah’s friend and lover Alan is also one of Eleanor’s clients. Alan is in charge of security at the nearby Belvedere Hotel. But he has another career that Sarah doesn’t know about; he is a professional arsonist, setting fire to buildings whose owners would like, for a variety of reasons, to have gutted. And he has a client, a mysterious J.T., a very persistent young man, who wants Alan to use his skills to set a small, not-too-destructive fire in a flat where a certain young woman, who J.T. describes as a whore, lives - a flat to which he asserts he has more right than she . . . connections, connections.

Henry moves into Sarah’s flat; he likes it, especially the ‘safe room’ where he feels really secure, protected from all his imaginary fears. Sarah moves into Henry’s flat, tries to befriend Mrs Hornby but finds this impossible, yet likes being close to where Alan works. Frances Fyfield depicts Bloomsbury, the background to the story, as being a most attractive locale, which it is: a little known part of London between Kings Cross and the British Museum, full of elegant Georgian squares, home to learned institutions, surrounded by quiet, rather shabby streets. The linking theme is fire: the havoc and destruction wrought by fire, the danger of injury and death to people . . . so easy to set, so difficult, once set, to control: ‘Fire altered everything, even where it had not touched. It was contamination.’

Fans of Frances Fyfield’s Sarah Fortune novels will know that they are moral fables rather than strictly realistic. The good people are signposted: Sarah bestows her favours as much from kindness as for cash and she seems never to think an unkind thought or to perform an ungenerous action; Dulcie, seeming arrogance and bossiness, is offset by her magnificent, larger-than-life personality; Alan, for all his East End persona and his criminality, is described as ‘an aristocrat of a sort’. The bad people - the miserable and malevolent Mrs Hornby, the resentful, almost demented, J.T. - have no redeeming features. And, as in the best fables, the good are rewarded and the bad punished.

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Radmila May

Other books by Frances Fyfield: A Question of Guilt, Shadows on the Mirror, Trial by Fire, Deep Sleep, Shadow Play, Perfectly Pure and Good, A Clear Conscience, Without Consent, Blind Date, Staring at the Light, Undercurrents, The Nature of the Beast, Seeking Sanctuary, Looking Down; writing as Frances Hegarty: The Playroom, Half Light, Let’s Dance.

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