'The Old Ladies' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

The prolific and popular author and novelist Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) knew something about cathedral cities and what went on behind the pleasant façades. The son of an Anglican priest who later became a bishop, Walpole had been sent to schools in Canterbury and Durham, cities which boasted ancient and magnificent cathedrals, and Truro, where the cathedral, newly designed in a soaring authentic gothic style, was under construction. The years Walpole spent living in cathedral cities were not forgotten – he went on to create one of his own.

Many of Walpole’s novels are loosely connected: not intended to be read in any specific order but including recurring characters and settings. Among these were four novels that, in the ‘by the same author’ listing at the front of his books, are grouped under the heading ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’. Set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester – based on Truro and used in other novels and short stories – the first, The Cathedral, appeared in 1922. The second, The Old Ladies, was first published one hundred years ago in October 1924.

Although there are glimpses of Polchester Cathedral and the charismatic Archdeacon Brandon, The Old Ladies is true to its title and concerns three elderly women whom circumstance has brought to meagre rented rooms on the top floor of a ‘windy, creaky, rain-bitten’ tumbledown house in Pontippy Square (1). Walpole describes the background and bleak situation of each of the ‘old ladies’ in some detail: their characters, which interweave with each other due to their proximity, contrast greatly. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer have one thing in common: their crippling genteel poverty. Forced to live on rapidly declining incomes, their lives are ones of constant retrenchment and quiet desperation. Mrs Payne, however, is able to live within the limits of her income. Her ‘lazy indifference’ to anything but her craving for sweets and cake is some protection from the dismal world of the other two women.

Lucy Amorest is a widow who longs to be reunited with her son, who emigrated to the United States but has not written for a long time. Her cousin also lives in Polchester; wealthy but in declining health, he taunts her with hints of the fortune he might leave. May Beringer has no-one but her little dog, Pip – and a piece of red amber carved into a dragon, a gift from her only true friend, now estranged. Her money will only last a few more months. Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer are rather pinched, timid women, seeking only to endure in a society that, without admitting it, does not need them or care whether they live or die. In contrast, Agatha Payne, another widow, exploits the good nature of the other ladies as weakness and is in effect a ‘psychic vampire’. A ‘large, stout, and shapeless woman’ (29), she has a vitality and strength partly fortified by an overbearing but outwardly polite domination of the other two. Although Mrs Payne is physically healthy, the housekeeper feels it would be no ‘wonder if she went queer in the ’ead any day’ (53). She finds a new focus in life when she notices, and instantly covets, Miss Beringer’s prize possession: ‘ . . . she saw, straight before her, as though it had been placed there for her especial glory, the heart and centre of all the colour of the world’ (92). From that moment Mrs Payne is determined to possess the piece of amber – by any means.

Against the background of Mrs Amorest and Miss Beringer’s approaching destitution, the novel describes the mental contest for possession of the amber. Mrs Payne’s manner to Miss Beringer is politely intimidating as she threatens never to leave Miss Beringer alone unless she is given the amber. But the psychological battle (and is it only a ‘psychological’ one?) is turned after Miss Beringer’s death, when Mrs Payne declares that she is being haunted. She refuses to believe that Miss Beringer is dead, finally rejecting Mrs Amorest’s explanations and sympathy: ‘You can’t help me! It's between us – and I’ll beat her yet!’ (303).

Hugh Walpole’s ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ may be compared to the Barsetshire novels of Anthony Trollope – especially when they take place in or near the cathedral city and explore the machinations of the clergy and other inhabitants of the cathedral close and city. As born storytellers, both men can verge on the melodramatic or sensational, but if Walpole is a Trollope, he is one gone ‘gothic’. The Old Ladies has a constant dense and claustrophobic atmosphere of being enclosed, walled away from the world: most of the story unfolds indoors – rooms in the decaying house in Pontippy Square, or the sickroom of Mrs Amorest’s cousin. The gothic is nearly always psychological rather than supernatural – although Walpole wrote much explicitly supernatural fiction too, mainly in its ideal short story form (exemplified by the collection All Souls’ Night). The novels are works of realism, set in the real world, but allowing for instances of bizarre intrusion: psychological or possibly, from the character’s point of view, supernatural.

Although the return of Brand, Mrs Amorest’s son, ensures that one of the women will end her days in peace and security, her closing words are hesitant: “Is it right, do you think, to be so happy?” Under the circumstances, perhaps one out of three was not such a bad result.

 (John Howard)