Across the Common – Elizabeth Berridge (1964) 186 pages
Back in 2023, I started off Novella a Day in May with Elizabeth Berridge’s The Story of Stanley Brent. I ended the post by saying I had Across the Common in the TBR and maybe I’d get to it later in the month 😀 Just two short years later…
Across the Common is told from the point of view of Louisa as she returns to her suburban childhood home, after leaving her artist husband Max.
“My grandfather had built the house in the eighties. It was tall and big and excelled in useless crenellations; in the front an immense stretch of holly hedge gave the house its name.”
Her two aunts, Seraphina and Rosa, still live in this Gothic pile and they are soon to be joined by Aunt Cissie:
“Since the war, which had robbed her of her second husband and her only son, something had shifted in her. A new, unbalanced cynicism revealed itself by a sarcastic twist of the mouth, a semiquaver of a shrug.”
Quite a contrast to Aunt Seraphina:
“it was all in her sigh: her lost opportunities for adventure, for love, for self-expression. She was more of a child than I had ever been, and I loved her again for her wild and illogical longings, her aching desire for drama.”
They live in an insular world. Cissie had left, so her worldliness means she wants a television on her return, but otherwise the aunts are preserved in a world long gone. The Hollies has always existed as a refuge for the women in the family, such as Louisa’s grandmother:
“She had merely withdrawn into the world of The Hollies, where unpleasant things like passion and unworthy emotions and reality were kept out by the high walls, lapped by the half tamed acres of the common.”
Louisa initially returned to her aunts for their familiarity and the need she feels to unravel who she is, based on experiences in her past which led to her leaving:
“I only wanted to remember it in order to remember something else, like turning the cut-glass top of a decanter bottle in the sun, to catch the sudden prismatic dazzle. This something lay with the aunts; it was an unease that spoiled relationships, a strange Braithwaite ambiance that lay like fallout over the family.”
However, she begins to realise that her past may be more complex than she realised, and there are secrets within the family to understand. The Gothic atmosphere is heightened when a solicitor passes on a sinister warning in a letter from her long-deceased father:
“Don’t, for your own sake, be misled by the cultivated exteriors of your aunts. They can smother, they can crush, they can exterminate.”
There’s also the fact that Louisa’s aunts are among the few people her husband struggles to tolerate:
“It was the Braithwaites, my mother’s family, who came outside Max’s indulgence. They filled him with a kind of detached horror. He was ruthless about them. Is ruthless. For he blames them for everything awry in me.”
Yet they are never caricatures of eccentric older women, but carefully drawn and fully realised. All three aunts were fabulous creations.
Berridge builds an atmosphere that feels both stifling and menacing, without being overtly threatening or devoid of love. There is humour here too, and I particularly enjoyed Aunt Seraphina’s habit of pilfering plant cuttings from Regent’s Park.
The Big Family Mystery is believable, providing enough plot to draw the story along, with Louisa’s growing understanding of her family history and herself being well-paced.
I have another Berridge in the TBR so hopefully it won’t take me two more years to get to it! She is so accomplished and her idiosyncratic characterisation is a joy.
“The Braithwaite way of life was a kind of anarchy that could scarcely be contained within one house.”
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