Women having it all, including the past and the pain
Legend Press, £8.99
Reviewed by Madeleine Kingsley
Jemma Wayne’s To Dare lured me in, quite unprepared for its twisted brokenness to come. I imagined settling into a novel of charmed NorthWest London and a gentrified terrace where Veronica, she of the pale blue bicycle, the white blonde hair and a bedroom bespeaking airiness and amour, is newly installed with rugby-fit George. She’ll work at a school with green playing fields, small classes and parents who chauffeur their children to after-class Mandarin. How serendipitous it seems that Veronica should find herself teaching the daughter of childhood best friend Sarah, now a barrister and working mum of three. The two of them must, Veronica enthuses, have dinner and catch up on all that’s happened since the summer when they were 12.
But something is out of joint with this have-it-all façade. Distress is more than chic paint décor; it is deep in the fabric of Wayne’s taut-tension tale. Veronica’s miscarriage has left her desperate to conceive — a perhaps remote prospect as the neighbours, Simone and Terry, unemployed tenants of the flat next door, cause nightly, unapologetic, mayhem. There is music, argumentative abuse, a whiff of neglect about their kids.
As for Sarah, an outwardly confident barrister, she is seeing a counsellor following a death in the family and longstanding claustrophobia. If Sarah is, at the very least, ambivalent about Veronica’s overture, it’s because of that pre-pubescent summer when she was enticed out of her good girl’s mindset to fulfil Veronica’s cumulatively brazen “I dare you” game. At 12, Sarah had known she should stand up for what was right, should make good choices, should always lead the way. “These”, Wayne writes, “were practically family mantras”, spoken of in reference to the Holocaust and family members lost there. But there was something liberating about letting those ethics go.
To Dare paints a less overtly Jewish landscape than Wayne’s Chains of Sand, which was part-set in Israel and questioned how Jewish its characters chose to be. Here, her themes are dominance and inequality, involving three women struggling in their own fraught ways to repair youthful damage.
Affluence, Veronica and Sarah discover, cannot buy off the painful past that they suffer no less than impoverished Simone. All three are beset by memories that gathered power through the years they have been unspoken. Wayne shines creative light on the internal world of her characters, fleshing them out with deft dialogue and interplay with the significant others in their lives. Of Sarah, for instance, daughter of a nonbelieving Jew and a “culture-clinging half-Jew,” she writes that, as a Cambridge fresher, Sarah, after her failure at alliance with the hard-drinking or super-sporty set, finds a sense of belonging in David, with whom “it was impossible not to feel secure”.
Wayne’s novel invites us to reflect on what it takes for women to claim such security, to feel complete — and it’s mighty compassionate towards the sometimes shaming mistakes we make in order to become so.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer and therapist