Putney by Sofka Zinovieff
ELISA SEGRAVE
Putney By Sofka Zinovieff Bloomsbury £14.99 Oldie price £11.70 inc p&p
I read this novel with huge enjoyment despite its grim subject: the grooming of a child from the age of nine, and her subsequent seduction when she is 13, by a man in his late twenties, a friend of her parents.
Ralph the seducer is a composer, and Edmund is the father of the girl, Daphne, a writer. Edmund’s wife, Ellie, – short for Greek ‘Eleftheria’ meaning ‘Liberty’ – is a Greek lawyer who has abandoned her City career to help her country get rid of the Colonels, a project that engages most of her attention.
Zinovieff skilfully creates the family’s captivating, bohemian environment in a house and large garden by the river in Putney in the early 1970s. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Ralph has a coup de foudre when he first encounters his underage love object coming down her parents’ staircase: ‘She was dressed in ripped shorts and a striped T-shirt and wore no shoes. Ralph took in the grubby feet, the burnished skin… the muscular limbs and unbrushed, almost black hair. Teasing, moving like mercury, she knew how to disappear before you could get a grip… His intestines juddered. Then, bewilderingly and somewhat shockingly, the beginning of a hard-on.’
Ralph very soon returns to the house, and then plans a series of meetings – which the child assumes are accidental – so as to be alone with her. He buys her carefully chosen presents and writes playful loving notes, nicknaming her ‘Monkey’ and ‘Strawberry’, emphasising the need for secrecy while making it all seem like a game.
Daphne’s parents, involved with their own lives and their own love affairs – they have a semi-open marriage – are unobservant, allowing Ralph to set his trap. In the summer of 1976, he escorts Daphne, now 13, overland to her cousins in Greece. His deflowering arrangements are almost derailed by a death.
Zinovieff is adept at showing the extent of Ralph’s self-deception. He is in denial that he is doing anything wrong and continues this into old age. We meet him in the first chapter, nearly 70, having chemotherapy treatment, soothing himself by recalling idyllic early times with Daphne: ‘A boyish girl who ran and tumbled… narrowed, knowing eyes’.
Anyone who is familiar with the abuse of minors knows that the abuser’s frequent excuse is that the young person wanted it. Ralph continues to self-justify. Like many promiscuous people, he compartmentalises his life, convincing himself that it is fine to love both Daphne and his wife – and other more passing fancies – in different ways. Here he is just before being finally called to account: ‘Our story had nothing to do with abuse. To link them is like pouring filth on flowers, like denying the power of love.’
Paradoxically, it is Ralph’s childishness and lack of responsibility that at first make him appealing to Daphne and, briefly, to her friend Jane, a frequent alibi. There is a brilliant description, told from Jane’s point of view, of an excruciating trip to Brighton when Ralph and Daphne deliberately lose Jane on the pier.
Zinovieff follows her cast through the decades and Jane, a plump, insecure schoolgirl, becomes the most interesting character of all, driving the story in unexpected ways. But all the portraits are convincing. I believed totally in Daphne’s ambivalence towards Ralph, her anger when she thinks about how she would feel if her own adolescent daughter were seduced by a much older man alternating with a lingering affection. As for Ralph – he was a pre-war child with all the restrictions that involved. Was the heady atmosphere of the Sixties and early Seventies in some way responsible for his becoming a predator?
This is only one question thrown up by Putney. Others are about the meaning of ‘liberty’ when applied to sexual behaviour; the justice – or not – of reporting an abuser many years after the event; the degree of damage caused to a child by abuse. It is a terrific novel and I look forward to reading it many more times.