Saturday Lunch with the Brownings, by Penelope Mortimer

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings By Penelope Mortimer Daunt Books £9.99

I used to think that John Updike had written the best short stories about marriage going wrong. But Penelope Mortimer may just be better.

With Updike, it’s always adultery that causes the rot to set in, but Mortimer is purer than that: in her stories, it’s the growing apprehension of plain and simple dislike that makes the marriages falter.

In real life, she was herself married for many years to the writer and barrister John Mortimer, who later left her for a younger woman, also called Penelope. The first Mrs Mortimer brought four children into the marriage and then had two more with John Mortimer. In her most successful novel, The

Pumpkin Eater (1962), a nameless wife is married to a successful scriptwriter, who persuades her into an abortion and hysterectomy when she becomes pregnant for the nth time. In hospital, she is visited by the husband of her husband’s mistress, who tells her his wife is pregnant with her husband’s child.

Years later, it came out that John Mortimer had been having an affair with the actress Wendy Craig while Penelope Mortimer was having an abortion, and that Craig was herself pregnant by her lover.

Penelope always mined her life for her stories. She evidently started young. In her memoir, About Time (1979), she describes how her father, a vicar who lost his faith, made passes at her when she was growing up. Three of the best stories here centre around this bizarre character, whose longing for absolutes saw him embrace, variously, Marxism, Methodism, vegetarianism and a nudist colony in Edwardian Eastbourne.

Abuse is not mentioned, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine all sorts of horrors concerning this dreadful, angry and self-important little man.

In the strongest – and oddest – story, The King of Kissingdom, he dresses up in blackface and enacts a strange sort of ceremony, in order to flirt with a mousy little schoolteacher. His young daughter looks on, coolly, a writer in the making.

Of the dozen stories here, five concern unravelling marriages. All but one ( Such a Super Evening) are absolute gems.

Penelope Mortimer is brilliant at describing children; like that other Penelope, Fitzgerald, she is not remotely soppy about them. A daughter is: ‘skinny and spiteful and clever, with a great burden of love inside her, a heart too passionate and heavy for her flimsy little body. Her lank, whitish hair was held back by a pink plastic slide.’

Children are trying, manipulative, bossy. Even fiendish: one little girl throws a live rabbit from a tenth-floor flat in Bayswater. Yet Mortimer is acutely sensible of any unkindness towards them, on the part of their stepfather in particular. Some of the most agonising moments occur when the wife figure observes the casual brutality of her husband to her children, and his favouritism towards his own. The title story charts just this.

In A Second Honeymoon, the couple visit Rome in an attempt to perk up their marriage. In their hotel, the couple ‘moved about the room as languidly and pointlessly as fish in a small tank’.

Much of the trouble seems to be caused simply by the wives getting older. They outgrow their use, becoming ‘incredulous but hopeful, like a woman who, in late middle age, gets her foot trodden on under the table’.

The best-observed of all is I Told You So. A visit to an East Anglian beach begins to go wrong as soon as the wife jumps off a little ledge onto the sand: ‘Her jump irritated and saddened him. They weren’t children, to be throwing their bodies carelessly about as if they were of no value. They weren’t young, for God’s sake.’

Later, when the children have annoyed the husband by disobeying him, the wife thinks, ‘ “Oh Geoffrey…” She felt trapped with him on the huge beach. Could it be possible that, even here, with the great light sky and the sea that stretched, she vaguely believed, to Russia, he could make her feel as though they were in a small city room – doorless, windowless, the only air in the warm, wasted breath of their quarrelling? She turned as though to ask him this.

‘He mistook her look of despair for love, for contrition at making him so unhappy. He grabbed at her arm. “Laura,” he said.’

Ouch.