One Night in Winter
Allan Massie
The Bodley Head London 1984
stan dostateczny plus, pobiblioteczna
str. 525
format 14 x 22cm
waga 410 g
Dallas Graham, a former writer with one novel long behind him, now runs an antique shop. He has a more successful and still sexy wife who has affairs from time to time and who reacquaints him with Candida, a woman he knew years before. Dallas writes about this past, relating the tangled circumstances of Candida’s involvement in a high profile murder, as if his former self was a character in a novel and he has little connection to him. These passages are interspersed with others set in the contemporaneous world in which Dallas is writing.
In the 60s – there is a reference to what can only be the Torrey Canyon – Dallas falls into the orbit of a well-connected businessman and charismatic womaniser called Fraser Donnelly who is a flouter of conventions of all sorts, with thuggish tendencies. Donnelly has a coterie of hangers-on who appear to varying degrees mesmerised by him. Candida is a friend of Fraser’s much put upon wife Linda and wishes to protect or even free her from his influence.
Dallas interacts with a few of these characters – who curiously spend a lot of time talking about the drawbacks of being Scottish and the merits or otherwise of independence. (Is this a reflection of the fact that the novel was published in Thatcher’s time, before devolution? It does not seem a necessary part of Dallas’s story, except as a philosophical illustration of his (and most Scots?) inability to escape his upbringing.)
Things come to a head on a sojourn to Crete where Donnelly behaves in a way which upsets the local inhabitants and takes coarse delight in informing Candida that he has subsequently buggered Linda.
This incident seems less than startling nowadays – Bridget Jones appeared to accept the act with equanimity in the film. But it is supposed to have occurred in the 60s and attitudes were different then. Candida and Dallas are suitably revulsed.
Partly as a consequence, Dallas begins to spiral loose from Donnelly’s orbit and, one night in winter, after a drinking session, is beaten up by Donnelly who apparently feels scorned. Due to Donnelly’s belligerence, Candida senses Lorna is in danger and asks Dallas to fetch the police, but he is caught drunk-driving and they ignore him. That same night Donnelly is murdered, the trigger being his attempted rape of his latest hanger-on, Caroline. Candida attempts to cover up the crime but is doomed to failure.
The trial which follows fails to bear out Dallas’s perception of the truth of what happened. There is a strange parallel here with The Fanatic which also featured a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.
There is a coda set in the 80s present where Dallas is revealed still to drift through his life.
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