5 - Hester Lilly

Summary

Early in Hester Lilly (1954), the middle-aged Muriel Evans, sitting at her tapestry and adjusting a rose pattern with silk highlights, remarks: ‘I always leave the background till last … So dull, going on and on with the same colour’ (HL 14). She has just told Hester, her husband Robert's orphaned young cousin, who has come to live with them at the school where Robert is headmaster, ‘Of course, you are in love with Robert’ (HL 8). Muriel, wrenched with jealousy of the younger woman, has planned what she hopes will be an annihilating counter-attack. She has chosen the moment, arranging herself to appear at her most commanding, her pink dress flowing down to the red carpet, her white hands working the wool, as poised and immaculate as one of her treasured Dresden figurines. The entire scene, the devastating ‘of course’, Muriel's posture, the way she throws in casual irrelevancies like the remark about her weaving habits, is intended to convey the message that she knows everything there is to know, that in her wisdom and graciousness she takes it all lightly, that no one could conceivably regard Hester as a serious rival, that the young girl's infatuation with an older man is just an ordinary part of growing up, and that the contrast is all too obvious between her own sophisticated elegance and Hester's gaucheness and lack of self-control. Yet even in the midst of Muriel's expert performance, some unguarded part of her brain is touching on the real confrontation still to come, with the expanse of monochrome around and behind; the emptiness at the back of it all, from which her brilliantly-turned foreground designs cannot completely distract her, and which may even be made more louringly visible by them.

Hester Lilly, a novella of some eighty pages, brings together all the most prominent themes of Taylor's work, and everything that is most powerful and distinctive in her treatment of them. There is the antagonism between an older and a younger woman; the terror of being supplanted; old age, loneliness, repetition and habit; living in a house not properly one's own; a sudden crisis of identity, the dream of transformation - above all, the breaking down of defences, the raw exposure of crumbling and growing: crumbling, mostly.