Book description
‘It was all such a dreadful muddle. How could she sleep with Max,
fantasise about Tony (and other men as well), yet also want Elizabeth,
want her more than anyone?’
Beattie’s lover Max has given her a very special birthday present - a
weekend away at England’s most exclusive health farm. But if he had
known what was to happen there, he would have bought her a diamond
instead.
For thirty-year-old Beattie, who has always fancied men, suddenly finds
herself attracted to a woman - a woman twenty years older, cultured,
privileged, a mother of four, a grandmother, even. Her initial
infatuation erupts into a passion which threatens to take over her life
as, desperately, she seeks admission into Elizabeth’s inner sanctum -
her work as a psychotherapist, her family, her very soul.
Beattie’s long-standing ambition to establish herself as a journalist
now becomes part of her obsession: if she can make her name, she will be
more worthy of Elizabeth, more an equal partner. Max’s high status in
the newspaper world means he can provide valuable help and contacts, but
he strongly disapproves of ‘bloody shrinks’ and of Elizabeth in
particular. The bizarre three-cornered relationship becomes increasingly
explosive when Elizabeth falls in love with a man from her distant past,
and the rejected Beattie reacts with murderous rage.
Wendy Perriam’s genius at putting ordinary people into extraordinary
situations is seen to brilliant effect in this intriguing story of
obsession, sexual confusion and, ultimately, redemption, as Beattie
moves beyond jealousy to forgiveness and self-fulfilment. Wendy
Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first
‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she
was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and
also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from
artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between
teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to
publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their
power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for
newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio
programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
