Sunday, July 21, 2002		Books

Mistress in the house
I. L. Dawra

Marrying the Mistress
by Joanna Trollope, Black Swan, London. Pages 333. £ 4.50

HOW will you react as a wife, as a son, or as a daughter-in-law if you suddenly find one fine morning that the ageing patriarch of the family is hopelessly in love with a girl less than half his age—almost fit to be his daughter? It is this situation woven into a stimulating story by Joanna Trollope, a British novelist. It is the story of an affair between a middle-aged judge and a lady lawyer, who meet by chance during a train journey and take a lasting fancy to each other, notwithstanding the vast difference in their ages and the fact that the judge has been married for 40 years to a "nice-looking, well-kept, largely unassuming woman". He is now 61, has two grown-up sons, and is a grandfather! The girl, whom he adores as the love of his life, is only 31 and she is realistic enough to perceive herself only as his "mistress." She herself defines the term "mistress." Says she: "We sleep together, you pay for some things for me, I keep myself exclusively for you. That's what they do, mistresses!" The main interest of the novel lies in the extraordinary treatment of the turmoil that this affair creates in a well-knit family, which had earlier been living "happily ever after." The judge suddenly decides, after seven years of clandestine romancing, to break the news to his shocked wife and family. Everyone reacts with a sense of revolt and disgust. Sons are smitten with a sense of anguish at the plight of their 61-year-old mother being deserted by her husband for a much younger woman.

Trollope has been successful in bringing out the innermost feelings of each member of the family—big or small—at the unbecoming behaviour of a husband, a father and a grandfather abandoning a wife, a mother and a grandmother after a marriage lasting 40 years, simply because the old man wants to play fair to his mistress with whom his affair was lying in wraps all this while. They are flabbergasted at the intent of the old man "choosing to do right by just one person at the expense of everybody else." The sons would rather prefer to live with a widowed mother than a mother who has been abandoned. Trollope has taken care to make this a perfect family novel giving a constrained description of love scenes between the old man and the girl. The author fills in the romantic blanks with details of day-to-day happenings in the affected family and in building up a good narrative. The novel makes for an interesting reading and is thought-provoking too. Of course the story of an affair between an old judge and a young lady layer has to be told with a conviction and here the author has been pre-eminently successful.