Smut: Two Unseemly Stories by Alan Bennett
Faber & Faber $29.99
Two middle-aged ladies are central to Alan Bennett's reflective pair of comedies in Smut. Mrs Donaldson is a modest widow who doesn't miss her husband or dull marriage much, but she lives alone and needs to get out, much to the chagrin of her married daughter, who feels her mother should stay home "grieving".
So Mrs D becomes an SP, a Simulated Patient, at a teaching hospital so she can act out illnesses with other SPs to help students practise diagnoses. Thus, on any given day, Mrs D becomes a "character", "a way of not being yourself". To her surprise - and great enjoyment - she's very good at not being herself. Dr Ballantyne, the acerbic instructor, fancies her.
Mrs D is also short of money because her husband's pension is inadequate, so she decides to take in lodgers - two students, Laura and Andy, who were "in every respect but one not to be faulted". But Bennett doesn't say immediately what this one fault is, a ploy used throughout the book where he circumvents crucial details only to come back to them later. You have to keep your wits about you. Another stylistic device he uses here to great effect is the brevity of commas, giving the prose a playful, gliding effect.
So the one thing where Laura and Andy are to be faulted as lodgers is that they fall behind in their rent, and they offer to provide a service "in lieu". Mrs Donaldson's thoughts "were running to housework, gardening and even painting and decorating" - but no. Laura and Andy are thinking of doing what Mrs D does at the hospital, "a demonstration", which proves to be oddly cosy, with a series of unexpected consequences.
Mrs Donaldson is a likeable woman.Mrs Forbes, in the second story, is not. Mother of grown-up Graham, Mrs Forbes can't believe it when her son chooses "to marry someone not nearly as good-looking as himself and even slightly older".
Mrs F's husband, known throughout as Mr Forbes, is the silent type, possibly because no thought is too trivial, snooty or unkind to stream from his wife's lips. But the subject of sex is verboten. When he dares speculate that Graham and his fiancee Betty might have "had it off", Mrs Forbes is outraged, both at the thought that her son might "commit" sex and at her husband for being so crude.
Little does she know that Graham is rampantly gay. "On the night before his wedding Graham was in bed with a youth called, he thought, Gary." Or possibly Trevor. A lorry driver - or possibly something else.
Obviously the honeymoon is going to present problems, not least of which is that Graham cannot perform without being able to see himself in a mirror, none of which is in evidence at their posh period hotel.
What follows that night, and in the months to come, is astonishing in many ways. Gary-Trevor returns: bad news. Betty, his new wife, is resourceful and wily. Mrs Forbes (now senior) resorts to the path trodden by so many bitter, rather stupid older ladies: hypochondria. And Mr Forbes senior finds an unexpected source of pleasure.
I closed this book laughing. It is empathetic yet unlikely, frisky yet clever. I guess it's only slightly filthy - but it's a whole lot of fun.
