A Christmas Gathering by Anne Perry
This novella features one of my favourite Perry characters, the redoubtable and now quite elderly Vespasia. Happily married to Victor Narraway, retired head of Special Branch, she accompanies him to a country house to take part in a Christmas gathering. She is aware that her husband has an assignment to carry out, but at first she does not know what it is.
The year is approximately 1900, and various nations including the US, Germany and the UK are busily developing submarine technology. In an effort to get the jump on Germany, the British government is planning a subtle form of disinformation, and Victor has agreed to use the experience he’s gleaned over years in the service to receive a package of blueprints from a courier. After returning to London, he will pass it on to a known spy in a way designed to expose the traitor they know is in their midst, but whom they have so far been unable to identify.
As her readers have come to expect from this seasoned writer, the period dialogue is pitch perfect, as are the descriptions of costumes, characters, and settings.
The story focuses on Victor and Vespasia, and I particularly enjoyed a couple of conversations that illuminated their marriage. Impatient with the vacuity of ladies’ dinner chat, Victor says dismissively, “Women talk such rubbish.”
Surprised, Vespasia corrects him, explaining that he is listening only to the words, which don’t matter. “If a man speaks, she tells him, he has something to say. But with a woman…it is the message that matters: I am concerned for you. I like you. I understand…” Watching his face as she explains, she stops to ask, “Do you really not know that?”
Though he feels a brief temptation to lie, he has too much respect for his wife to do so. Instead, he admits “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”
Whereupon she bites back a retort she was on the point of sharing and even keeps “her eyebrows from rising in incredulity.” and adds, “Just like men boasting to each other. I imagine that translates roughly like gorillas beating their chests.” And they laugh.
In the era the novel portrays, the social codes are very different from ours today. But now as then, men largely speak in a different style from women, and the sexes intend, and get, different kinds of meanings from their words.
Victor Narraway loves his wife deeply, and idealizes her as near-perfect. Thus, he does not tell her about a long-ago bad mistake he made for fear it will diminish him in her eyes. But Vespasia has no patience with her husband’s unrealistic attempts to hide his weaknesses. Impatient, she asks him, “Victor, did you suppose I did not know you’ve made errors, mistakes, and perhaps worse? If not, what would we have in common? You might forgive my flaws, but you would never understand them.”
Taking her argument a step further, she asks the profound question in a more general way. “Can you really forgive, if you have no need to be forgiven?”