Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins
As the novel opens eight-year-old Felicity has disappeared from the home of the Master of an Oxford college in the middle of the night. Though Dee, the temporary nanny, was in London at the time, she is being interviewed by two police officers. Voluntarily but cautiously, she answers them.
At the same time, the reader is party to facts Dee decides not to mention. This tapestry of half- revelations gradually uncovers a picture of dysfunction that applies to Oxford as an institution, to the Master’s family and crucially, to Dee herself.
Born and raised in rural Scotland, this unusual nanny is a talented mathematician who works on proofs in her leisure time. We learn that long ago she earned a place at Oxford. She never took it up. Why?
As narrator Dee feeds out tidbits of information , a deliberate pace encourages readers to try to assess whether and how she might be involved.
Though she keeps them mostly to herself, Dee certainly has sharp opinions about the University. In spite of many years living and worked in Oxford as nanny for a variety of eminent professors, Dee is neither “town” nor “gown.” That doesn’t stop her forming strong opinions about her new employers. Concerned with issues of privilege and status, she neatly sums up Felicity’s father at their first meeting, as “the kind of man — normal for Oxford — who pulls out facts in order to establish dominance.” Nor has she anything good to say about the “tormented Governing Body” of the college with its “rabid individuals,” these “overeducated employees” with their “Machiavellian egos.”
Felicity’s mother has been dead for four years. She sleepwalks and suffers from selective mutism. She speaks to her father but says not a word to her stepmother or anyone else. Deeply sympathetic of the frightened and ignored Felicity, Dee soon achieves rapport with her. Oblivious of his child’s emotional distress, her father carries on with his round of social obligations as a college Master, while his young Danish wife flits back and forth to London, focusing on her business of restoring antique wallpaper.
The nanny’s opinion of Nick as a man driven by power, status, and privilege is confirmed by his reaction to Felicity’s disappearance. He bullies his young wife, yells accusingly at Dee, and “bellows into the phone, marshalling every high-level contact he can think of to ’get this on top of the news.’” An intelligent and contained woman capable of internal irony, Dee sees through his efforts to control her, feeling “almost flattered” that he feels the urge. She’s also curious. Does he feels she has “the potential to become a rogue employee?” Or perhaps he simply senses he’s met his match.
While Felicity’s father and stepmother obsessively check their phones, Dee looks beneath the surface presented on social media: “the perfect family in a photogenic setting that is shorthand for a certain kind of British privilege and status.” Is there something darker going on beneath it? Will the mob turn against them?
She broods on how the press warps and manipulates our sensibilities. After the Master has given his first press conference, the lane fills with “camera crews, reporters, photographers and bystanders with lenses fixed on the windows and doors,” leaving the Master and his wife “trapped behind the blinds for a third day.”
In this gripping and tightly structured novel, Lucy Atkins does more than build believable characters in an interesting setting. She deftly raises questions about society and morality that continue to resonate for this reader.