The Last Resort – Pamela Hansford Johnson (1956)

I had several really tempting looking books that I could have read for the #1956club but I settled for The Last Resort by Pamela Hansford Johnson, she is a very undervalued writer, an excellent writer in fact, though so many of us now know her for her apparent enmity with the writer Elizabeth Taylor. Ironically of course their writing isn’t that dissimilar – certainly readers of one would most likely enjoy the other.

This appears to be a novel about a character we first met in the novel An Impossible Marriage – Christie from that novel is now older and become Christine – there is a passing reference to Ned her first husband, the subject of that earlier novel. However, the two novels do stand alone, and this can be happily read without having read the other.

The Last Resort is a very finely crafted novel, intelligent and often wryly humorous – Pamela Hansford Johnson explores a series of complex and sometimes suffocating relationships over the course of a few years. She has an extraordinarily incisive way of getting to the heart of how people are with one another – they way they feel, they way they talk to one another showing all those hidden little deceits and vanities they harbour.

Christine Hall, a writer and mother in her late thirties is on holiday on the South coast of England, staying at the Moray hotel, while her husband Gerard is in America on business. Here she bumps into her friend Celia Baird who is staying at the Moray with her parents.

“I recognised Celia Baird sitting farouche and neat between her parents. As usual, she was expensively dressed; as usual, only her hat became her. Her other clothes looked too restrained, too elderly, always a little too large. I noticed she was wearing a good deal of jewellery, a pearl necklace and earrings, a pearl and diamond brooch, a large, old fashioned ruby ring. She was looking through a smart magazine with the restless, rather angry air she had when she thought about buying things. I thought how much she had aged.”

Celia’s parents a retired doctor and his wife live permanently at the hotel – one of those hotels we just don’t have any more – a place of sleepy tradition and some suffocation. The Baird parents are wonderful creations – Mrs Baird keeps a cat – strictly against the rules in her cluttered stuffy room, while Mr Baird’s room is more organised and tidy – they are a couple who have really ceased to like one another – but continue to rub along together all the same. Old Dr Baird as he was, is difficult, opinionated, and rude, often savage or dismissive in his dealings with others.  

The Moray is portrayed in fascinating, atmospheric detail, elderly residents doze in the lounge, the bar is almost deserted later in the evening, there’s a feeling everything has been this way for years.

“Christmas dinner was a curious meal.  It was not the custom at the Moray for guests, whether resident or not, to pay much attention to one another.  The Bairds knew all the residents by now, but they hardly ever exchanged more than a good-morning or a remark about the weather.  I myself had commented upon two old ladies who, having lived there for more than ten years, occupied seats on opposite sides of the chimneypiece and had never spoken together in anything resembling friendship.  “But they aren’t relations,” Mrs. Baird said, puzzled, “though they do look a bit alike.  They don’t even know each other.  At dinner on that particular day (it was served at the usual time, at half past seven) a feeble attempt was made at general comradeship.  All through a well-cooked but poorly served meal…well-known solitaries braced themselves to look around, nod and smile blindly at random; elderly married couples, who wanted nothing but to be alone, bobbed quickly at other married couples, while hoping the gesture would not form a precedent; and one or two determined diners even leaned across with their crackers at adjacent tables.”

Celia, impulsive and a little eccentric, spends most of her time in London, coming back and forth to the Moray hotel to see her parents. She has a business in London though pretty much everything is taken care of by her business partner, Celia is one of a larger group of friends who all have Christine at their core – and meeting Celia again after some time, Christine is drawn back into their world. There is architect Eric Aveling, with whom Celia is having an affair and with whom she is desperately in love, Eric’s business partner Junius Evans, and Eric’s dying wife Lois. Lois is now permanently in a nursing home, where both Christine and Celia visit her – both secure in the guilty knowledge, that she knows nothing of Celia and Eric’s relationship. Everyone else knows of the relationship – though not everyone thinks that Eric and Celia should marry, after Lois dies. Junius, discreetly gay, is certainly interfering, and later he mischievously introduces Nancy Sherriff to them all, helping the inevitable change in dynamics that is to come.

Over the course of the novel, Christine returns several times to the Moray, sometimes on her own, sometimes with her husband Gerard and teenage son Mark. The family become favourites with the older Bairds particularly, with Christine often alarmed by Mrs Baird’s manipulation of her middle aged daughter and bemused at the unlikely friendship between her son and old Mr Baird. Christine is the one real, friend to Celia, she is her confidante, and while Christine remains a little colourless – we see everyone through her eyes with clarity.

When the inevitable happens, and Lois dies, the dynamics of the group begins to change. One constant refrain seems to be whether Lois did in fact know about Eric and Celia. Celia and Eric are haunted by the memory of Lois – and their relationship is rocked. Christine can only watch her friend’s obvious turmoil – Pamela Hansford Johnson explores the ravages of love, guilt, and secrecy in her story of these people.

As the years progress, nobody could reasonably predict the outcome of these troubled and fractious relationships.

I doubt this is Pamela Hansford Johnson’s best novel – but I rather loved it – reading it slowly suited the narrative I thought. I still think her Helena trilogy of novels is absolutely masterly.