Dave's Book Blog: "The Weather in the Streets" by Rosamond Lehmann

A bravura literary performance.

This is a sequel to Invitation to the Waltz. Ten years have passed and Olivia and Kate are married, although Kate is now the mother of four children while Olivia has separated from her husband and is living in London, eking out an existence through part-time work for a photographer. Called home because of her sick father, she meets Rollo on the train, son of the posh family in the next village, on whom Olivia had a crush. He is married too, nevertheless they begin an affair. This book chronicles their infatuation and its consequences.

And who is Simon? Why does he creep into Olivia's thoughts at key moments?

But what really sets this book apart is not what is written but how it is written. It's all in the past tense and the point of view is almost always Olivia's (although we are allowed glimpses of her sister's thoughts, at least in section one).

Parts one, three and four are written in the third person, although there are moments when interior monologue pops in. To start with this is most often as a sort of aside after a snippet of dialogue:

"'Well ...' She hesitated ... Oh, yes! ... Memory flashed mal a propos, all out of key ... Far back, in the early love-making days with Ivor: so far away, so almost unremembered. And he'd cried too, had needed to be comforted ... But that was to be buried ..." (1.5)

"'I think it will be gay,' she said meekly. ... Nothing you did or conceived of could ever be gay; and do your children know yet they hate you?" (1.5)

Interior monologue can even slip into full blown stream of consciousness and back again: “How dark, I can't find the road; the wind, what a wind, a gale, I hadn't noticed; the wind from the Atlantic, the equinoctial gale. When it died down for a moment a sound came after it like giant tumbrils rolling and snarling in cabins in the sky.” (4.1)

Part two, the only section unchaptered, is almost entirely Olivia's first person interior monologue with very little intrusion from the narrator (although it starts “It was then the time began when there wasn't any time.” which could be narrative or memory).

Throughout, the author also uses sentence fragments and punctuation for effect. For example: “Rollo must have been mad to - Think of the risk! You might at least ... The scandal! Did you ever think of that - for him? What right have you - even if you're prepared to sacrifice your own reputation - to endanger - other people's?” (3.4) creates the impression that Lady Spencer is almost lost for words ... although what she is saying is designed to control, to manipulate, and is cruelly one-sided. These effects can also create ambiguity (as they do in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) such as towards the end, when she is talking about Simon.

She also uses fractured narrative in section two and particularly section three, creating a discursive feel that reminded me of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier which made me question the reliability of Olivia as narrator. On the whole, I feel that she is reliable, at least when it comes to what happens, but that she is confused in her attitude towards Rollo. I suspect some readers see him as a cad, especially given his treatment of Olivia towards the end. There is the always vexed question of social class. Lady Spencer is certainly ready to turn from friend to foe when her son's respectability is threatened. In the last book, Olivia has been in awe of Rollo, the 'son of the big house', and this is how she views him at the start, though she is now a little more worldly-wise, recognising that he is “agreeable, easy-mannered, with a kind of class-flavour to his flirtatiousness and wit; friendly: and then not friendly: obstinate, on his guard ...” (2.1); the key phrase here is 'class-flavour'. But for all that she lives in London hand-to-mouth, Olivia is scarcely lower-class. She has a private income and the safety-net of her family, with servants, to fall back on; she can afford to play with employment as a photographer's assistant. When they are in the dilapidated Oxfordshire country inn, at the crisis in their relationship, he describes the publican as a “bloody woman ... God, these British innkeepers ...” and you feel Olivia's instinctive distaste for these words. But immediately afterwards, the narrator says: “Presently a large plump country wench in bedraggled black uniform and cap appeared from another door with cigarettes. She knelt down, put a match to the sticks, blew on it, her hips and haunches swelling out immense as she bent forward.” (4.1) The disdain is inherent in the choice of the words ‘wench’ and ‘bedraggled’ and the repetition of adjectives describing the lady as overweight: ‘large’, ‘plump’ and ‘immense’. It seems to me that Olivia's irritation at Rollo's snobbishness is hypocritical to say the least. As for his caddishness ... I think she entered their relationship with her eyes wide open.

The weather, whether in the streets or not,
There are passages of unbelievably wonderful description in which the weather is the ultimate in sympathetic fallacy. For example, shortly before Olivia meets a man on a train: “Out of the station, through gradually thinning fog-banks, away from London. Lentil, saffron, fawn were left behind. A grubby jaeger shroud lay over the first suburbs; but then the woollen day clarified, and hoardings, factory buildings, the canal with its barges, the white-boled orchards, the cattle and willows and flat green fields loomed secretively, enclosed within a transparency like drenched indigo muslin. The sky's amorphous material began to quilt, then to split, to shred away; here and there a ghost of blue breeze in the vaporous upper rifts, and the air stood flushed with a luminous essence, a soft indirect suffusion from the yet undeclared sun. It would be fine. My favourite weather.” (1.1)

Time and again, the weather seems to control the plot. At the start of the story, her dad has caught pneumonia: “He would go out in that bitter east wind, and he caught cold, and then his temperature went up so very suddenly.” (1.1) At a key turning point, the weather changes. Before: “What a day - dark, sodden, ruined with rain since early morning. ... this infinite thick soup of rain ...” (2.1) After: “The rain had stopped, the day was dark, grey, cold and gusty - one or two tattered blue holes blown into the sky for a moment, then over-blown again.” (2.1) At the end, bang on time: “That night, just before dawn, the thunderstorm broke.” (2.1) Just before her transformative interview with Lady Spencer: “A bad afternoon. The park was airless. The sky was clouding from the west, saffron-tinged: the fine spell would have broken before night. There would be thunder and then the rain would come down.” (3.4)

A few more examples of the weather:

“Beyond the glass casing I was in, was the weather, were the winter streets in rain, wind, fog, in the fine frosty days and nights, the mild, damp grey ones.” (2.1)
“May was wet and cold, June sunny from end to end ... In May the hawthorn hedge was soaking; after a windy night the elm flowers came down in drifted heaps at the end of the garden. ... In May there was a frost, it made the evening strange ... After that frost, the weather softened out, the warm days came.” (2.1)
“The transfiguring light was gone, and it was dark and cold now, blowing up for rain.” (4.1)

There are other, wonderful descriptions:

“The smutty window, the brown street blighted with noise and rain; the stained walls; the smell of geyser, of cheese going stale in the cupboard, of my hands smelling of the washing-up bowl, nails always dirty, breaking; the figures on the stairs, coming and going drably, murmured to reluctantly, shunned at the door of the communal, dread, shameful WC on the middle landing.” (1.2)
Dinner party chit-chat: “Across the table they began to apply a peaceful shuttle between the three of them, renewing, re-enforcing, patching over rents and frayed places with old serviceable thread.” (1.4)
“A corridor lined obscurely with supernumerary specimens of family portraiture.” (1.5)
“It was one of those country-town hotels with rambling, uneven passages and shallow staircases winding onto broad landings, with palms in stands, and a coloured print of King Edward, and sets of old prints and warming pans hung up along the passages and stairs, and objects of china and Indian brass and carved wood by the score on every available surface, and stuffed birds and fish in cases and pampas in giant vases, and dark-brown and olive paint, and a smell of hotel everywhere - dust and beer and cheese, and old carpets and polish ...” (2.1)
“Two swans sailed out around the bend heading for the middle of the river, taking the full, living and dying, light-and-wind-shaken, mid-stream current with round full breasts of peace.” (4.1)

And what of Simon?

Simon

Simon, a character the reader never meets but only hears about, is largely absent in the early part of the book. In section two, when Olivia is in the throes of her affair, blinded by love, he pops up here and there as a sort of counter-balance to Rollo. “It may have been I wanted to assure myself I was in between still, not choosing more patently than I must against Simon ... not that Simon would have ever have known or ever minded in the least whom I chose, what I did ... how surprised he'd be to know he's a sort of mystical private touchstone to me of - of some perfectly indefinite indefinable kind of behaviour ... spiritual, if the word can be whispered ...” And a page later: “I suppose Simon's a happy person; not from trying to be - he never tries to be or do anything ... An inherent quality - a kind of unconscious living at the centre, a magnetism without aim or intellectual pretension ... Simon seems to cause an extremely delicate electric current to flow between people when he's there; they're all drawn in, but he's just one degree removed from it all, he doesn't need anything from anybody ... He’s like Radox bath salts, diffusing oxygen, stimulating and refreshing ... Dear Simon.” (2.1)

At the midway turning point, as Olivia, still in the thick of the affair, is crying, properly realising for the first time what Rollo’s being married will mean for her, he says that he is afraid of losing her. And when she laughs and says that won’t happen he tells her that he is jealous of “That Simon you’re always talking about” and she replies “I could never persuade Simon to want to marry me, I’m afraid.” (2.1)

As she falls out of love, he crops up again: “In contrast with his usual well groomed appearance he [Rollo] looked startlingly disheveled. Everything's comparative: Simon's always disheveled.” (4.1)

Then suddenly, in 4.4, she talks to one of her art-friends about Simon and the sentences become hugely fractured and ambiguous:

“He separated himself ... long ago. I don't see what went wrong, but he chose the other thing. That's why he'd never have been a great man - only a person of genius. There was always something hectic about him, wasn't there? ... hunted. To me he was like a being rapt away in an endless feverish dream. ... He was more was to know him. If you tried to get near him he hated you ... as I found out. He was very dangerous - surely you could see that ... He was only interested in being loved...”

“His eyes brilliant, vacant ( with that look that made people say, did he drug? - but he didn't), checked again, thwarted in his flight.”
“Compassion itself ...? Was that why he released that warning, delicate current of happy stimulus? - lent people money that would never be paid back? - clowned, as he sometimes did, in that inimitable way? - and all the rest?” (4.4)
“He made me swear to unthink ... that Simon was the sacrifice ... Meaning all the guilt and corruption, the sickness ... Dad, Rollo ... me ... we didn't die - not us: it was Simon, the innocent one ...” (4.4)

It seems that Simon is a modern-day Jesus.

Other selected quotes:

“My mother-in-law. ... Give her a really large scale disaster in the morning papers and she's renewed like that bird. Not to speak of private croakings and prognostications of doom.” (1.5) Is the speaker muddling the phoenix and the raven?
“I like what's uncertain - what's imperfect. I like what - what breaks out behind the features and is suddenly there and gone again. I like a face to warm up and expand, and collapse, and be different every day and night and from every angle ...” (1.5)
“Do your children know yet they hate you?” (1.5)
“‘Was it? That was fun, that evening. ...’ Catching each other's eye, not knowing whether to laugh or what, looking away again ... Fun indeed!” (2.1)
“Thinking how one’s alone again directly afterwards.” (2.1) ie after sex.
“All the junk around us, the prints, the marble busts, oil-paintings, the negress with the lamp, the plush, the rather murky yellow light, the general stuffiness - all this made an atmosphere of a sort of sensuality and romantic titillation - the kind that looks and lingers in curiosity shops and old-fashioned music halls; the harsh, dark, intimate exhalation of hundreds of people's indoor objects and sensations, unaired, choked up pell-mell for years with no outlet ...”
“If my wife had a lover I hope to God she wouldn't see fit to tell me so. I call this confession and all-above-board business indecent.” (2.1)
“There's no solution for a situation like ours. Whatever we try out, the clock defeats us, complacently advancing acknowledged claims, sure of our subservience, our docility.” (2.1)
“We don't live by lakes and under clipped chestnuts, but in the streets where the eyes, ambushed, come out on stalks as we pass; in the illicit rooms where eyes are glued to keyholes.” (4.1) This is a tricky little passage but it might justify the title: the Weather in the Streets.
“It does get late early and no mistake, as the saying goes.” (4.1)
“I don't care for antiques myself - can't see the point. You don't go to make a show of a lot of senile old crocks in bath chairs, so why anything else old?” (4.1)
“We are born, we die entirely alone.” (4.1)
“I loathe the young ... Selfish, silly little beasts. I'm damned if I see why they should make one feel inferior.” (4.2)

References to other literary works:

“To be alone, sick, in London in this dry, sterile, burnt-out end of summer, was to be abandoned in a pestilence-stricken town; was to live in a third-class waiting-room at a disused terminus among stains and smells, odds and ends of refuse and decay.” (3.3) This reminded me of T S Eliot. The phrase ‘burnt-out ends of smoky days’ was in his Prelude written in 1910 or 1911; the phrase ‘dry sterile thunder without rain’ comes from The Waste Land (1922) In 1936, T S Eliot would have been working in London (at Faber & Faber, a rival publisher to Lehmann’s William Collins). I imagine they met.

She describes one character as looking “how I always imagined Dr Fell” (3.8) I presume this is Dr Gideon Fell, the sleuth in a series of novels by John Dickson Carr, who is described as “a corpulent man with a moustache who wears a cape and a shovel hat and walks with a cane”; he first appeared in print in 1933 (Hag’s Nook) and, most famously, in 1935 in The Hollow Man, both of which would have been best-sellers while this book was being incubated and written.

In the introduction to the Virago edition, Carmen Callil suggests this book is "our Bridget Jones's Diary". I suspect she is thinking of the subject matter. In terms of literary style, The Weather in the Streets is much closer to Virginia Woolf, eg To The Lighthouse

May 2025; 372 pages

First published by William Collins in 1936.

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2007.