In her essay collection Central Mischief (1992), Jolley devotes a whole chapter to her mother Grete’s adulterous relationship, grudgingly tolerated by her husband, with the generous Mr Berrington, provider of nice clothes as well as two trips to pre-war Germany, who was tutored by Grete in the German language. She describes how Mr Berrington regularly came to Sunday lunch, then took her mother away for the afternoon, with her father nervously pacing the home until his wife was returned. This curiously permissive relationship lasted for many years until Berrington’s death in 1953; he left Grete a considerable sum of money. ‘I do not maintain that a writer should conceal her private life,’ Jolley wrote in her ominously titled ‘What Sins to Me Unknown Dipped Me in Ink?’ That ink is like Hamlet’s ‘inky cloak’, the trauma of a mother’s adultery. More concretely, it refers to one of the episodes of the German collection of cautionary tales Struwelpeter, in which two boys who mock a black are dipped into ink and made black themselves.

The place is an English Midlands city; the time, 1939–40; the cast, innocent characters all. Henry and Muriel are an unhappily married couple with two young daughters. Muriel is a native Austrian of some refinement who teaches German in night school, Henry a socially inferior maths teacher. Muriel brings home one of her admiring students, the well-placed lawyer Mr Hawthorne. Henry cherishes the friendship of an educated gentleman older than himself, who showers gifts on his wife. What he does not know is that Hawthorne develops a habit of escorting Muriel home after her classes, and kisses are exchanged, always on a bridge over a dark river, the site a symbol for passion and danger. But then Mr H. is posted to London. An invitation arrives for a Covent Garden première of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Henry at once offers to look after the children; Muriel ‘must go with his unrestrained blessings’. The opera becomes a pretext for a tryst, a liberation from the shackles of a conventional marriage, not unlike the triumphant liberation of Florestan by the disguised Leonore.

The lovers are caught in a bombing raid and forced to spend the night in a shelter. Outside, London is given a hammering; German bombs, ejaculating their fiery energies, set all aflame. It is a prefiguration for the lovemaking that is to follow, described by Jolley in exquisitely tender words.

The lovers, alas, have innocently forgotten to take precautions. At first, Henry is full of understanding. He blames himself for having encouraged his wife to be so accommodating. At this point, when we begin to choke on so much innocence, the narrative enters the familiar terrain of marital warfare – after all, ‘there’s a war on’. Henry taunts Muriel with cruel guesses as to the paternity of her bastard child: ‘a regular traveller on the London train? A city man with his black bowler hat? A commercial traveller, more in your style?’ From ‘the mouths of babes’ (the daughters) falls the truth that he has always been fighting with Muriel. Her friend Leonie, something of a dominatrix and an expert on men and sexual matters (I wonder why she has that curious name?), observes that Henry is capable only of ‘low-key sex’ and, like most men, ‘does not like criticism of any sort’. Suddenly, we remember that Henry, recognising his wife’s aroused state when returning home from her teaching, cleverly exploited it for his own gratification. We also remember how keen he was on Mr H.’s gifts to his wife and girls, not being able to provide them himself. In one of the most surprising passages we find Henry getting a massage from his neighbour Mrs Tonks. ‘A quick relief job to clear away the cobwebs?’ she asks in a tone of sexual familiarity, and indeed, moments later, she fingers ‘his vulnerable one-woman-virginity’. After the baby’s arrival, Henry’s jealousy is deflated. Exactly because Muriel’s faux pas has permanent consequences, he cannot but stand by her. Mr H., though he is allowed his visits, is kept at arm’s length. He had his fun, now he has responsibilities – a transformation from ‘lover boy’ to ‘sugar daddy’. The novel ends on a strangely humorous note and a hint at everyone’s new role. During a nappy change, Muriel looks at her baby son’s ‘reliable little penis in the open air’ and thinks of ‘all the responsibility [emphasis mine] attached in readiness’.

 Three epigraphs provide us with clues as to how to read the narrative. One is from Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’, of which we best remember the famous episode in which the poetic persona rashly steals a vessel (a female metaphor ever since the King’s Bible) and for his own pleasure rows her towards a towering mountain symbolising order and authority, and, frightened by its hugeness, returns the boat. Wordsworth’s notion is that there are social limits to individual self-fulfilment. The second, from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, contains a reference to the invisible decline of a family even when outside signs indicate that all is well. Hanno, the last Buddenbrook, is like Henry (note how similar their names sound), a would-be artist with refined sensibilities who lacks the ability for decisive action. The final epigraph is Aschenbach’s definition of the lover and the loved from Mann’s Death in Venice. While there is great beauty in his sentiment, none of the characters of this novel is quite ready for it – Jolley’s comment on the chasm between the ideal and the real? There are also allusions to Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott, Fyodor Dostoevsky and William Shakespeare, the latter incongruously quoted by the vulgar masseuse. Another message: don’t typecast your neighbours. Jolley provides full bibliographical references at the end of her novel, a first.

Also for the first time, Jolley has given us a vivid picture of life during the war: the terrible dreariness of the Midlands; the added inconvenience of food shortages; the blackout and the bullying from self-important officials. No wonder an imprisoned housewife would yearn for some excitement, for an escape from the monotony of it all. It explains even the most shocking detail of this tale, Muriel’s plan to murder the waif Victor, whose makeshift home underneath the bridge has made him a witness to the triweekly smooching with Mr H. The plan, though never carried out and instantly regretted, stands in stark contrast to the narrative’s general tone, which fairly glows with compassion. But aye, there’s the rub: is anyone in this story really innocent? They are, as Jolley sees them, and they are not, in our modern understanding, and that creates terrific tension. All in all, an exceptionally engaging and wonderful novel. Even the cover is gorgeous.

An Innocent Gentleman is Jolley’s fifth novel in only seven years, and she is seventy-eight! Such productivity rivals that of her publishing life of the early 1980s, when we were given five novels and two volumes of short stories in six years. I raise my hat to that great lady of Australian letters.