There is a complicated back story, efficiently delivered in the first chapter, explaining how Portia’s childhood was lived in an atmosphere of some disgrace and how Thomas and Anna, thoroughly respectable if not noticeably happy, have reluctantly accepted that they must do the right thing and give Portia a home. This well-heeled couple live in some style on the edge of London’s Regent’s Park in a beautiful, immaculate house into which Portia, whose life has been spent shuffling between continental boarding-houses and shabby hotels, does not readily fit. In the first we discover Portia Quayne, a newly orphaned 16-year-old who has been taken in by her much older brother Thomas and his wife, Anna. The novel is divided into three sections: ‘The World’, ‘The Flesh’ and ‘The Devil’. But I went off for the long summer holiday and took her advice I have my Penguin copy fifty years later, and the cover illustration of a young girl wearing an anguished expression still takes me back to those inevitably anguished years. Coaxing us self-absorbed teenagers through the A-level syllabus she was diffident, patient and unassuming, and had it not been for a brief conversation in which she suggested I read The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen, I’m sorry to say I would by now have forgotten her utterly. At boarding school in the late Sixties we had as our English teacher a Miss J.
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