“Something had not come true; the essential part of her life. She had always imagined her children in fleeting scenes and intimations; that was how they had come to her, like snatches of a film.”
The first page of ‘The Blush’ is one of the most affecting openings I’ve ever read. Mrs Allen mourns the children she wanted but wasn’t able to have. Meanwhile, her housekeeper, Mrs Lacey, grumbles about her own children, drowning her sorrows after work in The Horse & Jockey.
One Monday morning, Mrs Lacey is late for work due to morning sickness. Bitter with animosity, Mrs Allen goes for a walk, “trying to disengage her thoughts from Mrs Lacey and her troubles; but unable to.” The dynamic between the two women – the mutual envy – is darkly comic and always compassionate.
In her lifetime, Taylor wrote four collections of stories and twelve novels. Kingsley Amis described her as “one of the best English novelists” and she’s widely regarded as a master of the short story.
Deploying an omniscient point of view, Taylor’s prose roves between characters with such lightness and fluency. How ‘The Blush’ develops is a stroke of genius – this is a story that expands in the reader’s mind.
First published in The New Yorker and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush, Peter Davies, 1958
A Personal Anthology 