‘Obsessions’ by Francis Wyndham

“I still dream about the Manor, although I have not seen it for over thirty years and could not have entered it more than a dozen times in the days when I lived nearby.”

If the opening to ‘Obsessions’ leads us to expect a Rebecca-style gothic, then the character introductions that follow it soon put us right. There are the owners of the Manor, Sir Jocelyn Bignall and his wife Lady Bignall, “whose first name, by fateful coincidence, was also Jocelyn”. There is Lady Bignall’s daughter by her first marriage, Madge, who has “married a soldier much older than herself; General Sir Archie Fuller was indeed nearly the same age as Sir Jocelyn.” And then there is the Fuller’s son, “named after his grandmother and therefore confusingly called Jocelyn too.”

They are clowns, in short, but still, by dint of their rank, figures of awe and fascination for our narrator, who is terrified when his near-contemporary, the youngest Jocelyn, invites him to tea. Refusing this first invitation after some hilarious agonising about what excuse to give, he accepts the next one, and thereafter his life becomes forever entwined with theirs. His ambivalence speaks powerfully to how we still think about class in Britain.

First published in the New Review, September 1977. Collected in Mrs Henderson and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1985

‘The Ground Hostess’ by Francis Wyndham

There is a long tradition of playing with the gap between fiction and reality, and the short story form has proved very adept at summoning ghosts and creating weird narratives. In this more light-hearted story, Francis Wyndham takes an existing strand and provides an original and satisfying twist on it. What makes it remarkable though, beyond the narrative, is the perfectly judged, perfectly characterised style.

First published in the London Review of Books, 1 April 1983; reprinted in Mrs Henderson and other stories, Jonathan Cape 1985