"If she had not been careful": MONICA REDLICH, Cheap Return (1934)

If she had not been careful, she might soon have realised the unflattering truth that Antony had thrown her over for somebody else: however, she was careful, and as soon as the turmoil in her mind began to grow calmer, she settled down to think things out in her accustomed manner.

Jan Forrester's ability to "think things out" is the central focus of Cheap Return, the first novel (of four) by Monica Redlich, who was later the author of several travel-oriented books as well as two children's books I quite enjoyed. But for Jan, "thinking things out" means either romantically justifying whatever she has done or tragically bemoaning how cruel life has been to her.

It's the story of a young girl in London, having just finished at a women's college and taken a flat of her own, who has her first love affair—with, rather unfortunately for her, the young author of a scandalous novel (called Blithe Morass, no less), a twit who still lives with his mother but harbors predictably self-serving fantasies of free love and breaking with bourgeois morality. Jan is young and silly, rather self-absorbed and rather deluded in imagining herself to be special and a cut above her friends. In other words, I fear, a very ordinary girl, or indeed person—I found myself more than once recalling myself at her age, and felt uncomfortable recalling what an arrogant idiot I was too. See these two lines, for example:

A middle-aged couple opposite looked at her, or through her, from time to time, and Jan let them see the kind of books she read.

…

Looking round the table, Jan perceived that she was the best-looking person sitting at it.

I certainly did the former a few times, and if I didn't usually think about being handsome, I definitely thought—without any justifiable reason at all—that I was somehow more sophisticated and interesting than those around me. Sex has the weird distinction of being the thing that every generation thinks they're the first to discover, and the boundaries of sexual morality may very well only exist so that young people can feel naughty and special in overstepping them. It certainly has that effect on Jan.

So I read most of Cheap Return thinking it a strikingly realistic (if not overly charming or entertaining) portrait of being young and stupid, and I still think it's surprisingly effective read that way. I was even praising Redlich to myself for being bold enough to look honestly and realistically at a heroine who has nothing special to recommend her (and a few strikes against her). But by the end (SPOILER ALERT, I should say, as if anyone will have a chance to read it for themselves unless they get to the British Library too!), when Jan has had a good spanking (metaphorically speaking), but has come through with all her self-justifying abilities and delusions intact, having apparently learned nothing, it occurred to me that the whole thing might have been intended as a satire—mocking Jan's silliness in a sort of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes type style. This is pretty strongly supported both by contemporary reviews and by a passage near the end when Jan, freshly dumped and trying to rebuild burnt bridges, decides—for appearances sake—to see a friend's priest for advice and reports on the meeting thus:

As Jan had expected, Father Pyx did not understand. … In other ways, too, he had been very short-sighted. He had counselled her against all sorts of faults which were the very ones she was most free from. Self-deception, for example.

No reader could have reached page 272 of Cheap Return and not laughed at that. But if the book as a whole was meant to be hilarious, it didn't work very well for me. Perhaps because Jan's delusions are too innocent and too common (ahem!) for me to want to mock her too harshly? I do wonder, though, what Redlich's father, the rector of Little Bowden in Leicestershire, thought of her young heroine's tawdry weekend in Brighton! Did he wonder how autobiographical it was?

One thing I did like in Redlich's portrayal of Jan, and that I found unusual for a novel published in 1934, and by a very young female author as well—is that she portrays Jan as apparently quite enjoying the sexual aspect of her relationship with Antony. Not explicitly expressed, of course, but clear enough, and it's refreshing that Redlich didn't feel obligated to make Jan's shameful dallying all bleak and depressing. It sounds as though they had rather a lot of fun, and as she doesn't end up pregnant either (the other plot twist one might have expected), I'd be inclined to say she should be thankful and chalk it all up to experience!

There are two descriptive passages in Cheap Return that I just have to salvage from the sands of time and share with you. Irresistible little glimpses of a lost world. First, a slice of life in the old reading room of the British Museum:

The Museum Reading Room, as usual, was full of strange sights. At each spoke of the great wheel of desks, among all the ordinary, diligent people, sat two or three freaks of such magnitude that even a Fleurallan student could not fail to notice them. An Indian sat in turbanned dignity, reading Elinor Glyn. A very, very fat woman was writing letters with a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica open in front of her. The man who was doing a dictionary was playing snap with his little white cards. Another man, much bearded, had six small flags of various colours pinned on to a card, and was also amusing himself. The free-love couple, bronzed and open-necked, were consulting an A.B.C. Everywhere, impassive, rubber-soled, and slightly vacant, moved the officials with stacks of books. The air was a delicate grey, the dome dim and high: and in the middle of the wheel, the pages of the catalogues flapped and cracked and rustled ceaselessly, as if a gardener were brushing up dead leaves.

And then, the now almost unfathomable luxury of a first class train journey in the 1930s (Mr. and Mrs. Albert Spender are the couple's aliases):

The porter stowed away their bags, and ushered them into a magnificent Pullman. Jan remembered that Antony had said they would do the thing in style, and tried hard to look as though she took her surroundings for granted. They had an armchair each, with a table between them, and the attendant brought her a special footstool. She turned on the little table-lamp to see if it worked: which it did. There was an oldish woman level with her, with much bosom and many pearls upon it. In another seat was an old gentleman with very yellow boots, reading Country Life. There was an important-looking business man, condescending to a much less important-looking one, in the fourth corner; and that, with Mr. and Mrs. Albert Spender, was the lot. Jan felt for Antony's hand under the table. It seemed a long time before the train started. She took a few furtive glances at the hidden lights, and the wall decorations in inlaid wood that made the Pullman so beautiful: then she looked out of the window at the surging, third-class mob on the platform, making little grimaces to show Antony that she realised how dreadful they were.

I see now that I had similarly ambivalent but intrigued feelings about Redlich's third novel, No Love Lost, back in 2019 (see here). I have her second novel, Consenting Party, also published in 1934, on my Kindle from our British Library orgy last year, so I'll be curious to see if I find it peculiar and interesting and not entirely satisfying as well. Or if you prefer Redlich's lighter fair, I wrote about her second children's book, Five Farthings, here—it was on a brainstorming list I did of possibilities for a batch of Furrowed Middlebrow children's titles, and I wish someone would reprint it and Jam Tomorrow as well.