Melanie is recovering from a flare-up of tuberculosis following her pregnancy. She is improving and has been allowed out of her bedroom to rest on a Victorian chaise-longue that she bought from an antique shop before falling ill. Happy, she falls asleep and wakes up 80 years earlier, still on the chaise-longue. From then on, the story becomes frightening and spooky, and doesn’t have a happy ending if I understood properly. I have only read one short story by Marghanita Laski that had a similar weird vibe, and I quite like her writing. The story starts out concrete and then becomes bizarre. Despite making the reader uncomfortable, this is a great book.
“And as she lay there in a fever of disgust at all she was, all she seemed to be, this body, this foul unreal body, began to make its demands on her. I can’t, she cried voicelessly, I can’t. This cannot feel and want and have needs like mine, it would be disgusting beyond everything that these long decayed organs should need what real bodies need. If I let it have needs, it becomes mine. I pass what is decayed and horrible, pass it from a rotten filthy dead dead body. But the need grew and grew, till it became overwhelming, till it became greater than the disgust which, although not itself vanishing, became mingled with disgust of a different kind, the disgust of embarrassment, so often felt yet never diminished, at what must be done.”