No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, by Rosalind Brackenbury

Review by Helen Parry

One of the great mysteries of recent literary history is the relative obscurity of Rosalind Brackenbury. Although her work is extremely good, although she is still writing, her earlier works have slipped out of print and out of mainstream consciousness. 

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch is the fourth of her books from the early 1970s and the first collection of her short stories to be re-issued by the Shetland publisher Michael Walmer. (You can find reviews of her novels A Day to Remember to Forget, A Virtual Image and Into Egypt here too.) This collection was originally published in 1975 by a small press in Leicester as a stapled pamphlet with illustrations by Brackenbury’s then husband, Michael. The fourteen stories showcase Brackenbury’s beautiful prose, supple and sensuous, and her sharp eye for the subtle ways experience confounds us and we confound it. They are a great place to start if you haven’t read any of her work yet. 

Five of the stories are set in France. For many British people of the 1970s, France was a slightly exotic land of culture and the senses, of food, wine and heat. In Brackenbury’s stories, her characters may respond joyfully to the pleasures of France, or may feel threatened by them. In the title story, William and Alice lunch in an expensive restaurant in southern France. Earlier, they had made love in a field of poppies, and then spotted a lizard, ‘green, green like the rest of that day, green and patterned as a fresh courgette, polished and bright’. Both admire him, but Alice ‘stood staring at the place where the lizard had gone, rooted in some deep disappointment.’ Now in the restaurant, surrounded by ‘couples who murmured to each other, forks raised, polished heads delicately forwards like tame birds’, William feels out of place while Alice enjoys the delicious food, the ‘chill and biting wine’. William sees Alice’s pleasure in her meal and fears it and what it might mean:

It was all nearly at an end, it would have to finish […] What would they do? After this, how step back into the ordinary world? […] He saw in the droop of her lips, her regret, that the pleasure ended. Anything he could suggest – a church, a walk, a museum – anything they could afford, would not do […]

And then, more than just this moment is spoiled. Hitherto William has imagined a ‘Good Life’ sort of future for them, where they lived in a cottage and grew their own food, but suddenly he realises this is futile:

Now he saw it; that one could leave things too late. There was a chance; and one looked away, moved, missed the moment; and it was gone. […] All at once he was eager to go home, to bring this holiday, this last fling, this absurd spending of time and money, to its end.

Is he angry because he is uncomfortable? Jealous of Alice? He decides that this voluptuous and beautiful holiday is ‘just a dream’ in which he does not fit. A grey working life under ‘a low sky’ is his lot – and Alice’s, he decides. And, sadly, he wonders ‘if the world outside ever mirrored anybody’s dream[…]’.

Brackenbury’s stories examine young married life, adolescence, and the tension between characters’ dreams and perceptions, and what they experience. Many stories reflect elements of each other – lunch in a restaurant, a meeting with a traveller, the sea – which gives the collection a cohesiveness and a richness. So in ‘The Visitor’, Lyndall returns from Turkey to spend a few days with Alex and Jane, and revitalises their marriage with her glamour and her appreciation of them. In ‘A la montagne’, it’s when James sees Charlotte through the eyes of the older couple they meet that he perceives her clearly. On the other hand, the American traveller in ‘En voyage’ initially strikes twelve-year-old Oliver, stifled by his mother, as liberated and heroic, but soon enough Oliver discovers that he is not so very different from other men. 

Brackenbury writes children and teenagers with a sense of their fragility and sadness. In ‘A Bird Flew In’, Jeannine remembers a day from her childhood she shared with Monica, a girl to whom she pledges best friendship by the canal ‘black as liquorice’. The day begins with a bird flying into her bedroom and terrifying her; it develops into a nightmare which brings her first experiences of sex and death. She sums it up with a memory that is very physical, very felt:

The day on which I first saw sex and death, and on which a bird flew in through my window. At the time, and for so long afterwards, all I felt was the jolt against me of Monica’s crying, and the sharp bones of her chest, and the river that poured simultaneously from both our eyes; and the clear sensation, known for the first time then, of another person’s heart leaping under one’s hand, against one’s self; that certain caged flutter, that beat.

But we already know that the connection between Jeannine and Monica, intense as it is, is not destined to last and the memory invokes pain. Jeannine says, ‘It is easier to see [Monica] as she is now, veins and scuffed wedge heels, wheeling those two in the high wire basket round the co-op; easier than to remember her exactly as she was, that evening.’ Something was glimpsed on that day, and something has been lost. This is the core of these stories: nothing is ever learnt without loss.

Many of the stories, even the lighter ones, unsettle. When Brackenbury pulls further away from consensual reality, as she does in a sequence of three stories, the effect is positively disturbing. ‘Lemmings’ begins with another meal in another restaurant, another couple not entirely at ease with each other. Initially, Helen’s craving for fish seems a sign of pregnancy, Howard’s lies about what he ate for lunch a warning of infidelity. But actually these are all signs of something quite different and strange. Similarly, ‘Revolution’ begins innocently enough with the squire’s open house at the Hall and everyone on their best behaviour, yet takes an unexpected and sinister turn. It’s as if you think you are reading one story, when in fact you are reading another.

The final story, ‘Dans le train’, begins with Brackenbury telling us to ‘Imagine’. She recreates a couchette around us as we hurtle through the French countryside: ‘The image is one of inevitability. Now that you are on the train, that is it, you are locked up and carried along. Imagine.’ Once you’ve started reading a story, you are impelled along by the words on the page. More than that, Brackenbury writes, ‘To imagine something fully is to make it inevitable.’ Even if she, the writer, or you, the reader, suppress it, one day it will leak out into the world. ‘I imagine that something might happen on this train. A train is a good place for a writer to imagine […]’ Although the writer doesn’t yet know what the story will be, it is somewhere there, on the train, waiting. She continues: ‘how am I to break it, how show you the roughness, the inconclusiveness of what happened? How say, this was real; this, because it is past, has been made up?’ I think she’s reminding us here of the truth in fiction, but moreover telling us that imagination is a place that has its own reality, where things happen and don’t happen, where stories are created that change us just as our own experiences in the physical world change us. Her own stories make us see the world afresh and repay many rereadings.

Helen Parry blogs at a gallimaufry.

Rosalind Brackenbury, No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (originally published 1975; new edition Michael Walmer, 2005). 978-1763565678, 248pp., paperback original.

BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)