Philip Matthews
Jane Blake, 37, suddenly leaves her mother, with whom she has lived since the death in a car crash of her fiancé thirteen years previously, to try to make a life of her own before it is too late. This action sparks a profound crisis, and she finds that, living alone for the first time, as well as trying to decide what to do with her new freedom, she must re-examine her life in order to make sense of this freedom, that is, discover who she really is. This situation is complicated by the competing claims and demands of her family. Her mother, embittered by a life of restriction, might be glad to see the last of a clinging child or might suffer abandonment by the only person who actually cared for her. Her father, long separated from the family and living in England, might want to help his favourite daughter without interference from his wife or he might want a housekeeper in old age. Her mother’s lover, Jack, might also want to help his favourite in the family, though this rush of attention could be misunderstood, or else he wants rid of her in order to have her mother to himself. Her sister, Helen, with great ambition for her banker husband, might resent the shifting of the burden of caring for their mother on to her, but complications in her own marriage might just as well tempt her to slip into a relation of dependence, now that her mother has more time for her. These familial pressures heighten old resentments and fears and threaten to draw Jane back into a sterile passivity masked as a capacity to endure suffering, but they also draw out the vulnerable love and sympathy that arise from relations of blood and the long-shared fortunes of family life, feelings that give her an autonomous strength and an integrity that surprises her. But the most threatening aspect of the crisis is brought to the fore by the attentions of a young man, Michael, who strives to protect himself from the ghost of his dead mother by becoming a philosopher, guarding empty factories at night
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