JP Delaney on Why are houses so often the heroes?

There are, obviously, lots of good books that aren’t about houses. But, my goodness, there are even more that are. Brideshead, Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice, Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love, Top Withins Farm in Wuthering Heights, Green Gables, Hill House… There’s something about making a house central to a story that brings together landscape, history, and the personality of the owners, past and present – all useful elements for psychological fiction, in particular. 

Everyone’s favourite fictional house is Manderley in Rebecca, famously based – at least, in terms of its setting – on Menabilly in Cornwall. Du Maurier first stumbled on it, abandoned and almost derelict, as a teenager, trespassing in its grounds. Later, stationed in Cairo with her husband during the war, her thoughts turned back to it as she dreamt Rebecca into life. That the success of Rebecca – and, in particular, Hitchcock’s film version – made her wealthy enough to negotiate a twenty-year lease on the dilapidated property she had, at that point, barely stepped foot in, is one of life’s extraordinary ironies.

Du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly was always a romantic, almost obsessive one. In her autobiographical essay ‘The House of Secrets’ she describes how, after she saw it for the first time, ‘the house possessed me from that day, even as a mistress holds her lover.’ (The reversal of gender is revealing: du Maurier sometimes attributed her ‘writing energy’ to ‘Eric’, an alternative persona she dubbed ‘the boy in the box.’)  Her daughter Flavia noted her habit of occasionally kissing its stone walls: ‘When she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.’ And du Maurier herself wrote to a friend, ‘I do believe I love Mena more than people’, and compared having to leave it when her lease expired to the screaming of a pulled-up mandrake. When she was sick with pneumonia on her deathbed, by then exiled to the nearby Dower House, she manged to haul herself up and go out in a storm, just so she could gaze on Menabilly one last time.

My new psychological thriller, The Move, was directly inspired by du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly, though I chose to transplant her domophilia to Hampshire. Rosemary and Paul Finch, both in their eighties, are downsizing from their beloved Trade Cottage after many happy decades there. Paul has terminal MND and will soon be in a wheelchair; their son Jamie and their grandchildren are all in America; and the house is starting to get too much. At the viewing, they hit it off with a nice family with young children who are looking to make the move out of London, even going so far as to accept an offer that isn’t the highest bid, so keen is Rosemary for them to have it. (Another nod, perhaps, to a fictional house story, in this case E.M Forster’s famous plot device in Howard’s End.)

And for Kate and Matt Crowther, the move is initially idyllic. Sure, it’s a little strange to discover, the day they move in, that Rosemary and Paul have chosen to leave most of their antique furniture behind – but then again, it wouldn’t fit into the ultra-modern passive house which, it transpires, they’ve built just at the end of Trade Cottage’s garden, close enough for them to pop round whenever they want. And it’s great that they want to look after the children when Kate and Matt are in London; to teach Tilly how to ride and Will how to shoot, and to help Kate and Matt throw housewarming parties so they can meet the rest of the village. Rosemary in particular is so welcoming that it takes Kate a little while to realise there’s something almost obsessive about her need to maintain Trade Cottage’s aura of picture-perfect loveliness just as it always has been – and that her own children’s time there, twenty years previously, might not have been quite the Swallows-and-Amazons paradise Rosemary paints it as.

Because that’s another great thing about houses: they have facades, and facades can be deceptive. Remember Cowslip’s warren in Watership Down? On the face of it, it’s wonderful – the farmer even leaves food nearby. It takes even Fiver a little while to work out that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Writing about houses, of course, immediately brings you close to the Gothic tradition. In the classics of the genre, there’s usually an isolated, ancient, crumbling manor, full of shadows and unexplained noises, presided over by a brooding, damaged master, as stuck in the tragic past as his dwelling place is. To this fearsome abode comes an innocent, usually a young woman; both the house’s potential victim, and its saviour. It’s an archetype that stretches all the way from Wuthering Heights to Beauty and the Beast.

Personally, I like to play around with the trope, to defamiliarize it. In The Girl Before I made my crumbling mansion a tiny minimalist house in London, and my brooding master its obsessively minimalist architect. (In a nod to my influences, I called the digital home controller ‘Housekeeper’.) In The New Wife, it’s a dilapidated finca on Mallorca that turns out – when the young man who has inherited it from his estranged father visits – to have been gorgeously renovated by his father’s third wife and her daughter, who he’s there to evict. And in The Move, it’s a Grade-II listed country property that, even run down, requires the heftiest of mortgages to purchase, and is crying out to be turned into an Airbnb.

When du Maurier titled her essay ‘The House of Secrets’, she put her finger on another aspect of houses which makes them such fertile ground for writers. Houses have pasts, and those pasts are sometimes hidden. Again, there’s an archetype: in Bluebeard’s Castle, there was one single room that his new bride was forbidden to enter. Needless to say, she does. In The Girl Before, it’s a service cupboard containing a dusty old sleeping bag and a pair of women’s pyjamas. In The Move, it’s a smugglers’ cellar, latterly used by teenage boys as a kind of nightclub, not unlike the ‘Club H’ Princes William and Harry created for their friends at Highgrove. It contains an ancient sofa, complete with some rather suspicious-looking stains.

Perhaps the final aspect of houses that makes them so good to write about, though, is their relatability. We all live somewhere, and that somewhere is our sanctuary; the way we choose to furnish it, an expression of who we are. Our homes are where we should feel most safe – and when that safety is threatened, we might all react in ways it takes a novelist to predict.  

             

The Move by J P Delaney (Quercus Books) Out Now

New beginnings can be deadly . . . Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there. When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect . . .

More information about JP Delaney and his books can be found on his website. J P Delaney can also be found on Facebook. He can also be found on Instagram @jpdelaney

A Strange Topic for a Thriller by J P Delaney

I was researching real-life accounts of people’s interactions with social workers for a previous novel when I noticed how many were about adopted teenagers who’d tracked down their birth families online. Sometimes the stories had happy outcomes – the teenagers were able to get some answers about who they were and where they’d come from. But there were enough that were messy, or simply fraught with peril, to make me jot down in my ideas book: Adoption reunion - goes wrong?

Coming back to that note months later, I dug into the topic some more, and discovered something that to me seemed extraordinary. Here in the UK, adoptees’ birth certificates are sealed until they turn eighteen, and contact after that is meant to be possible only if both parties separately sign up for a government register. But the reality, according to the Adoption Society, is that over a quarter of adoptees now contact their birth families before then. The reason they can do this is the unintended consequence of a well-meant policy: since 2005, it has been a statutory requirement for social workers to leave a ‘Later Life letter’ with the adoptive parents, explaining exactly who the child’s birth parents were, and the circumstances surrounding their adoption.

The Later Life letter is written for the adopted child to read when they’re old enough to understand it. The exact timing is left up to the adoptive parents, but according to the guidance they’re given, that’s usually when the child is about twelve. (The notion that under-sixteens or under-eighteens are ‘minors’ has now largely been replaced in our legal system by the idea that capacity and responsibility is a sliding scale, the so-called ‘Gillick competency’ rule; ironically, named after a campaigner who thought the very opposite – Victoria Gillick was trying to prevent under-sixteens from being given contraception without their parents’ consent.)

The Later Life letter therefore gets read at a time in life when any young person is beginning to wrestle with their identity, and to pull away from their family unit as they become more independent. For children who were adopted, that natural process can be exacerbated. Therapists use the term ‘ghost kingdoms’ to describe the way some create seductive fantasies of what their ‘real’ parents might be like. Add to that the fact that some will also have attachment issues stemming from early neglect, or simply from the process of being taken into care, and you can see why the urge to break away can be a powerful one.

It works the other way round, too. For mothers whose babies were adopted, it can leave a hole in their life which never entirely shrinks. It’s a claim much repeated (though also much contested) that the UK carries out more ‘forced’ adoptions – that is, adoptions by court order against the parent’s wishes – than any other European country. Many of those mothers may also be searching for traces of their birth children. 

As I began fleshing out my research and giving it the shape of a thriller, I was acutely aware that I was dealing with issues that, for many people, are all too real. My Darling Daughter is about a rebellious fifteen-year-old who finds her birth mother online, and discovers that she appears to have the perfect life – married to a rock musician, wealthy, with a gorgeous Instagram-worthy house and no other children. But it turns out there are details in the Later Life letter that don’t quite tally with the glamorous image the mother’s been presenting, and there are hidden dangers for both characters as their very different worlds collide.

Adoption in fiction is of course nothing new – it was a staple of Victorian ‘sensation’ writers like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who used it to explore issues relevant to the age, such as status and social mobility. But in the era of Facebook and Instagram, adoption also throws up new questions of the kind central to any domestic noir – questions of identity, loyalty and trust, not to mention how well we really know our nearest and dearest, with nothing less than your whole family unit at stake. It’s a sensitive subject – one I’ve tried to approach tactfully – but it’s also a fascinating one, and a cracking starting point for a psychological drama. My characters certainly aren’t typical – most adoptions are successful, as are most adoption reunions – but they are meant to be authentic, and I hope my readers will enjoy the twisty and sometimes mind-bending journey they’re about to embark on together.

My Darling Daughter by J P Delaney (Quercus) Out Now

The child you never knew knows all your secrets... Out of the blue, Susie Jukes is contacted on social media by Anna, the girl she gave up for adoption fifteen years ago. But when they meet, Anna's home life sounds distinctly strange to Susie and her husband Gabe. And when Anna's adoptive parents seem to overreact to the fact she contacted them at all, Susie becomes convinced that Anna needs her help. But is Anna's own behaviour simply what you'd expect from someone recovering from a traumatic childhood? Or are there other secrets at play here - secrets Susie has also been hiding for the last fifteen years?

More information about J P Delaney can be found on his website.