Women on the verge of a sexual breakdown

Edith Templeton's narrators may not be truly good or liberated, but they illuminate her collection of short stories, The Darts of Cupid, with their clarity of vision
Darts of Cupid by Edith Templeton

The Darts of Cupid and other Stories
Edith Templeton
Viking £16.99, pp312

It would be worth buying The Darts of Cupid for the title story alone, for it is as brilliantly taut as any I have ever read. In a provincial war office, a young woman, Eve, placidly attacks her work (she is a coder), her days enlivened by the gossip of her female colleagues and the joshing of the Big Bad Wolves, a couple of lippy sergeants. Then an American major arrives. Eve's relationship with this man, her superior, is brambly and intriguing; she is unable to work him out. 'I found that he was double-faced. His countenance bore one character when seen full front and a different character when seen from the side.' The major is charmless and yet - though this last thought hangs unspoken in the air - oddly animal, too. When he arrives at the office exhausted and tells her that he worked late into the night, she cannot restrain herself. 'Yes, on the mattress,' she says, her voice tinny with sarcasm (or is it envy?). 'On the human body.'

In time, the major asks her to dinner which, given that his heavily pregnant mistress is also to be present, is a kind of slap. During supper, Eve drinks too much, and has to be put to bed. No sooner is the light out, however, than the Major is there beside her. He covers his body with hers, but she must get up to be sick. He grips her wrists but, again, she must lean out of the open window. Afterwards, he cleans her up. 'My shame was mingled with fury and indignation... and at the same time I was flooded with gratitude.' Finally, she falls asleep, 'my body entirely... imprisoned in his'. The experience reminds her of an old Japanese print of a naked woman, dead, floating in the sea, an octopus penetrating her with his many arms. The woman looked blissfully content, as though she had been granted her most heartfelt desire.

Edith Templeton, now 87, has only recently risen to prominence again, following the republication last year of her mildly sado-masochistic novel Gordon, once banned under the Obscene Publications Act. The Darts of Cupid gathers together seven of her short stories, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker. Like Gordon, they make the flesh tingle. To modern ears, her prose is hardly naughty. But it is astonishingly fresh. Largely autobiographical, these stories, which jump from decade to decade, from continent to continent, have only two things in common: the elegance of their writing, and their prickly female narrators. These women are not good, nor even particularly liberated; their clarity of vision, on the other hand, is really quite dazzling.

Their gaze is forensic. In 'The Darts of Cupid', Eve admits to hating it when men show her photographs from back home. 'I always found myself embarrassed when confronted with pictures of scraggy or sagging wives and overfed, grinning offspring.'

In Templeton's universe, sexual violence is never far away, and it is an instinct that lurks well beyond middle age. In 'The Blue Hour', Louise is sexually harassed by the 60-year-old Clarence, her cousin's husband. The scene - an Italian apartment, an over-dressed white-haired visitor - is mundane, a backdrop that renders Clarence's actions at first startling and ludicrous, then horrifying. He runs at her, flabby chin trembling. 'Tell me where we can meet so that I can rape you,' he says. Louise, inwardly calm, for all that he has cracked her rib, wonders if rape can be committed by mutual appointment. This is marvellous stuff: funny and black and true. When Templeton writes that as 'people grow older, their lids tend to droop over their eyes as though they've become wary of seeing more than what's needed', she seems to do so with a wry smile: this is not, you understand, something of which she could ever be accused.

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