TeaHere, M.R. James tells us, there are five conditions that must be met for an ideal ghost story: a pretense of truth, a “pleasant terror”, no explanation of machinery, no unnecessary terror, and that the story be of the author’s (and the reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s first look at the novel, Danielle is living a precarious existence as a PA at a dilettante art charity called Hodgepodge (strapline: “for ideas”). She types up emails, makes tea, and quickly sets about handling personal errands for her monstrous boss, Jenny. Jenny seems to see no difference between working for a charity and working for a charity His.
After a devastating breakup, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no savings, no bank from Mom and Dad, and no room for her overdraft, she is left alone in Jenny’s ancestral home, a ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere. “We can work with someone to take care of that place,” Jenny says, while Danielle uncharacteristically starts crying. “You would be doing us a huge favor.”
Westerly has obvious antecedents: Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House, whose rooms are covered in sheets of dust and have doors locked without a key. Of course, all is not as it seems at Westerly: Danielle, home alone and miles away from anywhere, finds a fresh bowl of peaches on the sideboard; sees a face at the window; Wakes up to find herself somewhere – or somethingWhen? – Otherwise completely. She hears the sound of shoes slipping on the stairs; She finds herself reaching for a calico apron that doesn’t exist.
Danielle sleeps in the master bedroom at first, but when Jenny arrives unexpectedly – trailing her equally sinister son, Edward – she moves to the servants’ quarters. Soon, Danielle is rising at the crack of dawn, cleaning up after Jenny and Edward, bringing afternoon tea to the drawing room. As the past and present are blurring, so too are the lines between the 21st century employee and the 19th century maid. Didn’t she always bring green tea to Jenny at the office? And after all, didn’t Jenny ask him to “take care of the place”?
Seva is certainly a book of the present times: of the housing crisis, of the unstable nature of life in the arts without family support, of broken phones and poor WiFi. Yet the timeslips of Mooney’s novel make it clear how timeless some things really are: loneliness, poverty, aspirations, the feeling of toiling for someone, for something, for no reason other than the order of your birth, the uncertainty with which one has to walk between respect and dishonor, the effort to maintain a sense of self in the face of a world that deems you – subtly or otherwise – inferior.
Attempting seduction with attack-adjacent tones, the greedy Edward declares that he is upstairs, Wooster, and, er, Downton, while Danielle is downstairs, Jeeves, and… Abby. “It’s a joke, Jesus. You work for my mother, so you’re on staff? I was just kidding” Alone in the drawing room with the house’s young owner, Danielle – or, perhaps, her ghostly counterpart – has no idea what to do, or how to escape.
The specter of service is truly hair-raising. And yet equally scary is the real world in which so many Daniels have lived. How many Edwardses, for how many years, carried out their “seductions” without any results? How many poor girls have to face the threat of homelessness and poverty and worse? The book may seem a little heavy at some places. Mooney may have trusted the reader more – or, perhaps, his own writing. The careful dismantling of the class system stands on its own. Then again, the charge driving the book is how little has changed in more than 100 years. Or, perhaps, how little changes.
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