Accompanied By His Wife

It was for the sake of that dear old lady, Mrs. Harnby, that Patricia agreed to the fantastic suggestion that she should masquerade for a few days as Michael Harnby's wife. How was she to know that the deception would spread wider and wider until she even had to make the man she loved believe that she was indeed married to Michael?

The tense and yet entertaining situation keeps its interest right up to the ingenious and unexpected ending -- an ending brought about by the masterful intervention of that fragile mother whom everyone had been trying to protect.

Readers, "that dear old lady" is 55. If you can get past this stab in the gut, you will find Accompanied By His Wife, a cheerful, entertaining entry in Burchell's early Mills & Boon catalog. This kind of light, women-oriented fiction, vintage or otherwise, is all about fantasy, and it's always interesting to see what writers and publishers at a given time consider the stuff their audience's dreams are made of. Here, as the original 40s dust jacket suggests, it's mink. Indeed, there's an extended sequence setting up the necessity for, and then describing, the shopping trip where this item, a "beautifully worked, expensive-looking thing, silkily supple and of a softly smoky shade of brown" is purchased. Like a surprising, to the modern reader, number of male MCs in these vintage reads, Michael ends up having "very definite -- and extremely well-informed" (63) tastes in womenswear. And, less surprisingly, being in a position to accommodate them: "'You must be rather frighteningly rich, Michael.' 'No, not frighteningly so. But sufficiently wealthy to be reasonably generous..." (62) That a man would have the taste, the interest, and the resources to dress the woman he's attracted to, is clearly something that authors thought resonated with their readers. My sense is that this is much less so now.

Another common vintage theme you find in Accompanied is the consequences of a female character's loss of social/economic status. When Patricia's Phil reappears, she's delighted and infatuated and fails to realize that his intentions towards her are no longer honorable -- that because she's no longer in his social class, the conventions no longer apply & he need feel no compunction pushing against her "dear, absurd black-and-white ideas of right and wrong" (103) to try to get her, vowless, in the sack.

While she's initially a bit of a fool where Phil is concerned, though, overall, Patricia is a principled character with a strong sense of justice, and she really drives the action of the story, and the life-decisions of the male MC (like agreeing to contest his divorce). Vintage or modern, this is always nice to see.

Easy breezy for a lazy afternoon and can there be anything better than vintage Mills & Boon dust jackets?