Outside, looking in (by Kathleen Rowntree)

(Amazon UK link)

I’m enjoying my gradual re-reading of Kathleen Rowntree’s novels. She only wrote nine, but each of them is quite distinct, with different settings and styles. I hadn’t read ‘Outside, looking in’ for twenty-five years, so it’s not surprising that I had entirely forgotten the people and the story.

This is a ‘village’ style novel, featuring some believable people and some caricatures. There is quite a large cast, and I never fully remembered who was whom amongst the more minor ones. But I did like Kate, who is one of the main characters. She’s only in her forties, but was widowed a year earlier after nursing her husband through a terminal illness. She works part-time as a teacher, and is mostly coping - at least on the surface. But she has a lot of fears, and is somewhat obsessive about checking the house for intruders every night. 

Just down the road from Kate lives Will, who was a close friend of Kate’s husband. Will’s wife Sylvie is suffering from early Alzheimer’s, and seems to be regressing. Will works from home, and has taken time off to look after his wife; but one day a week he has to travel or go to the office, and Kate takes over for that day. There are daily visits from nurses, too, but - so far - Kate has looked after Sylvie without problem.

The whole novel takes place over the course of a couple of weeks in June. The prologue, on June 14th, tells of someone looking in the windows of a party - a ‘peeping tom’. The people in the house make light of it, after an initial panic, assuming it’s teenagers, or similar. 

But the same kind of thing happens several times more, when people are least expecting it. A keep-fit class is just winding down, doing cool-down exercises, when a face is spotted at a high-up window. Two elderly sisters see someone peering into their house. And there are several other incidents. No harm is done, but everyone’s on tenterhooks. 

One of the most worried is Bel, a tall and modern young mother who is perhaps over-protective of her baby Jamie. I liked Bel, who is new to the village, but wants to get to know everyone else. She’s started a sort of friendship with her immediate neighbour Tina, who has older children; but they’re very different people. Tina spends her time sunbathing or tanning, dieting strictly and doing what she can to look after her body. And she’s not so good at fitting in with the rest of the villagers.

There’s classism in several subplots; the church is an important facet of the village, but some of the people go because it looks good, or because it’s traditional. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of faith. There are coffee mornings and other fund-raisers… and it could have been rather tedious, but the author has a light touch, and focuses on human interactions rather than details. 

It’s mostly fairly light-hearted although I didn’t find it particularly amusing. The more serious threads interested me more. A huge amount goes on in just a couple of weeks; each chapter covers one day, looking at different people in the village and what they do. There are people who gossip, so nothing is really a secret, and there are tensions and disagreements, as well as the ongoing concern about the peeping tom.

By the time we learn who is doing the peeping, I had guessed who it was - there are plenty of clues - but wasn’t entirely certain. It’s well handled, I thought, as were other threads: in particular the question of how long Will can continue caring for someone who is no longer the beautiful woman he married. 

I thought the writing was good, the pace just right for my tastes, and a nice picture (albeit caricatured) was drawn of village life in the 1990s when this was first published. The story ends satisfactorily, too, with a brief prologue a couple of months afterwards that ties up more loose ends.

Recommended, if you like this style of women's fiction. 

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