Book review: The Greatcoat

FIRST, a note on the publisher. We all know about Hammer Films, purveyors of horror. Now, in association with Arrow Books, an imprint of the Random House group, we are promised a series of original novellas spanning “the literary and the mass market”.

Helen Dunmore’s ghost story, the first she has written, introduces the series very well. It is a story which is disturbing rather than chilling, and all the better for being so. Today’s ghosts are best presented in matter-of-fact manner.

Isobel and Philip are newly married. It is a few years after the 1939-45 war, rationing still in force. Philip is a recently-qualified doctor who has taken a post as an assistant GP in a practice in a Yorkshire town. They are living in rented accommodation, a small ground-floor flat, with their landlady above them. She has the habit of walking and walking over their heads; this gets on Isobel’s nerves. Just outside the town is an abandoned airfield from which Lancaster bombers used to fly over Germany. One day Isobel finds the greatcoat of the title – the kind of coat worn by RAF officers – stuffed into the back of a cupboard. She feels the cold badly and puts it on their bed to keep her warm.

One night she is disturbed by a knock on the window. Outside she sees the figure of a young man. He disappears but will return. This is Alec, the RAF officer we met in the prologue, just about to set off on a bombing raid over Germany. He returns. Is he in search of the greatcoat or what? He always comes when Philip is away, drinks gin and talks to Isobel. He takes her out sitting on the pillion of his motorbike to the airfield. It is disused. Everything there is going to ruin, but this is not how Alec sees it. Do they make love? Does Isobel imagine they make love? And what is his connection with the mysterious and unsympathetic landlady?

The reader will wonder: has Isobel slipped into another time, or is all this happening only in her mind? And if the latter, does the landlady share her fantasies, or does Isobel merely suppose she does? The interpretation is, suitably, left open, but, either way, the relationship that develops between the young woman and the returning airman is tenderly and convincingly described. Isobel may be living in her imagination, but she is doing so very vividly.

All ghost stories teeter on the verge of the incredible, but the best ones do not topple over that verge. They depend, first of all, on the author’s ability to make the improbable seem possible. This can be achieved only if the characters whom we know to be, in fictional terms, real, are themselves persuasive. Here we have first the landlady, eccentric, unhappy, jealous; it will be a dull reader who does not quickly realise that there are horrors in her past.

Isobel herself has been plunged, very young, into a new life to which she has not yet adapted. There is unhappiness in her past too; her parents are dead, having been imprisoned by the Japanese during the war. She loves Philip and is sure he loves her, but marriage, in a town where she feels an outsider, is new and difficult – difficult partly because it is something new, partly because Philip’s work is demanding – night visits to patients common. She is often lonely and she is always unsure of herself. The disused airfield fascinates her and draws her back time and again; in her childhood and in another town she and her brother Charlie listened to the bombers overhead flying missions to Germany and waited to hear them come home. Alec’s appearance in her life is entrancing. But of course she feels guilty too; Philip loves her – she does not doubt this – but her alternative life with Alec fills an emptiness in her existence in this mean flat she dislikes, living under a landlady she comes to resent and even fear. This makes no sense, and yet it makes sense, such is the precision of Helen Dunmore’s art.

The art of the ghost story requires delicate balance. The supernatural itself does not have to be convincing. It is enough that characters in the fiction are convinced by it. This was Scott’s way in, to give only one example, The Bride of Lammermoor and also Buchan’s in that remarkable and uncanny novel, The Dancing Floor and in his short stories about the supernatural. It is Dunmore’s here too, in this beautifully written tale, and because she achieves this delicate balance, it comes off splendidly.

• The Greatcoat

by Helen Dunmore

Hammer Books, 196pp, £9.99