A woman has died of stomach cancer in Cornwall, and her relatives gather to cremate her remains. Amanda Coe’s second novel pits the deceased woman’s two adult children Louise and Nigel against one another and their stepfather Patrick, once a famous playwright and now a needy drunk.
Sarah, his dead wife and muse, abandoned her first husband and children for Patrick in the north of England in 1979, when she was 30 and Louise and Nigel were 10 and 13. Coe has written a shrewd and sympathetic account of what happens when erotic love trumps the maternal kind, and a mother leaves home.
If Coe were less skilful, the contrast between Louise and Nigel might appear crude. Louise, brought up by her mum’s sister Auntie B after her dad remarried and rejected his first wife’s kids, is a single, unemployed, fat, working-class mum of two teens. Nigel, sent to boarding school with Patrick’s money and from there to Oxford, is a rich solicitor, married to a woman who looks like a Boden catalogue model, whose lack of sympathy for his younger sibling is edged with disgust: “Training, relocating, paying off a loan, finishing with her boyfriend, finding a different house, laying down the law with her kids, losing the weight. None of it ever happened.”
Not that Nigel has escaped the damage wreaked by his parents’ desertion, though in his case it has been internalised in a medley of symptoms and allergies including hay fever, sciatica and crippling lifelong indigestion that he blames on a “personal failure to evolve. His belly had started to ache the moment he was removed from the carelessly processed diet of his childhood and forced to consume the grains and pulses and alien vegetables of his unusually progressive boarding school.”
Thrown together in Patrick’s crumbling Cornish hideaway, where Louise has never been before but now plans an extended stay because daughter Holly has fallen victim to grooming up north, she and Nigel face the consequences of suddenly losing their mother for the second time.
In a series of flashbacks to their childhood, Coe lays out for us, in the detail of two awful visits, Louise’s overwhelming sense of loss, “the smell of Mum she hadn’t smelled for months and the shape she’d left behind like a cut-out”, more painful by far than Patrick’s vileness. In between the chapters are his love letters to Sarah, filled with sexy blandishments and manly ardour.
In a blackly comic subplot, interiors-obsessed media studies student Mia rocks up at Patrick’s house after the funeral with a plan to become his PA. Instinctively mercenary but not ill-natured, she stirs up Nigel’s own covetousness of the house – as a shabby-chic second home – and adds a splash of sexual intrigue.
So what are we to make of all this? The brief excerpt from Patrick’s sole hit play, Bloody Empire, that Coe invents, seems crass and titillating (it ends with bare breasts and a rape). Another letter reveals his fury that the original staging was themed around the Falklands war. In the decades since, he has produced very little, while passion appears to have staled. Do we conclude that Sarah, seduced into a second life as an artist’s muse, sacrificed her kids’ happiness for nothing?
It’s hard to know. “Everyone in a story is important” is the lesson that Coe, whose TV credits include episodes of Shameless, says she learned from its creator Paul Abbott. As a novelist she sticks by this, fully committing to each shift in viewpoint and making something substantial of Mia, Nigel, Patrick and Louise. Only Holly’s Asian boyfriend/abuser lacks a third dimension, and feels more plot device than man.
Though character-driven, the novel is crisply plotted and filled with pleasurably sharp observations. Coe turns a winning phrase, such as when Nigel and his wife’s sobbing son interrupts their lovemaking and they freeze “in position like escaping PoWs in a war film”. As a followup to her chilling 2011 debut What They Do in the Dark, Coe’s new novel succeeds with style. But for readers seeking resolution if not reconciliation, the title should serve as a warning. If Getting Colder is a game built around the mystery of Sarah’s double disappearance, the satisfying cry of “Found her!” never comes.
To order Getting Colder for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
