A PREGNANCY OF POSSIBILITIES

Ever since meeting Rose Tremain by accident in the hospitality tent at the Hay Literary Festival and finding myself persistently engaged in a conversation that I had not sought to initiate, I have become an avid fan of her novels. I had at the time read 'Sacred Country' but because the publishers had not graced the cover with her picture I had no idea what she looked like and the person therefore who talked to me beneath the billowing folds of white taffeta that June day in the Welsh Marches did not let on that she was an author, or even that she came from Norfolk.

She certainly didn't look like an author - whatever authors look like - but then I suppose I don't look like whatever it is that I am either, come to that, and it isn't everyday that one sits sipping Cava waiting for a Minister who doesn't arrive. In fact the whole experience became so surreal that it might almost have come from one of her novels, which, I suspect, is maybe what occurred to her as well. Life imitating art.

I've just finished both 'Restoration'- which I think her finest book - and a radio play by her called 'Temporary Shelter,' an acted version of which we may well stage at our thespian AGM in a couple of weeks. I won't try to describe what 'Restoration' is about; for one thing I can't say I'm really sure. The novel is so inventive that when the main character - originally a fop by the name of Merivel - slips away at the end of the book you aren't quite sure whether he is dreaming (and if so whether he is awake or asleep); or in a delirium or whether in fact he is quite well and about to step forward into the pages of another book - each ending being a new beginning.

We leave him anyway with a place to visit and a sense of purpose and a young daughter called Margaret after the main character's mother. My mother too come to think of it, though neither of my daughters have inherited the name. And a horse called Danseuse, who pines.

In 'Temporary Shelter' the action takes place more than three hundred years later and on a campsite but the people haven't changed much. The main characters in both novel and play are ones who have been humbled by circumstance. In the first case the cause the humbling is by the King; in the play it occurs thanks to EC Farming regulations. But both are finding redemption in a new life, trying to make themselves useful and to recover their dignities.

In 'Temporary Shelter'- the play - the main character is called Larry and his wife is Marje. But a different, or reworked, or reformed Larry appears in another of Rose's novels written about the same time and called 'The Swimming Pool Season' which I would regard as perhaps her second finest book after 'Restoration' - but then it's a hard choice for all are most excellent and way better than most. All fizz with the same pyrotechnics of the imagination.

The Larry in the 'The Swimming Pool Season' is more philosophical, cultured, softer; he has fewer hard edges, he has less to learn. He, too, has been humbled, by business failure this time in the eponymous swimming pool trade. His wife is called Miriam and she paints, which is something, one feels that the other Larry's Marje would never do - or at least not while Larry was around to demand coffee or wine or soup. Marje would look at the stars, perhaps and like Merivel in 'Restoration' feel a subdued hankering to paint colour. Unlike Merivel, however, any resulting efforts would be simple and elusive.

The one Larry drives a Granada; the Larry in the play, salesman and ex-pig farmer Larry, drives a Cortina. There's a nice ranking of the characters for you. In neither case, one suspects were their wives consulted. Had Merivel had a car I suspect it would have been an Aston Martin. At least he would have saved money on oats. But then Merivel had no wife: or not one that would have been entirely comfortable with Miriam and Marje. She wasn't even comfortable with Merivel come to that.

And now Younger Daughter has delivered to me 'Trespass' - her (that is Rose's) latest novel with barbed wire across the cover. I heard some discussion about the book the other day. Rose herself may have been speaking. I am inclined to think she was. I believe the story is to do with some land dispute or heritage in a family; the ferocious laws of French inheritance. I will let you know. Between the hard covers lies a pregnancy of possibilities