It is 1929 Miss Dolores Diver’s widowed brother Richard Hogg has just died, leaving behind nothing of worldly value to his six-year-old-child, Martha, now a bona-fide orphan with an uncertain future. It had been wonderfully kind of Miss Diver to save her brother’s child from an orphanage, but not surprising what was surprising was how well the arrangement had worked out. Ladies of ambiguous status have by convention hearts of gold, and Miss Diver was nothing if not conventional but a child in an irregular household is often an embarrassment. Having gobbled them up, I will now review them in order, with a probably doomed attempt at brevity, and place them together on my dedicated Margery Sharp shelf in our bedroom (where all the “chuck out the window in case of house fire” treasures reside) to await happy re-reading in future. I am surprised that these do not appear in an omnibus edition that would be kindest to the reader, and not unmanageable, as the three books are individually short and quick reads. These definitely need to be read in order to get a full appreciation of the journey of our unlikely heroine Martha. I had been nobly holding off on reading them out of sequence, and I’m glad I did. Naturally, the third book came first, then the second, with a dreadfully long lag before the first one showed up just a few days ago. Margery wrote a trilogy of sorts between 19: The Eye of Love, Martha in Paris, and Martha, Eric and George. Trickling in much too slowly are a number of new-to-me vintage books by my beloved Margery Sharp. All are light fiction summer reading at its best. Lately I have had an extravagant number of book-shaped packages from far-flung purveyors, so that like the proverbial child in the candyshop I am overwhelmed by choices and am greedily consuming each treat with an anticipatory eye on the next one. Not bad…” and, so often, “Hey, did you steal my book? I was still working on that one…” “What’re you reading?” and “Here, I’m done.
Our morning exchanges are brief after thirty years together the pattern is predictably set, and it suits us very well. I have been on an unapologetic reading binge these past few days waking at my husband’s 5 AM alarm to blink the sleep from my tired eyes and reach groggily for the book I laid down the night before – or, technically, earlier in the morning too many times it’s been past midnight – foolish me! A perfectly made cup of tea is always delivered to my bedside or chairside table by a man who values silence above conversation on workday mornings, and is himself stealing some precious reading time over his breakfast before heading out the door at the last possible moment.
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