![]() ![]() 'Sounds like My Fair Lady to me,' he says. Her real name is Eliza and she wonders if Eve was thinking of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. She has never been told who her father was, though she has her suspicions, which turn out to be dramatically off the mark. Uncertain how shocked he is going to be, she breaks it to him an episode at a time, 'like Sheherezade', she says. As they spend the autumn travelling around apple-picking and otherwise odd-jobbing, Liza tells Sean the story of her curious upbringing and her wonderful but just occasionally homicidal mother - now on remand, according to the papers. Liza, who has never been further than the nearest small town, ignores instructions, and runs to find Sean, the young estate gardener she's secretly been sleeping with, at his caravan. Sixteen-year-old Liza is given some money by her mother Eve and told to go make her way to a friend of Eve's in London, problem being that the police have just paid a call to the little guesthouse where mother and daughter have always lived, on a remote West Country estate, and Eve is liable to be booked for murder in the morning. It has next to no detective element and centres on the psychosocial complications favoured by Ruth Rendell's alter ego. The mystery about this one is that it's not a Barbara Vine. ![]()
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