“None of the legatees on pain of forfeiting his legacy shall follow to the grave. I will not have people pretending sorrow they do not feel.”
One of the family members ignores the request and is believed to have forfeited the legacy that is due to her — until a codicil to the will is found and the tables are turned.
The author, Mary Fanning Wickham (née Porcher, born 8 June 1898), grew up in Philadelphia and received the benefits of a private education. She turned a place in the prestigious Bryn Mawr College to volunteer as an emergency aide during the First World War. She began writing fiction in the 1920s but only two of her seven novels of that period were published. Her first successful novel (this one) appeared in 1949. Another novel followed as well as poetry and works of non-fiction, including an autobiography in 1988. Her other claim to fame is that her second marriage was to the ornithologist James Bond — Ian Fleming came across him and felt his plain name would suit his new fictional character.
The novel describes the parallel responses to the death of a family member — the conventional emotional loss of a loved one and the unemotional loss of someone who performed an important role in family life but in a way that did not inspire respect and admiration. Her daughter Kate’s sense of loss is shown in the context of previous bereavement:
“When Kate’s father had died, a pillar of her world had collapsed. She had never loved him but she had depended on him. Now, when the undertakers came to take her mother's body away, and their dark sleek car had rolled unctuously down the drive and out through the gate, Kate became light-headed.”
This made me reflect on the fact that some of the men killed in the war were not greatly loved and admired by the members of the family (they weren't all charming young men) but their deaths were still felt hugely because of the roles they performed within the family.
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