The Things We Do To Our Friends

Heather Darwent

Viking, £14.99

BY ROSEMARY GORING

 

A library could be filled with the novels set in Edinburgh that take their cue from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Recently, Ian Rankin has pointed out that when he started writing his Rebus series, this was his inspiration, yet nobody caught on; not even when he titled the second book Hide and Seek.

When you start to look, however, the rarer thing is an Edinburgh novel that is not in some way shaped by Stevenson’s depiction of duality: a person who is respectable one minute, evil the next.

What it says about Edinburgh is a subject for another day – nothing flattering, for sure. Yet the concept of a two-faced personality is embedded in Scottish literature, from the days of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to our own.

Heather Darwent’s debut novel dives head-first in this territory. There are two Jekylls and Hydes in her unsettling tale: most obvious is the narrator, Clare, who arrives from Hull as a first-year student at Edinburgh University, to study history of art (as did the author).

The Things We Do To Our Friends is her account, some years later, of the momentous events that followed: “September … is a month that has a special anticipation associated with it … It’s a month that means fresh beginnings, and that only happens a few times in life when the slate is wiped clean, and the story is ready for you to begin and tell it how you wish.”

The other split personality is the city itself which, when the novel opens, is closely described, Clare warming to it immediately despite having a room in the “glossy theme park” of the Old Town: “It was magnificent, but there was an underlying sense of squalor below it all” – one of the reasons, perhaps, that it appeals to her. As is the coolness of the people: “even if I went to the same café every day, I knew I’d be greeted with a blank stare.” Not until things grow dangerously complicated does she discover another side to the capital: “My city had played at being charming for a while. That came to an end, and in January it was catty and combative.”

When Clare talks about a clean slate, she means more than the usual fresh start that going to university represents. As a teenager she committed a crime, whose details are not fully revealed until late into the novel.

That she now goes by an entirely different name suggests how terrible the deed was, but for the time being, Darwent makes only fleeting allusions to this shadowy past, leaving Clare sufficiently enigmatic and inscrutable that it’s impossible to know what kind of woman she is.

Despite her lurid history, what she seeks in Edinburgh is not redemption but the chance to decide what sort of a person she wants to be, to get into character so fully that even she, presumably, will be fooled.

When she is drawn into the circle of a rich, charismatic student called Tabitha, who is surrounded by a strange assortment of satellite friends, it becomes clear that Clare has set her sights on the high life: wealth and glamour, tinged with a frisson of sleaze and risk.

Brideshead Revisited this is not. Clare describes the allure of Tabitha and her pals in minute detail: clothes, hair, conversations, as if desperate for her readers to understand the magnetic pull they exerted and why she was so eager to join their ranks.

Although this is a depiction of privileged student life – Tabitha lives in the flat her father bought for her in the New Town, whose rooms she rents out to her friends at an exorbitant price – it is a clichéd portrayal of posh young things: champagne quaffed on the rooftops, outings in fast cars, essays written by slavish friends. Darwent evokes their brashness, swaggering through the city, as if they are untouchable, misguidedly assuming they are envied and admired.

This is not a rags to riches tale, since Clare’s roots are far from humble: her parents were rich, but fell on hard times and after her disgrace have distanced themselves from her.

Only her grandmother in Hull has any affection for her, although Darwent’s scenes of Christmas chez gran are a cameo of financial and emotional bleakness.

Even so, as Clare is drawn into Tabitha’s orbit, it’s obvious that in many ways she and this strange young woman are well matched. Both are amoral and heartless, and possibly worse.

When Tabitha finally reveals plans for a lucrative business that entraps cheating spouses, thereby providing their partners with ammunition for divorce, she requires Clare to play a starring role.

This she does happily, until things turn ugly. At which point, with thrillerish momentum, the plot begins to race.

Until then, however, The Things We Do To Our Friends is frequently repetitive and dull. This is a novel driven by an idea, not by character. The clique with which Clare is involved comprises individuals who represent a list of attributes and peculiarities; rather than shaping what happens, they are simply designed to play a part.

And, in the same way that this crew seems to drift along, chapters pass with nothing of substance happening; when it does, the drama, surprisingly, is almost thrown away.

The confidence of this debut lies in the author’s assurance that what fascinates her will captivate others. As the unpleasant and gradually vicious nature of the gang’s activities is revealed – this is #MeToo taken to another level – Darwent’s skill at plotting emerges.

Preposterous though the story becomes, she handles it well. Although her writing oscillates between the over-written and the functional, she brings to this sinister story an intense imagination that lingeringly circles the same ground as Clare is pulled tighter into Tabitha’s web.

Only slowly does it become apparent that, rather than being the prey, Clare is the spider.