There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence as a PA at a dilettante arts charity called Hodgepodge (strapline: “for ideas”). She types emails, makes tea and increasingly finds herself running personal errands for her monstrous boss Jeannie. Jeannie seems to see no difference between working for the charity, and working for her.
After a horrible breakup, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no savings, no bank of Mum and Dad, and no room left in her overdraft, she winds up staying alone in Jeannie’s ancestral home, a rambling pile in the middle of nowhere. “We could do with somebody to take care of the place,” Jeannie says, as Danielle bursts into uncharacteristic tears. “You’d be doing us a huge favour.”
Westerley has obvious antecedents: Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House, with their rooms shrouded in dust sheets and locked doors with no keys. All at Westerley is, of course, not as it seems: Danielle, alone in the house and miles from anywhere, finds a fresh bowl of peaches on the sideboard; sees a face at the window; wakes to find herself somewhere – or somewhen – else entirely. She hears hobnailed boots on the stairs; finds herself reaching for a calico apron that doesn’t exist.
Danielle sleeps at first in the master bedroom, but when Jeannie arrives unexpectedly – trailing her equally appalling son, Edward – she moves, of course, into the servants’ quarters. Soon, Danielle is rising at dawn, cleaning up after Jeannie and Edward, bringing afternoon tea up to the drawing room. As past and present blur, so too do the lines between 21st-century employee and 19th-century maidservant. Didn’t she always bring Jeannie a green tea in the office? And didn’t Jeannie, after all, ask her to “take care of the place”?
Service is resolutely a book of the present day: of the housing crisis, of the unsteady nature of a life in the arts without family backing, of broken phones and bad wifi. Yet Mooney’s timeslip of a novel makes it clear how timeless some things actually are: loneliness, poverty, aspirations, the feeling of toiling for somebody, for something, for no other reason than the order of your birth, the precariousness with which one must tiptoe between deference and degradation, the effort to retain a sense of self in the face of a world that believes you – subtly or otherwise – to be lesser.
Attempting a seduction with assault-adjacent undertones, rapacious Edward announces that he is Upstairs, Wooster and, er, Downton, whereas Danielle is Downstairs, Jeeves, and … Abbey. “It’s a joke, Jesus. You work for my mum, so you’re the staff? I was joking.” Alone in the drawing room with the young master of the house, Danielle – or, perhaps, her ghostly counterpart – has no idea what to do, or how to escape.
The hauntings of Service are genuinely chilling. And yet equally chilling is the real world in which so many Danielles have lived. How many Edwards, for how many years, carried out their “seduction” with no consequences? How many poor girls have suffered worse with the threat of homelessness and penury hanging over them? The book, in places, can feel a little heavy-handed. Mooney might have trusted the reader more – or, perhaps, her own writing. The meticulous evisceration of the class system stands by itself. The charge that drives the book, then, is how little has changed in over 100 years. Or, perhaps, how little ever changes.
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