Harnessing Peacocks - Tapa blanda

Hebe listens in the darkness of the hall to a family conference. The stern hypocrisy of her grandfather is winning the day. He has summoned her three horsey sisters' successful husbands and they are discussing Hebe's unexpected pregnancy. The decision, unanimous, is that it be terminated. Hebe, dissenting, flees into the night. Twelve summers later she is living happily alone with her son in a seaside town in Cornwall. He is receiving an expensive education. Hebe has organised her life oddly but well. She has two chief talents in life - cooking and making love - and these she has exercised with dignity, in privacy and for profit. It is when separate strands of the web of Hebe's life become entangled that the even tenor of her days is threatened, and her life is changed.

Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War Office. She also worked part-time in he antiques trade. Mary Wesley lived in London, France, Italy, Germany and several places in the West Country. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is arrested development, getting my first novel published at the age of seventy'. That first novel, Jumping the Queue, is published by Black Swan, as are her later novels, The Camomile Lawn, Second Fiddle, Harnessing Peacocks, The Vacillations of Poppy Carew, Not That Sort of Girl, A Sensible Life, A Dubious Legacy, An Imaginative Experience and Part of the Furniture. With the help of Kim Sayer's evocative photographs Mary Wesley showed us her own personal West Country in her last book, Part of the Scenery. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list.