Same Time, Same Place
by Mervyn Peake: The young man is sick of living at home, disgusted by the
sight of his father slumped in an armchair every night, his mother shuffling
around in slippers with worn-down heels. He’s been living in this house for
twenty-three years, and it’s no existence for a young man who wants to see life
and find love.
Going into
the city, he enters a café and seats himself opposite a magnificent-looking
woman. It’s love at first sight. Each day after this he visits the café and
meets the woman, and every day he leaves with the same promise of ‘same time,
same place’.
In due course the two
decide to marry, and they arrange a date and a place. She tells him that she’d
like to invite some of her friends.
I would
have first read this story in the mid-1970s, around the time that I read the
Gormenghast trilogy – that’s about forty years ago. In that time, although I’d
forgotten details of the story, the hallucinatory weirdness of its conclusion
remained in my memory. Re-reading it for this review, I found that the story
had lost none of its power, none of its uniqueness. And possibly the implicit
true horror of the story is delayed until after the story has passed what is
ostensibly the moment of horrific revelation.
