Books: The Devoted Murderers

THE PUMPKIN EATER (222 pp.)—Penelope Mortimer—McGraw-Hill ($4.95).

“We didn’t love each other as most people love: and yet the moment I have said that I think of the men and women I have seen clasped together with eyes full of loathing, men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion.” So says the Peter pumpkin eater of the title. He is a loosely knit English screenwriter named Jake Armitage, and the wife he has put in the pumpkin shell is the narrator—a woman who remains as nameless to the reader as she seems face less to herself.

The wife, at 38, is in her fourth marriage, Jake is in his first, and they are surrounded by an unnumbered “bodyguard” of children. The crisis in their marriage comes when the wife learns that Jake has been unfaithful to her, and she collapses in a “haemorrhage of grief.”

The heroine’s trouble is her belief that “with the slightest effort we could escape to some safe place where everything would be ordered and good and indestructible.” Her first three marriages were a kind of play. But slowly she finds resignation and returns to Jake with no illusions: “I was no longer frightened of him. I no longer needed him. I accepted him at last, because he was inevitable.”

That conclusion may at first seem small recompense for the private hells the characters have been wallowing in. Yet such is the power of Author Mortimer’s mordant vision that the wife’s resignation finally appears as the sort of accommodation any loving murderer might wish.