The Constant Mistress [Paperback]

I first read this book some years ago; since then, I have recommended it to many other readers. Perhaps it was the context; I read it on a plane from Delhi to Goa, and finished it over a good lunch. I so enjoyed the mistress; the character seemed very whole, in that bits of her I loved, and bits of her I disliked. She seemed very real. Ages since I read it, as my books are packed away, but two scenes spring to mind: the first, her shopping in H. Nics; even that joy is robbed from her. The second, the words of her nurse: death is a woman in white, and she has been with you for all of your life [paraphrased]; well, I cried, and I'm sure others have too. Since reading this, I've read lots more of Angela Lambert's titles, and whilst I have enjoyed them, I have not been so moved or believed so much in the characters. A lovely, lovely book.

The beautiful and intelligent courtesan fighting a terminal illness has captivated the public's imagination since the 19th century, Dumas' 'La Dame aux camelias' and 'La traviata'. Laura King (sister of Constance, heroine of 'Love Among the Single Classes') is not exactly a courtesan - she earns her own living as an interpreter, owns her own house in Chelsea (she must have done well; I'm not sure even in the 1990s interpreters could have afforded little Chelsea houses) and is fairly independent. But, owing to a combination of sexual freedom in the days of the Pill, bad luck finding a man she could imagine living with, and, in her youth, an unscrupulous older lover who introduces her to life as a mistress, Laura has increasingly found herself playing the role of mistress to a number of wealthy men all over Europe and in the USA. When she is diagnosed with hepatitis C, and told she has only two years maximum more to live, Laura decides to spend her remaining months visiting all the men who've been important to her. And so begins an odyssey - mentally back into Laura's past as she revisits her life from university days where she experienced her first heartbreak to her first longterm and horribly exploitative relationship (on the man's part) with a married publisher, to her first experiences as mistress to various wealthy men, her two attempts to get married (one of the men she finds sexually repellent, the other she likes but has little physical chemistry with) and on to her experiences as a casual mistress - and physically, as she travels from Manchester to Amalfi to Camberwell to Norfolk, from Paris back to London and on to Monaco and New York - and finally back to London to face both her end, and the one man that she has not confronted - her greatest love and her greatest heartbreak. And as Laura forces herself to face him we learn a great deal about her and why she is determined not to fight death.

Lambert, who faced horrible periods of illness herself, writes with great sensitivity about Laura's illness, and her thoughts about death. She also describes her life and her experiences in relationships vividly and with intelligence, though I had my doubts about the way Laura reacted to some of her men: I doubt, with Edouard so charming, she'd have gone off him so fast (30 year age-gaps are no barrier to women finding men attractive, and many women have married with bigger gaps!), and Conrad, her other 'older man' was so vile that one felt that to stick with him Laura must have either been very insecure or masochistic. And, considering she was earning well, would Laura really have considered that she'd be choosing a life of poverty by marrying Kit? (As a university lecturer with no children, Kit wouldn't have exactly been on the breadline either.) Still, many of the descriptions of Laura's encounters with her men were beautifully written - particularly her time with Kit and her affectionate reunion with Edouard - and Lambert kept Laura's mystery carefully concealed until towards the end of the book, revealing it most subtly. I also liked the descriptions of Laura's relationship with her family; one came to feel that she and Constance had both been damaged in different ways by their hearty middle-class parents, but Lambert also wrote movingly of the tenderness between the sisters. The descriptions of the places Laura visited were good too, though the research into work as an interpreter was (as one of the other reviewers has pointed out) very sloppy: I doubt many professional interpreters could manage Russian, German, French, Italian and Mandarin; Laura's degree specialization changed a couple of times in the book; and I think she'd have found the switch from publishing to interpreting a much bigger jump than she did.

Still - a finely written and thoughtful book on the whole, and anyone who can write about dying without making an unbearably depressing book is a pretty impressive writer.

As a conference interpreter myself this was a cringe a minute. The author acknowledges the people who gave her info about Monaco casino and liver disease, but she doesn't seem to have interviewed anyone who shares her central character's profession. On page after page the author demonstrates her total ignorance of conference interpreting. Eg the idea of accepting an assignment "with German, though not much" when her German "isn't up to much" is for example utterly anathema to a professional!She also must be the only English mother tongue colleague to work from Russian AND Chinese!! Also the French sentences are all grammatically WRONG, so God help anyone who would actually employ this thankfully fictional character.
If the author wasn't a journalist with contacts in the publishing industy this book would never have been taken off the slush pile; and if it had been it would've been sent back with the words 'Do proper research' written on it.
Shame because the story in itself isn't too bad.