a day ago
The Margate woman who argued with locals
Caroline Lane vanished in 2009, not long after a fractious residents' meeting at Saltwater Mansions, her apartment block in Margate. For the next 13 years, her mortgage and other standing orders continued to be paid, but no one came looking for her or sent Christmas cards, and she has not been seen by any of those residents since. Nor is there any trace of her online. 'I've great admiration for anyone who doesn't have the minutiae of their lives splashed all over the internet,' David Whitehouse writes in his superb, intoxicating book, named after Lane's mysterious residence. 'I see them as I might the survivor of a plague.'
If no man is an island, then one woman at least seemed to be. This absence, not just of a person but of everything that comes with being even a vaguely social animal, is what so intrigues Whitehouse in this hybrid of reportage and memoir. His quest is sparked by a chance remark from a hairdresser friend, and as he digs for information, Lane comes gradually into focus, less as a defined individual than as a palimpsest, half-glimpsed through layers of others' impressions and Whitehouse's own imagination.
Those impressions are varied, plentiful, and largely negative, mostly because Saltwater Mansions was a hive of gossip, with everyone's lives discussed by everyone else. Lane, however, stood apart, in every way: perhaps snobbish and haughty, perhaps aloof through shyness and solitude. 'There were no pleasantries. No small talk. Not even remarks on the weather.' At Lane's final residents' meeting, she alone had opposed every single majority decision – on the election of directors, the auditing of accounts, a new fire escape – angering and exasperating the others.
But Beth, who buys Lane's flat after its eventual forced purchase, makes Whitehouse reconsider the common view that Lane was unreasonably stroppy at such meetings: maybe she was merely standing her ground against men who thought they knew better? Without anything close to a consensus on the kind of person she was, Whitehouse allows himself to imagine 'a multiverse of Caroline Lanes' – a fugitive, a dominatrix, a spy.
By this stage, however, the book has already outgrown its starting point and diverged into chronicling the lives of others: Beth; Lane's erstwhile neighbour Leonard; and Whitehouse himself. All these narratives sooner or later circle back to the same place: family, in all its forms. A woman protects her sister; a mother fights to stay alive for her daughter; a husband is widowed and remarries; and the writer reflects on his own relationship with his father, a man who was happiest doing things and helping people, and who had little time for self-reflection. One of the best lines in the book, up against some stiff competition, comes when Whitehouse watches his father with his own small son, 'a craggy hand saddling the soft hump of infant belly, their whole world there in the cradle of each other'.
The world here is Margate, Whitehouse's adopted hometown, and it is as much a character as a setting. Once blighted by crime, poverty and xenophobia, its more recent gentrification has been a double-edged sword, with organic cafés, yoga studios and second homes combining to hollow out the place's chaotic but authentic spirit. That process has proved 'disproportionately bad for the poor and people of colour', displaced by an 'arts-led regeneration whose proponents talked a good game about investing in their community, but whose schemes and businesses in practice tended mostly to benefit people who looked and sounded like themselves'.
Were this a novel, it would have a twist ending, but the non-fiction writer has to stick to what is known. It's hopefully no great spoiler to say that Lane's tale is not resolved neatly, though the way in which it gets there is certainly unexpected. Whitehouse is honest enough to admit his reflexive feelings of entitlement to know her full story, and it's proof of his versatility – he's both an award-winning novelist and an acclaimed non-fiction writer whose last book, About a Son, dealt with a man's quest for justice after the murder of his son – that he so beautifully combines the diligence of fact and the verve of fiction.
Saltwater Mansions is by turns compassionate, melancholy, perceptive and uplifting. Whitehouse's turn of phrase is exquisite, conjuring entire scenes with just a few words. Margate High Street is 'pocked by the wounds of empty units'; net curtains are 'stained with rococo curls of yellow by decades of cigarette smoke'; 'Mr Peake was plumping cushions as though they'd wronged him'; 'the cat-hiss of waves breaking'; 'a charmed snake of ripped police tape dancing on the breeze'. The people and town in Saltwater Mansions may be resolutely ordinary, but the book itself is anything but.
