The Cat Jumps Book

Elizabeth Bowen was greatly interested in -life with the lid on- and what happened when the lid came off. Her work deals with innocence and betrayal and the secrets that lie beneath the veneer of respectability. Her style is highly wrought and owes much to literary modernism. She was also influenced by the techniques of cinematography. 'Place'-plays a central role in her work. *** an excerpt fromt the third story: THE CAT JUMPS AFTER the Bentley murder, Rose Hill stood empty two years. Lawns mounted to meadows; white paint peeled from the balconies; the sun, looking more constantly, less fearfully in than sightseer's eyes through the naked windows, bleached the floral wallpapers. The week after the execution Harold Bentley's legatees had placed the house on the books of the principal agents, London and local. But though sunny, up to date, and convenient, though so delightfully situated over the Thames valley (above flood level), within easy reach of a golfcourse, Rose Hill, while frequently viewed, remained unpurchased. Dreadful associations apart, the privacy of the place had been violated; with its terraced garden, lily-pond and pergola cheerfully rose-encrusted, the public had been made too familiar. On the domestic scene too many eyes had burnt the impress of their horror. Moreover, that pearly bathroom, that bedroom with wide outlook over a loop of the Thames . . . 'The Rose Hill Horror': headlines flashed up at the very sound of the name. 'Oh, no, dear!' many wives had exclaimed, drawing their husbands hurriedly from the gate. 'Come away!' they had urged crumpling the agent's order to view as though the house were advancing upon them. And husbands came away -- with a backward glance at the garage. Funny to think a chap who was hanged had kept his car there. The Harold Wrights, however, were not deterred. They had light, bright, shadowless, thoroughly disinfected minds. They believed that they disbelieved in most things but were unprejudiced; they enjoyed frank discussions. They dreaded nothing but inhibitions: they had no inhibitions. They were pious agnostics, earnest for social reform; they explained everything to their children, and were annoyed to find their children could not sleep at nights because they thought there was a complex under the bed. They knew all crime to be pathological, and read their murders only in scientific books. They had vita glass put into all their windows. No family, in fact, could have been more unlike the mistaken Harold Bentleys. Read More