That lives have been tragically wasted is clear from the start.īut Roberts wanted to tell Patrick's side of the story too – 'my policeman', her title, is his name for Tom – so she intersperses with Marion's memoir large chunks of Patrick's diary describing the affair with Tom, and later his awful experience in prison after being convicted of 'acts of gross indecency', or for being what angry, jealous Marion calls a 'sexual invert'.

Her first-person narration, written for her husband, is a confession that will reveal her part in what happened next. The novel opens in Peacehaven in 1999, where Marion, Tom and Patrick are living together in an unprepossessing bungalow, and Marion is nursing Patrick following a stroke. Sadly for her, by the time of their marriage Patrick has captured Tom's erotic attention completely their halting, gasping, half-ashamed encounters are warmer and sexier than anything Marion will ever experience. 'Sylvie's mother was wearing an orangey shade of lipstick and from where I was sitting I could smell the lavender cleaning fluid on her hands … her bosom was enormous and always propped up on display, like an oversized, well-whipped meringue in a baker's window.'īut it is Tom who compels Marion's attention, with his whiff of hair oil mixed with pine-scented talc and, 'if you were close enough, the warm, muddy smell of skin beneath'. 'We ate in the front room, and Sylvie's mother's budgerigar provided a constant background tweet,' Marion recalls. Roberts, whose previous novel The Good Plain Cook was sharply comic, brings her 1950s setting to life with evident pleasure in period props, scents and colours. Unfortunately for Roberts, their disappointing wedding night in a seaside hotel can't help but evoke Ian McEwan's famous south-coast wedding-night catastrophe in On Chesil Beach, but there is pathos in her description of the new bride reminiscing about her swimming lessons with Tom, because he held her more gently then than he does in bed. Tom and Marion marry in pouring rain in March 1958, and manage to make love once or twice.

Bethan roberts author