The Whole Day Through

“… he remembered her sleeveless dress was simple and fairly short, the colour of a favourite pair of suede shoes….a brown somewhere between bread crust and butterscotch. It was either very well cut or she had an excellent figure; without her inside it would surely have looked like a sack. Her arms and legs were slightly tanned and her short hair hung across her face as she arched backwards. She was anonymous and elegant, and elegance in a busy general hospital was as unexpected as dancing”

The Whole Day Through is the fourteenth novel by British author, Patrick Gale. Ben Patterson and Laura Lewis have not seen each other for twenty years when they run into each other by chance in a Winchester hospital. Ben works in the hospital’s Genitourinary Medicine clinic while providing support for his Downs Syndrome younger brother, Bobby. His wife, Chloe, is living in London. Laura has recently returned to England from Paris to be the carer for her elderly mother, an eminent virologist who is mentally sharp but physically debilitated. “Ben had just begun to admit to himself that he was happier away from Chloe than with her…when he ran into Laura in the hospital”: he asks Laura out.

The narrative alternates between Ben and Laura, and extends over the length of a whole day, some weeks after their chance encounter. As each goes through the routine of their day, they examine the life they have now, the events that have brought them to this point, and remember the course of their earlier relationship, twenty years previous. By alternating the narrative, Gale presents two versions of events, two points of view which, naturally, do not always correspond.

Gale has a marvellous talent for slowly revealing his characters: their strengths and weaknesses, their good qualities and their faults and failings. Their ideas and opinions, their reasoning and rationale, their emotions are all expertly conveyed: “He had retained few close friends and they were all married, child-bearingly and happily so, apparently, and to voice doubts about a marriage to anyone in such a tight-knit group was to unstopper a baleful genie”.

As always, his descriptive prose is wonderfully evocative, capturing mood and ambience with consummate ease. “…she felt her unvoiced anger breaking out at last as a flush on her face and a tremor in her hands and jaw and a sense that everything around her – the visitors with their reused plastic bags, the too chirpy porters, the nurses sullen with exhaustion, the amateur art lining the corridor along which she strode – seemed an affront to her senses” and “At that time of year she enjoyed looking up from her magnificent seat to explore the farther reaches of the vaulting and tracery with her eyes. In the winter months there was a different pleasure to be had from the vast darkness of the church around them and the sense of the quire as a pool of light in a forest of nocturnal stone” are just two examples.

Fans of Gale’s earlier work will not be disappointed in this bittersweet love story. Beautifully written.

4.5 stars