A review by shoba
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

3.0

The novel begins in the middle of the London bombing raids of World War 2. A time when attachments underwent official scrutiny and information was often withheld. The protagonist, Stella Rodney, waits for Robert Harrison’s visit. Harrison, a man she dislikes, nonetheless insists on this meeting.

“She had asked him to go away and to stay away: that was the best he could do- she said, last time. What did she expect him to do? She expected him to do whatever he did do: she had no idea what he did, but surely he did do something?- why not get on with that? She had finished up with: “p’I’m sorry, but it just is that you don’t attract me. Why should we go on wasting each other’s  time?….There’s something about you, or isn’t something about you. I don’t know what.’”

Harrison claims Stella’s lover, Robert Kelway, was a German spy. Offered no evidence pertaining to the charges, Stella was unsure what to do next. 

“Stella pressed her thumb against the edge of the table to assure herself this was a moment she was living through- as in the moment before a faint she seemed to be looking at everything down a darkening telescope.”

Stella finds herself becoming attached to Harrison, while her affection for Kelway never wavers. As she becomes increasingly fearful, Stella remains unable to decide which man was telling her the truth.

“…and his abstention from touching her, always marked and careful, was becoming, in this constriction of the embrasure, powerful as a touch.”