Cathy Rentzenbrink’s first book, the 2015 memoir The Last Act of Love, recounted the terrible story of her brother’s decade-long coma after being hit by a car. It revealed a writer imbued with considerable empathy, something she then extended upon in her 2021 novel, Everyone Is Still Alive, which put the realities of marriage and parenthood under the microscope, not flinching from any of it.
Her new novel, Ordinary Time, does the same, following a woman who wakes up one morning to the realisation that she might just be in the wrong life.
By her own description, Ann is “44, and mousey”. She lives with her husband Tim, a vicar, and their young son Sam, in Cornwall. She would love another child, but after an ectopic pregnancy Tim seems reluctant to go through such an ordeal again, and so they remain three. Besides, Tim is busy, as church business rarely observes the regular 9-to-5.
Ann’s role here is largely domestic: to cook and clean for Tim while he ministers to his needy flock. The local parishioners’ meetings do not enliven her days, neither the semi-regular book club evenings she helps to organise. One of the novels she recommends is Anna Karenina, the 19th-century epic in which, she points out, “adulterous women tend to end up dead by their own hand”.
Not that Ann herself is considering adultery – or suicide, for that matter – but she does crave something: incident, excitement, anything. Frankly, who wouldn’t? And so when her brother, who is spiralling into a midlife depression, needs her help, she leaves Cornwall to be by his side in London. It is here, at a dinner party, she meets Jamie.
As all good potential fling candidates should be in fiction, Jamie is almost preposterously handsome. “It’s that James Bond vibe,” a friend says to her. “Women go giggly around him, and men stand up straighter and suck in their tummies.”
Ann allows herself few expectations with Jamie – she’s “44, and mousey”, remember, and not in the habit of ensnaring mysterious hunks – but he proves receptive to her otherwise overlooked charms. He is a former Marine who now works as a security consultant advising high-net-worth individuals, which is far sexier than a mere vicar. They meet again for a walk, and then for a coffee; their assignations tentative and thrillingly uncertain. It is through Jamie that Ann allows herself to daydream about a portal into another existence entirely.
Ordinary Time endeavours to explore that period in midlife when things begin to close in, and one can feel a lingering sense of: Is this it? Ann isn’t unhappy, strictly speaking, but neither is she its opposite. Is it too late, she wonders, to dare dream for more? And if she makes good on that dream, how will that affect her adored son?
Rentzenbrink conjures up the humdrum and the everyday not only to show how stifling it can be and how Ann may wish to escape it, but also simply to convey real life as it is lived: “The frying pan has seen better days,” she writes. “All the nonstick has worn off, and I have to keep stirring and make sure the mince doesn’t catch on the bottom.”
Elsewhere, Ann faithfully recounts the dreary details of those weekly church meetings. Her own existential ruminations, meanwhile, come with the distinct whiff of Victoria Wood. “Perhaps this is where all romance leads,” she muses. “Bladder problems and recriminations.”
Rentzenbrink is generous in offering Ann a wish-fulfilment glimpse at The Perfect Man – on the page, Jamie is essentially part Daniel Craig (muscles everywhere) and part Alan Titchmarsh (unaccountably good at pruning flowers) – but this novel is not a fantasy.
As she painstakingly charts the will-they-won’t-they course that Ann and Jamie embark upon, one that will have ramifications if pursued fully, she brings her characters up into vivid, complicated reality, replete with all the warmth and confusion and sadness that reality invariably entails. But not despair, not quite. Rentzenbrink is a hopeful writer, and this a hopeful book.
Published by Phoenix, £20