Celia Dale is a new author to me and now a wonderful discovery thanks to Daunt Books’ recent reissue of A Helping Hand. As I write about this terrific book, another of her titles just published titled Sheep’s Clothing is on its way to me.

It’s Christmas time, a festive season marked by cheer and good company, but one of the novel’s central characters Mrs Fingal is all alone, confined to her room, about halfway through the book. And yet she brims with excitement, at the prospect of presents she is expecting from her niece Lena who hasn’t kept in touch with her for a while, and the Evans couple Josh and Maisie at whose home she has been residing. But when the time to open her presents finally dawns, Mrs Fingal is hit with a crushing sense of disappointment. Lena’s present is cheap with not much thought gone into it, and Mrs Fingal finds Josh and Maisie’s presents equally unremarkable. Mrs Fingal is reduced to a state of tears but is too proud to show her distress, yet the sadness within her is complete. Having led such a rich and vibrant life with her husband, waves of nostalgia often washing upon her, Mrs Fingal finds the reality of her now shrunken circumstances too hard to bear.

It is claustrophobic, chilling scenes such as these that make A Helping Hand so deliciously compelling – a brilliant tale of lies, greed and deception, loneliness, and the heartaches of growing old.

There’s something sinister about Josh and Maisie Evans, the novel’s other protagonists, in the opening pages. An elderly woman, Aunt Flo, lodging with them, has just expired, and the two are seen going through her papers and the contents of her bag. What also lends an eerie air to this chapter is the sense that Aunt Flo was not really related to them in any way and that Josh and Maisie had murky motives for taking her on.

The next chapter then cuts to the Italian beaches, glorious days of summer brimming with sun, sand, bracing air, and a surfeit of tourists. Capitalising on the legacy left behind by Aunt Flo, Josh and Maisie are vacationing in Italy staying in a mid-range pensione. Creepy Josh spends his time ogling at the women on the beach as well as the waitresses at the pensione, but Maisie appears to have made new friends. Enter the elder lady Cynthia Fingal (a wealthy widow close to turning 80) and her niece Lena who are staying in a much luxurious and expensive hotel. Mrs Fingal is pretty fit and active considering her age, but she is stubborn, willful, and opinionated driving Lena over the edge.

Soon, this unlikely set of four people begins bonding. In Josh, Mrs Fingal finds a sympathetic and attentive listener, while Maisie adroitly befriends Lena lulling her into confessional chats about her life or the alleged lack of it. It soon transpires that Lena is Mrs Fingal’s niece but only by marriage; she is no blood relation of Mrs Fingal, a point the old lady keeps harping about to Josh. We learn how after the death of her sister Peggy, Mrs Fingal has no choice but to shift in with Lena; the latter is resentful of Cynthia’s unwelcome presence that cramps her style.

A proud woman for whom her independence is critical, Mrs Fingal finds Lena rude, uncaring, and a killjoy. The fact that she latches on to Josh during their Italian holiday shows how Mrs Fingal longs for a man’s attention; she misses her husband who passed away long ago. Josh is adept at outwardly showing an interest in Mrs Fingal’s chatter even if his mind is elsewhere, and Mrs Fingal feels flattered and complicit in their companionship. Meanwhile, Lena unburdens herself to Maisie; she complains about the impossibility of caring for Mrs Fingal which has brought her social life to a dead end; the two living together has left no room for privacy which Lena yearns for. To Josh and Maisie in separate conversations, it is quite clear that Cynthia Fingal and Lena are pretty unhappy with each other, and thereby arises a ripe situation for the pair to take advantage of.

Offering to accommodate Mrs Fingal, and lend “a helping hand” if you will, at the Evans’s suggestion Mrs Fingal soon comes to stay with the couple as a paying guest; Josh and Maisie have a spare room now that Aunt Flo is dead, and Lena is finally relieved to wash her hands off Mrs Fingal. At first, the old lady thrives on her sense of independence (she is paying for her room) and her freedom (free from Lena), and looks forward to those afternoon conversations with Josh carried over from their Italian sojourn to these drab surroundings of their English suburban residence. But slowly and very subtly, Maisie through her clipped efficiency and psychological manipulation disorients Mrs Fingal who gradually begins to lose her sense of self besieged by a lingering notion that her mind is playing tricks on her.

It took Mrs Fingal some time to do everything: to make up her mind to get out of bed and then actually to do so, for her joints got painful in the night. It was, of course, kind of Mrs E. to make her stay in bed; but at Lena’s she used to get up as soon as she felt like it, with the whole day ahead of her full of small tasks, tidying, washing-up, little trips to the shops, even if she grumbled about them and certainly got no thanks. Here there was so little she had to do that it took twice as long to do it, and became twice as important.

Celia Dale’s excellent character sketches showcase a perceptive mind. Josh is quite the creep with his repulsive male gaze but is subservient to Maisie, in their relationship; she is the one who wears the pants. Indeed, Dale excels in her chilling portrayal of Maisie, a very capable nurse lacking bedside manners; her demeanour suggests a readiness to be kind and caring, when the reality is anything but, her cruelty masked by an air of civility and propriety. She is quite the terror not just to Josh who dare not challenge her, but even to Mrs Fingal who is afraid of her but helpless to do anything about it. Maisie also displays a penchant for smooth-talking when it suits her, particularly in the way she keeps Lena in the dark about Mrs Fingal’s time with them.

Dale also superbly plays with the reader’s emotions where Cynthia Fingal is concerned. At first, Cynthia comes across as an annoying, bullying woman with her complaints and her grievances, so much so that Lena’s frustrations begin to rub off onto the reader too, but that quickly transforms into a sense of mounting fear once she begins staying with the couple and finds herself at their mercy. Cynthia Fingal is also an incredibly lonely woman who craves companionship, her life has been replete with tragedy what with the death of her husband and her only daughter, and the presence of Josh rekindles in her a desire for some kind of a connection.

Lena, of course, is the quintessential angry young woman who finds the responsibility of looking after an elder relative too cumbersome and a heavy burden; she is filled with despondency that life is quickly slipping past her as a result. A surprise element is later on introduced in the form of another character who makes a brief appearance in the novel’s opening chapters, a character on the fringes then, but who becomes pivotal in the second half of the novel, a breath of fresh air in contrast to the deep and ominous gloom of the Evanses.

What’s remarkable about A Helping Hand is that most of the action is dressed in the garb of polite conversations; an outward, all-is-well façade that belies the currents of menace flowing underneath. Here, a striking scene depicting the conversation between Maisie and Lena in a shopping mall is particularly telling; Maisie doles out snippets of information on Mrs Fingal’s health in a manner that sounds disturbingly plausible, and Lena accepts it at face value because that version fits in nicely with how dramatically her life has changed for the better.

Dale’s evocative portrayal of the dreariness of the Evans’s limited suburban existence is spot on. The sameness of her surroundings at home and its unwavering routines accentuates Mrs Fingal’s sense of claustrophobia, a living made all the more cheerless by the grim, featureless landscape outdoors, the anxiety-inducing roar of airplanes flying in the sky, and other aspects that bring to the fore the barren industrial wasteland that is England.

The landscape was not dissimilar to that round Salvione: flat, characterless, the fields half-cultivated, half-industrialised, the proliferation of expedient building, and the arterial road with its whipping, stenching traffic. But beyond it there was not the sea, placidly lipping the sand and the little crabs; and beyond cabbage fields and concrete factories were not the mountains, over whose spine lay patrician cities. For all Graziella knew, this wasteland extended indefinitely, was all England. And over it was a sky pierced by aircraft, that was never the same from one hour to the next unless to be a sullen grey, that never surrendered itself to being bountiful. In Salvione the rain poured itself out of purple clouds extravagantly, like a Verdi opera. Here it stung from a closed sky, spitefully.

The physical and mental anguish of growing old, crippling loneliness, cruelty and deception, what caring for an individual entails, and the exploitation of vulnerable people are some of the themes that are expertly explored in A Helping Hand.  Desperate for company that can keep her growing isolation at bay, Mrs Fingal turns to Josh although her infatuation with him is pretty unnerving. Maisie’s experience as a nurse stands her in good stead but her mode of caregiving is too clinical, one character aptly describing it thus “They seem kind, they take care of her – but they don’t care for her.”

The strength of A Helping Hand lies in the way the story juxtaposes an outward veneer of suburban respectability, with its polite tête-à-têtes and appearances of genteel living against the darker forces of greed and exploitation. We see how appearances can be deceiving and how generally accepted social norms leave room for masking questionable behavior.

Sharply observed, astute, and utterly riveting, A Helping Hand is domestic horror at its finest where Dale deftly and with aplomb exposes the hidden depths of sheer evil, the darkness prevalent in the banality of everyday life that often goes unnoticed. The terror here is not sudden but one that slowly and quietly creeps up on you. With its dark and suspenseful atmosphere suffused with growing dread and unease, A Helping Hand effectively examines the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise when helpless individuals bear the brunt of cruelty and exploitation. Highly recommended!