‘I know I can’t expect you to forgive me.’
‘No.’
‘We shouldn’t have come here, to Netherburn. It was all fine before we came here.’
‘You can’t blame the house.’ But perhaps it was the house, because it was hers, and contained so much of lives that were not his.
Life is a complicated business with no simple fix for damage done, casually or intentionally. In the face of her ex-husband’s need for forgiveness, Ruth wonders about its presence, or absence, in the important relationships of her life, the different things it represents to different people and what it really means to her. People often take refuge in Ruth’s friendship.
On one level, she is uneasy in the role of mother figure, dispensing home comforts to the motley group working out their own life crises under her roof. On another, she deeply enjoys the sense of living family it brings to the old house.
What should Ruth do about Netherburn? She questions her resistance to the idea of selling the dilapidated family home where she was born. By staying put, is she refusing to embrace life? Gradually Ruth opens up to Larry, a New York artist lodging at Netherburn, and he comes to understand quite how private, and passionate, this woman is. Does he have the strength to forgive himself and move forward in step with her?
 | Jenni CalderJenni Calder is the author of many books on social and literary history, and writes fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. Her most recent published work is Forgive (Luath Press, 2015), a novel which explores the nature and possibility of forgiveness. It centres on Ruth, who presides over Netherburn, a large decaying house in West Lothian, and the disparate collection of troubled individuals who for a while make it their home. Disturbing information about the past mingles with Netherburn’s shifting relationships and a growing attraction between Ruth and Larry, an American artist and draft-dodger. The individuals cohere briefly into a kind of family, with mutual support but also friction. Ruth, sometimes resentful of her role as nurturer, cannot break away from Netherburn. The others are sojourners, passing through, but Larry, perhaps, will return. |