“WHOSE FAULT WAS IT?”

INTRODUCTION

Appearing in The Happy Mag in August 1923, Heyer’s last for that publication, “Whose Fault Was It?” is Heyer’s first domestic romance – a tale of conflict and love between a husband and wife. It is a sprightly story with some excellent and at times realistic dialogue, as George and Diana argue back and forth over the teacups. Heyer was still living at home in 1923, but since her own parents had been married for over twenty years, it seems likely that she would have witnessed or overheard marital disputes from time to time. While her father, George, was often described as charming and charismatic, her mother, Sylvia, was known to suffer from mood swings—and every marriage has its trials.

George and Diana, however, are only a year married, and though not long out of their honeymoon phase, are already becoming increasingly frustrated with each other. Heyer opens her story with a fiery interchange, in which Diana is surprisingly outspoken. There is no sign of the downtrodden wife or little woman here, even though her husband is self-absorbed and autocratic. Diana has been brought to live in “a beautiful Tudor house about twenty miles from London” where she has “her car and her horses and a large allowance.” There seems little to complain of but Heyer understood relationships and she finds the weakness and uses it to powerful effect.

Although she had no direct experience of living in a grand house – Heyer had grown up in pleasant but mostly rented homes – at the time of this story’s writing she was friends with Dorothea Arbuthnot. Dorothea was the great-niece of the Duchess of Atholl and had grown up in the Manor House in Hollingbourne with a retinue of servants; she was also the “Doreen” to whom Heyer would dedicate two of her novels. From girlhood, Heyer had enjoyed entrée to some of the “best” houses in Wimbledon where she had absorbed many details of how the wealthy and well-connected lived. Although the life she describes in “Whose Fault Was It?” had become less common after the Great War, it was still the dream of many. Having given her protagonists every reason to enjoy their marriage, Heyer teases out their one problem: Diana “had every intention of enjoying life. George, too, meant to enjoy life; unhappily their ideas of enjoyment did not blend.” This is the crux of Heyer’s story.

George is obsessed with Chinese porcelain and finds it “inconceivable that anyone could be bored when looking at a K’ang hi [sic] vase.” He is outraged when Diana describes a recently-purchased vase as “ugly”: “Ugly? Ugly? My dear girl, this is a Ming vase!” (in fact, the Kangxi period belongs to the early part of the Qing dynasty). Heyer must have had a penchant for this sort of china, for years later she would write a superb scene in A Civil Contract (1961) in which the magnificent vulgarian Jonathan Chawleigh presents his aristocratic son-in-law with a Kangxi vase. Chinese porcelain forms a vital part of “Whose Fault Was It?” and Heyer uses it in several subtle ways to reveal character, to progress the plot and as a metaphor for how a broken marriage maybe mended.