The comforts of good sex

The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden

*Warning! Contains mild spoilers if you haven’t yet read The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden

A couple of weeks ago I found myself badly in need of a book to jolt me out of the blues; out of the world. I wasn’t sleeping and when I was my dreams were sinister and stressful.

Then I heard that Yael van der Wouden had won the Women’s Prize for fiction so I went straight to where my book pile was saving her novel, The Safe Keep, and started to read.

I knew from the first page that I’d like the book. The first paragraphs are lush with tactile detail: there’s a wound, a rotting garden, a broken piece of ceramic with a hare’s leg still visible on the rim. I was immediately drawn close to Isabel’s (the protagonist) world. I was drawn to the tone, too: sinister and unsettling, like my dreams.

I have always been intrigued by houses and the traumas and secrets they hold, like bodies. Many of my favourite books revel in houses that both intimidate and protect (like du Maurier’s Rebecca; Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi; Oby in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner that Held Them; all of Austen). Van der Wouden’s The Safe Keep is a book about a house and by turns that house shelters and it yearns and it haunts.

The house is the historic heart of The Safe Keep which is set in 1960s Den Haag / The Hague: it’s the vessel that resounds with the quiet but devastating aftermath of the rampant antisemitism that marred the decades prior. But what makes The Safe Keep a perfect historical novel is its aliveness. And what gives this novel life is desire. I think we’ve all read historic novels that feel coated in the dust of the past. Then we’ve all read novels like The Corner That Held Them, or Wolf Hall, that seem more alive than we are through lightness of touch, just the right amount of well-placed detail, and attention to the everlasting truth that people are people no matter when they lived. Those novels have eyes and ears and heartbeats and somehow you synch with them as you read.

The Safe Keep has a beating heart in Isabel who lives in the house and takes care of it. Her avid attention to her domestic routine gives the novel its quiet tension: she’s the ultimate spinster — fussy, domestic, anxious and wary to the point of paranoia. When her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, comes to stay (or inveigles her way in if you’re Isabel) Isabel’s iciness is almost unbearable.

*Spoiler incoming*

Eva is a key. Her arrival to the house unlocks Isabel and their negotiation of each other is the quick of this book. In her acknowledgements, van der Wouden says, “Thank you all for not talking to me about Chapter 10, you are all very respectful people.” I loved reading this. Chapter 10 is some of the best written sex I’ve read in a long time. I’m just going to quote a small bit of it, here:

“They were at eye level like this: Isabel kneeling, Eva perched on the bed’s edge. They were close, and Eva had tow hard hands in the flesh of Isabel’s shoulders. Their noses brushed, cheeks pressed, and Eva turned her face away. Turned it back. Isabel made a sound, tightened her grip on Eva’s thighs, and Eva panted —a hot thing on Isabel’s lips.”

The Safe Keep is an intimate portrait of a house that comes alive with desire and sex and love. And it surprised me. Not because I don’t think the past was full of sex just as it is now, but because the container of the story is pain, loss and sadness. And reading the juxtaposition of that kind of intergenerational wound with hot and heady desire equalled comfort.

Two covers: I love both. The pears have significance… but I do love the long view into the house and its solitary occupant.

We’re currently living through a time of gross violence; systemic inequality; rising hate and bigotry; and overt signs of Fascism. For me, reading The Safe Keep and finding a blooming of desire and love amid heavy, hard truths was deeply moving and profoundly comforting. In many ways the novel feels uncannily timely: a story to remind us that even in the hardest of times there is joy and passion to be found, there are surprises, there are sudden and magnificent changes to our lives for the better.

The rest of the novel is tremendous. If you haven’t read it yet I urge you to! There is a shift in narrative view and tone that you may see coming or you may not. Either way it is an enormously satisfying and intimate novel — one of the best I’ve read this year.

In one of life’s perfect coincidences, soon after I read The Safe Keep, my friend Danae who has immaculate taste in films and art told me I had to watch Portrait of a Woman on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma (2019). Like The Safe Keep, this is an exquisite piece of art that seeks joy amid pain. It’s a historical French romance about an artist — a woman — who is commissioned to paint the portrait of a reluctant subject — a woman betrothed to someone she’s never even met. Every frame of the film is like a painting. It’s simple and builds into a passionate love before ebbing into an inevitable conclusion. I loved the wild, seaside setting, the fire scene and the singing …, and the threads in the film that carry weight and tension but are never overly explained. And, like The Safe Keep, the film is comforting even when it is heartbreaking.

I would love to know your favourite historic novels! Please share them with me in the comments. Especially if they have well written sex!

The beautiful stars of Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Adèle Haenel, left, and Noémie Merlant. Photo: Curzon Articial Eye.