Paying Guests

Here's a delightful book we found during our three--and their twenty-seven-- days of fog on Deer Island, N.B., while paying guests. Those familiar with the Tilling (Rye, East Sussex) of Benson's Mapp and Lucia will not be surprised at the array of characters here: the butterfly-fingered pianist-painter Miss Howard with her "little place in Kent" that entices the bachelor exercise-fanatic Colonel Chase to propose while the virtuosa is entertaining a more welcome--and more modern--proposal from another quarter. For others from the Boston area, Mrs. Bliss, a mind healer, is a wonderful creation; and, more profound is the dutiful Florence, daughter and nurse to her unappreciative, valetudinarian father, Mr. Kemp. Oh, we read it all aloud, savoring, making it last over a month. This novel is a welcome, ironic antidote to all the pharmaceutical hype on TV. It's about "paying guests" who are there for the Cure; and by all that's sacred in Tilling, this book IS the cure.