Word: gemma
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...accountant, he fished Elsa out of his typists' pool. She flapped and wriggled a little, and then lay still, legs gently parted." This plummy pair is to spend the weekend cataloguing marketable monstrosities at the mansion of Hamish, an elderly millionaire, and his beautiful, young, crippled wife Gemma...
...with Gemma that naughtiness enters the picture. She has cooked up a scheme-unnecessarily devious, since no one seriously opposes it-for Hamish to lie with Elsa, who will then hatch out the child that she, Gemma, wants but cannot give birth to. She herself, more to serve iniquity than to requite passion, will bed with Victor. "Love," she tells Elsa, is "gene calling to gene, as country cats call to each other across fields...
...author's warm-weather fiction. But Novelist Weldon is much too fond of the kind of ornateness that clutters Iris Murdoch's lesser novels-in this case, the ponderous idea that Hamish is Rumpelstiltskin and Elsa is the poor girl for whom he spins straw into gold. Gemma insists that Elsa do huge batches of typing each night. Elsa can't manage it, but Hamish...
Straw into gold-but what's the point? The remainder of the fairy tale requires that the girl guess Rumpelstiltskin's name or give up her first-born child to him, and sure enough, Hamish's origins are unknown, at least to Elsa and the reader. Gemma ultimately reveals her husband's identity at the end of an amusing but overlong story of her introduction...
...between the acts of this royal variety show are several excursions off to the home of the wicked Stepmother (Margaret Lockwood-the heroine, during rather better times, of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes). There, Cinderella (Gemma Craven) gets snooted by her Stepsisters and gazes sorrowfully into the flames of the scullery fire, waiting for her Fairy Godmother to come along...