Heart Breaker Part I

This is Howatch's final published novel. She said afterwards that she was going to write shorter works, but they have never appeared. There seems to have been nothing from her in many years now so I suppose she has been suffering from ill health. Her last novel in the St Benets Trilogy moves on to some new characters, which I think is one of the problems of the work as a whole. In Starbridge, we get to know several characters very well over their whole lives, but in St Benets, it jerks uneasily from one set to the next. This is about another outsider who comes into contact with the church. The novel takes up the story of Carter who now spells her name, Carta, 2 years after her husband's suicide. She is living with Eric Tucker, a would be novelist.. but the 2 of them find it hard to make the commitment of marriage. Carta is much richer than him, and she still has some guilt issues about Kim. Nicholas Darrow has married Alice but his ex wife is still inclined to try to involve him in her life. This doesnt seem to ring true to me, as Rosalind was earlier desperate to persuade Nick to give her a divorce. Carta has taken up a volunteer job in the Centre, as a fund raiser, trying to raise money to improve the Healing Centre's faciilities. She admits she does not know much about fund raising but she has contacts among the rich of the City. She asks advice on fund raising from a friend, who is a corporate lawyer, Richard Slaney, and his wife Moira, who does charity work. Richard tells her that he has some family problems, and she offers to listen but he will only tell her he is in love with someone else, and that his daughter has anorexia... Then suddenly Richard dies of a heart attack, and Carta finds that the person he is in love with is another man. She knows that he met his lover in a flat in the city, and went there only to find that there is a handsome young man called Gavin Blake, who claims to be straight but who has a business having sex with middle aged City men. She is shocked and amazed, and is even more angry when she finds that Gavin is making a pass at her. Part of the novel is narrated by Carta and part of it by Gavin. We learn that he works for Mrs Mayfield who is now living under another identity as Mrs Elizabeth Delamere, and she runs psychic healing groups, sex groups and also runs Gavin as a high class rent boy.