Friends and Relatives Author:Elizabeth Bowen ' "Life after all," thought Edward, hearing tea approach, the gay dance of china on the silver tray, "is an affair of charm, not an affair of passion." ' But his mother had discovered otherwise. Aristocratic, ageing, still beautiful and still passionately attached to her lover, Lady Elfrida had tasted forbidden fruit, and her affair had become t... more »he skeleton in the family cupboard. And for her son Edward, tied to a job in the Civil Service, bound into marriage, sealed by the charming rituals of social intercourse and teatime conversation, his mother's sin, nonetheless, still has a disturbing potency.. Through nuances of drawing-room comedy, the absurd - potentially explosive - interplay of propriety and passion, Elizabeth Bowen richly earns V.S Pritchett's tribute: "Daring by nature and intellect and passionate in imagination, compassionate in heart, she saw to it that her people faced the secrets from which society no longer protected them."« less