SHY CREATURES (LARGE PAPERBACK)
The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her 30s. She's an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a forbidden love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor. One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she's admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge. When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented reclusive artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man's past, Helen's own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel. . .