The Demon Lover

Content Warning: This section mentions wartime violence, relationship abuse, sexuality, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and demon possession.

“The Demon Lover” is a story that gives Kathleen Drover’s anxiety regarding the World War II metaphorical embodiment. Bowen sets the scene in a desolate 1941 London, abandoned because of Germany’s bombing campaign targeting the city, which was the epicenter of the British Empire. Like many Londoners, Kathleen and her family have relocated to the countryside to avoid the air raids. During her brief return to gather some personal items, the rhythms and routines of her former life seem alien to Kathleen, and she starts to feel a great deal of apprehension.

An off-kilter atmosphere manifests from the start. Mrs. Drover’s house key barely fits the lock on the warped door, and the interior is stuffy and covered in a kind of “film.” While the location is quiet and should seem familiar because the Drovers have resided there for many years, there is an underlying feeling of foreboding. Mrs. Drover doesn’t trust the caretaker, and the arrival of a mysterious letter, not forwarded to the country house, immediately strikes her as disconcerting. She feels the sender of the letter has “intruded upon” her routine and bears no goodwill toward her (662), endowing the intentions of the letter writer with a sense of hidden menace.

The actual words of the letter exacerbate Mrs. Drover’s unease. The letter’s tone is commanding but also familiar, telling “Kathleen” to expect the letter writer at the “arranged hour” (662). For Mrs. Drover, who has been keenly living in the present, this incident opens a floodgate of memories taking her back to 1916, World War I, and the moment a young soldier proposed to her as he was heading back to the battlefront.

During this last goodbye, which takes place in the evening in her family’s shadowy garden, she cannot see the young man’s face except for the ghostly glimmer of his eyes. Only 19 in 1916, Kathleen is hardly prepared for marriage and longs instead for the “safe arms of her mother and sister” as she mourns the fact that the soldier has gone back to war (663). She does not think his absence will be permanent. When she starts to wonder about the worst-case scenario—that he will die in battle—he reassures her that “I shall be with you […] sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait” (663). This assurance, however, is complicated by his speaking to her “without feeling” (663). Further, he does “not [kiss]” her but holds her away from him (663). Unable to see him clearly, she reaches out to touch him, and he takes her hand and presses it to his uniform, repeatedly cutting it: “That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away” (663). In the end, her feelings are not those of a girl in love but of a girl coerced into agreement. This makes her feel “apart, lost, and forsworn” (663), as if she has agreed to a pact that is “sinister.”

Nevertheless, when her fiancé goes “missing” and is “presumed dead” (664), the young woman is devastated. She feels a “complete dislocation” from her life (664), and for years, she does not date. Her family begins to worry about her future. She is 32 when, to everyone’s relief, she marries William Drover. William and she settle in London, have children, and enjoy a life of relatively peaceful routine until the blitz forces them to leave their home. This critical moment greatly disturbs Mrs. Drover’s stability.

After reading the letter, Mrs. Drover begins to conflate the past with the present, noting that the war has made “her married London home’s whole air” seem like “a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away” (664). She feels like all the years as Mrs. Drover have been “cancelled.” This sense of obliteration echoes the bombs dropping on London and the country’s fear that “normal” life had irrevocably changed. For Mrs. Drover, everything is in jeopardy due to arbitrary forces: a bomb, accidents, abandonment, arbitrary death, and a former fiancé who has returned from the dead to meet her on their supposed “anniversary” (662).

Eager to get away from the letter and potential danger, both real and imagined, Mrs. Drover quickly gathers the things she came for. As she does so, she imagines that the ghost of her former fiancé might arrive at the house to meet her, and she anxiously begins to plan escape routes. Her terror deepens when she remembers the phone is not working and she cannot call a taxi to the house. Deciding that she will get a taxi and bring it back to collect her packages, she feels slightly relieved. However, it then occurs to her that she can’t remember her fiancé’s face and therefore, if he were “waiting, [she] shall not know him” (665). The dread of being confronted and the risk of obliteration by the unknown are too much for Mrs. Drover. She “let herself out [of the house] by inches from her own front door” and hurries to the taxi rank (665), deeply afraid.

As she approaches a busier corner, where she sees people engaging in life despite their fear, she deliberately slows down and puts the supernatural from her mind. When she gets into the taxi, it appears that Mrs. Drover has achieved her safe escape and managed to hold herself together after revisiting her former trauma. However, when the taxi stops suddenly, she sees (or imagines) that the taximan bears a recognizable face. She begins to scream and hit the glass of the taxi as the taximan—or her demon lover—drives her away. The story, which veers between realistic and gothic, ends on an ambiguous note in which it is unclear if Mrs. Drover is having a stress response or if the taximan truly is the demon lover, the ghost of her former fiancé or the fiancé himself, seeking revenge.