Far Cry from Kensington (19 page)

In 1955 I knew much less about what the Box claims to do than I do now. At the time I
had only two clear ideas about it, which I still hold. The first was that it was a
crank activity, not necessarily fake in that its practitioners and followers were
apparently in good faith. The second was the purely academic proposition that if the
Box is able to do good it follows logically that it is capable of doing harm. So that
if you believe it can bless the crops then it can curse the weeds. If you believe it
can affect your health beneficially, then you have to believe it can affect it
malevolently. My advice to anyone who wants to try the Box is, treat it as an
experience but believe nothing. And above all, don’t spend much of your good
money on it.

Before Abigail left I asked if I could borrow some of the literature on the subject,
which she had taken from Wanda’s room. She lent me a book and a pamphlet. I
wanted to see if I could find how Wanda had worked it out that through her efforts I
was wasting away. I couldn’t make head or tail of the mumbo-jumbo, and in fact
spent very little effort in trying to grasp what radionics was all about.

In a later publication I saw the claim that with a sample of hair or blood it was
possible to treat someone radionically without their knowledge. The Radionics
Association, formed in 1960, ‘prohibits this practice’. But since there
is no way of enforcing such a rule, these ‘prohibitions’ are worthless.
Some publications, which I have consulted to refresh my opinion of what happened in
1955, confirmed my disbelief in the efficacy of the practice. The subject was aired
in the High Court of Justice in a famous case of 1960, when it was generally
established that while the Box had no scientific basis for its diagnostic claims, the
practitioners and their followers might be perfectly sincere. A large number of
medical witnesses said the Box was utter rubbish, and a large number of respectable
people said it wasn’t. And I daresay that from the point of view of a visitor
from outer space the Box is no more ridiculous than a Catholic catechism or the
Mass.

When I returned to my real young life, later that night, William made me laugh about my
‘wasting away’. I thought he was unduly callous about Wanda’s
madness, but at the same time I saw he was trying to lift my spirits out of morbid
reflections, and he succeeded. He had a fine collection of gramophone records.

I went by tube on the Northern line to Highgate for my interview next morning. I had
had enough of the buses of my long, sad peregrinations during the past month.

Abigail was waiting to introduce me.

‘How do you do, Mr Send.’

‘Nice to see you, Mrs Hawkins.’

Abigail went to another room to wait for me and file her nails. I got the job, on the
basis of a month’s trial starting early April, which was the next week.
‘When you are editing copy, Mrs Hawkins, what sort of things do you look
for?’ said Howard Send. ‘Exclamation marks and italics used for
emphasis,’ I said. ‘And I take them out.’ It was as good an answer
as any. ‘Suppose the author was Aldous Huxley or Somerset Maugham?’ he
said. I told him that if these were his authors he didn’t need a copy-editor.
‘Too true,’ he said. He pointed to some piles of manuscripts on another
desk. ‘We have to look through all those. But they aren’t by Maugham or
Huxley.’

The place they had rented in Highgate was a tall Victorian house, not unlike
Milly’s in South Kensington, only wider. My job there was the most interesting
and amusing one of my life. The excitement was purely connected with events and
people. But when, in my waking hours of the night, I look back at
‘Highgate’ as an experience I think of it as shell-pink. This can be
partly explained. First, it was Howard Send’s habit to bring in armfuls of
flowers to the house, tall pale apple, pear, peach and plum-blossom, white and pink,
forming an all-over pink effect. Tulips and bowls of hyacinths too, but it is one of
my memory’s impressions, rather than a memory, that I am describing. I think
Howard’s friend and editorial partner, Fred Tucher (pronounced Toocher) wore
one of the first men’s pink shirts I had seen. One way and the other, I see it
in shell-pink. The sitting-room wás a large front room across the hall from an
equally proportioned room which formed the office. Both had bow windows. The
sitting-room had very deep and comfortable beige-covered sofas and chairs; the office
had a light wall-to-wall carpet, pale walls, light wooden desks and shelves.

And shell-pink is what emerges as a general effect. Perhaps, if I delved deeper into
this impression it would emerge that my memory is coloured shell-pink by the tepid
politics of the refugee Highgate set. I had expected them to be rabid reds or
extremists of the left as their enemies in America claimed, and I had always
associated people of crusader-like left-wing leanings with grim faces and glum
rectitude, with plans and statistics, and coming home from night schools at the
London School of Economics, in the rain, sucking acid drops. But the Highgate set
were moneyed and sophisticated. Their politics were more or less liberal. They were
so like the ordinary educated English in their tastes and ideas that one wondered how
they could possibly have been accused, as they had been, of allegiances with the
rigid Soviets. In fact they were simply typical expatriate Americans, with an
abundance of money at the current rate of exchange, culturally informed, and very
much at home in England. I had not travelled much at that time, or I would have known
that many other Americans were becoming very much at home, too, in France and Italy.

On that day of my interview Howard Send said, ‘Well, thanks, Mrs Hawkins,
you’re hired for a month’s trial. We’re on first-name terms around
here. I’m Howard. You’re Agnes, I take it?’ I said,
‘Nancy.’

‘Well, Nancy, see you next week. You’ll find plenty to do.’

Abigail and I found somewhere to lunch. We decided we could largely make what we liked
of the job, and went on to talk of more important things, such as Abigail’s
passion for Giles Wilson who had a job in Lloyd’s to which he went
bowler-hatted every week-day morning, and whose evenings were devoted to managing and
supporting a small pioneer rock-and-roll group. He fitted Abigail into these
evenings, which she loved, and took her away for weekends in the country to as many
of their friends as would have them, preference being given to those who didn’t
have big dinner parties on Saturday nights, ‘and make you help with the
washing-up on Sunday.’ Abigail’s parents were divorced. Her father, she
told me, lived with some sisters and male cousins in a big old house ‘where you
have to make yourself useful the minute you put your foot in the door. You spend all
your weekend outside getting the tomatoes or vegetables or eggs or picking
strawberries, and inside, cleaning the silver which they save up for you to do. All
that, so that everyone can sit round the table sticking their fork into a
brussel-sprout and expressing adulation for Anthony Eden.’ Nor did Abigail care
to spend weekends at Giles’s family home which was a charming converted barn,
but with too small a family for her to sleep with Giles: ‘In a house like that
you would be noticed.’ They intended to get married as soon as they had the
money for the honeymoon, which might be next year.

I loved Abigail’s knack of portraying her world in these inconsequential
phrases, without any rancour, explanations or many details.

I told her I was looking for a small flat.

‘I like your digs in Kensington,’ she said.

So I told her about William, and how we intended to set up together and get married
when he had passed his finals. She said she would keep a look-out for a cheap flat.
We went home together as far as Knightsbridge where Abigail left me with a flick of
her red scarf. I was feeling restored, for the moment thinking of my new job and
William, instead of that death, that death, of Wanda.

It was just after three when I got home, to find Milly’s
suitcases in the hallway. She had just arrived back from Ireland, almost at the same
time as Wanda’s sister had turned up to go through the last remains of
Wanda’s property. I found Milly upstairs in Wanda’s room with Greta.

‘Milly, oh, Milly,’ I said, standing in the door.

‘How thin you are, Mrs Hawkins. Are you all right?’ Milly said.

‘Do call me Nancy,’ I said.

‘Are you well?’

In fact I had been getting thinner before Milly had left, but so gradually, she
hadn’t noticed. I told her I was feeling fine. Nothing, however, then or later,
would remove from Milly’s mind the idea that the shock of Wanda’s death
had affected me in such a rapid and dramatic way as to reduce my former bulk by half.

‘You see what happens,’ she said to Greta who was sitting by the window
looking through a bundle of photographs — ‘You see what happens when this
sort of thing happens? It happens that people’s hair goes white overnight and
they waste away. Suicide, and a person in my house.’

Greta hardly noticed Milly’s agitation; it seemed she was puzzling over the
photographs.

I went into the room and tried to calm Milly down.

‘Most of her things, her clothes, went yesterday,’ I said.
‘Let’s go through the rest and finish. Would you like a cup of
tea?’

‘Later,’ said Milly. ‘There are things to do here.’ I had
never seen her so agitated. She had taken out a drawer full of old-looking papers,
letters, bills of no account dating from five years back. Obviously Wanda had been a
hoarder. ‘What I’m looking for,’ said Milly, ‘is one of those
anonymous letters. Someone drove Wanda to suicide.’

‘They certainly did,’ said Greta.

The drawer full of papers was on Wanda’s bed. Milly and I sat, one on each side
of it, Milly fingering the papers aimlessly. Greta put aside her bundle of
photographs and took up another bundle from the dressing-table. Watching them for a
moment it struck me they were trying to reconstruct Wanda, and I thought of a passage
in
Frankenstein
where the scientist-narrator dabbles in the grave for
materials to construct his monster. I have looked up this passage. Here it is
precisely:

Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret
toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living
animal to animate the lifeless clay?

That is putting it strongly in the literal sense, but it portrays the
impression I had, there in Wanda’s room, while we looked through Wanda’s
pitiful papers.

I started putting the contents of the drawer in a preliminary order — letters
here, postcards there, old bills elsewhere. With my office training I was able to do
this quickly. There were five or six little piles. Then I started putting each pile
in date order. ‘Most of this stuff is useless,’ I said.

‘Any sign of those anonymous letters?’ said Milly. ‘Look
carefully.’

‘No, Wanda must have destroyed them.’

I felt it necessary to say something about Wanda’s merits.

‘She was a very good dressmaker,’ I said, inspired by an old receipt for
threequarters of a yard of
moiré
ribbon, ‘and very reasonable
in her prices.’

‘A hard-working woman,’ said Milly.

‘She didn’t deserve it,’ said Greta.

I could tell that Milly really wanted to agree to this proposition, but that her
Catholic beliefs wouldn’t let her go so far as to attribute the victim’s
role to Wanda. She tried to speak, but didn’t.

Greta said, looking at me for confirmation, ‘They gave her a Catholic burial.
Unsound mind is a disease like any other.’

Milly brightened at this news. ‘Is that a fact?’ she said.

‘Somebody or something turned her brain,’ I said.

‘That I believe,’ said Milly.

‘What a fool,’ said Greta.

‘It looks as if she owes nothing. There are no bills unpaid,’ I said.

‘Her rent,’ said Greta. ‘She didn’t pay her last week’s
rent, did she? — I’ll pay it.’

‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Milly. ‘I wouldn’t touch her last
week’s rent. It would be blood money.’

Among the correspondence, I was looking only for the handwriting as I remembered it of
the first anonymous letter, but I found nothing resembling it. Most of the letters
were from Poland, and written in Polish; evidently the postcards were those sent from
friends on holiday. There was one from Kate, one from myself. I handed the bundle to
Greta. ‘You’d better take these home and destroy what you don’t
want to keep,’ I said.

‘And the photographs?’ said Greta, as if asking for permission.

‘They’re all yours,’ I said. ‘We can destroy these old bills
and things.’

‘The photographs I don’t know how to explain,’ Greta said.
‘There are snaps of the family, our sisters in Poland, and me, and our
children. There is the uncle and our two aunties. That is good. But here is some
photos, I don’t know what.’ She handed me a postcard-sized photograph.
‘It’s Wanda’s face, but that isn’t Wanda. And who is the
fellow?’

I saw immediately that the fellow was Hector Bartlett,
pisseur de copie.
He
was standing beside a girl, or at least it was Wanda’s face poised on a
girl’s shape, not Wanda’s. It was a model girl’s shape dressed in a
neat shirt and slinky trousers. The background was a sea-front, somewhere like
Margate or Ramsgate. Obviously the photograph was faked. However, it was harmless. I
showed it to Milly, and not to alarm her with what was really beginning to go on in
my mind, I said, ‘This has been faked, it’s a joke, Wanda’s head on
another woman’s body. Do you recognize that man with her?’

Milly said at once, ‘That’s one of her cousins.’

‘What cousin?’ said Greta.

‘The cousin that’s studying for the priesthood, a late vocation,’
Milly said.

‘We have no such cousin, said Greta,’ ‘I never saw that person
before.’

Milly was aghast. I thought she was inclined to disbelieve Greta.