Loitering With Intent (10 page)

‘It’s getting late,’ Dottie said. She put away her knitting in her awful black bag, said good-night, and left.

When she was gone, struck by her silence, I gave it a new interpretation. I gave her time to get home and phoned her.

‘Was there anything the matter, Dottie?’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I think you’re unhinged. You’re suffering from delusions. There’s nothing the matter with us. We’re a perfectly normal group. I think there’s something the matter with you. Beryl Tims—well, I’ll let her speak for herself. Your
Warrender Chase
is a thoroughly sick novel. Theo and Audrey Clairmont think it’s sick, it worried them terribly, correcting the proofs. Leslie says it’s mad.’

I pulled myself together sufficiently to think of a retort suitable to the occasion, since it was the attack on my
Warrender Chase
that really annoyed me; I didn’t care about the rest.

‘If you have any influence with Leslie in the matter of his novel,’ I drawled in the calmness of my suppressed hysteria, ‘you might get him to eliminate that dreadful recurrent phrase of his, “With regard to …“.

‘He uses it all the time in his reviews.’

I could hear Dottie crying. I meant to tell her more about Leslie’s prose, its frightful tautology. He never reached the point until it was undetectably lost in a web of multisyllabic words and images trowelled on like cement.

She said, ‘You didn’t say this when you were sleeping with him.’

‘I didn’t sleep with him for his prose-style.’

‘I think,’ said Dottie, ‘you’re out of your element in our world.’

So ended one of my million, as it seemed, rows with Dottie.

‘Oh, Fleur!’ said Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert in her hoarse drawl, ‘Would you mind handing round the sandwiches? You could also help with the coats; my little maid has only one pair of hands. See if anyone needs a drink …’ She had pressed me to come to her cocktail party, and here I was in her flat in Curzon Street in my blue velvet dress among a crowd of chatterers. I now saw why she had pressed the invitation so hard. Half-heartedly I lifted a plate of cheese biscuits and put it under the nose of a solid-looking young man standing by me.

He took a biscuit and said, ‘Fleur, it’s you.’

It was Wally McConnachie, an old friend of mine from war-time who worked in the Foreign Office.

Wally had been in Canada. We lolled against the wallpaper and talked while Bucks glared at me in a somewhat ugly way. When she had glared enough and I had got back my smile with Wally’s talk and a drink, I roped in Wally to take people’s coats at the door and to help me in pushing the sandwiches, which were filled with black-market delicacies and of which Wally and I ate our share. This infuriated Bucks the more.

‘I’m sure,’ she said, as she passed me by, ‘that Sir Quentin would want you to help. He hasn’t arrived yet.’

I said that Sir Quentin insisted on perfect frankness and to be quite frank I was helping, and the sandwiches were a great success.

Presently Sir Quentin arrived and one by one the members of the Autobiographical Association filtered in amongst the other guests. The room was packed. I saw Dottie talking earnestly to Maisie while looking over at me. Empty glasses stood all over the grand piano on which was a large photograph of Bucks’s late and hyper-bemedalled husband. My hostess caught my arm and silently pointed to the glasses.

Wally and I collected them, dumped them in the kitchen and made our get-away. We dined at Prunier’s with its tranquillizing aquarium-decor, while we described the lives we had been leading since last we had met. The fish swam and darted in their element, while we talked and looked into each other’s eyes a lot over our wine. We went on to Quaglino’s, whose decor then was picture frames without any pictures on the dark walls, and we danced till four in the morning.

Wally told me numerous amusing stories in the course of the evening. They were very weightless stories but for that very reason I felt restored. For instance he told me about a girl he had met who had an uncanny habit of sneezing if she drank inferior wine, and as a consequence of this talent got a job with a wine-merchandising firm as a taster. He told me about another girl whose mother, to overcome her daughter’s strong objections to marrying some man on the grounds that he had chronic bad breath, said, ‘Well, you can’t have
everything.’
Such blithe anecdotes put me in a frame of mind to see myself once more in a carefree light. I told a number of funny stories to Wally about Sir Quentin’s set at Hallam Street, and I gave him an outline of what my life was like on the grubby edge of the literary world. Wally, who was racking his brains as to where he had heard of old Quentin Oliver ‘somewhere or other’, and was extremely entertained by my stories, at the same time advised me strongly to get another job. ‘I should get out of all that if I were you, Fleur. You’d be happier.’

I said, yes, possibly. In fact, it came to me during that evening of high spirits that I preferred to stay in the job;

I preferred to be interested as I was than happy as I might be. I wasn’t sure that I so much wanted to be happy, but I knew I had to follow my nature. However, I didn’t say this to Wally. It wouldn’t have done.

I promised Wally that he should meet the fabulous Edwina.

I stayed in bed next morning; about eleven o’clock, when I woke, I telephoned to Hallam Street to say I wasn’t coming in.

Beryl Tims answered the phone.

‘Have you got a medical certificate?’ she said.

‘Go to hell.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m not ill,’ I said. ‘I was out dancing all night, that’s all.’

‘Hold on while I get Sir Quentin.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘There’s somebody at my door.’

This was true; I hung up and went to find at the door the red-faced house-boy with a bunch of amber-coloured roses and behind him the daily cleaner, whose unwanted services were thrown in with the rent, in her pink dress and white apron. It was a colourful ensemble. I stared at them for a moment, then I sent the maid away while the house-boy told me that I’d had a visitor the night before —‘That awful nice lady that’s married to your gentleman friend. I let her in here to wait, and she waited the best part of an hour. ‘Twas after ten she left.’ I gathered this was Dottie.

I got rid of the boy and counted the roses, which were from Wally. Fourteen. This pleased me. I always liked getting roses, but the usual dozen seemed always so shop-ordered. Fourteen had been really thought of.

In the late afternoon, at about six, when I was thinking of getting up and doing a bit of my new novel, the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret rang me up. ‘Sir Quentin,’ she said, ‘is worried about you, Fleur. Are you indisposed? Sir Quentin thought there might be something I could do. If you have any problem, you know, Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness.’

‘I’m taking a day off. How good of Sir Quentin to be so concerned.’

‘But just at this moment, Fleur, as I say, the affairs of the Association are falling to bits, aren’t they? I mean, Bucks Gilbert is a bit much, isn’t she? Of course, she hasn’t a penny. I mean, we all had a very frank discussion this afternoon. I’ve just left them. Then Quentin introduced a sort of prayer-meeting, my dear, it was most embarrassing. What could one do? I quite see that I for one have a private life and when I say private life I’m sure you know what I mean. But I do object to being prayed over. Do you know, I’m terrified of Quentin. He knows too much. And Maisie Young—’

‘Why don’t you give it up?’ I said.

‘What? Our Autobiographical Association? Well, I can’t explain, but I do believe in Quentin. I’m sure you do too, Fleur.’

‘Oh, yes. I almost feel I invented him.’

‘Fleur, do you think there’s something, I mean something special, between him and Beryl Tims? I mean, they’re very thick with each other. And you know, this afternoon at the prayer part, that awful Mummy of Quentin’s came in and started making that sort of insinuation. Of course she’s ga-ga, but one wonders. She says she’s fond of you, Fleur, and I think Quentin is rather worried about that too. And I mean, is it true you’ve written a novel about us, Fleur?’

I have the impression that I was tuning into voices without really hearing them as one does when moving from programme to programme on a wireless set. I know there was a lot of activity at Hallam Street. Eric Findlay and Dottie ganged up against Mrs Wilks, arriving at Hallam Street together one morning when Sir Quentin was out at the local Food office trying vainly to get extra tea and sugar rations on behalf of the Association. I remember plainly on that occasion Dottie asking me irrelevantly if I had heard from my publishers. I said I had received a printed acknowledgment of the proofs and now I was waiting for publication. Dottie said, ‘Oh!’

Another day came Mrs Wilks in her pastel hues, and her veils, and a wet purple umbrella which she refused to give up to Beryl Tims. She had lost her fat, merry look. I had noticed the last time I saw her that she was losing weight, but now it was quite obvious she had either been very ill or was on a diet. Her painted-up face was shrivelled, making her nose too long; her eyes were big and inexactly focused. She demanded that I change her name in the records from Mrs Wilks to Miss Davids, explaining that she had to be
incognito
from now on since the Trotskyites were posting agents all over the world to find and assassinate her. I remember that Sir Quentin came in while she was raving thus, and sent me out on an errand. When I came back Mrs Wilks was gone and Sir Quentin was leaning back in his chair, eyes half-closed, with that one shoulder of his slightly in advance of the other and his hands clasped before him as if in prayer. I was about to ask what had been the matter with Mrs Wilks when he said, ‘Mrs Wilks has been fasting too strictly.’ Whereupon he turned to something else. He was very much on the defensive about his little flock. One day, about this time, I made some scornful remark to Sir Quentin about Father Egbert Delaney who had been remonstrating with me on the telephone about Edwina’s presence at the meetings. Sir Quentin replied loftily, ‘One of his ancestors fought in the battle of Bosworth Field.’

My job at Sir Quentin’s, now that he had taken the actual autobiographies out of my hands, was taken up largely with Sir Quentin’s other, quite normal, private and business affairs. He seemed to dictate unnecessary letters to old friends, some of which I suspect he never sent, since he would often put them aside to sign and post himself. I felt sure he now wanted to establish the idea of his normality in my mind. He apparently had business interests in South Africa, for he wrote about them. His villa at Grasse was greatly on his mind, it having been occupied by the Germans during the war; he was anxious only to find out by which Germans. ‘Members of the High Command and the Old Guard I have no doubt.’ He had an interest in a paint manufacturers who were compiling a history of the firm,
One Hundred Prosperous Years;
I helped with the dreary proofs. I doubted if he needed me at all, except that I was useful in coping with the members when they took to dropping in or telephoning as they now did more and more phrenetically.

It was about this time that he said to me, ‘What have you got against the
Apologia?’

I forget how I answered him precisely. I wasn’t at any event about to be drawn into a discussion of that exquisite work or any other with Sir Quentin. All I wanted to know was what he was up to. And besides, I had been thinking about autobiographies in general. From the personal reminiscences of the members I had perceived that anecdotes and memoirs are only valuable if they are extremely unusual in themselves, or if they attach to an interesting end-product. The boyhood experiences of Newman or of Michelangelo would be interesting however trivial, but who cared—who should care—about Eric Findlay’s memories of his butler and nanny, he being what Sir Eric Findlay was? It was precisely because I’d found all their biographies so very dull to start with that I’d given them so light-hearted a turn, almost as if the events they described had happened to me, not to them. At least I did them the honour of treating their output as life-stories not as case-histories for psychoanalysis, as they more or less were; I had set them on to writing fictions about themselves.

Now these autobiographies were out of my hands; but I didn’t care; they were dreary, one and all.

I was sure that nothing had happened in their lives and equally sure that Sir Quentin was pumping something artificial into their real lives instead of on paper. Presented fictionally, one could have done something authentic with that poor material. But the inducing them to express themselves in life resulted in falsity.

What is truth? I could have realized these people with my fun and games with their life-stories, while Sir Quentin was destroying them with his needling after frankness. When people says that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

It wasn’t till later that I found he was handing out to all of them, including Dottie, small yellow pills called Dexedrine which he told them would enable them to endure the purifying fasts he inflicted. The pills were no part of my
Warrender Chase;
Sir Quentin thought of them himself, doubting his power to enthral unaided.

Now, on that same day as he asked me this question about the
Apologia
Sir Quentin switched over to the problem of his mother. ‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘is a problem.’

I busied myself placing a sheet of carbon paper between a sheet of writing paper and one of copy paper.

‘Mummy,’ he said, has always been a problem. And I want to tell you, Miss Talbot, that you would do well to ignore any promises Mummy might have effected in your regard as to an eventual legacy. She is probably senile. Mrs Tims and I—’

‘The noun “promise” is not generally followed by the verb “effected”,’ I put in wildly, trying to keep calm. I had seen while he was speaking that he pressed the bell for Mrs Tims. As the door-bell rang at that moment she didn’t immediately appear, but Sir Quentin smiled at my little divergence and went on, ‘I know you have been very good to Mummy, taking her out on Sundays and I’m sure that if you have been out of pocket we can find ways and means of reimbursement. There is no question but that if you care to continue some little arrangement can be made. It is only that, for the future—’