Loitering With Intent (8 page)

But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma. It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender’s war record so convincing and full when I had said so little—one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it —but since then I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

I never described, in my book, what Warrender’s motives were. I simply showed the effect of his words, his hints. The real dichotomy in his character was in his public, formal High Churchism, and his private sectarian style. In the prayer-meetings he was a Biblical fundamentalist, to the effect, for instance, that he induced one of his sect to give up his good job in the War Office (as the Ministry of Defence was then called), to sell all his goods to feed the poor, and finally to die on a park bench one smoggy November night. This was greatly to Warrender’s satisfaction. But he himself, I made quite clear, understood Christianity in a far more evolved and practical light. ‘Induced’ is perhaps not the word. He goaded with the Word of God and terrorized. I showed how four women among his prayer-set were his greatest victims, for he was a deep woman-hater. One woman committed suicide, unable to stand the impressions of her own guilt that he made upon her and convinced that she had no friends; two others went mad, and this included his housekeeper Charlotte, that English Rose who was enthralled by him. His nephew’s wife, Marjorie, was on the point of mental crash when the car crash killed Warrender. All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew. How do I know? Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page. If I had conceived Warrender Chases’s motives as a psychological study I would have said so. But I didn’t go in for motives, I never have.

I covered the pages, propping them on the underside of a tray, to finish
Warrender Chase
on my sick-bed that winter, even when my ‘flu had turned bronchial and touched on pleurisy. I was too hoarse to read it to Dottie when she came to see me. But when she spoke of Sir Quentin and said, ‘Beryl Tims is in love with him,’ I sat up in my fever and said, ‘My God!’ The idea that anyone could be in love with Quentin Oliver was beyond me.

I noticed the deterioration in the members of the Autobiographical Association precisely at the end of January 1950, a week after I had finished the book. I felt low from my ‘flu but cheerful that my work was finished and behind me. I had no great hopes of success with
Warrender Chase
but already I had plans for a better book. Solly had found me another publisher to replace the one whose contract he had so despised. This publisher, an elderly man, was called Revisson Doe. He had a round, bald head of the shiny type I always wanted to stroke if I sat behind it in church or at the theatre. He said he thought
Warrender Chase
‘quite evil, especially in its moments of levity’, and that ‘the young these days are spiritually sick’, but he supposed his firm could carry it at a loss in the hope of better books to come. He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn’t such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm, Park and Revisson Doe, had a printing press on which they produced ‘the usual form of contract’ to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author. But Revisson Doe commended himself to me by his entertaining reminiscences of his youth, when he was an office-boy on a literary weekly and had been sent out to Holborn Underground to meet W. B. Yeats: ‘A figure in a dark cape. I said, “Are you the poet Mr Yeats?” He stopped, raised his hand high and said, “I yam.”‘

But these matters were of the past and I had said a temporary good-bye to Revisson Doe on signature of the contract.
Warrender Chase
was to be published some time in June, and I only had to wait for the proofs. At the end of January when I went back to my work at Sir Quentin’s I had almost obliterated the book from my thoughts.

The proofs came in March, and when I came face to face with my
Warrender Chase
again I was so far estranged from it that I couldn’t bring myself to look through the proofs for typographical errors. Instead I went with Solly one afternoon to St John’s Wood to see our friends Theo and Audrey, a married couple who had both published their first novels and who consequently enjoyed a little more respect, in that very hierarchical literary world, than did my unpublished friends whom I used to meet at poetry readings at the Ethical Church Hall. Theo and Audrey had agreed to read my proofs for me. I exhorted them to make no changes but only to look for spelling errors.

I handed over my proofs.

These were kind people. ‘You look haunted,’ said Theo. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘She is haunted,’ said Solly.

‘I am haunted,’ I said, but I wouldn’t explain any further. Solly said, ‘Her job’s getting her down’, and left it at that.

Audrey made me up a package of buns and sandwiches left over from tea, to take home.

Since the end of January and for the past two months I had come to feel that the members of Sir Quentin’s group resembled more and more the bombed-out buildings that still messed up the London street-scene. These ruins were getting worse, month by month, and so were the Autobiographical people.

Dottie couldn’t see it.

Sir Eric Findlay said to me, ‘Do you
really
think Mrs Wilks is in her right mind?’

I thought it safest to say, ‘What is a right mind? ‘He looked frightened. We were alone having coffee after lunch in the ladies’ sitting-room of the Bath Club which, because of a fire in its original premises, was housed within another club, I think the Conservative.

‘What is a right mind? Well, you have a right mind, Fleur, and everyone knows it. The point is that the Hallam Street set are saying … Don’t you think it’s time we all had it out with each other? One big row would be better than the way we’re going on.’

I said that I didn’t care for the idea of one big row.

Sir Eric waved his hand in mild greeting to a middle-aged couple who had just come in and who sat down on a sofa at the other end of the room. Other people presently joined them. Sir Eric waved and nodded across the room in his timid way as if making a side-gesture tot some sweet discourse with me about the London Philharmonic, the Cheltenham Gold Cup or even my own charms, instead of this depressing conversation about what was wrong with the Autobiographical Association. I longed for the power of the Evil Eye so that I could cast it on Eric Findlay in revenge for his taking me out to lunch and then assaulting me with his kinky complaints.

‘One big row,’ he said, his timid little eyes glinting. ‘Mrs Wilks is not in her right mind but you, Fleur, are in your right mind,’ he said, as if there was some question that I wasn’t.

I felt some panic which, however, I knew I could control. I felt I should sit on quietly as one would in the sudden presence of a dangerous beast. The atmosphere of my
Warrender Chase
came back to me, but grotesquely, without its even-tempered tone. When I first started writing people used to say my novels were exaggerated. They never were exaggerated, merely aspects of realism. Sir Eric Findlay was real, sitting there on the sofa by my side complaining how Mrs Wilks had failed tot appreciate the latest part of his autobiography, his war record, and thus was out of her mind. All Mrs Wilks could think of, he said, was the foolish incident in his schooldays with another boy while thinking of an actress. ‘Mrs Wilks harps on it,’ said Eric.

‘You shouldn’t have revealed it. Those autobiographies are dangerous,’ I said.

‘Well, a lot of them were your doing, Fleur,’ he said.

‘Not the dangerous passages. Only the funny parts.’

‘Sir Quentin insists,’ he said, ‘on complete frankness. Are you leaving that sugar?’ He pointed to a tiny lump of sugar on the saucer of my coffee-cup. I said I didn’t want it. He put it in his pocket in a small envelope he kept for the purpose. ‘They say it will be off the ration in three months,’ he said in an excited whisper.

Dottie said to me that evening, ‘I quite see Eric’s point of view. Mrs Wilks has an obsession about sex. I don’t believe she was raped by a Russian soldier before she escaped. It’s wishful thinking.’

‘It makes no difference to me what any of you did,’ I said. ‘I just can’t stand all the gossip, the canvassing, the lobbying, amongst the awful members.’

‘Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness and I think we should all be frank with each other,’ Dottie said.

I looked at her, I know, as if she were a complete stranger.

Maisie Young had found out where I lived. She had come to my room, one Saturday afternoon, only some days before I met Sir Eric Findlay at his club for lunch. She had come complaining too, as it turned out, although she at first protested she didn’t want to come in, she only wanted to leave me a book and she had kept the taxi waiting. We sent the taxi away.

‘Oh,’ said Maisie, ‘what a delightful little wee room, so compact.’ She herself came out of the best half of a house in Portman Square and enjoyed the rent of the other half. I think Maisie was rather stunned at the spacelessness of this room where I lived all of my present life, she was amazed that anyone could have space for intelligent ideas when they lived with a gas ring for cooking, a bed for sitting and sleeping on, an orange box for food stores and plates, a table for eating and writing on, a wash basin for washing at, two chairs for sitting on or (as on the present occasion) hanging washing on, a corner cupboard for clothes, walls to hold shelves of books and a floor on which one stepped over more books, set in piles. All this Maisie, clutching her bag like a horse’s rein, took in with a dazed look-round as if she had been thrown from her horse yet again. I believe it was out of sheer kindness that she kept on saying, ‘Compact, compact, it’s really … it’s really … I didn’t know they had this sort of thing.’

I bundled the washing off one of the chairs and settled Maisie into it with two volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and the complete Chaucer piled up for a footstool whereon to rest her poor caged leg, as I always did for Edwina and for Solly Mendelssohn when they came to see me. She took this very kindly. I sat on the bed and smiled.

‘I mean, I didn’t know they had this sort of thing in Kensington,’ said Maisie. ‘I mean in Kensington—nowadays. Is this where you bring Lady Edwina?’

I said yes, sometimes. I set about making tea, so much to the renewed astonishment of Maisie in Wonderland that I felt bound to assure her that I often had quite a lot of visitors, five, six, even more, at a time.

‘How do you keep so clean, yourself?’ said Maisie, looking at me with new eyes.

‘There’s a bathroom on every landing. A bath is fourpence a time.’

‘Is that all? ‘.

‘It’s too much,’ I said, and explained how the proprietors made a fortune out of the penny gas meters in the bathrooms and the shilling meters in the rooms, since they got a refund when the meter-man came to collect, which refunded loot was not shared among the clients.

‘I suppose,’ said Maisie, ‘they have to make some sort of a profit.’ I could see whose side she was on and although she then looked round the room enquiringly I didn’t enlighten her as to the rent, lest she should exclaim over its dirt-cheapness.

‘What a lot of books—have you read them all? ‘she said.

Still, I liked her very much. She was merely ignorant about penniless realities, as indeed she was about most realities, but she wasn’t pretentious. Maisie settled down with her tea and biscuit and started saying what she had come to says.

‘Father Egbert Delaney,’ said this handsome girl, ‘believes that Satan is a woman. He told me as much and I think he ought to be made to resign. It’s an insult to women.’

‘It does seem so,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell him?’

‘I think you, as secretary, Fleur, should take it up with him and report the matter to Sir Quentin.’

‘But if I tell him Satan is a man he’ll think it an insult to men.’

She said, ‘Personally, I don’t believe in Satan.’

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ I said.

‘What’s all right then?’

‘If Satan doesn’t exist, why bother if it’s man or woman we’re talking about?’

‘It’s Father Delaney we’re talking about. Do you know what I think?’

I said, what did she think?

‘Father Delaney is Satan. Satan himself. You should report the whole thing to Sir Quentin. Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness. It’s time we had a showdown.’

I still liked Maisie Young, she had an air of freedom that she wasn’t herself aware of, and she reminded me as she sat there in my room of my character Marjorie in
Warrender Chase.
But I didn’t dwell on this at the time; I was thinking of her phrase, ‘Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness.’ It stuck in my mind so that, a few days later when I sat with Eric Findlay in his club and he twice spoke that very phrase, I was convinced that Sir Quentin Oliver had started orchestrating his band of fools. At the moment, sitting with Maisie in my room I was simply irritated by her ‘Sir Quentin insists.’ I said, ‘Complete frankness is always a mistake among friends.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Maisie. ‘You make out you’re happy to see me but really you don’t like me coming here. I’m only a cripple and a bore to you.’

I was appalled; for the moment that she had turned my generality on to herself she indeed became a very great bore, not merely for the present hour, but stretching into the future; this apprehension of Maisie in the future affected me with a clutching void in my stomach. All in a moment she had seemed to lose that air of a freedom that she would probably never be aware existed.