A Far Cry From Kensington Page 3

  When she didn’t have a client being measured or fitted or pinned-up in her room, Wanda continued to work, either by hand or at her sewing-machine, even while her friends and enemies crowded into her room. One of the women would busy herself with tea at the gas-ring while Wanda sewed and talked. She was too busy, herself, to go to lectures and libraries.

  The men amongst her Polish friends all looked much older than the women, not old enough to be fathers, but certainly elder brothers. When I accepted one of Wanda’s pressing invitations to stay for a refreshment, the conversation was a polite change-over from Polish into English. I got to know and recognize most of Wanda’s crowd.

  One Saturday morning I had gone down to see if there was any post for me. I passed Wanda on the stairs. She was smiling with her letters in her hand. For me, there was a letter from a cousin. I stood beside the hall-stand, opening it. Suddenly, from Wanda’s room came a long, loud, high-pitched cry which diminished into a sustained, distant and still audible ululation.

  I ran upstairs. Milly came out to see what was the matter and stood on the lower steps, looking up. I knocked on Wanda’s door at the moment that a second lament came piercing from inside the room; I wasted no time in going straight in. There was Wanda in her black working jumper and skirt, her blue carpet-slippers, holding a letter in her hand and the long cry issuing from her mouth. Her eyes were terrorized. She handed me the letter. I made her sit down before I read it, imagining it to be news of a sudden death in the family, at least. The letter read:

  Mrs Podolak,

  We, the Organisers, have our eyes on you. You are conducting a dressmaking business but you are not declaring your income to the Authorities.

  Take care.

  An Organiser.

  The envelope was cheap brown manilla. It had been posted at Westminster.

  ‘Mrs Hawkins,’ said Wanda, ‘this is the end of me. They will put me in prison. They will deport me.’

  Milly arrived, tapping at the door to see what was the matter. As I let her in, I saw the Carlin couple and Kate Parker, the nurse, standing in their doorways, alarmed. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Wanda’s only seen a mouse. Or she thought she did.’ Whether they believed me or not I don’t know. I pulled Milly inside and shut Wanda’s door.

  ‘A lot of rubbish,’ said Milly when she had read the letter. ‘Who wrote it?’

  Wanda cried out that she didn’t know such an evil enemy. I said she must keep quiet — ‘We don’t want the whole house to hear about it.’ I wasn’t thinking of any danger to Wanda but in fact I judged that the arrival of an anonymous letter would make a bad atmosphere in the house. I hated handling the wretched thing; I had an urge to wash my hands.

  ‘A bit of brandy,’ said Milly, who always, in emergency, came straight to the point. She disappeared downstairs, returning with a stiff brandy for Wanda, who was now trembling and whispering that she would go to prison or be deported. ‘It is a crime, you don’t pay income tax.’

  Again, Milly came straight to the point. ‘What income?’ she said, looking round Wanda’s world, her lumpy bed made up in the corner, the pile of old clothes waiting to be altered, with here a pair of men’s trousers to be taken in and there someone’s dearly treasured small fur collar to be transferred from one coat to another; cotton-reels in a shoe-box, bright scissors on the sewing-table, a little tin box which had once held Allenbury’s glycerine and blackcurrant pastilles, and now, Wanda’s pins. There was a gas-fire and a gas-ring, the chairs and hanging-cupboard that Milly had acquired second-hand in order to nominally furnish the room; on the mantelpiece was a wood-framed photograph of Wanda’s mother and father — the mother standing up, the father sitting, beside a tall vase of flowers — now both dead; a photograph of a Polish soldier with a wide moustache, looking out at his destiny with staring eyes: he had been killed. A picture of a black Madonna, which I now know to be the Madonna of Czestochowa. A photograph of Wanda and her four sisters, one of whom was married in Scotland and the other three of whom were still in Poland and to whom Wanda and her sister sent off parcels of tinned food, warm scarves and stockings every now and then, hoping against hope they would arrive safely. Wanda’s suitcases piled dustily on top of the wardrobe. Wanda’s sewing-machine was the most expensive thing in the room: Wanda had just finished paying it up. The smell of all this jumble and effort, the smell of bed, of worn clothes, a waft of moth-ball from the strip of fur collar to be transferred, and of soap, of tea and biscuits — this was Wanda’s room’s special smell, and not at all offensive; I had known it already from my visits to Wanda for the fittings of my clothes and for tea when she held her merry sociable soirées. Now there was added the faint smell of brandy, for in her agitation she had spilt some on her jersey.

  I remember a lot of sensations clearly from those first moments of Wanda’s shock. Part of her brave future was gone forever. I remember her panic-stricken face, her trembling. Nothing Milly or I could suggest would convince her she had nothing to fear. I wanted to take the anonymous letter to the police: she was frantic.

  ‘Look, Wanda,’ I said, ‘I could fill you out an income-tax form. You have working expenses, you have dependants in Poland; if you let me put down everything clearly you won’t have to pay a penny. I’ll come with you to the tax-office.’

  ‘Tax-office?’ She was breathing heavily. ‘Go to the tax-office? They will send me to prison; I go back to Poland.’

  Milly kept repeating her dictum that in order to pay income tax you first have to have an income. But this argument only terrorized Wanda the more. She was convinced she would be arrested for coming so late, after all these years. ‘I never thought of income tax. How could I think? They will never believe.’ The judges, she said, would condemn her. I don’t know what picture she had in mind, of how many judges, grand juries, and the clank of prison doors, but she was not to be consoled. Plainly, she had come from a world of bureaucratic tyranny infinitely worse than ours. In a way, I felt she wanted to embrace this suffering; she was conditioned to it.

  What I wanted to know was who had sent the letter. That was the question working and lurking in my mind all the time we were trying to convince Wanda she had nothing to fear. It seemed to me vastly more important to locate the anonymous fiend than to bother about Wanda’s tax return. Who was this ‘Organiser’? This was in Milly’s mind, too.

  ‘No, no,’ said Wanda, ‘none of my friends, my worst enemy, nobody from Poland could do such a thing. How could they do it?’

  ‘It must be someone who knows you, who knows a little about you, Wanda.’

  ‘Someone in this house,’ said Wanda.

  ‘Never,’ said Milly. ‘It must be one of your customers or those friends and cousins.’

  ‘Why should they?’ Wanda said, and wailed, with her hands over her eyes. I was sure that Wanda would think of a possible someone after she had calmed down.

  Milly was now anxious. I spent Saturday afternoon discussing it with her. Wanda had taken a sleeping pill and gone to bed, and we had promised to keep all of her visitors away with the excuse that she had been obliged to go out to the suburbs to measure a new lady, very important. Wanda had let me take the letter away with me. I wanted to study it.

  ‘The swine!’ said Milly. She was certain it was a man who had written the letter. ‘It could never be a woman,’ said Milly, when I raised that possibility. I inclined to agree with her but I couldn’t think of a respectable reason for eliminating a female suspect.

  Although Milly wasn’t prepared to admit to Wanda the possibility that someone in the house, or connected with the house, had written the letter, she was ready to discuss the eventuality with me, if only for the purpose of eliminating it. Who were ‘the organisers’ and who the ‘organiser’ who had written the letter?

  It was written on blue Basildon Bond paper in smallish writing, near to what used to be known as ‘script’, an adaptation of ordinary book-print to cursive handwriting. It looked as if this was the writer’s normal hand, but h
ere and there obviously disguised, so that some of the ‘d’s were larger than the natural proportions of the rest; the word ‘business’ sloped to the right, with the effect of italics; and some of the individual letters were slanted, too, although the writing in general was upright. I looked at the letter with half-closed eyes, to get a sense of it. For an instant I thought I recognized it, without being able to place it. But when I opened my eyes to study it closer, the sensation had gone. Certainly I wasn’t able to recognize any handwriting in the context of Wanda, the house, or Wanda’s acquaintance. I suppose I had noticed letters addressed to her lying on the hall table or on the mat inside the front door, but I had never taken any particular notice of the writing. As for the other occupants of the house, I had never seen their handwriting apart from Milly’s which was something of a scrawl. But what struck me was the difference between the benighted tone of the letter and the relatively educated hand; it seemed a deliberate literary performance of poor quality, an attempt at parody, if a lame one. Someone had invented the ‘Organisers’ in order to scare Wanda. If she had belonged to my own world, that of books and publishing, I would perhaps have known where to begin in sorting out the vaguely possible culprits; I say ‘vaguely possible’ because even among the people I knew and came up against in my working life, some of whom included the more viperish and base examples of literary hackdom, I would have been hard put to it to select any one. But to try to discern any shape or form in Wanda’s ambience was absolutely to flounder in a fog.

  Milly was upset at the suggestion that it was someone in the house, to the point of being almost mesmerized by the idea. She also feared further letters. ‘These things happen in threes,’ said Milly in her way of uttering bits of folk-wisdom; she was spooning tea into the heated teapot. She always mixed tea with maxims.

  We decided to go through the occupants of the house, one by one.

  Basil and Eva Carlin, in their large bed-sitting-room and small kitchen on the first floor: ‘I can’t see them doing it,’ I said.

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Milly. ‘They’re so quiet. Never a murmur and the rent paid on the dot.’

  ‘It’s often the quiet types who do these things,’ I said.

  ‘That’s very true. You’ve got a point, there.’

  ‘What exactly does he do?’

  ‘Well,’ said Milly, ‘I only know he’s got a job with an engineering firm at Clapham, keeping the books.’

  One of the few occasions that I had exchanged a few words with Basil Carlin was when we found each other on the top deck of the same bus, and the only vacant seat was next to me. That was when he told me he was an ‘engineering accountant’. A quiet type, yes, but not creepy. I hated having to think of these normal neighbours of mine, whom I passed on the stairs, as suspects. I thought of Eva, respectfully sidling through Milly’s kitchen in the afternoon to hang out her husband’s shirts to dry in the back garden. She was a thin and wispy woman who had a habit of walking with her elbows out. Basil was of medium height and build with thin fair hair and glasses. There was nothing wrong with them, nothing at all.

  It’s awful,’ said Milly, ‘to have to go through them all one by one like this.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing. I feel treacherous.’

  It was true that the search for the offender put us in a sense on the same debased level. But I was determined to exhaust every possibility as impartially as possible. I would much have preferred to take the letter to the police.

  ‘What could the Carlins have against Wanda?’ Milly said. They’ve never had words with anyone in the house. Wanda let down a hem for her the other day.’

  ‘Oh, she let down a hem for her?’

  All right, she let down a hem for Eva Carlin. I said, ‘Do you know what their handwriting’s like?’

  ‘Never seen it. They pay in cash.’ We all paid in cash. The less you put on paper the better, was one of Milly’s opinions.

  Wanda let down a hem for Eva Carlin. That’s all we know. I turned to plump Kate Parker with her white, bright teeth, the vigorous cockney cleaning her room, even now, upstairs, on a Saturday afternoon. We could hear the furniture being moved out on the landing in the process of her war against germs. I thought of her boxes marked ‘electricity’, ‘gas’, ‘bus-fares’, ‘sundries’. Everything organized.

  ‘Not Kate,’ said Milly. ‘That I could never believe.’

  Nor could I. In spite of the fact that Kate disapproved of Wanda’s over-stuffed room and crowded alien lifestyle, I couldn’t believe it of Kate.

  But Kate was an organizer by nature. I wondered how she spelt the word ‘organizer’, which in the letter was spelt with an ‘s’.

  I took Wanda up a cup of tea at about five o’clock. She was awake and crying. She had got right into bed and unloosed her hair. It was the first time I had seen her with this quantity of natural corn-coloured hair about her face and shoulders. She made a very impressive sight. It occurred to me she might well have a lover, or at least an admirer, someone who courted her and who had a rival, a rejected vindictive somebody, or a jealous woman whose man Wanda had attracted. Perhaps we don’t observe each other well enough, I thought. Seeing Wanda in this new light, not only a worthy Polish matron, but a sex-potential, I could see that the range of suspects was vastly increased. But I didn’t like to say, right away, ‘Wanda, do you know of any man, woman, who could be sentimentally roused for you, against you?’ — I didn’t say this because at that moment she would certainly have exploded with indignation. The image she showed to the world was that of a church-going seamstress and dedicated widow. And indeed I didn’t see where she would have found time to fit in a love-affair, nor the hint of a flirtation.

  Anyway, she was crying and lamenting so much that any form of rational enquiry was useless. Oh God! She might milk this event for the rest of her life. ‘Wanda,’ I said, ‘you have to ignore it. If there are any more we’ll take them to the police.’

  ‘Any more? Any more? … The police!’

  Milly opened the door and came in. I could see, as she looked at blue-eyed Wanda for the first time sitting up in bed with her fair hair flowing around her, that the same thought struck her as had struck me: Wanda was an attractive woman, Wanda was sexy. It was something which, stupidly, we hadn’t thought of before.

  ‘I have enemies,’ wailed Wanda.

  ‘Leave them to God,’ said Milly.

  We left Wanda to her tea. ‘But’, said Milly, ‘she often spoke of her friends and her enemies. Now she’s surprised she has enemies. She always said “my friends and my enemies”, as if they were to be expected. Foreigners always talk like that, mind you. And when you think of the number of people that come to this door for Wanda …’

  ‘She looks pretty with her hair down,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t she, now?’ said Milly.

  That evening, after supper, we went through the possibilities of the other tenants in the house. There was my neighbour on the top floor, young Isobel, who had such a lot of friends and who rang her Daddy every evening. Here again, Milly and I blinked at each other. Isobel, of all people to write a nasty anonymous letter… ‘I’ve met her father,’ said Milly, as if that settled the question. I hadn’t met him, myself, but it was true that the presence of Isobel’s father’s voice in her daily life seemed to give her a sort of stability; but even more than those telephone calls to her father, it was rather her vivacity and her silly crowd of young friends that put Isobel out of the question. Surely no one as careless and carefree as Isobel, as she ran out of the house into the waiting taxis or the boyfriend’s car, could have written that mean letter? It was someone broody, with inner malice, whom we were looking for.

  Milly felt as guilty in her way as I did in mine as we sat discussing and analysing the people who shared the same house with us. I noticed that, although we always came to the same conclusions, Milly’s reasons were different from mine: she tended to exonerate all tenants of hers because they were her tenants, while I took a mo
re objective look at them. I felt it came to the same thing, for Milly had already done her sizing-up when she took the people under her roof. Still, we could be mistaken. And we felt obscurely guilty. The letter, lying on Milly’s table, was a thing of guilt, arising from guilt, causing it.

  There remained William Todd, the student in his final year of medicine. I say he remained, although in fact from a strictly impartial point of view the suspects in the house would have included both Milly and me. I pointed this out to Milly, who said, ‘Whatever would you and I do a thing like that for?’ I felt, then, that this was the real question to be asked of all of us. What would be the point in any one of us molesting Wanda? Why? What for? William Todd’s wireless programme was going on upstairs, sifting down to us as we were talking. He was usually out on a Saturday evening, but tonight he was studying. Generally, in the evenings he thumped down the stairs with his sturdy legs and went out to meet his friends at the coffee bar near South Kensington station. I had seen him there several times if I happened to be returning home late, myself. He would be with a group of young men and women who looked like the fellow students that they were. Why on earth should William take it into his head to write a scurrilous, anonymous letter to Wanda? He probably didn’t ever think of her unless he happened to pass her on the stair.

  ‘So it’s none of us,’ said Milly. ‘It must be one of Wanda’s people, from outside. And I’m going to tell her so in the morning.’ As the evening proceeded, Wanda became almost herself a culprit in our minds: she was guilty of being a victim of the guilty missive lying on Milly’s table, author unknown, exuding malignity all over the kitchen.

  ‘Wanda looks out of the window,’ I told Martin York. ‘She sees spies standing at the corner of the road. She sees spies in the grocer shop, following her. Private detectives and government spies.’