Loitering With Intent Page 6

  One of these books, which took me back over the years to wintry Hampstead Heath, was a rare edition of John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua and another was a green-and-gold-bound edition, in Italian, of my beloved Benvenuto Cellini’s La Vita.

  Questa mia Vita travagliata io scrivo …

  I remember Solly at his sweetest during those walks at Hampstead, with our Edwina always ready to support the general drama of our lives, crowing like a Greek chorus as we discussed this and that. I had not yet finished Warrender Chase, but Solly had found for me a somewhat run-down publisher with headquarters in a Warehouse at Wapping who on the strength of the first two chapters was prepared to contract for it, on a down payment to me of ten pounds. I recall discussing the contract with Solly on one of our walks. It was a dry, windy day. We stopped while Solly scrutinized the one-page document. It fluttered in his hand. He gave it back to me. ‘Tell him to wipe his arse with it,’ said Solly. ‘Don’t sign.’ ‘Yes, oh yes, oh yes,’ screamed Edwina. ‘Just tell that publisher to wipe his arse with that contract.’

  I wasn’t at all attracted tot obscenities, but the combination of circumstances, something about the Heath, the weather, the wheel-chair, and also Solly and Edwina themselves in their own essence, made all this sound to me very poetic, it made me very happy. We wheeled Edwina into a tea-shop where she poured tea and conversed in a most polite and grand manner.

  This, about the middle of December 1949. I had sat up many nights working on Warrender Chase and already had a theme for another novel at the back of my mind. I was longing to have enough money to be able to leave my job, but until I could get enough money from a publisher there was no possibility of that.

  And here comes a further point. My job at Sir Quentin’s held my curiosity. What went on there could very well have continued to influence my Warrender Chase but it didn’t. Rather, it was not until I had finished writing the book in January 1950 that I got some light on what Sir Quentin was up to.

  It was the end of January 1950 that I began to notice a deterioration in all the members of the Association.

  I had been down with ‘flu and away from work for two weeks. Just after the New Year Dottie had fallen ill with ‘flu and I had spent most of my evenings with her in her flat, feeling fatalistically that I would catch her ‘flu. I’m not sure that I didn’t want to. During those first weeks of January when I went to Dottie’s every night with the bits of shopping and things that she needed, Leslie often came round. He was no longer living with Dottie, having moved in with his poet. But something about the ‘flu made Dottie very much more relaxed. She was less of the English Rose. She refrained from telling Leslie that she was praying for him. It is true she had some relics of her childhood, a teddy-bear, some dolls and a gollywog in bed with her, all lying along Leslie’s side of the bed. She had always draped these toys on top of her bed, along the counterpane. I knew that they had got on Leslie’s nerves but now that she was ill I suppose he felt indulgent, for he sometimes brought her flowers. There were no recriminations between us and we merrily skated on thick ice, while I privately wondered what I had ever seen in Leslie, he seemed so to have lost his good looks, at least in a virile sense. However, we were happy.

  Dottie even managed to laugh at some of my stories about Sir Quentin although at heart she was taking that Autobiographical Association very seriously.

  Now that it was my turn to be ill I lay in bed all day with my high temperature, writing and writing my Warrender Chase. This ‘flu was a wonderful opportunity to get the book finished. I worked till my hand was tired and until Dottie showed up at six in the evening with a vacuum flask of soup or some rashers of bacon which she fried on my gas ring, cutting them up kindly into little bits for me to swallow for my health’s sake. She had got thinner from her own ‘flu and wisps of her hair fell down from its handsome upward twist so that she looked less English Rose for the time being. She had been to Sir Quentin’s to give a helping hand in my absence.

  ‘Dottie,’ I said, ‘you simply mustn’t take that man seriously.’.

  ‘Beryl Tims is in love with him,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said.

  I had just that day been writing the chapter in my Warrender Chase where the letters of my character Charlotte prove that she was so far gone in love with him that she was willing to pervert her own sound instincts, or rather forget that she had those instincts, in order to win Warrender’s approval and retain a little of his attention. My character Charlotte, my fictional English Rose, was later considered to be one of my more shocking portrayals. What did I care? I conceived her in those feverish days and nights of my bout of ‘flu, which touched on pleurisy, and I never regretted the creation of Charlotte. I wasn’t writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them. I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. I am sparing no relevant facts.

  Now I treated the story of Warrender Chase with a light and heartless hand, as is my way when I have to give a perfectly serious account of things. No matter what is described it seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with a pen and paper or before a typewriter. I enjoyed myself with Warrender’s mother, Prudence, and her sepulchral sayings: and I made her hand over the documents to the American scholar, Proudie, whom she thought so comical. I did it scene by scene: Marjorie’s obvious release from some terrible anxiety after Warrender’s death and the consequent disapproval of her husband, Roland, with his little round face and his adoration of his dead uncle; then came the discovery of those letters and those notes left by Warrender Chase, pieced together throughout the book, which finally show with certainty what I had prepared the reader slowly to suspect. Warrender Chase was privately a sado-puritan who for a kind of hobby had gathered together a group of people specially selected for their weakness and folly, and in whom he carefully planted and nourished a sense of terrible and unreal guilt. As I wrote in the book, ‘Warrender’s private prayer-meetings were of course known about, but only to the extent that they were considered too delicate a matter to be publicly discussed. Warrender had cultivated such a lofty myth of himself that nobody could pry into his life for fear of appearing vulgar.’ Well, he was supposed to be a mystic, known to be a pillar of the High Church of England; he made speeches at the universities, wrote letters to The Times. God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

  I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper. I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day. I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table. One of them said, ‘There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.’

  It was all I needed. That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter. All the rest sprang from that phrase.

  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.

  Chapter Five

  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 S
ir 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?’