Far Cry from Kensington (15 page)

The printer’s shop in Notting Hill Gate where Cathy the
book-keeper had gone to work after the Ullswater Press had closed down was on my bus
route one afternoon. I decided to look in on Cathy. Mr Wells asked me to sit down on
a chair in the noisy outer workshop while he went to tell Cathy. ‘I don’t
want to interrupt …’ I said.

‘No interruption, ma’am. Aren’t you the lady who recommended Cathy?
I seem to remember …’

‘Yes, I came with her for her interview.’

‘You must be Mrs Hawkins, of the Ullswater Press.’

‘The late Ullswater Press,’ I said.

‘Yes, a sad affair. I must say, Mrs Hawkins, you’re looking very
well.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wells. I hope everything’s fine with you?’

‘Everything’s fine. And I must say, Mrs Hawkins, if you’ll pardon my
saying so you look ten years younger than the last time I saw you.’

I was twenty-nine. This meant I must have looked ten years older the first time.

Mr Wells was a grey-haired bespectacled man with a wrinkled face, long nose and a
generally Dickensian appearance. None the less his words cheered me up so
considerably that I realized then and there how depressed I had been, riding about
the faceless streets and shabby suburbs of London on the tops of buses, for the best
part of a month.

‘Thank you, Mr Wells.’

Cathy came beaming with that smile of gratitude beyond what was called for. Above the
din Cathy cackled her delight at my visit; her eyes were fixed on me behind her
extra-thick lenses. It was impossible to talk through the noise but it was near
closing-time, so I waited for her to get ready and took her to supper at a newly
opened French restaurant in the Bayswater Road. We were ushered to a discreet corner,
out of the way of the more glamorous clients. I didn’t in the least resent
this, and Cathy, excited at our meeting, didn’t notice. And, in fact, I dwelt
with part of my thoughts, while Cathy cackled with her terrible voice and often
unintelligible English, on the desire that had been taking hold of me all this month
of March, to have a more attractive life; I needed some compelling charm.

I forgot about glamour and turned my attention fully on Cathy when she said, ‘Do
you remember that redhead man, he would stop you in the Park, he would want that his
books can be published by Mr York, that he should give you so much trouble?’

‘Hector Bartlett,’ I said.

‘Is the name,’ said Cathy. ‘He come now these days by Mr Wells to get
printing done and I say to Mr Wells you mind he don’t pay, that man.’

I imagined that the
Pisseur
was arranging to have some of his work privately
printed, since he was unable to get a publisher. But on carefully and warily
catechizing Cathy throughout the meal I managed to gather that his printing
commission was a very special case, almost a challenge to Mr Wells. It consisted in
‘printing in columns like in a newspaper’, and on paper like a newspaper,
so that the final result would look like a cutting from an actual newspaper.

I was quite puzzled. ‘Does he have it copied from an actual newspaper?’ I
said in one of my cross-questions.

‘No, no. He bring a page, it is typed out. It must be made like from the
newspaper.’

‘What does he want that for? Any idea?’

‘To Mr Wells he says it is the new form of fiction. Mr Wells thinks he’s
crazy but OK, no rude words, I print it and he pays.’

That was all I could get out of Cathy. That I had lost my job through refusing to
promote the
Pisseur
I thought well to keep to myself.

‘Why you don’t eat, Mrs Hawkins? Half you leave on your plate,’ said
Cathy.

Young Isobel Lederer was still at No. 14 Church End Villas, in her
third month of pregnancy. At first she had confided in Kate because she was a nurse,
then in William because he was a medical student, then in the Carlins because they
were a married couple, and about the same time that she informed her Daddy she
confided in me because I was Mrs Hawkins.

We felt that Milly, who was in any case away in Ireland, need not be troubled by the
news at this point. Nor did Wanda share the secret, with her panic morals and her
hysterical troubles. Isobel, having told five people about her pregnancy, carried on
uncaring, as if it was our problem not hers. In a way she was right, because her
first suggestion had been that she should procure an abortion. This was not an easy,
legal course of action in those years, but her Daddy and money could have arranged
it. Isobel had gone to Kate and William with this idea in mind. They had counselled
strongly against it. Isobel consulted others. Basil Carlin had wavered but his wife
Eva would have none of it. Finally Hugh Lederer declared himself dead against it, and
I opposed it so strongly on the grounds of danger, immorality and guts-repugnance,
that she gave up the idea, and her pregnancy now became our problem. Hugh Lederer, in
fact, tried to reduce it to his problem and mine. To this end he proposed marriage to
me. ‘It would be good for Isobel to have a mother,’ said this amazing
fellow.

I could have said that it would be good for her to have a husband; and I could have
added that, at the age of twenty-nine, I wasn’t minded to take on a girl of
twenty-two as a daughter and become a grandmother as well; I could have told him that
I wasn’t anywhere near in love with him; but all I said was No. And it is my
advice, when you have to refuse any request that admits of no argument, you should
never give reasons or set out your objections; to do so leads to counter-reasons and
counter-objections. So to Hugh Lederer I said No.

There was no way of knowing whether it would be good for Isobel to have a husband,
presumably the father of the child, for she was vague when the possibility of her
marrying the father was proposed to her.

‘Do you love the man?’ said Eva Carlin.

‘I don’t know.’

As it happened she didn’t know quite who the father was. And in the third month
of her pregnancy, between her bouts of morning sickness when she stayed home from her
job, and those evenings when she had no dinner-dates or outlets for her high spirits,
having gained our attention she gradually let it be known that there were three
claimants for fatherhood, none of whom she thought good enough to marry.

Hugh Lederer got Kate to call a meeting at the house. He mounted the stairs with a
heavy and weary tread as if it were he who was carrying the baby. The meeting was
held in the Carlins’ bed-sitting-room, on account of its being the largest.

But this was a mistake: it was next door to Wanda’s room. She was not in the
secret and was naturally curious about the evening party at the Carlins, who normally
kept themselves so very much to themselves. William clattered in after me; Wanda was
at her door to watch. Kate arrived with a notebook in her hand; Wanda took this
opportunity of going to the bathroom. I suppose I made matters worse by coming out on
the landing while Wanda’s activities were going on, calling up to Isobel that
we were ready and would she bring three more glasses. Wanda retreated, slamming her
door, very offended at being excluded. I noticed this with only part of my attention
because the business on hand was uppermost, and then came the question of coffee cups
and the bottle of sherry, the bottle of port, the glasses; and were there enough
chairs, would we sit on the divan beds? And it was so strange to see the
Carlins’ room for the first time, what it was like, with their little kitchen
adjoining, that nobody gave much thought to Wanda. With Isobel, who arrived with a
tinkle of glasses and another bottle of something in her hands, we were seven. But we
managed to sound like twenty. Hugh, William and Basil Carlin filled the room with
their voices, making the most noise, but Kate was interrupting with her expert
knowledge of what facilities and benefits were available to Isobel under the National
Health scheme.

‘Isobel’, said the father, ‘has no need of the National Health with
its homes for fallen women. I can buy her a small flat, then if she gets a decent
job, say, in publishing —’

‘Why don’t you take her home to live with you?’ said Eva Carlin
coming out of her kitchen carrying a plate of fanciful snacks, with that way she had
of walking with her elbows out as one who means business.

We had all sat down and Basil Carlin was helping his wife to serve the drinks and
snacks.

‘Live with Daddy?’ said Isobel. ‘No, I don’t like Sussex. I
like London.’

‘Isobel’, said Hugh, ‘likes artists and so on. She likes
culture.’

‘What a life for a baby!’ said Kate. ‘Those cultural groups
don’t know what hygiene is, they don’t even know what clean is. I
remember I was sent to an arty house in Holland Park —’

‘Maybe we should get down to business,’ William said. Isobel, looking very
pretty, with a rosy flushed face and her fair hair short and shiny, sat next to him.

‘I appreciate very much you all being here,’ said Hugh. ‘I
appreciate that you want to stand by Isobel and that there’s no prudery
involved.’

‘Have you seen
The Teahouse of the August Moon?
’ asked Isobel of
William.

‘No, I don’t go to the theatre. What’s that got to do with
it?’

‘Nothing. I was only wondering, in case you’d been, what you thought of
it. You should see
Antonio’s Spanish Ballet,
it’s on at
—’

‘And if I get her a flat, she could get someone to look after the baby
—’

‘Wouldn’t you want her to marry the father of the child?’ said Basil
Carlin.

‘That’s what I say,’ said Eva. ‘Make the swine marry her,
whoever he is.’

‘Salad Days,’
Isobel confided to William, ‘was pretty
good. I haven’t been to
Wonderful Town
yet, the bookings
—’

‘Come on, Isobel,’ said William. ‘Tell us who the father is.
That’s what we all want to know.’

‘Yes, tell us that,’ said Hugh. Why he had not already asked her this in
private I could not understand. But I have sometimes observed that people close to
one another can discuss their private affairs before others better than alone. Hugh
Lederer evidently assumed there was only one possible man. ‘It would be a
help,’ he said, ‘if you could indicate who he is.’

Isobel treated this as if it were a guessing-game at a party, handing out the clue:
‘Oh, it’s one of those boys in Fleet Street or in publishing. You know
how they promise to get you a job in publishing, and you sleep with them, and then
they don’t know of any jobs in publishing and to be quite fair, it isn’t
easy to get a job in publishing. Daddy doesn’t realize that.’

‘Do you mean to say that these men don’t take precautions?’ said
Basil Carlin, very shocked.

‘You can’t ask my daughter to go into details,’ said Hugh.

I remembered then what Hugh Lederer had told me on that occasion at the Savoy: Hector
Bartlett was one of Isobel’s friends who was trying to get her a job in
publishing. I was so horrified at the idea that he might be the father of
Isobel’s baby that I swallowed the whole of my sherry instead of leaving half.
I said, ‘Don’t tell me it’s Hector Bartlett?’

‘No,’ said Isobel. ‘It can’t be him, but he likes to think
he’s the father. I only slept with him once because he offered me a job with a
publisher. But that was too long ago for him to be the father. He would marry me and
make out he’s the father; he’s been hanging around here for
months.’

I registered these last words without their making an impression. It is frequently the
case that we lose important parts of what people say in our predominant interest in
the other parts. All I noticed at the time was that the
Pisseur
wanted to
marry Isobel. I overlooked ‘he’s been hanging around here for
months’.

‘You couldn’t possibly marry that man,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t marry any of them,’ said Isobel.

‘Fair enough,’ said Hugh.

‘What a life for a baby!’ said Kate. ‘You should have it adopted. It
needs a respectable home.’

I said the idea of giving away a baby was too sad to be contemplated, especially when
there was no material hardship involved. Isobel agreed: ‘I don’t see why
I should go to a lot of trouble and then have nothing to show for it.’

Kate offered to look for a flat for Isobel. William wrote down the name of a
gynaecologist. Eva Carlin agreed, on thinking it over, that Isobel shouldn’t
marry a man she wasn’t in love with. Basil Carlin in a grave voice implored
Hugh Lederer to persuade his daughter to go straight from now on. I agreed to be the
godmother. Isobel said she hadn’t been to see
A Star is Born,
was it
any good? Hugh Lederer said he appreciated very much our solidarity with Isobel,
which he hoped would continue. The meeting was over. Everyone left in a friendly
spirit. ‘You’ll make a great godmother, Mrs Hawkins,’ said Hugh.

Wanda caught me on the landing just as I was about to go up to my room.

‘Mrs Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins.’

My mind was still occupied with the fuss and hubbub of the meeting, the sherry and
snacks, Isobel and her problem and her doting parent. I half expected Wanda to ask
me, as she stood repeating my name on the landing outside her room, if I could get
her a job in publishing.

‘Yes, Wanda, do you want me?’

‘Mrs Hawkins, you must speak with me. You must come into my room.’ She
stood bobbing her body forward with every phrase, in great earnest. She looked to
right and left, then hastily backed into her room, beckoning.

‘You plot, Mrs Hawkins,’ said Wanda. ‘You are all day away from the
house. Don’t tell me you go to a job because I know you have lost your job. You
leave the house to go to those people and you come now in the evening with the other
tenants here, to ruin my name. You plot against me. My Box — I make no money
from it. I do it for a favour. I help the sick.’

Wanda’s Box was open and visible. She had a little pile of cards and a printed
booklet open at a page which seemed to have some tabular arrangement. But this was
all I could see at a glance. I wasn’t about to answer Wanda’s accusations
of a plot. I just stood and looked at her. The more I heard of the Box, the more I
was convinced, as I still am, that it was a lot of rubbish. But was it any more mad
than my compulsive Hail Marys at twelve o’clock noon? I went on standing,
looking at poor Wanda, in a dreadful state as she was. I decided then and there to
give up those Hail Marys; my religion in fact went beyond those Hail Marys which had
become merely a superstition to me.