Far Cry from Kensington (16 page)

‘Mrs Hawkins, you are making a plot against me in the house. Is it my fault you
are ill? You are getting thin, you are wasting, wasting, and you will die.’

‘Wanda I’m feeling fine. Why don’t you talk to a priest? You should
see a priest,’ I said. ‘In the morning I’ll ring Father Stanislas
—’

She interrupted with a wild cry, one of her long wails, as if the mention of the
Polish priest had inflicted a physical wound. Father Stanislas was a small, mild,
bespectacled, white-haired man who was known in the house through having visited
Wanda several times about a year before, when she was ill in bed. Wanda now sat on
the bed and screamed. I withdrew rapidly. I was suddenly unable to cope without Milly
in the house. The Carlins opened their door.

‘She’s having one of her fits,’ I said.

‘Another letter?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think she’s having a breakdown, and I
can’t make head or tail of what she’s saying.’

Wanda was now quiet in her room. Eva Carlin knocked at the door. ‘Wanda,’
she said, ‘would you like a cup of tea?’

Wanda opened her door. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go and plot that I am mad.
That you report me to the priest. That you decide that my friends and my sister
should turn against me. Is it my fault that Mrs Hawkins is to die?’

‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ said Eva Carlin.

I went upstairs. Kate and William were looking over the banisters. ‘What’s
going on?’

‘I don’t know. She needs a sedative — have you got one, Kate?’

‘Yes, but I won’t administer it without a doctor’s
prescription.’

‘I will,’ said William.

But Wanda wouldn’t open her door again to anyone. William came up, after his
efforts to persuade her, and knocked on my door. ‘Can I come in?’

We sat and talked about Wanda for a while. I told him of her mystifying predictions
about my wasting away and dying. ‘I feel a bit spooky,’ I said.

‘She needs professional treatment,’ said William. ‘And the reason you
feel spooky, Mrs Hawkins, is that you don’t have a sex life. At your age
you’re bound to feel spooky without sex.’

I was pulling myself together from this species of shock-treatment, when he added,
‘By the way, were you christened “Mrs Hawkins”, Mrs Hawkins?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I was christened Agnes. But I’m called
Nancy.’

So I spent the night with William on my threequarter-sized bed, with my mind free of
everything but ourselves.

My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is
to not demonstrate her ability too much. You give advice; you say, do this, do that,
I think I’ve got you a job, don’t worry, leave it to me. All that, and in
the end you feel spooky, empty, haunted. And if you then want to wriggle out of so
much responsibility, the people around you are outraged. You have stepped out of your
role. It makes them furious.

I often wonder what would have happened to my life if William had not been a tenant on
the top floor of 14 Church End Villas, South Kensington, that rooming-house, shabby
but clean, that to-day is a smart and expensive set of flats, gutted and
restructured, far beyond the means of medical students, nurses, and the likes of us
as we were.

It was the next morning, at nine-thirty after William had gone off to his lectures,
that the telephone rang downstairs. I went down the two flights in my dressing-gown
to answer. Usually, I was up and dressed by eight o’clock, but this morning was
different. Emma Loy was on the line, with her magic and her way of overlooking her
own past offences. ‘Mrs Hawkins, I want your help,’ she said, as if she
wasn’t really responsible for my losing two jobs.

‘I’m afraid, Miss Loy —’

‘Call me Emma, for goodness sake.’

‘I can’t be of much help to anyone at the present time.’

‘But, Mrs Hawkins, you are a tower of strength, I say it in quotes of
course.’

‘What’s the problem, Emma,’ I said.

‘Well, could we meet and talk?’

‘Do you know of a job for me?’ I said. ‘A job in publishing?’

‘Mrs Hawkins, I think you’ve misunderstood the situation. I honestly
didn’t want you to leave Mac’n Tooley. On the other hand, believe me, my
dear, between ourselves, you’re well out of it. Will you lunch with me at the
Ivy?’

‘To-day?’

‘To-day.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t.’

‘Oh, can’t you?’

‘No, I’m lunching with my boyfriend.’

This was true. I had a date with William at the ABC in Old Brompton Road.

‘Mrs Hawkins,’ said Emma, ‘I understand your state of mind.
I’m not a novelist for nothing. If you would only let me explain. I myself am
in great difficulties. And I personally would greatly appreciate your giving me an
hour, a half-hour, of your time which I genuinely appreciate is very …’

I agreed to meet her at six at Grosvenor House in Park Lane. It is useless to conceal
the fact that I looked forward to the meeting with the usual excitement that Emma
managed universally to invoke. Although many people deplored her I never met anyone
who would willingly miss a date with her.

I had no sooner put down the phone but Wanda came down the stairs. ‘Who was
that, Mrs Hawkins?’

‘A friend of mine.’ I think my voice was harsh. Certainly I was afraid of
psychic contagion. Wanda was no longer as she used to be, amiably receiving her
ladies, those clients who used to call for fittings or with alterations to be done.
It seemed to me there were very few customers for Wanda these days.

‘You spoke to Father Stanislas. I heard you.’

My fear was irrational but strong. I must have appeared guilty; probably I backed away
from her.

‘No, Wanda. You need to see a doctor.’

‘What! You have talked to my enemies that say I am mad. You plot. All in this
house are plotting to take me away by a doctor.’

‘Why don’t you see Father Stanislas first?’

She ran upstairs to her room, wailing.

I sat with William in the ABC while he ate his sandwich and the spare half of mine. I
was absolutely at ease with William, and always have been.

‘Wanda’s in a bad way again this morning,’ I said. ‘She thinks
we are all plotting against her.’

‘With the result’, said William, ‘that we’ll have to sort of
plot against her. At least she ‘should see a doctor.’

‘Or a priest. There’s a Father Stanislas, one of the Polish
community.’

‘Get him to come and see her,’ said William, ‘and then forget her.
You take on too much. Leave something for the specialists.’

‘I’d like to make some arrangement for Wanda before Milly comes home.
I’m thinking of Milly,’ I said.

‘We should do something about ourselves before Milly returns,’ said
William.

‘What should we do?’

‘Take a flat. A small flat, and share.’

It seemed to me the clear and obvious thing to do, so evident that I was surprised
there were no complications. I was accustomed to obstacles. I said,
‘Aren’t we being a bit precipitate?’

‘Nancy, do you think so, yourself?’

‘Not if I find a job.’

‘Then look for a flat. Fairly quiet for my studies. You’re a capable
woman, Mrs Hawkins.’

‘I’m getting a bit tired of being capable.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t take on unnecessary responsibilities,
and simply abandon anything you’ve taken on, except me. That’s my advice.
You’re looking lovely.’

‘I went to the hairdresser,’ I said.

That afternoon I went to Brompton Oratory, and after many enquiries which involved
waiting about and being passed from hand to hand, priest to priest, I finally
obtained a telephone number for Father Stanislas. Something about this search wore me
out so much that I couldn’t make the last effort to ring him up. I remembered a
story I was told by a man who was invited to dinner in a provincial city at the home
of a girl he was in love with, a nervously important occasion for him. It was a rainy
night. He couldn’t find the house, having first mistaken Aldington Way for
Aldington Gardens, then having tried ‘Street’, ‘Avenue’,
‘Crescent’ and ‘Terrace’, up and down both ways; finally,
after stopping people to enquire, and being misdirected, looking into fruit and
tobacconist shops with his problem, and tramping around, he approached 10A Aldington
Way, which he knew was certainly the right house at last, with the name on the door
and the light on behind the curtains. But he didn’t ring the doorbell. He
walked away and on, past the house, and never saw the girl again.

With me, too, the last lap was just too much. With Father Stanislas’s number on
a slip of paper in my handbag, I made my way early to Grosvenor House. I spent some
time making myself presentable in the ladies’ room, then came out to await Emma
Loy.

Grosvenor House was not my idea of the best place for a serious talk. There were too
many smart and scented people about, girls and women with furs and A-line dresses or
black box-coats and skirts, men too carefully dressed, some with over-padded
shoulders, obvious spivs, as we then called the post-war crooks. In that ambience of
spivs and their molls, one elderly couple, newly arrived with their battered leather
bags from the country, wearing their shapeless country things with raincoats over
their arms, looked furtively around, totally bewildered by this brave new world. The
porters ushered them out of sight as Emma Loy appeared, handsome in her swinging fur
coat, her smart grey dress and pearls.

‘Mrs Hawkins, how nice you look with your hair done like that. And you’ve
lost weight, it suits you.’

‘You look nice, too.’

We ordered gins and tonic. ‘What amazing people,’ said Emma, looking
round. She had been quick to see that her choice of meeting-place was a mistake.
‘I think we should have met somewhere quieter.’

‘But the scene is amusing,’ I said. ‘Quite new to me.’

‘And to me,’ she said. ‘I suppose, as a novelist, I should welcome
any experience. Of course, a novelist doesn’t really have to undergo every
experience, a glimpse is enough.’

I felt, almost, as if it was I, not she, who had chosen the place. But she, quick to
thought-read, added, ‘I should have picked a more suitable spot. But
let’s make the best of it.’

Our drinks were served, and Emma nibbled a peanut. Then she said, ‘Mrs Hawkins,
why do you hate Hector Bartlett?’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’s got nothing to do with
me. I’ve got nothing to do with him. I’m out of publishing, now. He only
wants to use people.’

‘Now, if it’s a job in publishing you want, you can, I think, count on me.
Not right away of course, but eventually. I want to talk about Hector. He’s
very, very hurt by you, Mrs Hawkins. I think it all began one morning last summer
…’ said the novelist,’ and he met you in the park on the way to
your office. Hector was delighted. It was a lovely day in the park, Green Park, I
think, or St James’s, one or the other… He admired you so much, caring
as you do for everybody. Then suddenly, without warning you turned on him with that
deadly appellation.’ Emma lowered her voice: ‘
Pisseur de copie.
Do you know what that means to a writer, how it affects him? Look at it from the
human point of view.’

I was fascinated by her rhetoric. It was a new side of Emma Loy. She was saying things
she wouldn’t dream of writing or putting her name to. Her tone was not that
usually associated with Emma Loy. This meaningless coinage, Took at it from a human
point of view’, as if I were another species, must either be put on for my
benefit, in which case she had miscalculated my intelligence, or she herself was
under some emotional strain; and I had noticed before, once or twice in my job, that
the most intelligent and sophisticated of writers are often banal and incoherent
under an emotional pressure of real life. I decided to sip my gin and tonic and let
her continue.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving next week for the United
States where I’ll stay for some time, I think. My books are doing rather well
over there. And before I leave, I do want to make things all right between Hector and
you. How can I go away with an easy mind if you put it about every time you get a job
in publishing that he’s a (lowered voice)
pisseur de copie
? It’s
a very hurtful term. And it’s not at all like you, Mrs Hawkins.’

I was myself putting on an air while Emma Loy was speaking; it suggested that I was
only partly attending to what she was saying. I was assisted by the fact that a more
elegant clientèle had begun to replace the lurid six-o’clock set. People
were arriving in evening dress in small groups, young and middle-aged, mainly
handsome, all very happy.

I turned my gaze from the passing scene to Emma Loy, and I said, ‘Any better
phrase that you can honestly suggest might apply, I’ll be willing to give it
careful consideration.’

‘Aren’t you being rather hard?’

‘You must be relieved to be getting rid of him, Miss Loy.’

‘Please call me Emma. I know that you stick to Mrs Hawkins and it suits you.
It’s a matter of your own preferences. I don’t at all want to get rid of
Hector. In fact I shall miss him very much while I’m in America. Do you realize
how dedicated he is to my work? He knows all my works by heart. He can quote chapter
and verse, any of my novels. It’s amazing.’