Far Cry from Kensington (18 page)

‘The motives for suicides are often quite trivial,’ William had said.
Trivial to the rest of us, but not to them, obviously not to them. I realized how
very little I knew about Wanda, far less her mind. It was strange that Emma Loy had
been discussing her with me, probably at the very moment when she gave her last cry
and jumped into the dark, cold canal. ‘The motives quite trivial
…’ Yes, but not to Wanda, not to Wanda.

I remember hardly anything about what I did or said after the police left, that night
of Wanda’s death.

Somebody in the house rang Milly’s daughter in Cork to warn her of the event.
Milly herself rang back, and asked for me.

‘Why don’t you stay there, Milly, till it all blows over?’

Milly wouldn’t hear of this. And she wasted no sympathy on Wanda. ‘The
nerve of the woman,’ said Milly, ‘to commit suicide from my house!’

For some odd reason this made me feel better. Milly’s point of view always
offered an element of defiant courage. I looked forward to Milly’s return.

After the inquest and the funeral Wanda’s sister from Scotland came to the house
to collect Wanda’s possessions. The others were all out at work. I let her into
Wanda’s room and asked if I could help her. She said no, she could manage by
herself, but I could see she was in a daze, vaguely lifting things up and putting
them down in the same place. She was a darker version of Wanda. Her name was Greta;
she spoke in a slightly broken English with a Scottish accent.

Now, I had to remind her that all the stuff piled about the room was not necessarily
Wanda’s. Some, I said, belonged to her clients, and generally speaking we would
be safe in assuming that only the clothes which were packed in Wanda’s
suitcases, or folded in the drawers, or hanging in the wardrobe, were Wanda’s
property. And even then, I said, sometimes Wanda used to hang up in her wardrobe
special dresses she had made for her ladies: one would have to judge by size. For the
rest we would have to wait, I rattled on, until the clients came to collect their
clothes.

‘They’re not all women’s clothes,’ said Greta, fingering
through a pile.

‘No,’ I said, ‘Wanda was very clever at altering men’s
clothes. The owners will turn up for them.’

‘Those photographs on the mantelpiece,’ said Greta. She sat down and
started to cry. ‘The bed’s not even made,’ she said, and picked up
a pair of Wanda’s well-worn shoes.

‘The photographs are undoubtedly Wanda’s,’ I said. ‘Look for
an empty suitcase and start putting the photographs together. I’m going to get
some newspaper to wrap them in and bring you a cup of tea.’

The sadness of these last gatherings of personal effects, the sittings and sortings
and parcelling-up, is more inexpressible than the funeral, where at least there is a
fixed rite, there are words, the coffin has a shape and the grave a certain depth,
and even the sorrow of the mourners has some silent eloquence if only conveyed and
formally interpreted by their standing still. But the grief which is latent in relics
like Wanda’s pair of worn shoes has no equivalent at all.

When I returned with the tea Greta was examining her sister’s bank deposit book.
‘Six hundred and thirty pounds,’ said Greta. ‘I’d no idea she
was so well off.’ I was called away again just then to answer the doorbell. It
was Abigail, Ian Tooley’s secretary. She had come primarily to see me, she
said, and also to take away some radionics equipment which Wanda had on loan.

I doubted she had come mainly for my sake, but I appreciated Abigail’s
politeness. I took her up to Wanda’s room and, avoiding the big mouthful of
Abigail’s name, introduced them as Abigail and as Mrs Podolak’s sister
Greta. Abigail murmured that she was sorry to hear of the tragedy.

‘Abigail would like to take away certain equipment that belongs to someone
else,’ I said. ‘In fact I think it’s that black box over there. And
maybe those books and manuals stacked beside it.’

‘Yes,’ said Abigail, ‘the literature is Mr Tooley’s as
well.’

‘Do you have a receipt for them, Miss?’ said Greta, surprisingly awakened
out of her vagueness. I was equally surprised to hear Abigail say that she had all
the documents with her, and a letter to authorize her to take Mr Tooley’s
property away. Greta seemed to understand this, and immediately got out her glasses
to examine the business on hand, while I stood there marvelling at the acuity of both
sides. I had already had some experience of death in my family, and I had been
struck, there too, by the way in which people who were stricken with sorrow would be
able to deal with rapid lucidity with anything concerning what they conceived to be
valuables; and that any claimants to goods in possession of the dead person, or
creditors, seemed to have all their documents and receipts ready to present. To see
Abigail, efficiently explaining the papers to Greta, and Greta earnestly examining
them, one might have thought they had both foreseen and prepared for Wanda’s
death.

I went to get some tea for Abigail and left them getting down to business.

‘But Wanda was a good Catholic!’ was what Greta was
saying when I returned with fresh tea for Abigail. Greta appealed to me: ‘Wanda
was devout, no?’

‘I believe she was,’ I said.

‘There is some old Catholics, her friends, told me she shouldn’t have had
a Catholic burial by reason she committed suicide. But I say she was devout and the
Father would not have given her a Catholic funeral if she wasn’t all right with
the Church.’

‘The verdict was unsound mind,’ I said. ‘It’s an illness like
any other. She wasn’t to blame for it.’

‘But now I see she practised this magic,’ said Greta. ‘This black
box of works.’

‘It’s supposed to do good to people,’ said Abigail. ‘It
isn’t magic, as I say, it’s radionics. It’s supposed to work cures
on people thousands of miles away.’

‘Take away that box, girl,’ said Greta, ‘and all the books. I have
to tell the priest about it. Yes, it’s on my conscience.’

I had in my mind’s ears that cry of Wanda’s when I had offered to talk to
Father Stanislas. That cry, that cry. Wanda, in her madness, had been terrorized. And
her fearful suspicion, that morning, when I had spoken on the phone to Emma:
‘You spoke to Father Stanislas. I heard you …’ Her wail, as she
ran upstairs. ‘Is it my fault you are ill? You are wasting. You will
die,’ she had said the day before.

I determined to get out of Abigail what Wanda was doing with that radionics
instrument, or rather, what she thought she was doing. If it hadn’t been that
Wanda evidently had it in her disordered mind that she was doing me some harm, I
would have taken no further interest. Wanda was dead. People commit suicide for quite
trivial reasons, William had said. But whatever Wanda’s reasons I was disturbed
by the words that had involved me in her mind, ‘You are wasting. You will
die,’ when in fact I had no previous idea that I was specially in her mind at
all.

‘Don’t go just yet,’ I said to Abigail.

‘No, I’m not going. There’s something I came to talk to you
about.’

So Abigail stayed and helped us to pack Wanda’s boxes, to sort out in separate
piles the clothes that were obviously Wanda’s and those that were presumably
her customers’. In the wardrobe was a man’s suit of clothes, an ordinary
dark-blue suit. I grabbed it and said, ‘This must be a client’s.’
It flashed through my mind immediately that it might be Hector Bartlett’s. I
remembered what Emma had told me: ‘Hector has been taking the most absurd steps
to stop you calling him by that name …’

Now, holding this man’s suit in my hand, I was convinced that Hector Bartlett
had been somehow using Wanda to work against me. Isobel introduced him to Wanda to
have his dinner suit altered. ‘I think it all began last summer and he met you
in the park …’ — I could hear Emma Loy’s words. But already,
Wanda had been blackmailed by Hector Bartlett, probably seduced, the foolish woman.
And he had gone on to use Wanda, and used her beyond her endurance. Because I had
insulted him in the park … The theory grew in my mind, wild as it was, and
took various forms. I filled in details.

Abigail waited till Greta had left in a taxi with her first load of stuff. Greta was
to return next day to go through Wanda’s letters and papers, and see what she
could throw away. We had already glanced through them, with the police, to see if
there was any clue to Wanda’s death, but it appeared the papers were all old
receipts and even older letters written in Polish, mixed up with old photographs.

I have always liked Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight, as she then was, Abigail Wilson
as she is now. It turned out to be true she had come to Church End Villas that day
primarily to see me, and only incidentally to claim back the Box. She told me she was
leaving Mackintosh & Tooley’s to join the staff of an interesting new
magazine, the
Highgate Review,
so called because the editors, a group of
American refugees from Senator McCarthy’s political persecutions, had settled
in Highgate. The
High-gate Review
would be devoted to cultural and
political events. They needed a capable managing editor. ‘So I thought of you,
Mrs Hawkins. They don’t pay much but it could be a wonderful job. Would you be
interested?’

My savings were getting low and I felt ready for a new job. Abigail agreed to arrange
for me to go for an interview. I would have shown more enthusiasm then and there, if
I had not had heavily weighing on my mind the mystery of Wanda’s suicide and my
suspicions of Hector Bartlett’s involvement in it, which I was to talk to
William about later that night. If Wanda’s belief that I was wasting away
because of some curse she had put on me was sincere, she was totally mistaken. But
the fact that anyone should wish me ill to such an extent appalled me, already
depressed as I was by Wanda’s death.

I sat with Abigail in Milly’s kitchen, thinking of the
Pisseur’s
suit, as I thought it was, hanging upstairs in Wanda’s wardrobe. I only
half-listened to Abigail’s deb-chat conversation, which usually I found very
diverting. I had known, before Emma Loy told me, that I had made an enemy of Hector
Bartlett on the morning in Green Park when I had hissed in his face
‘Pisseur de copie’.
Since then I had lost two jobs for this
crime and the repetition of it, and I didn’t think of repenting. On the
contrary, I had counted it one of the prime duties of the jobs.

‘And the name of the party,’ Abigail was saying in her description of one
of the founders of the
Highgate Review,
‘is Howard Send. Too
killing. I called him Passage to India, he was amazed. Of course, he’s that
way, but they often make better friends.’

I agreed to go for an interview with Howard Send. ‘Abigail,’ I said,
‘tell me about this Box of yours.’

‘Not mine, it’s Ian Tooley’s. He’s a spiritualist, you know,
and a psychic researcher, all that. I’m really sorry for his wife because
he’s rather sweet in spite of it all.’

‘How did he get hold of Wanda Podolak?’

‘She’s on his list, introduced by a general organizer who hasn’t any
skill at it himself, but he’s clever at finding people who are, Hector
Bartlett, you know, that hanger-on of Emma Loy’s. He’s the organizer,
gosh, isn’t he awful? Imagine him running around with a sample of your blood or
a strand of your hair and trying to get someone to diagnose what’s wrong with
you.’

‘Surely he doesn’t believe in it?’ I said.

‘Ardently, said Abigail,’ ‘unutterably ardently.’

‘I can’t imagine that man being sincere about anything,’ I said.

‘But his operators get results. Apparently they get amazing results. Ian Tooley
gets letters from grateful patients, I’ve seen the letters.’

‘About Hector Bartlett?’

‘About him, yes. They say he’s a wonder at the Box. They don’t know
he doesn’t do it himself, but of course he does teach his operators, so in a
way he deserves the credit. Personally, I can’t stand the man, frightfully
smarmy.’

‘Why doesn’t he stick to radionics as a profession, I wonder? Why does he
try to write?’

‘I suppose he wants to see his name in print, and be famous. You know how they
all do. Ian Tooley has tried to reason with him, but he considers himself a great
critic, a sort of thinker.’

‘He’s a
pisseur de copie,
’ I said.

Abigail was delighted. ‘The French’, she said, ‘always have a word
for it, don’t they? You’re looking so very young these days, Mrs
Hawkins.’

‘I’m not so very old,’ I said.

Much later that night when I propounded to William, in its various stages of logic, my
theory about the
Pisseur’s
influence on Wanda, I was persuaded to
discard it. ‘First of all,’ William said, ‘that blue suit in
Wanda’s wardrobe is mine and I’ll thank you to hand it over. It’s
the only decent suit I’ve got.’

William said other things that sounded like common sense. I forget what they were. But
the fact that I had jumped to the wrong conclusion about the owner of the suit in
Wanda’s wardrobe waylaid me into doubting my own suspicions about Hector
Bartlett’s relationship with Wanda. I was anxious to impress William with my
reason-ability and intelligence. But in fact William was wrong and I had been quite
near the truth.

Radionics was already flourishing in England by the
mid-‘fifties. It was a pseudo-scientific practice that had started in the
United States in the early part of the twentieth century. It claimed to diagnose and
cure at any distance disorders and ailments in people, animals and vegetables. It
gained a following, and to-day still enjoys a considerable number of believers. That
it is a totally irrational method of healing is not to discount it and certainly the
claims of ‘radionics’ (the word is not in the dictionary) are no more a
subject for mockery than the claims of all our religions. Personally, I think it a
lot of bosh and object to the tenacious efforts of the practitioners over the years
to establish a scientific basis for the efficacy of this Box with its coloured
liquids, its bit of hair on a metal plate, its rows of knobs which the operators
twiddle, its claptrap about ratings, coded instructions, electromagnetic fields, its
chabras (rays) and its L-fields (life), T-fields (thought), its O-fields
(organizing), and its emanations. Oh God! — the Box has no relation to any
scientific instrument; it is not electronic, it is not electrical; it has no
radiation. It was discredited in the United States, but not in England where to-day
farmers put their crops on the Box and horse-trainers their sick horses.