Far Cry from Kensington (4 page)

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 here 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.’