Time to Be in Earnest (12 page)

The four of us went to St. Edmund’s Church for the 11 o’clock service and it seemed appropriate to take part in the order, the dignity and the well-known prayers of the 1662 Mattins. The priest was at another of his group churches and the service was taken by a layman wearing doctor’s robes. He preached a short but remarkable sermon which could not have been bettered: Christian, scholarly and sensitive.

After lunch at the Swan, Françoise and I spent most of the afternoon and evening watching the BBC tribute. It is never easy for public figures
to react appropriately at short notice to such a tragedy. Well-worn adjectives begin to sound like a mantra and the reiterated tributes seem fulsome and platitudinous. I thought that the Prime Minister was impressive, the Archbishop of Canterbury inadequate. The most moving tributes came from ordinary people whom Princess Diana had met, sometimes briefly, who spoke of her warmth and her loving concern and who obviously felt that they had had a personal relationship with her. This, I imagine, would have pleased her most.

The process of beatification was well under way by the end of the day and will no doubt continue. There was something so horribly appropriate about the manner of her death, and I have the feeling that we were all involved in a Greek tragedy with the whole country as the Chorus. Beautiful, wilful, complicated, destructive and doomed, it is hard to believe that she could have found happiness. Her comfort was always in the love of strangers and, if she most wanted that love to be intense, personal and universal, today, at least, she would be satisfied.

Frances Fyfield arrived at 11 o’clock for our last session in connection with a
Times
interview with me. In the course of general discussion about writing we spoke about copy-editing. Frances said that she doubted whether any novel could be absolutely accurate in every detail and that the last person to spot a mistake was usually the author, who was too involved with plot and characters to notice small inconsistencies or typing errors. I know that I am occasionally a careless writer in this respect and, as my books are long and complex, they do need very careful copy-editing; this they certainly receive. Apart from the Faber copy-editor, who is usually excellent, the proofs are read by Peter and Jane. Peter is meticulous about language, deleting, for example, the superfluous adjective in the phrase “wide panorama,” and methodically noting the number of duplicated words.

Ruth Rendell held her publicity party for her new book
Road Rage
at the Groucho, but I was unable to be there as I had undertaken some months ago to speak at the University Women’s Club. I managed to reach Ruth at her London house both to explain and to congratulate her on the reviews for
Road Rage
. Ruth, who, with her husband Don, is a long-standing friend, is a remarkable and prolific writer, regularly producing novels which explore with power and high imagination the darker corners of the human psyche. She used to find the conventions of the detective story too restrictive and some critics would agree that her best novels are those written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. But she is now beginning to use the Wexford saga as an opportunity to deal with social affairs about which she feels concern. Neither Ruth nor I are didactic writers and I never set out to point a moral or to deal specifically with a social problem. But if a novel is set in the modern world, social and political concerns necessarily intrude. In the first book in which my woman detective
Kate Miskin appears,
A Taste for Death
, I didn’t set out to explore the problems of an intelligent, ambitious and underprivileged young woman fighting her way to seniority and success in the machismo world of the police, but the book would not have been realistic if these problems hadn’t been dealt with. Because the detective story is usually set unambiguously in its own time and place, it often gives a clearer idea of contemporary life than does more prestigious literature. If we want to know what it was like to work in a City advertising office in the early 1930s, there is no better book than Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Murder Must Advertise
.

The dinner at the University Women’s Club was, I think, successful and it is always a pleasure to be in this attractive, comfortable and well-managed club with its ambience of unpretentious feminine tranquillity. But the evening left me exhausted because of the high level of noise at dinner. I realize now that I really cannot tolerate being battered by a cacophony of shouting voices, but it is difficult to know what to do about it. Peter, who is a neuroscientist, has explained that in youth the human brain has the facility to distinguish between the sounds it wishes to receive and others, thus effectively shutting out loud background noise, but that this ability decreases with age. But then, I am becoming intolerant of almost all loud noises and, in particular, of pop music. It blares out in shops, assaults my ears in taxis, is piped into offices and seeps from the earphones of fellow passengers in trains and on the Underground. And now we have the intrusive nuisance of the ubiquitous mobile phone to disturb the peace of railway journeys. Perhaps the train companies should consider introducing quiet compartments as well as those for nonsmokers.

Derek Parker, who edits the journal of the Society of Authors, came for a brief interview to gather material for an article in the journal following my appointment as President of the Society. Polly-Hodge, as always with male visitors, was outrageously flirtatious and affectionate, laying her head on his knee and effectively covering his trousers with white hairs. Happily he is a cat-lover and didn’t mind.

We talked about the Society and whether there would be an advantage
in applying for affiliation with the Trades Union Council. On the whole I have never been in favour, but certainly wouldn’t strongly dissent if a majority of members want affiliation. I don’t think there is much evidence that they do. We talked about support for the public library system and he asked my views on whether a small charge should be made for each borrowing. My strong dislike of imposing a charge arises from my early experience when I depended on the Cambridge Public Library for virtually all my reading. The library was education, meeting-place, refuge and treasure trove, although it was poorly equipped and ill-housed compared with the large public libraries of today.

There, too, in the reading room I would read the newspapers. It was there one Saturday morning in 1936 that I first read the news of the uncrowned King Edward VIII’s infatuation for a divorced American woman, Mrs. Simpson, for whom apparently he was prepared to give up the throne. It seems incredible in these days of media power and intrusiveness that a secret of such importance could be kept from the British public so effectively and for so long. It was achieved because a small group of powerful men, politicians, courtiers and newspaper magnates could exercise a far more effective censorship than almost anything possible today.

The public library was essential to my generation because we couldn’t afford books. I pointed out to Derek that it is now possible to buy a classic in paperback for under a pound. The range of paperback fiction is enormous and the huge expenditure on the Lottery doesn’t suggest that borrowers would find it an imposition to pay a small charge, perhaps when borrowing new hardback books. But the administrative cost might outweigh the advantage, and I still retain that vestigial dislike of charging for public library borrowing.

Afterwards I shopped in Kensington High Street. The flower stall outside St. Mary Abbot’s Church had set up a trestle table with a huge pile of tissue paper and there was a continuous sale of flowers to people on their way to Kensington Palace. This extraordinary festival of mourning is like an infection. It is oppressive and poignant, but also alien and disturbing. I have a feeling, uncomfortable and irrational, that something has been released into the atmosphere and it isn’t benign. The real woman has become smothered by acres of plastic and decaying flowers. The crowd was extraordinary. The women—and the great majority were women, many with prams or toddlers—walked, eyes fixed with a kind of desperate intensity as if afraid they would be late or were on their way to
the first day of a sale. They didn’t communicate or even look at each other. One could almost believe that an official edict had gone out that flowers must be laid within three days on pain of condign punishment. There is a growing and disturbing animus against the Royal Family whose reticence is clearly neither understood nor sympathized with. I shall feel relieved when Saturday is over.

Yesterday evening Dick Francis held his publication party for his new book,
10 Lb. Penalty
. Dick is a remarkable writer. He produces a book a year, all of which immediately appear on the bestseller list, usually at number one. He begins writing in January, delivers the manuscript by the end of May, and the book is published in August. Obviously this regularity of output and the disciplined setting aside of five months each year for writing suits him. I don’t think I could possibly do it and I admire both his inventiveness and his stamina. For me a novel takes from nine months to a year to plot and plan, and even longer to write. I sometimes envy those writers who produce their best work when under the pressure of time. They make my own leisurely method seem self-indulgent.

Dick’s annual novel is always launched at the Ritz and the usual mixture of media people, publishers and crime writers was present. John and Norma Major were guests, both looking extremely well and cheerful. As John has said, “There is life outside Number Ten.” I suspect it is a life Norma prefers. They won’t be able to be at my publication party on 6th October as this is the first day of the Conservative Party Conference and John will attend before beginning a lecture tour in the United States.

The Royal Family seem to be giving way to pressure from the people—which of course means pressure from the tabloids—to show their grief more publicly. It seems outrageous that the bereaved should be expected to come down to London publicly to collude in what is increasingly seen as a self-indulgent, almost neurotic display of emotionalism. But it would have been wise if the Queen had spoken briefly on radio and television to say that it was right that she should be with her grandchildren at this time, but that her thoughts and prayers were with
all who were grieving, and if the Duke of York and Prince Edward had returned to London at once, perhaps to meet some of those waiting to pay tribute.

Today there was a curious atmosphere in London composed of unease, expectation and grief. The carpets of flowers are growing before Kensington Palace, St. James’s and Buckingham Palace, and people are already settling down to spend the night on the funeral route. There was a spell of heavy rain in the afternoon, but a clear night.

In the evening I had supper with Harriet Harvey-Wood, now retired as Director of the Literature Department of the British Council, and her mother. Harriet had shopped in Kensington High Street and said that it was virtually impossible to get out of the Tube trains because of the pressure of people on the Underground platform—all carrying flowers. Mrs. Harvey-Wood, now over ninety, found the public emotionalism particularly distressing. Her generation, which has survived two world wars, is stoical in grief and mourns in private. And for what exactly are people mourning? I suspect for themselves.