Time to Be in Earnest (15 page)

From that morning she moved in permanently. Knowing this was inevitable I attempted to lay down the conditions under which we would live together. (I dislike anthropomorphizing, but when a cat sits in her Ancient Egyptian pose—head erect, paws together, tail curled, eyes straight ahead—it is difficult to believe that my carefully reasoned arguments are not being understood.) I said that the kitchen would be her territory. An old fur coat would be placed on the chair for her greater comfort. A cat-flap, as she had already discovered, would give access to the garden and the mat by the door was suitably tough for scratching.

Receiving this information, Hodge (as I immediately called her) was mentally laying down the conditions under which she would condescend to live with me. She did not long remain in the kitchen. The corner at the top of the basement stairs is particularly warm since the hot water pipe runs down that wall. There seemed no good reason why she should not be allowed to sleep on the top step. Then it became apparent that she enjoyed watching television with me, provided no war film was being shown when she would immediately leap from my lap and make for the door while keeping close to the wall. So the sitting-room became available to her during the evenings. After that it was only a flight of stairs to my bed where, although she is never allowed to sleep at night, she often finds it convenient to spend the day. Now, of course, there is no corner of the house which is free from white hairs.

It was my then neighbour, the late Lady Moynihan, more knowledgeable than I about people in the neighbourhood, who discovered where Hodge had come from. This coincided with a photograph of me with the cat published in a national newspaper. A letter immediately followed from her previous owners. Apparently Hodge—whose name, I learned, was Polly—had previously lived with the family in Holland Park. When they moved, however, they acquired two more cats and Polly obstinately refused to share her home. It was impossible to keep her in and the vet, when consulted, said that there was nothing they
could do to prevent her leaving. Polly-Hodge, cat-like, was prepared to live wild in her old haunts until an acceptable home presented itself, rather than share comfortable accommodation with two interlopers. Her previous owners—although the word
owners
is inappropriate in relation to cats—were happy for me to keep her and Polly-Hodge, now renamed, has remained. Since she never answered to the previous name, the addition of Polly has made no difference. She doesn’t have to earn food or houseroom by any service, by tricks of behaviour or by an inordinate display of affection. It is enough that I take daily pleasure in the infinite variety of attitudes, all graceful, in which she composes herself for sleep, the elegant hieratic stillness with which she contemplates life with those inscrutable amber eyes. It is in this attitude that she waits beside her bowl for food. When hungry she never wreathes herself round my legs but sits in a parody of patience unrewarded. Returning to her half-empty bowl she won’t deign to eat until I have bent down to scrape the food into the middle. The impression given is that she is awaiting permission to begin eating; more likely she prefers not to touch the edge of the bowl with her whiskers or requires me to perform this small act of servitude.

I have no doubt that she would have found a more desirable home on the Avenue had one presented itself, but nevertheless, irrationally, I feel a sense of pride that she chose me. She is embarrassingly affectionate to all callers, particularly those who dislike cats, loves being photographed—except when she is wanted, when she declines to cooperate—is obstinate, timid and entirely beautiful. I took her to the vet when she first moved in and he thought she was about five years old, so she is now over fifteen and, alas, has that illness common in elderly cats. The symptoms are constant hunger and thirst but, despite huge intake, the cat gets inexorably thinner. But Polly-Hodge still purrs, still grooms herself fastidiously and obviously still enjoys life. When the moment comes when that life is no longer agreeable and it is apparent that she is suffering it will be painlessly ended. We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other. Meanwhile we grow old together, she the more gracefully.

A young photographer, Andy Slack, came to take a portrait photograph for
The Times
to accompany Frances Fyfield’s interview. He brought a young woman assistant and I provided tea and cakes before and after the photograph, which was happily stress-free once the young man realized that I strongly dislike talking about my work when being photographed. Photographers, particularly the young ones, seem to feel they should take an interest in an author’s craft, and actually imagine that we are gratified to answer the overfamiliar questions about working methods, where we get our inspiration, how long it takes to complete a book, etc. At least this one didn’t come accompanied by a skull and a dagger and expect me to peer round the edges of doors looking malevolent. Photographers, new to me and setting out to produce images of a dark, sinister and probably emaciated witch-like woman, are disconcerted to find themselves facing a plump, generally benign grandmother. They do their best to fulfil the picture editor’s expectations (“You don’t happen to have a skull we could use, I suppose?”). Most resign themselves to failure. But I thought the results, judging by the contact prints, were good and Andy was an unfussy photographer. Some of the best photographs I have had taken have been by Jane Bown with no assistant and only a hand-held camera.

I realize that a diary should be written up daily even if the day is without particular events and there seems little of note worth recording. No day is really without interest, being filled with thoughts, memories, plans, moments of particular hope and occasional moments of depression. Every day is lived in the present, but also vicariously in the past and one can write a novel of 100,000 words covering just one hour of a human life. But it seems too egotistical to spend the last hours of every day contemplating the minutiae of unrecoverable moments. I say my prayers and am grateful for the comfort of bed.

This evening the Mayor of Kensington, Mr. Edward Hess, gave an enjoyable dinner at the Town Hall. At thirty-five he is the youngest mayor the Royal Borough has ever had, and I imagine probably younger than any previous mayor in any borough. He is a lawyer and a number of barristers from his chambers were there, including Gavyn Arthur, who has so generously helped with the research for
A Certain Justice
. Gavyn had his copy with him and passed it to Mr. Hess, who obligingly held it aloft at the end of his brief speech and exhorted the company to buy it.

This weekend I attended a Conversazione on Culture and Society under the heading “The Future of the Past” held at Lincoln College, Oxford. The event was interesting and at times enthralling, bringing together more than eighty representatives of Church, finance, the arts, academia and journalism in a three-day discussion of our attitudes towards the past and our cultural perceptions of history and heritage as we have inherited them through literature, art and buildings. My own lecture, on the importance of language and the written word, given this afternoon, was generously received, although I feel that I was boxing somewhat above my weight (always the surest way to ensure a swift knock-out), and most of what I said about literature, language and the importance of encouraging children to read has been said before both by me and by others better qualified to participate. I emphasized that preserving the language doesn’t mean resisting change. English has from the beginning been a hybrid; brought to Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, influenced by Latin and Greek, enriched by the Danes and French-speaking Normans, given strength and beauty by Tyndale’s translation of the Bible and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. To preserve a language is not to guard it jealously against any alien influence but, in the words of Chambers Dictionary, “to keep safe from harm or loss; to keep alive; to
keep sound; to guard against decay.” A living language responds to the aspirations and needs of each generation but the changes should enrich, not impoverish. We debase our language if, while inventing new words to meet new techniques, we lose that nice precision of definition in vocabulary and construction which makes English an exact as well as a versatile language.

This was the first Conversazione I have attended and it had its own form and procedures, being neither conference nor colloquium. At dinner people at each table conferred and then asked a question of any of the speakers. They were designed, I think, to entertain, challenge or amuse rather than seriously to elicit information. I was asked for Dalgliesh’s views on structuralism—or was it post-structuralism? I replied that he had given it careful thought for a number of evenings and had come to the conclusion that it was nonsense. The young chaplain sitting next to me murmured, “In vain they lay snares at her feet.” I suppose that, if I’d been to university, I might have understood these more complex literary theories. Whether they would have added to my enjoyment of reading or made me a better writer is open to question. The Conversazione was an enjoyable and welcome experience and I was reminded of the conversation between Mr. Elliot and his cousin Anne Elliot in
Persuasion:

Yesterday was one of those catching-up days in which resolutions to tackle the “pending” file, sort out my summer dresses and put them away, and fit in a hair appointment had all been dissipated in a kind of aimless activity. I did manage to complete, and Joyce faxed to the
Sunday
Times
, my review of the
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations
edited by Peter Kemp.