Far Cry from Kensington (12 page)

The Brigadier listened with deep interest as he ate, his glaring eyes turning back and
forth between me and his plate. Then he said, ‘Good. Right. I’ll go out
and get a cat.’ (I must tell you here that three years later the Brigadier sent
me a copy of his war memoirs, published by Mackintosh & Tooley. On the jacket
cover was a picture of himself at his desk with a large alley-cat sitting inscrutably
beside the lamp. He had inscribed it ‘To Mrs Hawkins, without whose friendly
advice these memoirs would never have been written — and thanks for introducing
me to Grumpy.’ The book itself was exceedingly dull. But I had advised him only
that a cat helps concentration, not that the cat writes the book for you.)

While I was talking to my neighbours at dinner, aware of the chatter and tinkle of
forks along the rest of the table, I sneaked a glance at the amount everyone else was
eating. It seemed enormous in relation to my half. The voices were expressing
opinions on the following: numerous people I didn’t know; Billy Graham; Senator
McCarthy; Colonel Nasser; again,
Lucky Jim;
the Box; and
‘They’, which meant they, the Government, they, the Americans, they, the
Irish, and many other they’s; which left a very small world of
‘us’; also, Martin York and the shock to his poor father. One young woman
took a second helping of a delicious concoction of fruit and frothy cream. She smiled
across the table to me, ‘I’m eating, for two. Pregnant.’ Lady
Philippa smiled and said, hastily, ‘When are you hoping to finish your
lives?’ Which curious question, in a moment, resolved its logic by turning out
to refer to the
Lives
of two saints which this girl was writing; I learned,
too, with the half of my attention that was left over from my neighbours, that
although she was only twenty-eight (my age) she already had five children. I assumed
she was a Roman Catholic and reckoned that her helpings added up to four times mine.
If I hadn’t been in conversation with the Brigadier and the young man who
worked at Sotheby’s I would have advised her that eating for two is not
desirable in pregnancy; and I resolved to tell her so later; but as things turned
out, after dinner I forgot, being too puzzled and in the disarray of wondering if I
had done the wrong thing about something else.

Although I hadn’t been to a dinner party as formal and upper-class as this
before, I felt quite up to it. I had never considered, in fact, what class I belonged
to: I presumed it was Ordinary Class, something like O blood group. I didn’t
think upper-class habits were so very different from any other English habits. It is
true that I had read in novels about such eccentricities as ‘the ladies left
the men at the table with their port’ but I didn’t attach these
performances to real life. I might as well have been a foreigner. And I will say,
now, that I learned a lot about upper-class habits while I was with Mackintosh &
Tooley. In the end I concluded it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the
upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the
latter can get on very well on its own.

The dinner itself was coming to an end but the chatter went on. At a certain moment
there was a hush, not quite a silence. Lady Philippa was looking at me very
intensely, and I hadn’t the slightest idea why. I supposed she had asked me a
question and I looked back enquiringly. Suddenly Lady Philippa got up as if someone
had said something that touched her on a tender spot; I thought she was going to make
a scene about it. The other women got up, too. But I didn’t see what the men
had done wrong that the women should leave them like that, haughty and swan-like,
sailing out of the room. I would have liked to advise them to pull themselves
together. The men shuffled to their feet and looked at me curiously, as if they
couldn’t believe that I, too, wasn’t offended. But, touchy as I was at
that hungry period of my life, I perceived nothing to take umbrage about. I, for one,
refused to behave rudely just to show solidarity with these oversensitive women,
possibly prudes. Lady Philippa murmured, as she passed my chair, ‘Are you
coming?’ But I felt the men had done nothing to deserve such treatment. I was
Mrs Hawkins. I sat on.

Although I had something to acquire in social savvy, looking back I
can now say I wasn’t immature in my common sense. In fact, from the time of the
dinner party I seemed to perceive that the Tooleys felt more confidence in me, not
less, as one might have expected. It was as if they put me into that reliable
category of the nanny or the cook who would never let them down. However, my days
with Mackintosh & Tooley were numbered; they were numbered to the extent of two
more months. I used those two months well.

A large part of an editor’s job is rejection. Perhaps nine-tenths. In those days
at least, it was not only rejection of manuscripts but of those ideas that seemed to
come walking into my office every day in the shape of pensive men and women talking
with judicious facial expressions about such mutilated concepts as
optimist/pessimist, fascist/communist, extrovert/introvert,
highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow; and this claptrap they applied to art, literature and
life to the effect that all joy, wit and the pleasures of curiosity were quite
squeezed out.

But along came Emma Loy. She had decided to publish her new novel with Mackintosh
& Tooley, who gave a welcoming cocktail party for her in the office boardroom.
Along came Emma with her egocentricity, her capriciousness, and her magic and her
charm. About so good a writer it seems pointless to say she might have made an
excellent actress, but this was a thought her presence evoked.

She had decided to forget her complaints about me to Martin York, and simply presumed
that I had decided to forget.

Now, my advice to anyone who knows a person with charm, wit, and talent like Emma, and
with some wisdom and intelligence, too, and should fall out with them, is to accept
any opportunity of making it up. Because life offers only a few of such people.

And in fact I was genuinely pleased when Emma Loy said, as soon as she saw me at the
party, ‘Mrs Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins, I can’t tell you how relieved I am that
you’re here. I don’t know another soul. I hope you’re going to look
after my books.’

‘Your books look after themselves,’ I said.

Which was true. Opinions varied about Emma Loy, but nobody could ever deny that she
was a marvellous writer. Ian Tooley had let me read the typescript of her new novel.
After the drivel I had been dealing with, Emma’s work was a decided relief, it
was sheer pleasure, that way of composing a book like a piece of music, that Loy
style of ferreting out facts and juxtaposing them with inventions.

I told Emma Loy of my admiration while I eked out my one glass of sherry and she
sipped her second. She radiated delight. I was glad, then, that my quarrel with Emma
Loy was over and forgotten. Whether I could trust her or not was beside the point; in
fact, I think she didn’t believe in friendship and loyalty beyond a certain
limit, and maybe she was right; they are ideals that can put too much of a strain on
purposes which are perhaps more important. I couldn’t see that protecting
Hector Bartlett’s reputation was much of a purpose, and Emma must have known
that he was the
pisseur de copie
that I had called him. But he was her
protégé; I imagined the bond between them was sex; and it wasn’t
till much later that she told me, quite by chance, how he had been useful to her. He
had helped her with research and brought her the books she needed. Useful, merely
… But that explanation was Emma Loy’s way of brushing off her own folly.
I think she was emotionally lazy, too bound up in her literary activities to form a
new relationship or fall in love. She had a morbid dependence on Hector Bartlett even
while she knew he was a disaster. Years later he tried to do her a lot of damage.

But now, as was inevitable, Hector Bartlett turned up at the party, and seeing him
among the crowd I merely marvelled that Emma could bear to have that
pisseur
breathing down her neck. And I think I wasn’t alone in this thought. He
made a sort of hole in the crowd as the people he wanted to talk to moved away from
him as politely as possible; and Emma, discerning this, went to join him; whereupon
the gap closed up again. The people Hector Bartlett hadn’t wanted to talk to
then hovered warily round the fringe; these were people like myself, including
editors and employees from other publishers, literary agents and authors of little
fame.

Ian Tooley made his rounds very civilly, explaining here and there how Mars had passed
into the sign of the Fish (or maybe it was that Venus or Mercury had moved into
Scorpion), and that, as a consequence, various national problems might be resolved.
The ebb and flow of the party soon brought Emma my way again. I remember her getting
into an argument with Ian Tooley over his arcane beliefs. It was typical of Emma Loy,
and part of her attractiveness, that she ignored all the cocktail-conventions in her
conversation. She liked to discuss general subjects. What I heard her say to Ian
Tooley on this occasion, or he to her, has largely gone into a flashback blur; except
for one clear passage. Ian Tooley said she was a sceptic: ‘Don’t you even
believe in God?’

‘Some days I do and some days I don’t,’ said Emma Loy. ‘But one
thing I do know — in fact I think it obvious — is that God believes in
me.’

That was Emma Loy, and no doubt still is. Standing by Ian Tooley’s side at that
moment, I gave her my advice that if I were in her place, with my beliefs coming and
going some days yes, some days no, I would have a jolly good time the days I believed
and repent the days I didn’t.

‘Mrs Hawkins,’ said the famous lady, ‘if I take your advice will I
become an editor?’

‘There’s no guarantee about that,’ I said.

‘Well it’s good advice. But I have no matter for repentance.’

Ian Tooley remarked that the study of radionics was taking us beyond good and evil.

Sir Alec Tooley hardly ever appeared. How he arrived at the offices or
how he went was a mystery; there must have been some back door exclusive to himself.

About the end of February he called me on the intercom and wearily invited me to come
to his office when convenient. I went right away and took his hand, limply held out
to me and carelessly withdrawn once the touch had been achieved.

‘Mrs Hawkins, we know you are a remarkably reliable woman and so we have
decided, after long reflection, to entrust you with a work of criticism which we have
decided to publish but which needs a great deal of that application, that scrupulous
attention and editing which we believe only you can give.’

My attention was waylaid by the phrase ‘remarkably reliable woman’ which
was almost exactly what Mr Twinny the odd-job man had once said about me to Milly, in
my presence. His actual words were, ‘Mrs Hawkins is a remarkable reliable
woman.’ They had been spoken in robust friendship with a good deal of force
above the wireless which was chattering in the background.

Sir Alec’s utterance and subsequent words of praise were like the cry of a bird
in distress, far away across a darkening lake. I had a sense he was offering things
abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or
coitus interruptus
; and by
no means, at that moment, did I want to be a remarkably reliable woman.

‘The manuscript’, he said, ‘needs putting into shape.’

‘Do you mean re-writing?’ I said.

‘Well, of course, that, too. But there are facts to be verified and so on.
Grammar and syntax and so forth. Dates.’

My intuition revealed to me there and then that he was talking about a book by the
Pisseur de copie
which had been pushed on to them by Emma Loy as part
of her price.

‘The book,’ said Sir Alec, ‘is entitled
The Eternal Quest, a
study of the Romantic-Humanist Position.
Somewhat deep. It is a comparative
study of
The Pilgrim’s Progress, Wilhelm Meister
and
Peer
Gynt,
or at least, purports to be. I know very little of the
subject.’

‘I, less,’ I said. ‘Quite above my head. Who is the author?’

‘A Hector Bartlett. He is highly recommended by our Miss Loy.’

I said, ‘Oh, don’t touch him. He’s a
pisseur de copie.
He
has no clear ideas. He gets all the facts thoroughly wrong to start with, then he
strings them together to form a cooked-up theory.’

‘Yes, yes. But what was it you called him in that French designation?’

But I considered Sir Alec’s health and well-being unequal to a full explanation.
I calmed down. I said I would have a look at the manuscript. I said that, after all,
the advice of St Thomas Aquinas had been to rest one’s judgement on what is
said, not by whom it is said. ‘So never mind the author. I’ll look at the
actual book.’