Far Cry from Kensington (13 page)

‘We are committed to publish it. A small edition of course. It will involve
considerable …’

I took the book away; I took it from his hands, so eager to be rid of it, and into
mine, which I suddenly felt should be wearing rubber gloves.

I misspent a week in which the book got thoroughly on my nerves. I took it home to
read, hoping to be able to concentrate on the incomprehensible pages.

‘Perhaps it’s above my head,’ I said to Milly.

‘No fear,’ said Milly. if you can’t understand it, Mrs Hawkins, it
can’t be a Christian book.’ (By Christian Milly meant human. She would
describe the cat as looking at her ‘like a Christian’.)

I was suffering from hunger and my diet. The resentment I felt against the book had
something in it that I was unable to locate. After all, I could have treated it with
the indifference I showed to all the other bad manuscripts that passed through my
hands. But this book
The Eternal Quest
was a personal threat. It was Emma
Loy who desired it to be put into shape for publication. She knew I was not a fool.
But one might as well have taken a carpet-sweeper to clear the jungle as edit that
book.

I took it to William Todd, our medical student, always friendly, and in recent weeks,
even more friendly towards me. He was an intellectual fellow, accustomed to ideas and
the study of them. He brought it back to my room after reading two chapters, the
first and the last. ‘A lot of balls,’ he said. ‘Completely phoney.
On every page Nietzsche, Aristotle, Goethe, Ibsen, Freud, Jung, Huxley, Kierkegaard,
and no grasp whatsoever of any of them. Send it back.’

We had a drink on that.

For the rest of the week I practised what I would say to get out of the job. I
practised the speech in my mind and I practised it on Milly. ‘What I’m
going to say,’ I told her, ‘is that despite Emma Loy’s sponsorship
of the work, I myself feel that —’

‘Keep that woman’s name out of it,’ Milly said. ‘You know
she’s dangerous.’

Before the week was out Ian Tooley came to my office with an important expression on
his face. I imagined at first he had come to discuss the
Pisseur’s
book.

‘How are you, Mrs Hawkins?’

‘It’s all quite beyond me,’ I said. ‘I can’t possibly
cope.’

‘Four days of rain on end. I quite agree,’ he said. ‘But the weather
apart, Mrs Hawkins, there is something I want to discuss. Something rather jolly, in
fact.’

‘It is not jolly,’ I said, getting ready for my speech.

‘The march of ideas,’ he said, settling himself in the chair where my
authors generally sat.

He had in fact come to offer me the job of assistant editor of a new quarterly
magazine called
The Phantom
which he was founding. It was to publish
essays, poems and stories on the supernatural and extra-sensory perception.

There was an upsurge of interest in the supernatural in those years, probably as a
result of the uncontemplatable events which had blackened the previous decade.

‘Yes,’ said. ‘That would be jolly.’

It was jolly, too, that he offered me a rise in pay.

Before he left, he said, ‘Are you keeping well, Mrs Hawkins?’

‘I’m fine, thank you, Mr Tooley. And you?’

‘Oh, I’m all right. It’s only that you look different, if I may be
personal.’

‘Yes, I’m losing weight.’

‘Oh, dear. Shall you be thin?’

‘No, only normal, I hope.’

‘Oh dear. Of course, you could try the Box.’

That was on a Thursday. Friday morning I sent Hector Bartlett’s manuscript to Sir
Alec with a note, the wording of which I had pondered well: ‘I consider that it
cannot be improved upon.’

I was looking through some notes about
The Phantom
that Ian Tooley had sent
me when the intercom buzzed. It was noon.

The angel of the Lord brought the tidings …

‘Mrs Hawkins speaking,’ I said.

It was Sir Alec.
And she conceived by the Holy Ghost.

‘Mrs Hawkins, if you could see your way to be free at two-thirty this afternoon I
should be obliged if you would come and see me here in my office.’

Hail Mary … the Word was made flesh.

‘Yes, of course, Sir Alec.’

I went to lunch at a pub nearby to eat half a delicious ham sandwich, and drink half a
cup of watery coffee and half a glass of port. It was a popular pub for journalists
as well as for the people who worked at Mackintosh & Tooley’s and
publishers in the vicinity of Covent Garden. I was early enough to get a place at a
table, but others who came in after me had to stand. The place was soon full of
people and noise, the smell of beer, cigarettes and of people. The door swung open
and shut as more and more came in. One man had a spaniel on a lead. He let it loose
and it ambled round everybody’s legs to see what treats it could pick up from
friendly customers by way of bits of sandwich or sausage rolls. My eyes followed the
dog, for I was going to give it the left-over half of my sandwich if it should come
my way. It was at the bar, now, and was nosing a sausage roll which a man was idly
letting hang from his left hand while his right hand was holding a glass of beer.
Rather comically, the dog just helped himself to a bite of this dangling sausage
roll. The man turned and swore at the dog. I now saw who this man was: Hector
Bartlett. All in one second, he now took a large dab of mustard from the pot on the
counter, dabbed it on the rest of the sausage roll, and gave it to the greedy dog.

‘Oh, no,’ shouted the few people who had seen this happen, including me.
Too late, also, was the dog’s master who also had been just in time to witness
the nasty work, and to whom the poor beast ran, whining and shaking its head from
side to side. I got the barman to give me some water in a deep, clean, glass ashtray.
Fortunately, very soon the dog was sick on the floor, and there was a flurry of
people with sawdust to mop it up, and a great fussing round the dog. The owner, a
young thin man, went over to big Hector Bartlett and said, ‘I say, old boy,
that was pretty rotten of you.’ Which I thought quite a restrained reaction.

But the
Pisseur de copie,
who had obtained a second sausage roll, merely
said, in an off-hand way, ‘It stole the first half, so I thought it might as
well have the second.’ The owner of the dog turned away in disgust, fixed the
lead on the dog’s collar and went out. There was a feeling of relief in the
place, for everyone had been expecting a fight.

The
Pisseur,
his chins folded into the collar of his sheepskin coat, his
baby-mouth consuming a fresh sausage roll, lolled over the counter, with his eyes on
the crowd, and his back to the barman. He was often to be seen in pubs in this
neighbourhood at lunch-time and immediately after office hours, hoping to catch the
eye of some editor or journalist who could be useful to him. He caught my eye.

‘Mrs Hawkins, what a pleasure,’ he said, and, with his back still to the
barman, turned his head just enough to throw an order for another beer over his
shoulder. ‘Mrs Hawkins, I understand you’re my new editor.’

I didn’t reply. I got up and left. It occurred to me on the way to the office
that I couldn’t stand the publishing scene any longer. Then it occurred to me
that this was unfair; the pub was hardly the publishing scene nor was Hector Bartlett
representative of it. But there was a residue of uneasiness in my mind about the
publishing scene, a weariness of authors, agents, books, printers, binders, critics,
editors, when I went in to Sir Alec Tooley’s office punctually at half-past
two. He hadn’t arrived back from lunch yet. I sat down with my thoughts. I was
tired of the whole scene and longed to be able to go into a bookshop as in former
times and choose a book without being aware of all that went into its making. Besides
being weary, I was hungry, but I took pride in that.

Sir Alec arrived all beams and smiles at five past three, ushering before him Emma
Loy. I had never seen him in this exuberant mood.

‘We have kept you waiting, Mrs Hawkins. Have we kept you waiting?’

He busied himself with Emma’s coat and settling her into a chair. They had
evidently been to lunch somewhere grand like the Ivy, Rules or the Ritz, and were
mellowed with all the wines and rare foods my imagination could impute to the
occasion. One of the effects of being on a diet is a kind of puritanical dismay at
the idea of other people’s eating and drinking, especially the quantity. Three
luxurious courses, I thought wildly, as I greeted Emma Loy with my good smile;
Rhenish white wine, smoked salmon, then lamb chops with tiny vegetables or something
flambé,
followed by —

The details began to escape my imagination, but anyway my attention was directed quite
away from these two and their lunch by the arrival of Ann Clough, the formidable
reproach to our national conscience whose maniacal father had been hanged, and who
was so nice, and an important director of the firm. She was followed by Colin Shoe
who immediately said, ‘Emma, you look wonderful,’ to the tailored and
grey-clad Name who sat back in her armchair, dreamy with lunch. ‘Are we
late?’ said Colin. Clearly this was to be a meeting and it had been called for
three o’clock. I thought, paranoically, that I had been called for two-thirty
and made to wait in order to put me in my place; but maybe they only forgot to tell
me that the time had been changed. Whatever Colin Shoe had been struck off the
medical rolls about, it wasn’t a lack of bedside manner. He fussed over Emma
and exclaimed proudly and justly over her forthcoming novel; and he quite forgot for
the moment that the best author was a dead one. Sir Alec had now called someone else
on the intercom, in response to which Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight came in and
was introduced to Emma Loy as such.

‘I didn’t quite catch the name,’ said wicked Emma, whereupon Abigail
mildly replied, ‘Abigail will do.’ Abigail had a short-hand notebook. She
perched on the edge of a chair on the outskirts of the circle we had formed, with
pencil poised.

‘This is a very pleasant occasion,’ said Sir Alec. ‘I doubt if we
shall have a great deal of discussion. It is the question of this book by our author
Hector Bartlett, entitled
Quest for Eternity —
’

‘
The Eternal Quest
I think is the title,’ said Ann Clough with a
smile at Emma Loy.

‘
The Eternal Quest.
There are a few small problems, they need not detain
us for long. Mrs Hawkins, you have undertaken to deal with this book and I have your
note that it can’t be improved.’

‘Exceedingly high praise,’ said Colin Shoe, with the optimism of one who
observes that four months to live is a lifetime.

Abigail squiggled her pencil across the lines of her notebook.

‘Mrs Hawkins doesn’t want to touch the book,’ said Emma Loy.
‘You know, Mrs Hawkins, you are terribly prejudiced against Hector.’

‘Let us stick to the book,’ said Ann, with the tone of a patient
schoolteacher. ‘We are not here to discuss personalities. The book’s the
thing.’

I spoke directly to Emma Loy. ‘Nobody could re-write the book. No-one can edit
it. It’s awful.’

‘I want to do this for Hector,’ she said. ‘Why are you so down on
him?’

‘He’s a
pisseur de copie
,’ I said, and I said it because I
couldn’t help it. It just came out.

‘Oh, God!’ said Emma. ‘That epithet of yours. It’s going the
rounds and it’s ruining Hector’s career. I’m not claiming
he’s a genius, but —’

‘What was that you said, Mrs Hawkins?’ said Sir Alec. Colin Shoe looked up
at the ceiling.

‘
Pisseur de copie.
It means that he pisses hack journalism, it means
that he urinates frightful prose.’

‘Perhaps we’d better —’ said Ann.

‘The truth is’, said Emma, ‘that I’d like to help Hector and I
don’t know how.’ She meant, as I suspected at the time, that she wanted
to get him out of her life, and this attempt to get his book published was a
valedictory present.

‘I’m sure Mrs Hawkins doesn’t mean —’ said Colin Shoe.

‘I am sure that a distinguished author like Miss Loy’, said Sir Alec,
‘would not recommend an unworthy book, and if I may say so, Mrs Hawkins, your
terms of expression are hardly —’

‘Not having read the book personally —’ said Ann.

Abigail scribbled on, her legs crossed, cool and slim on the edge of her chair.

‘I wish you could get to know Hector, Mrs Hawkins,’ said Emma. ‘He
has so many good points.’

It had become almost a private argument between Emma and me. She said Hector Bartlett
went to a great deal of trouble over his writing. I told her trouble was the word.
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘But touch up the book a bit. My dear, what are
you here for?’ Then I recounted what I had just seen in the pub. ‘A great
slosh of mustard on a sausage roll,’ I said. ‘The poor dog.’

‘There’s another side to Hector,’ said Emma. ‘After all, how
many authors and artists in history have been absolute swine. It’s nothing to
do with his work. I say you’re prejudiced.’

‘If you want my advice,’ I said to Sir Alec, whose postprandial euphoria I
had thoroughly spoiled, ‘you will send this book back to the maker, just as a
shopkeeper would do with any faulty object, a camera or a tin of beans gone bad. Send
it back.’

Poor Ann Clough said, ‘Let us be fair —’

‘And,’ said Emma, ‘Mrs Hawkins, your description of the author is
obscene.’ She turned to Alec. ‘You must admit —’

‘Miss Loy’s name is enough to guarantee —’ said Colin Shoe.

‘I think we’ll have to pass the book to one of our other editors,’
said Sir Alec, it’s a great shame, Mrs Hawkins, but we can’t have this.
Just when we were counting on you to assist with
The Phantom. The
Phantom’,
he said, turning to Emma, ‘is a new project of ours,
a quarterly review of the occult.’

They never published the
Pisseur
’s book. They brought out
The
Phantom,
not assisted by me, and it flourished for nearly twenty years.