Far Cry from Kensington (20 page)

‘Did he come to see her?’ I said.

‘Often,’ said Milly. ‘He came often in the afternoon to keep Wanda
company, after all that shock she had with the letters.’

‘He is no cousin,’ Greta said.

I said, ‘I never saw him here.’

‘Oh, you were out at work. He had to get back to his seminary at five,
don’t forget. There’s surely no harm in him,’ said Milly.

‘There is no such cousin,’ Greta said.

‘She told me he was her cousin, a student priest.’ Milly was agitated.

‘It was a joke,’ I said. ‘Like the photo. A harmless joke.’

‘Some joke!’ said Greta. ‘Look at these other pictures.’

The other pictures were equally harmless, Wanda and Hector in the street, Wanda in her
normal dumpy guise but Hector with his face imposed upon another, a small man’s
body. There was a picnic photograph, both Wanda and Hector Bartlett faked into an
elegant pose they couldn’t possibly have assumed in real life. I took the
photographs from Greta and went through them. I found five of these obvious fakes.
Then I found one without Wanda. It showed Hector Bartlett and a short man standing in
profile. They were feeding ducks on a lake which I couldn’t identify. I thought
I vaguely recognized the man in profile but couldn’t place him at the time.

I turned all the photographs over to see if there was anything written on the back
and, finding nothing, returned them to Greta. ‘Take them away,’ I said.

‘It’s a mystery,’ said Greta.

‘Fancy him fooling me,’ said Milly. ‘I thought he was a
seminarian.’

I bustled to get a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe in order to pack
Wanda’s final things. I wanted to get rid of Greta but I knew my thoughts would
take shape later on, perhaps in the course of my waking night. We made a separate
package of Wanda’s correspondence; we packed the suitcase with the belongings
of Wanda’s clients which Greta was arranging to leave with a friend in London
whose address she gave to Milly. We put the old bills in a heap to throw away. There
were various untidy and useless odds and ends and scraps of old paper left in some of
the drawers. ‘Leave them to me,’ said Milly. ‘I’ll clear them
all up tomorrow.’

She took Greta downstairs for a cup of tea. We called a taxi, and sent her away. Milly
was tired after her journey, and anguished by the disaster that had come into her
life. ‘I wonder why that fellow said he was her cousin? A student priest
…’

‘Forget it for now, Milly,’ I said. ‘You’ll feel better in the
morning. And so will I.’ I was upset that the latest perplexities of
Wanda’s death had put out of my mind, for the rest of the afternoon, the
prospective happiness of my new job, and the beautiful story, as it seemed to me, of
Abigail and Giles, he with his bowler hat going to work at Lloyd’s and in the
evening going to manage his rock-and-roll group. I wanted a flat to share with
William. In fact I was good and tired of being Mrs Hawkins. I wanted to be Nancy with
my new good shape.

The telephone rang shortly after Greta’s taxi had driven away. We had wished her
a good journey home. We had told her not to worry. I was going to sit Milly down and
give her a drink.

I answered the phone. ‘Mrs Hawkins, I wonder if you would be free for dinner one
evening this week, perhaps Friday or Saturday? I want your advice about Isobel.
She’s having difficulty settling in to the new flat. Curtains and so forth. And
besides, we could have a rollicking good time, you and I, if you …’

‘No, Mr Lederer, it’s not possible.’

Your advice, Mrs Hawkins … Was I still Mrs Hawkins with my face superimposed on
the shape of another woman, like Wanda’s in the photograph?

Later that evening we had a sort of wake for Wanda; the tenants collected in the
kitchen round Milly to welcome her home and keep her company in the astonishing
course of events; in her absence, Isobel had left the house, pregnant, and Wanda had
jumped in the canal. Some show of solidarity was called for.

The news about Isobel did not shake Milly very much, especially as she had already
left the house.

‘She was too much indulged by her father. What can you expect?’ said
Milly. ‘But I wouldn’t have expected it of Wanda Podolak,’ she said
more than once, as if suicide and having a baby outside of marriage were equals in
disaster. But, deeply, I knew that she was far more disturbed by Wanda’s death
than she could express. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it of Wanda
…’ sounded in my ear like that legendary rebuke of the Edinburgh
landlady to James Simpson, the nineteenth-century pioneer of chloroform, who,
experimenting on himself, was found unconscious on the floor of his room, and was
presumed drunk: ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Mr Simpson.’

Working people as we were, nobody remembered seeing Hector Bartlett whose visits as
Wanda’s cousin had been timed, I supposed, to avoid us. ‘I thought he was
a young gentleman. I never would have suspected that of Wanda,’ said Milly. And
I realized she now assumed he had been Wanda’s lover. Perhaps he had. For my
part, I kept quiet about him. Not a word about his name or identity or the fact I had
recognized him in the photographs. I was sitting there with William beside me, Kate,
the Carlins. Mr Twinny the odd-job man and his wife looked in, also, to greet Milly
and make awesome remarks about Wanda’s fate. It was strange how everyone
remembered what they were doing when they heard the news of Wanda’s death and
described the moment to Milly. Kate had opened the door to the police: ‘I s
this where a Mrs W. Podolak lives …?’ And Kate described her feelings as
she took them upstairs, knocking on the door of the Carlins’ room. The Carlins
recalled their frozen horror, and Basil Carlin had called William to his wife’s
white-faced aid. Mr Twinny got the news from someone in the street, ‘and I went
home and I told Mrs Twinny to sit down and take it easy, and I broke the news.’
William said he was of course horrified, ‘but you get used to situations where
people are brought in to the hospital after accidents, you don’t have to take
it too personally.’ All these testimonies helped Milly. I wasn’t able to
contribute greatly. My mind wasn’t so much on what I was doing when I heard the
news. ‘I came home wet through,’ I said, ‘to find the police up in
Wanda’s room.’ But I was really thinking of what I was doing at the time
she took the plunge; in Grosvenor House with Emma Loy, discussing Hector Bartlett,
with the telephone number of Father Stanislas in my handbag.

In the course of the reunion I was called again to the telephone. It was Isobel
Lederer. She wanted me to do something for her, and I completely forget what. But I
can still hear two bright and confident phrases: ‘I know I can depend on you,
Mrs Hawkins,’ (Oh, can you? I thought), and ‘You won’t let me down,
I know, Mrs Hawkins,’ (Oh, won’t I?). Whatever the errand or the favour
she wanted, whether I promised to do it or not, I didn’t do it.

Lying awake in the night I saw again those grotesque photographs of Hector Bartlett
and Wanda. It came to me quite easily who the short man was who had appeared with
Hector in profile: the blighted Vladimir, who used to flit round the offices of
Mackintosh & Tooley. Fake White Russian as he was, with his embittered camera, it
was well within his scope to confection these fake photographs of Wanda. I wondered
why she had kept them, and considered it probable that there had been others,
possibly of Wanda’s face mounted on a pornographic-ally posed body, that she
had fearfully destroyed or had been shown by way of blackmail. This was a supposition
that I was never able to verify. In piecing together the jig-saw pieces of Hector
Bartlett’s involvement in Wanda’s suicide I wasn’t able to explain
with certainty the scope of those pathetic fake photographs and I am left with the
memory of Greta’s bewilderment and Milly’s puzzled horror, that day on my
return from High-gate when we looked at the bundles of photographs in Wanda’s
room. I began to think of Wanda in a new light. Emma Loy’s story, combined with
my own new love affair with William, had opened my eyes. I have noticed that people
in love and having a love affair are more aware of the sexual potential in others
than those who are not. In the years since my first husband’s death, when I
hadn’t been in love, it hadn’t occurred to me that some of the people I
knew might be amorously involved, unless they actually told me so or had got engaged.
What did I really know of all the people I had met in the offices where I had worked,
day after day? What did I know of Kate? Or of Isobel, perhaps in love with someone,
not the father of her child? What had I ever known of Wanda?

I thought of that day when, after one of her long, terrible cries, Milly and I had run
up to Wanda’s room and found her in bed; I had fleetingly noticed, had not
perhaps noticed enough, how attractive, bedworthy, she looked with her fair hair down
around her shoulders. Not having a lover myself at the time, I saw and didn’t
see. I had thought of Wanda as the plump Polish dressmaker, her life full of church
and friends and enemies, of Madonnas and novenas and her ladies who came for
fittings. The last thing I would have thought was that she might have a lover.

I thought of it now, and I thought of Hector Bartlett then as a psychological case and
a dangerous one. A lonely middle-aged widow, and Hector Bartlett banally insinuating
himself into her life and feelings, mesmerizing and blackmailing the silly woman with
a view to forcing her to work that absurd Box. Was that melodrama possible? I decided
that it was. Ageing women were seduced by ruthless men every day. Since then I have
seen it happen to women of high intellectual qualities. I have known a woman doctor
on holiday in Italy who was seduced and pickpocketed by a man calling himself an
airline official at the Trevi fountain; it wouldn’t have mattered, but she took
it to heart. I knew of a woman governor of a prison who fell in love with one of the
inmates, who was serving time for murdering his wife; it wouldn’t have
mattered, but she lost her job. What chance, what protection against herself, had
Wanda?

Next morning, just when I was thinking that my notions formed in the quiet night might
be rather too wild, Milly came up to my room.

‘I’ve been clearing up Wanda’s room, and I found this stuff under the
mattress,’ said Milly.

There were two press-cuttings, one tiny, one longer, and three small crumpled
envelopes. I looked first at the envelopes because on one of them was written
‘Haukens’ which I took to be Wanda’s spelling of my name. On the
other two envelopes were written respectively ‘Stoke’ and
‘Asherbi’. Who these last two names referred to I was never to find out.
Inside each envelope was a small cutting of hair neatly bound with a piece of thread.
The hair of ‘Haukens’ seemed exactly my own, but at the moment I
couldn’t think how Wanda could have obtained it.

‘She used hairs to work a silly box for curing people,’ I said to Milly.

‘It makes me feel awful,’ Milly said. She sat down, handing me the
press-cuttings. ‘Read these,’ said Milly.

By my editorial training I looked first, automatically, to see what newspaper the
cuttings came from. There was no indication. No name or date was either printed or
written on the cuttings. On the back of each cutting was a roughly printed news item,
both disjointed and unintelligible scraps such as appear on the backs of all
press-cuttings. But it wasn’t an expert job.

The small piece was from a presumptive Personal column. It read: ‘South
Kensington Dressmaker specializing alterations Wanda Podolak phone for fittings all
hours.’ This was followed by our phone number.

The longer piece, apparently a news item, was headed ‘Polish Dressmaker Under
Investigation’. It began:

Police are investigating the activities of a
Polish lady resident in our country with headquarters in Kensington who advertises
regularly in the Personal columns of our newspapers. Invariably, the Personal message
comes in the following apparently innocent words. [The Personal advertisement in the
small press-cutting repeated.]

But what is behind this message? The lady in question, Mrs
Wanda Podolak, of 14 Church End Villas, South Kensington explained in an interview,
‘I am only trying to help people. There is nothing malign whatsoever in my
activities. It is not true that I practise witchcraft or try to alter the personality
of my clients by means of radionics. It is not true that I obtain snippings of their
hair when they come to have their clothes fitted. I am a bona fide dressmaker and a
practising Catholic.’

The police deny they are investigating the case of a young
woman who has begun to lose weight mysteriously after being treated by radionics at
the establishment of Mrs Podolak in the respectable Victorian house in Church End
Villas where the ‘dressmaker’ operates. ‘If the young lady in
question has complained that she is wasting away,’ said the police spokesman,
‘we are not aware of it and if we were we would advise her to see a
doctor.’ The spokesman admitted, however, that they were looking into other
aspects of a possible ‘racket’ being conducted at 14 Church End Villas.

‘The cheek of it,’ said Milly. ‘In the papers. What do you make of
it?’

I said, ‘These are not real press-cuttings. They are fake. Honestly, Milly, they
never appeared in any newspaper. That man who posed as Wanda’s cousin had them
made up to play a trick on her. I happen to know where he had them specially printed.
A Mr Wells at Notting Hill, a perfectly nice printing shop. I’ll take you
there, and I’m sure he’ll confirm it.’

I did take Milly and the press-cuttings to Mr Wells, and he did confirm that they were
part of Hector Bartlett’s special orders. But even if I hadn’t already
known about Hector Bartlett’s confections of press-cuttings, certainly I
wouldn’t have been taken in by these scraps of paper. Mr Wells was not such a
fine artist as to reproduce a newspaper cutting which would appear authentic to
anyone used to handling them. Mr Wells was concerned that his work had upset Milly.
Cathy was hanging about outside his office as we talked.