Far Cry from Kensington (21 page)

‘Are there any copies of these?’ I said.

‘No, I only made one copy each. Very expensive, but he paid. Might I ask what
use he made of them?’

‘Only a joke,’ I said. ‘Let’s tear them up.’ And we tore
them up then and there.

‘A very bad joke,’ said Milly. ‘Mentioning my house.’

We went to tea with Cathy, and Milly cheered up as she always did when she met some
new human being. Cathy committed herself so far as to say that Hector Bartlett with
his tricks was dangerous, and Mr Wells was a fool, though he meant no harm.

‘Do you think,’ said Milly, ‘that the sight of those words in the
press sent Wanda to her death?’

I was inclined to think so. But how could I explain this malignity to Milly? I
believed that Hector Bartlett had put every sort of pressure on Wanda. He had used
terror, sex, the persuasions of love, the threats of exposure to induce her to work
the Box against who knew what people before me? My crime had been to call him to his
face
pisseur de copie.
I intended to do so again.

‘Quite futile motives …’ William had said about suicide in general.
‘Often, something quite trivial …’ I suppose if we had taken our
story and the press-cuttings and the bits of hair to the police they might have done
some token thing, like questioning Hector Bartlett. But he need only have explained
that it was a joke. In any case I wasn’t about to involve Milly and her 14
Church End Villas in any more of this upset. Wanda was dead. And, certainly, of
unsound mind. I felt bad about not getting the priest to her in time.

It was after six when on the way home in the bus I remembered how Wanda had altered a
round-necked dress, to make it more fashionably lower. Snip, snip, went her scissors
round my neck, cutting V-shapes in that expert way that dressmakers have. That must
have been how she got my piece of hair.

Realizing this, I felt suddenly claustrophobic. I said to Milly, ‘I’ve
found a job, starting next week. That gives us three clear days. Let’s go to
Paris tomorrow.’

Milly had never been ‘abroad’. But just as if I had said,
‘Let’s go to the pictures tomorrow,’ she turned her blue eyes on
me. ‘OK,’ she said.

It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot
of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.

Milly, who was at home everywhere, made herself at home in Paris to the extent that
immediately on our arrival at the hotel she found herself indispensably involved in
coping with a girl who, at that very moment, had a miscarriage in the entrance hall.
Somehow, although she knew no French, Milly sent porters, bellboys, maids and myself
flying to right and left for blankets, towels, water, mops and buckets, the doctor
and a glass of brandy. Milly took off her coat. She rolled back the cuffs of her
blouse. She arranged two chairs for a couch and ordered the girl to be laid upon it.
She cleared the hall of unnecessary people. The doctor arrived, the ambulance came.
It was all over in about twenty minutes. Milly turned down her cuffs and signed the
hotel register.

I think of that three-day trip in terms of Milly’s Paris, for it was quite
unlike any other visit to Paris I have known; it was full of the Arc de Triomphe, the
gilded Joan of Arc, the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, and the Mona Lisa. Now, Milly
remarked that the Mona Lisa was ‘the image of Mrs Twinny,’ by which
observation I was first amazed and then impressed for, indeed, Mrs Twinny the wife of
our odd-job neighbour bore a decided resemblance to the Mona Lisa; I wondered that I
had never thought of it and decided that the intellectual practice of associating
ideas overlays and obliterates our spontaneous gifts of recognition. Since then I
have formed a more observant habit and sometimes I see people I know or have met in
the features of a portrait which has nothing else whatsoever to do with the people of
my acquaintance. The face of one of Picasso’s acrobats looks strikingly like
Milly’s in her sixties. Many a drawing of Matisse resembles Abigail. One of the
Magi in Mostaert’s ‘Adoration’ haunted my memory for days until it
came to mind he was the image of that man in a raincoat who was employed by a
creditor of Ullswater Press to stand outside and stare up at the office window in the
hope of embarrassing the firm into paying. Cathy is reflected in a family portrait by
Degas. The face of the self-portrait of Dürer in the Prado Museum, bearded
though it is, resembles both in features and expression that director of Mackintosh
& Tooley whose family tragedy clouded her life. And the face of that good woman,
Rembrandt’s wife dressed up as ’Flora’ in the National Gallery of
London, bears an intense similarity to Hector Bartlett,
pisseur de copie,
as he appeared in the 1950s. I have seen on a dining-room wall the portrait of a
calm, proud and noble ancestor who could have been a male twin of sad Mabel, the
distraught wife of Patrick the packer. My advice to anyone who wishes to categorize
people by their faces is that physiognomy is a very uncertain guide to their
character, intelligence or place in time and society.

Milly bought a blue flowered toque in Paris, into the high crown of which she stuffed
some bottles of scent, successfully to wear on her return through the customs.

*          *          *

William was to take his final exams within a few months and had good
hopes of getting a job for a year in a big general hospital in London. We decided to
find a flat but not to get married till he had actually got his degree and the job.
But we had very little time for serious flat-hunting. My new job at Highgate involved
long hours of travelling, and the even longer hours of work that are somehow demanded
by those easier and more intimate employers than in large formal establishments where
the staff comes and goes at fixed hours.

It was true that Abigail and I, as we had decided, could make what we liked of the
job. We both did a bit of everything, I mainly doing editorial work and Abigail,
secretarial. I read manuscripts and passed them to Howard Send or Fred Tucher with
recommendations about acceptance or rejection. If they were accepted I went through
them again to make suggestions of all sorts, ranging from punctuation and style to a
complete reconstruction. The
Highgate Review
was well enough known, and is
still quoted, but for readers before whose time it flourished and who haven’t
heard of it, here are some of the topics that I recall from among its contributions
over the months: the hydrogen bomb and the World Scientists’ Appeal for peace,
the question of atomic stations and the suspension of nuclear test explosions, a
report on an Afro-Asian conference, universal copyright law, the need for smokeless
zones in major cities, Germany’s joining NATO, the reopening of the Vienna
State Opera house, the case for Anglo-Catholicism as against Roman Catholicism,
extrasensory perception. Then there was a literary section with essays on Pablo
Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway. There was an art and music
section. Each issue made space for two or three poems.

Howard and Fred were occupied most of the day discussing the articles, forming policy,
and talking, among their flowers in the large sitting-room, to the frequent visitors,
mainly the authors of the essays. Abigail’s jobs, besides composing and typing
letters which she was well able to do, included packing suitcases for Howard and Fred
when they went away for the weekend, checking their laundry and making coffee. My
job, apart from editing, was making omelettes and salads on days when there was
little time for lunch.

Abigail and I used often to discuss ‘the Boys’ as we called them, between
ourselves. She said that for her part she found it easier to work for homosexuals
than for straight men. ‘No personal complications,’ she said.

We were impressed by the way the Boys generally got up when we came into the room,
unless they were really overwhelmed by work or telephone calls. ‘I s that
American or is it homosexual?’ Abigail wondered. Anyway, I said, I felt we
should tell them there was no need.

‘No, don’t do that,’ said Abigail. ‘I love it. So refreshing
after the manners where I was dragged up.’ I was presently to spend a weekend
at Sanky Place, the stately pile where Abigail was dragged up. It was true that, to a
man, the men grunted when you came into the room, and went on reading the paper,
sometimes shifting their behinds with a slight shuffling movement of acknowledgement.
According to Abigail, when she went in to announce the fact that she was going to
marry Giles Wilson, they just went on grunting.

Abigail came to work in a small Austin car she had acquired. But I had to leave Church
End Villas at a quarter to eight every morning and seldom got home before
eight-thirty. None the less, my life was changing for the better, and better still,
in the third week after I joined the
Highgate Review,
Howard Send asked me
to put an advertisement in the papers, a basement flat to let.

‘Do you mean’, I said, ‘that you have the basement free, here in
this house?’

There was a basement flat free, and within our means. T’m looking for a flat for
my boyfriend William and me,’ I said.

I phoned William and he came to look at the flat that evening. It was not too dark,
the windows being partly above street level. There was one other occupant, Mrs
Thomas, who did the cleaning and shopping for the house. ‘She shares the
facilities,’ Howard explained, meaning the bathroom. ‘The trouble with
houses in England, there are so few facilities,’ he said. But this sharing
meant that our three rooms were extraordinarily cheap; we had a sitting-room, a
bedroom and a kitchen. There would be the extra strain of travelling for William but
none for me. I thought this fair enough, starting, as I did, worse than I meant to go
on. William didn’t seem to mind this attitude. It actually made him happy.

We went out to dinner with Howard and Fred to seal the bargain. The Boys were
enchanted to hear that William was almost a doctor, and lost no time in consulting
him over dinner about their various ailments. William lost no time in switching the
subject to music, referring to the musical articles he had read in the first two
numbers of the
Highgate Review.

Milly knew why I was leaving South Kensington. But she pretended not to know. She was
happy with my promise to come and see her every Sunday. She said, ‘It’ll
be better for your health, Nancy. All that travelling on the underground. And if
William’s with you, so much the better. It’s awful the way that Isobel
comes here to consult him, about to be a mother, and sitting up there in his room
keeping him back from his studies.’

Isobel’s new flat was off the Cromwell Road. In the past two weeks I would often
find her when I got home in the evening sitting on William’s bed, talking. I
knew that he usually threw her out, for he was studying hard for his finals. But I
was furious because she didn’t for a moment think I could be the part of his
life that I now was, and if she had realized it, she wouldn’t have cared. She
continued to think, speak and act as if I was motherly, and she was wrong as far as
she was concerned. To be motherly, I felt, was her role.

One of the perquisites of the job which made life good for William and me were the
occasional tickets we got for musical events that spring of 1955. William wrote a few
short pieces for the
Highgate Review,
using his hours on the underground to
do them. I begged Fred Tucher, who was in charge of this section, not to accept these
pieces merely because William was my boyfriend, but he assured me William was both
lucid and expert. Fred said many other good things about William, for Fred talked
like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main
idea. So that you didn’t have to listen much at all, but just wait for the big
splash. And so, from his long rippling eulogy I was able to report to William that
his musical criticism was lucid and expert.

‘Glad the Jessies approve,’ William said. Jessies was his name for the
Boys.

If in the early spring of 1955 you went to concerts at the Wigmore Hall, the Festival
Hall, the Albert Hall and the smaller recital rooms of London, and Sadler’s
Wells and the Royal Opera House you must have seen the steamy and scruffy young
couples and groups of eager young, sometimes on a cold night wearing woollen gloves
and wrapped in scarves, waiting in queues for the cheap seats or hanging round the
foyer. William and I were among them. When we didn’t get tickets from the
High-gate Review
we bought them.
Don Giovanni
at Sadler’s
Wells; the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer playing Mozart and
Bruckner; at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, an unknown string quartet gave us Tippett,
Dvořák and Beethoven;
Daphnis and Chloë
at
Sadler’s Wells; at the Wigmore, Britten’s
Three Canticles;
and
I remember a charming piano and song recital at the Arts Council, though not the
performers;
La Traviata
at Sadler’s Wells.