Far Cry from Kensington (23 page)

It’s no good at the moment,’ said William with his street-savvy. ‘You
have to wait for a lull. You then go in and start shouting yourself.’

‘Call the police?’

‘The police will come anyway if they go on like this.’

Someone bounded down the basement steps and banged at our door. It was Fred, the
younger partner, his handsome brown face smeared with blood. ‘We need a
doctor,’ he said. ‘Howard has collapsed. He hurt his leg.’

We went up, with Mrs Thomas in the wake. Howard had not hurt his leg, he had some
broken ribs. He lay on the carpeted floor of the office, moaning. ‘Don’t
worry,’ Fred told him. ‘We have a doctor in the house.’

‘Who’s going to clean all this up?’ said Mrs Thomas.

We got Howard into hospital in an ambulance and put plasters on Fred’s face. The
office was completely wrecked, with manuscripts torn and watery from overturned
flower-vases. The typewriters were somewhere in the street having been heaved through
the window. Nobody asked for or gave a single explanation.

It was a week before we could set up the office again. The
Highgate Review
was held up for two months. Abigail and I pieced together some of the typescripts and
proofs and wrote apologies to the authors we could trace, explaining there had been
an accident, begging them to re-submit their work.

But most of the papers were irretrievable, soaked, and trampled to shreds. We swept up
the sodden mess over the weekend and threw it all out. William gave us a hand.

‘The thing about the Boys,’ I remember Abigail saying,
‘they’re basically charming. When homosexuals are charming it sugars the
pill.’

Howard, home from hospital, was in bed in his room above the office, and Fred was
mildly carrying on with his work, his affable meetings and his flower arrangements.
William and I stayed on in the basement till just before Christmas when we were
married, and there were no more disturbances. ‘The fight to end fights,’
said William.

But in that first week when Abigail and I, with the help of Mrs Thomas, the carpenters
and glaziers, were putting things straight and searching for lost letters and
manuscripts, it was in our own flat that I searched the most. The article by Hector
Bartlett and Emma Loy’s letter had completely disappeared.

‘I brought them down here, what did you do with them, William?’ I finally
said, for I knew he must have put them somewhere.

‘I took them back up to the office the morning after the fight, and dumped them
among the wreckage,’ William said. ‘That’s where they
belonged.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘We don’t have room for rubbish like that down here.’

I went to console Howard in his bed of pain among his flowers. ‘It’s all
straight down there, now,’ I said. ‘Only we’ve lost nearly all the
letters and manuscripts.’

‘We’ll get more, I guess,’ said Howard.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘there was a letter from Emma Loy. She hadn’t
anything to offer herself, but she sent an essay on radionics by an author called
Hector Bartlett. It’s lost, and so is the letter.’

‘What’s radionics?’

‘A sort of witchcraft,’ I said. ‘The essay was no good. Have you
heard of Hector Bartlett?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘He’s a
pisseur de copie
,’ I said.

‘Jesus, please don’t make me laugh,’ said dear Howard, holding his
poor ribs.

Later that year, when we were planning the wedding, I lay awake for a
while, then drowsily falling asleep I thought how Wanda could make my dress, until I
remembered she was dead.

More than thirty years later, I saw Hector Bartlett again. It was in Tuscany in a
restaurant that had been constructed within a restored medieval castle famous for
Dante’s having once slept there. It was about three in the afternoon. We had
finished our lunch. William had to go and make a promised phone call to England,
where the time was then two o’clock. We often go to Italy. That afternoon, the
Italian voices lilted the doings of the day. The sun blazed outside, Apollo as he is,
on the wine- and oil-soaked skins of our friends and fellows who set off with great
cheer in their Alfas, their Fiats and their Lancias. William said, ‘You pay the
bill. I’ll make that call.’

I paid the bill, waited for the change, and set off towards the door. The serving
counter was surrounded by people, mostly visiting English. A voice said something
about its being a lovely place. Another voice replied, ‘Yes, there’s a
wealth of wild flowers and butterflies.’ Something about the tourist-brochure
quality of the phrase made me look at the speaker. Thin, with a grey face and white
wispy hair, it was, after all these years, Hector Bartlett. He noticed my searching
look, and staring back, recognized me. I believe some of the people around him were
friends or travelling acquaintances in his group. He looked at them then back at me,
and started to laugh nervously.

‘Pisseur de copie,’
I hissed.

He walked backwards so that the people behind him had to make way for him, still with
his short staccato laugh like a typewriter.

William was waiting for me at the car.

‘Did you settle the bill?’ he said.

I said, ‘Yes.’

It was a far cry from Kensington, a far cry.

A
LSO BY
M
URIEL
S
PARK

available
from New Directions:

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