Far Cry from Kensington (3 page)

The telephone: ‘Would you mind calling back later? Mrs Hawkins isn’t
in.’ That was Ivy, getting rid of someone. Again, the telephone:
‘Ullswater Press,’ says Ivy.

Hardly a morning passed but Mabel, the distraught wife of Patrick, would come in to
visit him. She invariably turned on me with accusations that I was seducing her
husband.

‘Mabel! Mabel!’ — Patrick was a tall young man with glasses and
lanky fair hair, very like a curate in his precocious solemnity; a little younger
than me. He was hoping to make a career in publishing; books and reading were his
passion. It was true he was attached to me, for he felt he could confide in me. I
would listen to him often during the lunch hour when, if it was too cold and rainy to
go to the park, we would send out for sandwiches and eat them with our office-made
coffee. I think he had married Mabel because she was pregnant. Now Patrick earned
very little, but Mabel had a job, and their young child was looked after during the
day by Mabel’s mother. Whether it was because Patrick was too engrossed in his
books to pay attention to his wife or whether he had spoken approvingly of me to her,
or whether it was both, Mabel had taken it into her head that I was enticing Patrick
away from her. She was in a great state of nerves, and if we had not all tolerated
these outbursts of accusation when she came into our office on her way to work, I
think she would have been unable to go on to her job in the offices of a paint firm
nearby. As it was, we always calmed her down and she would leave with backward looks
of reproach at me on her small blade-like face. ‘Mrs Hawkins, you don’t
know the harm you’re doing. Perhaps you don’t know,’ she said more
than once.

‘Mabel! Mabel!’ said her husband.

Ivy the typist would batter on all through this scene. Cathy the book-keeper, her eyes
bulging behind her thick lenses, would rise to her feet, wave her hands, and croak,
‘Mrs Hawkins is our editor-in-chief and innocent of the crime.’

Patrick was always mournful after his wife’s departure. ‘It’s good
of you to take it like this, Mrs Hawkins,’ he would say sometimes, although all
I had done was stand in my buxom bulk. And at other times he would say nothing,
intensely studying the books he was packing so carefully, so expertly and rapidly.

One of our creditors, a small printer, had taken the difficulties of Ullswater Press
so personally as to employ a man with a raincoat to stand in the lane outside our
office windows all morning and afternoon, staring up. That’s all he did: stare
up. This was supposed to put us to shame. In the coffee break we did a certain amount
of staring back, standing in threes and fours at the window with our cups in our
hands. It was strange to see the raincoated man: he was out of place in that smart,
expensive area of London; indeed, he was supposed to be shabbily noticeable. In that
part of South Kensington from where I emerged every morning from Monday to Friday,
the man would have been merely that man-in-the-street that the politicians referred
to: one of many. But here in the West End everyone looked at the man, then up at our
windows, then back again at him.

At Milly’s in South Kensington, everybody paid their weekly rent, however much
they had to scrape and budget, balancing the shillings and pence of those days
against small fractions saved on groceries and electric light; at Milly’s,
people added and subtracted, they did division and multiplication sums incessantly;
and there was Kate with her good little boxes marked ‘bus-fares’,
‘gas’, ‘sundries’. Here, in the West End, the basic idea was
upper-class, scornful of the bothersome creditors as if they were impeding a more
expansive view. We, in the noisy general office, were not greatly concerned: after
all, the responsibility was not ours, it was that of the Ullswater Press, of Mr
Ullswater and of Martin York, and the other names who formed a board of directors;
especially of Martin York who ran the firm. It was he who brought me manuscripts he
had picked up from his fellow-officers of war-time, or former school friends.
‘Will this make a best-seller? Read it and tell me if it might be a
best-seller. We need a few best-sellers.’ As for the proofs of books waiting to
be published, these piled up on my desk, waiting their long turn. I worked on them
meticulously; words, phrases, paragraphs, semi-colons. But they remained on my desk
long after they were ready to be returned to the printers. New credit from printers
and binders was difficult to get. ‘Mrs Hawkins, keep those authors away from
me.’

Authors — they wanted to know why publication date was always being postponed.
The phone would ring. Whereupon Ivy, in her highly affected drawing-room accent,
would loudly reply above the auditory effects of our office, ‘Mrs Hawkins is in
a meeting, I’m afraid. Can I take a message? No, I don’t know when
she’ll be back. No I can’t disturb her, she’s in a meeting.’
I discovered, after enquiring, that it was an old tradition of the firm, started by
Martin York, to say ’in’ a meeting, not’at’ a meeting. I
supposed ’in’ sounded more immersed and not to be disturbed. Ivy had the
knack of making ‘in a meeting’ sound indignant right from the start, as
if the very idea of telephoning merely to ask for someone who was thus occupied was
an outrage. Ivy had caught the Ullswater Press idea. The floor around Ivy’s
desk was presently piled with papers, for Mary the filing-clerk left, complaining of
the ‘atmosphere’ created by wild Mabel’s visits. Mary was not
replaced.

It was after the tea-break that Martin York would usually call down on the intercom.
‘Can you spare a minute, Mrs Hawkins?’ A minute meant an hour, sometimes
more. He wanted to talk, to confide. He would stand at his window looking down at the
courtyard at the back of the house and talk. Or he would sit down and talk from the
leather armchair opposite mine.

‘Sherry? Whisky?’ said Martin York.

I accepted a sherry only if he kept me talking after five-thirty, when it was my time
to go home. I was used to keeping late office hours, especially now that the office
staff was thinning out, and everyone had to take on the jobs of two or more people.
In the days when Martin York kept me talking it was a sort of rest. When he spoke of
the past, it was the war. When he spoke of the future, it was of the important loan
he claimed to have raised to put the firm on its feet. His war exploits were true. As
for the loan, I kept in mind a former remark of his: ‘If it is widely enough
believed that you have money and wealth, Mrs Hawkins, it is the same as having it.
The belief itself creates confidence. And confidence, business.’ His round face
was pock-marked as if he had had smallpox. It was difficult to dislike him; this was
not only my feeling but that of all his associates and friends. So that when he put
it about from time to time that he had received important backing, if he was not
believed, then everybody wanted to believe him, to the effect that he did indeed
attract new funds from time to time, and temporarily save the situation.

It was when Martin York was especially upset that he would call me up
to his office to talk to him. It made me sad to leave the galley-proofs of a novel by
Cocteau or a new edition of
Tender is the Night
folded on my desk. Many of
the Ullswater Press books were so good, so rare. I enjoyed keeping a sharp eye for
typographical errors; I loved to check doubtful points of translations with the
greatest care; no matter that the office was a turmoil of mixed sounds and that I was
constantly interrupted to answer the telephone or settle some point of contention, I
was always happy when checking proofs.
‘Evening Dispatch, Evening
News’
would come the cry from the newsboy downstairs in the narrow
lane; and the telephone would summon me to Mr York’s office. On these occasions
he gave orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed by the telephone or by visitors.

When he was upset he drank whisky. I would talk to him while he sat back in his chair,
eyes closed. I never talked about affairs in the office; I spoke of my home life at
14 Church End Villas, South Kensington. Mr York listened quite intently, as I
discovered, for he always remembered some detail of the previous instalments.

‘How is Wanda getting on, Mrs Hawkins?’

Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, had enough problems to fill up the rest of the
afternoon. Mr York filled his glass, and I him in about Wanda.

‘Wanda’, I said, ‘suffers greatly.’

‘I never met a Pole who doesn’t.’

‘Most of her sufferings derive from her past sufferings. But now she has a new
source. It isn’t a joke, Mr York. Wanda has a hard life. She has had an
anonymous letter.’

Wanda made all my clothes for me. The only other place I could get
clothes to fit me at a reasonable price was an Outsize Shop in Oxford Street: these
were clothes suitable for everyone, only larger. Wanda, on the other hand, had a
flair for divining her clients’ personalities. Since she charged me very
little, I had to take my chance for an occasional fitting when she wasn’t
occupied with more profitable clients. This chance often occurred on a Sunday
afternoon after five o’clock. Wanda had been to the one-o’clock Polish
mass at Brompton Oratory and there, after the service, had met all her friends and
relations who were then living in London. Counting the elderly and the children there
must have been at least a hundred Polish refugees acquainted with or connected with
Wanda. I knew this at first hand because I had accompanied Wanda on a few occasions
to the one-o’clock Polish mass and national gathering. The Oratory was always
crowded. A large number of husbands and fathers were gathered outside the church for
the entire service, only turning towards the church doors to sign themselves with the
cross at the moment when the bell announced the Elevation.

Wanda was a short plump woman in her late forties. In my memory, it is always winter
when Wanda comes to mind on her social occasions outside Brompton Oratory after the
Mass. The heavy incense of those days hovered around the doors of the church as the
people emerged. Wanda had a thick, shapeless, bristling fur coat of a dark colour,
with a fur hat to match. Her pale blonde hair protruded at the back in a thick
plaited bun. She had a sweet oval face with small blue eyes. As she talked to her
special group of compatriots she would rhythmically bob her whole body forward in
emphasis of her words, to the effect that with every bob forward her behind would bob
backward as if likewise to emphasize its declarations. The gatherings outside the
Oratory which spilled over into Brompton Road would gradually disperse, so gradually
that it was not till three in the afternoon that the voluble exiles had moved off,
some to visit a nearby museum, the Victoria & Albert or the Natural History, most
to crowd into the tea shops where they ate sweet cakes and creamy pastries with tea
and lemori. They greatly enriched London with their new and alien life.

As I discovered from Wanda, a good part of the afternoon’s conversation
consisted in exchanges of émigré survival-lore and items of information
about the practical aspects of the country they had come to settle in. Like other
groups of war refugees, they brought their courage with them; it was no mean
offering. In exchange they visibly and loquaciously went about to discover what funds
were available and where. What ministry to apply to? What forms to fill in? What
schools, what doctors? — And, for the Poles, what Catholic schools and doctors?
— What organizations, what committees, bursaries, scholarships, what
personages, what names, addresses and telephone numbers, and what jobs and what
employment agencies? They knew the public libraries, the specialized private
libraries and the best reading-rooms. Wanda and her friends certainly knew far more
about how to tap the resources of post-war Britain than I did. And it was not all a
materialistic process. Some of Wanda’s friends were ardent lecture-goers. Word
went round about the lectures given in the evenings in London. Someone was always
giving a lecture on politics or astronomy, history, Czech poetry, Polish literature,
the customs of the Polynesians. I had no idea, until I heard about it from Wanda,
that there was so much lecturing going on in London.

In those days of pounds, shillings and pence, Wanda managed on very few of them; her
charges for alterations were mostly computed in shillings. Alterations of clothes
took up a great many of her working hours; only occasionally did she have to devote
her days to an important job — the making of a wedding dress, a coat for the
bridegroom’s mother or a new summer dress for one of her ladies.

When she didn’t have a client being measured or fitted or pinned-up in her room,
Wanda continued to work, either by hand or at her sewing-machine, even while her
friends and enemies crowded into her room. One of the women would busy herself with
tea at the gas-ring while Wanda sewed and talked. She was too busy, herself, to go to
lectures and libraries.