Far Cry from Kensington (5 page)

‘Any more? Any more? … The police!’

Milly opened the door and came in. I could see, as she looked at blue-eyed Wanda for
the first time sitting up in bed with her fair hair flowing around her, that the same
thought struck her as had struck me: Wanda was an attractive woman, Wanda was sexy.
It was something which, stupidly, we hadn’t thought of before.

‘I have enemies,’ wailed Wanda.

‘Leave them to God,’ said Milly.

We left Wanda to her tea. ‘But’, said Milly, ‘she often spoke of her
friends and her enemies. Now she’s surprised she has enemies. She always said
“my friends and my enemies”, as if they were to be expected. Foreigners
always talk like that, mind you. And when you think of the number of people that come
to this door for Wanda …’

‘She looks pretty with her hair down,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t she, now?’ said Milly.

That evening, after supper, we went through the possibilities of the
other tenants in the house. There was my neighbour on the top floor, young Isobel,
who had such a lot of friends and who rang her Daddy every evening. Here again, Milly
and I blinked at each other. Isobel, of all people to write a nasty anonymous
letter… ‘I’ve met her father,’ said Milly, as if that
settled the question. I hadn’t met him, myself, but it was true that the
presence of Isobel’s father’s voice in her daily life seemed to give her
a sort of stability; but even more than those telephone calls to her father, it was
rather her vivacity and her silly crowd of young friends that put Isobel out of the
question. Surely no one as careless and carefree as Isobel, as she ran out of the
house into the waiting taxis or the boyfriend’s car, could have written that
mean letter? It was someone broody, with inner malice, whom we were looking for.

Milly felt as guilty in her way as I did in mine as we sat discussing and analysing
the people who shared the same house with us. I noticed that, although we always came
to the same conclusions, Milly’s reasons were different from mine: she tended
to exonerate all tenants of hers because they were her tenants, while I took a more
objective look at them. I felt it came to the same thing, for Milly had already done
her sizing-up when she took the people under her roof. Still, we could be mistaken.
And we felt obscurely guilty. The letter, lying on Milly’s table, was a thing
of guilt, arising from guilt, causing it.

There remained William Todd, the student in his final year of medicine. I say he
remained, although in fact from a strictly impartial point of view the suspects in
the house would have included both Milly and me. I pointed this out to Milly, who
said, ‘Whatever would you and I do a thing like that for?’ I felt, then,
that this was the real question to be asked of all of us. What would be the point in
any one of us molesting Wanda? Why? What for? William Todd’s wireless programme
was going on upstairs, sifting down to us as we were talking. He was usually out on a
Saturday evening, but tonight he was studying. Generally, in the evenings he thumped
down the stairs with his sturdy legs and went out to meet his friends at the coffee
bar near South Kensington station. I had seen him there several times if I happened
to be returning home late, myself. He would be with a group of young men and women
who looked like the fellow students that they were. Why on earth should William take
it into his head to write a scurrilous, anonymous letter to Wanda? He probably
didn’t ever think of her unless he happened to pass her on the stair.

‘So it’s none of us,’ said Milly. ‘It must be one of
Wanda’s people, from outside. And I’m going to tell her so in the
morning.’ As the evening proceeded, Wanda became almost herself a culprit in
our minds: she was guilty of being a victim of the guilty missive lying on
Milly’s table, author unknown, exuding malignity all over the kitchen.

‘Wanda looks out of the window,’ I told Martin York.
‘She sees spies standing at the corner of the road. She sees spies in the
grocer shop, following her. Private detectives and government spies.’

Wanda’s troubles were now known throughout 14 Church End Villas, South
Kensington. She was unable to keep it a secret at the same time as she lamented that
everyone was talking about her. Even the people at No. 16, the Cypriot and his
English wife, were by some means thoroughly informed of the affair before the week
was out. They even called to express their solidarity, the husband earnestly offering
to break the neck of the offender should we ever be in a position to name him or her
or them. ‘They call themselves “Organisers”,’ I said, hoping
it might mean something to the couple.

‘Organizers!’ said the wife. ‘I’ll organize them, just let me
get my hands on them.’

Mr Twinny, the odd-job man who lived at No. 30, was equally indignant. ‘No
gentleman’, he told me in a hushed, confiding tone, ‘would ever do such a
thing to a lady. A widow at that.’

Wanda was now in difficulties with her work. Her clients were puzzled at her sullen
tearfulness; they came for their fittings and asked Milly on the way out, had they
done anything to offend?

‘Wanda’s not herself just now,’ Milly would say.

‘What’s happened? What’s the matter?’

‘It’ll pass, mark my words,’ Milly always said.

But her Polish friends were not to be put off. Within a fortnight they had all got to
hear of her anonymous letter; within another fortnight they came asking Wanda to be
reasonable and shake off the shock — ‘After all, what can they do to you?
… After all, there is no threat and extortion … After all, it is some
crazy person, he sends out this letter by the hundreds, the thousands, this
person.’

When I described the letter to Martin York I was impressed by his spontaneous
generosity in offering the services of his own lawyer, at his own expense, to help
Wanda. He was genuinely outraged at the story. At that time Martin York was himself
more deeply in trouble than I knew. Some months later, when the judge at his trial
told how ‘Commercial life cannot be carried on unless people are honest,’
and sentenced him to seven years, I remembered his simple gesture to Wanda, an
obscure immigrant seamstress in South Kensington whom he had only heard of through
me.

At the same time Martin York was full of unconventional advice which savoured of
officers’-mess lore. ‘The way to throw the income tax, Mrs
Hawkins,’ he said, ‘is to send them, out of the blue, a cheque for eight
pounds seventeen and three. Something like that. They can never tally up a sum of
that kind with any of their figures; your file goes from hand to hand for months and
years, and eventually gets lost.’

‘I wouldn’t like to try it,’ I said. ‘It would be one’s
money that would get lost.’

‘I daresay, Mrs Hawkins.’

I took things more or less literally in those days; perhaps that was why he felt I was
reliable and safe.

In the event Wanda didn’t consult the lawyer about the letter; she was too
terrified. But eventually she let the Ullswater Press accountant put her income tax
right. She owed a little over twelve pounds, of which, some months later, she got a
rebate of four. For the time being there was no further anonymous letter, and
generally the first high tide of horror, puzzlement and suspicion died down in the
house. It died down but it didn’t quite die. I would find myself looking
strangely at one of the tenants or at one of Wanda’s visitors; I would wonder.
And since I wondered and even sometimes pondered, I supposed that the other tenants
did more or less the same. They must have thought, they must have speculated. I know
that Milly was vigilant about everyone who came to the door for Wanda. ‘A lady
for a fitting,’ she would report; ‘the old priest; her young cousin
that’s going to be a priest; that fellow from the Post Office with a suit to be
altered; that Polish family that bring her those cakes; those two Polish sisters that
teach music …’

But I was more active in my investigations. It is amazing what one progressively
learns about people through an attempt to dispel suspicion. I went about it by simply
getting more friendly with each one of them.

Then, Wanda herself was far more subdued than she had ever been before. She slowed
down; she seemed to age and begin to fade. Time would have done these things for her
anyway, as for us all. But then and there, for Wanda, it was the work of the
anonymous letter-writer, the infamous ‘Organiser’. Wanda had left the
letter in my hands, for I promised her I would continue to investigate and try and
find who her enemy was. I felt that samples of handwriting were things to get hold of
as unnoticeably as possible. I bought a book about handwriting, and I remember going
over the letter, alone in my room, night after night, studying the formation of the
letters through a magnifying glass. I am a neat note-taker: I bought a quarto-sized
notebook and began to make notes of the graphological features of the letter —
looped ‘I’s and unlooped ‘h’s, closed ‘o’s and
unclosed ‘a’s, ‘f’s exaggerated in such a way as to suggest a
fake. For the letter yielded all the symptoms of a disguised hand, that is, small
inconsistencies, like the contradictions of a guilty person under interrogation.
Above all, I was looking for the organizer spelt with an ‘s’. I tried
collecting as many examples of handwriting with words ending in ‘ize’ as
I could. But in most cases — for instance ‘realize’ and
‘recognize’ where the alternative spellings ‘realise’ or
‘recognise’ are common — one could draw no conclusion.

But there was some element in Wanda’s life, I was sure, which held the clue; it
was perhaps something of which Wanda herself was unaware, or some person she had
completely forgotten.

In the meantime she mourned, no longer so much for her own potential plight in the
hands of the Inland Revenue department but on the much more reasonable grounds that
someone she had known was gratuitously vicious.

‘Good morning, Mrs Hawkins.’ This was the Cypriot next
door cleaning his bicycle as I left for the office. ‘Good morning,
Marky.’ That was the name he demanded to go by; he was decidedly embarrassed
when any of us made to call him Mr something. It was to be a while before I found
myself being addressed by my first name. This certainly coincided with the time when
I was moved to lose my great weight. Then, I invited people to call me Nancy, instead
of Mrs Hawkins as I was to everyone in that summer of 1954, when I went to my office
in the morning partly by bus and partly across Green Park, whether it rained or
whether it didn’t.

Suicide is something we know too little about, simply because the chief witness has
died, frequently with his secret that no suicide-note seems adequate to square with
the proportions of the event. But what we call suicidal action, an impetuous career
towards disaster that does not necessarily end in the death of the wild runner, was
going on at the Ullswater Press. That spring I had reason to reflect on Martin
York’s precipitous course towards a heavy reckoning when I heard on the
wireless — it was May 6th — that the runner, Roger Bannister, had beaten
the world record: a mile in under four minutes. Martin York, I reflected, was going
faster than that, he was going at something like a mile a minute, even when he sat
hemmed-in, drinking whisky. One day he called me to his office. He was signing some
documents. ‘Will you witness these signatures, Mrs Hawkins?’ I poised my
pen and drew towards me the papers he had already signed, while he signed one further
document. But I didn’t sign my name: I saw they were letters to banks and I saw
that the signatures, although they were in Martin York’s natural writing, were
not his. And I saw that one of the signatures was ‘Arthur Cary’. Sir
Arthur Cary was in those days the top financier, always in the news with his larky
wife. I had no time to see anything else. Martin York, foreseeing my objection, had
snatched back the documents.

‘You aren’t forging signatures are you, Mr York?’ I said in a joking
way, not absolutely to offend.

‘Forging? Of course not. Forging is copying someone else’s signature.
Arthur told me I could write his name, it’s all right. But I see there’s
no need to get the signatures witnessed.’ Martin York put the papers in a
drawer.

Many months later I knew that what I had seen was part of a fraudulent act so naive
that it was bound to be discovered. At the time I decided it couldn’t possibly
be a serious fraudulent act simply because it was so naive. I thought at the time
that it was one of Martin York’s bits of self-irony on his suicidal career to
business ruin. For ruin was certainly ahead. He had that year taken on a few
‘literary advisers’, mostly young men of good family and no brains whose
fathers had pleaded them a job. They were on the payroll. They amused us when they
came into the office, which was usually on Friday, the pay day. They lasted for three
or four weeks, and replaced each other in quick succession. The reason why their
terms of office were so short was that Mr Ullswater would remonstrate with Martin
York: ‘Who was that young man I saw downstairs?’ or ‘Who is that
insufferable youth making scented tea in the general office?’ Martin York would
explain to the effect that the young man was learning the business. But so frequently
did they find no paypacket waiting for them that they drifted away, much to the
typist Ivy’s regret.