Far Cry from Kensington (8 page)

‘No, I was speaking metaphorically.’

Dance music was playing somewhere. I ate those small oblongs of toasted bread with
oysters, anchovies and other involvements, called angels on horseback, which were
then more commonly served at the end of a meal than they are now. Mr Lederer had a
brandy.

‘Isobel’, he explained, ‘likes artists and so on. She goes to those
pubs and places where they all meet together and talk about culture. But I
mustn’t bore you.’

‘Isobel should go to concerts, art galleries and poetry readings,’ I said.

He got a taxi and insisted on taking me to the door.

‘Good-night, Mrs Hawkins. It was nice to have your company.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Lederer.’ Whether Isobel’s daddy was
married, divorced, widowed or simply a bachelor, I was never to know.

Indoors, there was a sound of revelry from Milly’s kitchen. On investigation I
found it did not arise from revelry but from consternation. Wanda’s anonymous
menacer had struck again, this time by telephone, only half an hour before, at
quarter-past eleven. Wanda had roused the house and here she was, weeping and
drinking tea, with Milly; with Basil and Eva Carlin, those quiet ones from the front
bed-sitting-room; Kate Parker, the district nurse; with young Isobel, sleepy and
yawning, her hand delicately patting her open mouth; with the medical student William
Todd, fishing cotton wool out of an aspirin bottle; with, in fact, all of us. The
Carlins wore Liberty dressing-gowns, looking better dressed than they did in the
daytime, and in fact somewhat romantic. It occurred to me they were in love. Kate
Parker had put on a white overall over her pyjamas. William Todd was wearing striped
cotton pyjamas; his pocket didn’t run to dressing-gowns. Wanda had on a purple
taffeta kimono and Milly a blue silk one. And Isobel wore something of transparent
pink nylon. I, in my black lace dress with my fur over my arm, caused a temporary
silence, possibly astonishment. Then Wanda began, all over again, to tell her tearful
story interspersed with the comments of the little crowd. Everyone had gone to bed.
The telephone had rung. William had bolted down to answer. It was a man, urgently
demanding Mrs Podolak. William had fetched her and started to climb the stairs to his
room again. The house was then awakened by a long scream from Wanda.

All that was so far apparent from this event was that the tormentor was not one of the
tenants and that he was a man.

Did she recognize the voice? — No, said Wanda.

A foreigner? — No.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘We should inform the police.’

Wanda gave a long loud cry of No. ‘Perhaps I know him. I can’t place
him,’ she said.

Milly got out more cups and handed tea all round.

Before we sent Wanda to bed I gave her a notebook and told her to write down as soon
as possible everything she could remember about the voice, and what it said. ‘I
don’t want to write down things,’ said Wanda. I think already she had an
inkling of who the voice belonged to. Perhaps, already, she had started putting two
and two together.

Basil Carlin said confidingly to William Todd, ‘Next thing he’ll no doubt
show up in person, and if I lay hands on him I’ll black his eye.’

‘I’d break his teeth,’ said William.

Neither of them achieved these ambitions. Much of our time was to be taken up, and
many wits were to be tried, in the effort to identify Wanda’s tormentor. The
idea hovered in the background of our lives for the next few months. But we were all
too busy with the foreground of our lives to notice what was happening to Wanda.

But that night, while everyone was talking and exclaiming, and putting forward
theories I went out in the garden by the kitchen door to admire the large bright moon
which floodlit Milly’s flower-beds, her beloved tall hollyhocks against the
wall, and her pansy borders. The other houses in Church End Villas were all asleep. I
was aware of a great lightness having fallen upon our house. I knew that it
wasn’t until this night’s phone call had proved that nobody among us was
responsible for Wanda’s suffering that we realized the heaviness of the past
six weeks. It is terrible to live with suspicions. Milly and I had privately
scrutinized everyone, and now it came to me that each and everyone in the house,
Milly excepted, had inevitably suspected, not only each other, but had also wondered
about me.

Hector Bartlett was already far from my thoughts; there was no possible way I could
have thought of him in connection with Wanda, not having yet come across that glint
of a thin trail, like something a snail leaves in its slow path, which led from him
to Wanda. But even if I had known, it would have been irrelevant to my feelings of
relief: the persecutor was not one of us, not one of us.

Now, to cheer things up still further, someone had turned on the wireless to Radio
Luxembourg with its late-night dance music. I could hear Milly begging everyone to
keep it low. I could hear the tinkle of tea-cups and the voices loosening up in
prattle in the kitchen; the household was garrulous with tacit deliverance. Even
Wanda, now upstairs, had stopped wailing; she came down again only to proclaim, in a
very insistent voice that reached me in the garden, her oft-repeated assertion that
her persecutor was an agent of the Red Dean (as was known the widely deplored, the
learned and the communist, then Dean of Canterbury).

Suddenly William Todd came out to the garden. ‘What a moon!’ he said. He
took my hand and put his other arm round my large waist as far as it could reach, and
danced me all over the lawn to the sound of the music, he in his cotton pyjamas and
I, Mrs Hawkins, in my black lace party dress.

While waiting for another job I considered myself on holiday; I
painted my rooms at Church End Villas and put up new curtains. I found a job for
Cathy as bookkeeper and invoice-clerk, not with a publisher as she wanted, but with a
small printer at Notting Hill, a kindly man who knew of our troubles at Ullswater
Press, although it was actually through Milly that she got the job. And it was
through Kate, the district nurse, that I got mine.

When you are looking for a job the best thing to do is to tell everyone, high and
humble, and keep reminding them please to look out for you. This advice is not
guaranteed to find you a job, but it is remarkable how suitable jobs can be found
through the most unlikely people. For instance, if you are looking for a job as a
management consultant or a television announcer, and can do the job, you will
naturally apply for the jobs available, advertised in the normal papers, known to the
appropriate agencies and to friends in the field of business. But you should also
tell the postman, the mechanic in the garage, the waiter in the restaurant, the hotel
porter, the grocer, the butcher, the daily domestic help; you should tell everyone,
including people you meet on the train.

It is surprising how many people subterraneously believe in destiny. The word goes
round, and in a relaxed moment a businessman will listen with interest to the barman
or the doorman. Hearing of the very person he is looking for, he might well think
that luck has come his way, and arrange to see the applicant next day. There is
involved that fine feeling and boast: ‘I just happened to be looking for an
accountant, and do you know I got a first-class fellow through the barman at the
Goat.’ People love coincidence, destiny, a lucky chance. It is worth telling
everyone if you want a job. In any case, while you are looking for a job you are
always walking in the dark.

So it came about that Milly’s friend and neighbour Mrs Twinny, with whom she
went to Bingo every Thursday afternoon, heard from Milly that I was called to the
phone a great deal by a certain Cathy, a book-keeper in my former office, and that
Cathy gave me little peace, she was looking for another job in publishing. Mrs Twinny
remarked that Mr Twinny was putting in shelves for a publisher. In fact, she meant a
printer, it came to the same thing. Milly reported this conversation to me, with
dramatic eagerness a few days later; it came with the news that Mr Twinny had
procured an interview for Cathy. ‘Funny enough he’s looking for a
book-keeper,’ said Milly, ‘and he’s looking for someone he can
trust, with a recommendation. They have to handle cash.’ So it was that I took
Cathy on the bus to Notting Hill. Cathy had at first put up a resistance to applying
for the job on the grounds that a printer in London W.8 was not the same as a
publisher in W.1. I had met her at five-thirty near South Kensington station in one
of the new espresso-bars that were then opening up all over London. She was still
with Ullswater Press but knew it was doomed; she knew it only too well from the books
she had to try to keep. She looked at me over the cappuccino raised to her lips, with
her puckered face and balding dyed hair; she looked at me through her thick lenses
and said, ‘I should put my head in the gas oven.’

I didn’t think for a minute that she would get the job. But I went along with
her to the interview and she got it. And the only thing that could explain why she
was taken on the spot, apart from her honesty which I had vouched for in a simple
letter of recommendation (in place of one from Martin York which I didn’t feel
would get Cathy very far, so near was he to the hour of his reckoning for fraud), was
a certain superstition on the part of Mr Wells, the printer. I waited for Cathy in
the noisy outer workshop, sitting on a chair which had been dusted specially for me.
Mr Wells came out with Cathy, both smiling. ‘A most extraordinary
coincidence,’ he said. ‘This man was putting up shelves, and we were
having a chat at the coffee break, and he happened to remark …’ I assume
the hiring of Cathy became his favourite anecdote. She kept the job for twelve years,
retiring on the death of her employer.

I happened to get a job for Patrick very easily, having been actually asked by a
bookseller in the Charing Cross Road, when I was in his shop one day rummaging around
the second-hand shelves, if I knew of a young man capable of minding the shop,
selling books and also packaging and posting the mail orders. But this brought on my
head a series of reactions from his wife, Mabel, who rang me every day and sometimes
twice on the same day with alternating expressions of gratitude and reproach. First I
was a wonderful woman to have done this great good deed for Patrick, especially as he
now got more pay; and secondly I was a fat old whore who was never done trying to
wheedle him into my bed with my wiles and favours. For Patrick’s sake I tried
to humour her as long as I could. I hardly listened to her on the phone, so that my
answers didn’t always correspond to what she was saying: it was a pleasure,
Mabel. No trouble on my part. I hope everything will go well with you, now,’ I
said, once, when she was actually accusing me of ‘doing it upside down’
with her husband.

Milly, when she answered the phone to Mabel, threatened to report her to the police,
refused to call me to the phone. I went to see Patrick in the book shop:
‘Patrick, you have to take Mabel to a doctor.’ ‘She won’t
go,’ he said, and was close to tears.

On some of those days before I got my next job I went for long walks, whatever the
weather, discovering scenes and aspects of London which office-workers never see. I
recall a day when there must have been fine weather, for in a street at
Regent’s Park a film was being made for which artificial rain was made to fall
in great quantities.

‘What between Mabel and her phone calls and those anonymous letters and calls
for Wanda, the house is a nightmare,’ Milly said. ‘Pack a bag, Mrs
Hawkins. I’m taking you home for a fortnight.’

‘Home’ to Milly was Cork. I willingly accepted and enjoyed a summer
holiday in the fine rain and sunshine of Ireland, remote from mad and untrustworthy
London among people who acknowledged respectfully the cultural life but were not
remotely mixed up with it. Milly’s eldest daughter lived with her husband in a
new house on the outskirts of Cork from which every day we set out for some new
stretch of Southern Irish greenery. At night I would lie awake as long as possible
with the sound in my mind’s ear of soft voices and amusing stories and in my
mind’s eye an ambience of leafiness. Sometimes I thought of London and wondered
where fate would take me in the future, and sometimes in those precious, silent,
waking hours I thought of Wanda. And I thought then more clearly than before. I felt
she was now holding something back, that she was not still unaware as she said she
was as to the possible identity of her enemy. Since that night of the anonymous phone
call she claimed there had arrived another letter, but she didn’t show it
around. According to Wanda, the writer had changed the motive of his threats. It was
no longer the income tax, it was something else. About the phone call she was
imprecise. This led me to reflect that in any case the man now knew that her little
tax affair had been put right. But Wanda was still upset, very distressed. She had
wept when I went to say good-bye before I left for Ireland, and I thought she was
going to tell me something; but she hesitated and decided not. I didn’t press.
Indeed, in a sense I didn’t want to know, for I felt the weight of so many of
other people’s difficulties. I was still young, in my twenties, and everyone
treated me like a matronly goddess of wisdom. I fell asleep one night, thinking of my
own future and its possibilities and with the strange, involuntary image of the
moonlit garden at Church End Villas, that night of the anonymous phone call to Wanda,
after my dinner at the Savoy; and I thought of William Todd whirling me round and
round.