Far Cry from Kensington (9 page)

When Milly and I got back home only one thing had changed and it didn’t affect
us very much: a reshuffle of personnel in the house next door. Marky’s wife and
baby had left and another girl, still ‘my wife’ to Marky, with two
children and a young sister had taken their place; the first sister-in-law remained:
an interesting mixture; Milly speculated much on the outcome.

Ian Tooley, director of the vast publishing firm of Mackintosh &
Tooley, looked at his pocket diary and said, ‘I suggest you start next Monday,
the 11th, Mrs Hawkins. If that is convenient?’ I said that would suit me very
well. It was a week ahead. ‘You will find us at the peak of our
activity,’ he said, his eye still on the page of his diary. ‘October 12th
will be the next day, Tuesday, a full moon: there will be a movement of
authors.’

‘Do you find the moon affects the authors, Mr Tooley?’ I said.

‘Oh, a great deal, believe me,’ he said deeply. ‘There is always a
considerable movement from those quarters at the full moon.’

This saying, combined with the décor of the office, made me extraordinarily
happy: I knew already that the new job was going to be something of an adventure.

I hadn’t expected to get the job. In fact I suspected that a number of highly
experienced men and women editors must have applied for it, people with
recommendations, qualifications, honours degrees, specializations, and after I had
been at the job for some time I found out that this was true. Many well-known
reviewers and literary editors and BBC personnel had applied for this job at
Mackintosh & Tooley, and had been interviewed for it. It was later that I
realized why I was employed in preference to these impressive applications.

I got the job at Mackintosh & Tooley in October through Kate, who had been nursing
an elderly relation-by-marriage of Sir Alec Tooley throughout September. Martin York
had already been arrested for fraud and was now remanded on bail and in a nursing
home tended by psychiatrists.

The scandal in the publishing world was rife, and the bankruptcy of the Ullswater
Press and his other ventures, imminent and inevitable. A considerable list of people
stood to lose weighty sums of money in the crash.

To entertain her patient, whom Kate greatly liked, she read bits of
The Times
to her every day, I imagine with those appropriate observations of a moral order, so
typical of Kate. And, according to Kate, the news of Martin York’s arrest with
the list of his alleged (as the papers put it at this stage) frauds and forgeries, so
much fascinated Kate’s patient that Kate was led to say she knew someone who
had, up to only recently, been an editor at the Ullswater Press, and was alas out of
work.

This news was passed on rapidly to Sir Alec Tooley. I believe his sick relation must
have been a fairly poor relation, otherwise she would have had a private nurse, not
Kate. I suspect that this near-acquaintance with an actual inside observer of the
goings-on at Martin York’s establishment was a kind of poor relation’s
offering to the rich Sir Alec, and that he in turn was induced by curiosity to
arrange an interview for me. This is my construction of how I got the interview, for
certainly there was a vacancy for an editor just then, and the candidates were many
and the qualifications required were far higher than any I could claim. Some series
of reasons and half-reasons like this procured me the interview. Why I actually got
the job was, I am sure, due to something else. Kate had warned me fairly:
‘These are different people than you meet every day, Mrs Hawkins. They can
command university degrees and titled young lads as their office boys.’

But allowing for the rhetoric of Kate’s sincere beliefs, it was still a mystery
to me that I got the job. I came to realize the answer later.

I had been interviewed by two directors in turn. Ian Tooley, of Mackintosh &
Tooley, son of Sir Alec Tooley (there was no surviving Mackintosh), an esoteric
crank, was the second. First, I had been ushered in to the vast carpeted office of
Sir Alec. I was fairly keyed up, so I didn’t notice many details at first. An
elderly man. A voice that I placed at the back of my mind as surprising, a whimper. I
was too occupied with the interview and whether I could possibly hope to get a job in
this important firm of publishers to take in much as Sir Alec talked.

‘Mrs Hawkins, I believe you in fact worked for the Ullswater Press? That must
have been an interesting experience,’ he prompted me.

I said that it was.

‘And what was your feeling about Mr York’s conduct?’

I said I thought Martin York was off his head if it were proved he forged documents
without taking the slightest precaution to conceal his own handwriting.
‘But’, I said, ‘my work at Ullswater Press was with actual
books.’

‘Ah yes, in fact, books,’ said the venerable publisher. ‘Yes, many
of our staff here are in fact fairly interested in books. One of our senior
colleagues in fact was saying at a meeting only the other day that he thought he
might perhaps have a shot at getting back to his first love —
books.
Now, tell me, in fact, Mrs Hawkins …’

I had begun to wonder if I had wandered into the wrong premises. Was it tomato soup,
ladies’ dresses, washing machines that they trafficked in here? But Sir Alec
pressed on ‘… was there not in fact — I am sure you must know
— some difficulty or
fracas
at the shareholders’
meetings?’

I told him I was never at the shareholders’ meetings, but according to the
newspapers there was a lot of money involved.

‘Indeed there is, Mrs Hawkins. Distilleries, building schemes. I quite
understand you, in fact, wanting to keep out of it, although let me assure you that
anything you say between these four walls will go no further. Given that York is a
loony and I’m not, in fact, excluding it, tell me about Ted Ullswater. I
suppose he’s taken the affair rather hard?’

I was now noticing rather more. On his desk was a silver frame with the photograph of
a woman of the ‘twenties in Court dress holding an ostrich-feather fan.

Sir Alec was thin and grey and his voice matched his looks. It sounded like a wisp of
smoke wafting from some burning of leaves hidden by a clump of lavender. The effort
that appeared to go into his voice seemed not to correspond with any commensurable
weariness or boredom; indeed, he was eager to pump me, and, genuinely looking for a
job as I was, I felt highly impatient both with the affectation built in to his
manner and with the fact that I had come primed for a serious interview and was being
frivolously quizzed. Moreover, I had come in a taxi. I always took a taxi to an
interview.

I said I understood there was an editorial job available.

‘Yes,’ he breathed, ‘there is in fact an editorial job available, I
believe.’ He pressed a button on his desk and spoke through an intercom. Tan,
would you come in please? I have a lady editor who might in fact very well suit us.
Yes, now, please.’

He rose and so did I. He walked me to the door just as it opened and Ian Tooley came
in. Sir Alec offered me a limp hand and when I took it he seemed to throw my hand
away into thin air. Tan, this is Mrs Hawkins.’ Then he said to me, or rather
sighed out the words: ‘I hope you don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote
the plays. The evidence in fact does not stand independent scrutiny. He must be
laughing up his sleeve in the next world, if in fact there is one, when he looks down
and sees what is in fact going on at Stratford-on-Avon.’

I followed Ian Tooley along a carpeted corridor, its walls lined with reproductions of
the Boz illustrations of Dickens, into his own less vast but impressively
oak-panelled office.

Ian Tooley was more robust than his father whom he resembled except that he appeared to
have a squint, which presently I found was not so; it was an effect caused by his
nose going off at a slight angle. Unlike his father he was casually dressed in a
sports jacket and brown corduroy trousers, unusual for office-wear in those days.
More unusual still, he wore a vivid green tie. I thought, after all he might be
interesting.

He began by looking at me very closely, very carefully, not at all as a man looks at a
woman but as if he were considering me as a specimen for some purpose quite beyond my
understanding. I felt dreadfully physical.

‘You worked for the self-styled financial genius, Martin York?’ he said.

‘I was an editor in the publishing firm. They published some good books,’
I said.

‘Well then, you understand about proof-reading, dealing with authors, et cetera,
et cetera.’

‘All that,’ I said, without any clear idea what the et ceteras meant.

Now I was anxious to get away; convinced they had only got me to come along out of
curiosity, and that they were in any case looking for an honours graduate or someone
of that nature.

A tall thin girl came in with a tray of tea, set out with a silver tea-pot and
delicate china. ‘Thank you, Abigail. May I introduce Mrs Hawkins, who is coming
to join us — Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight.’

That was how I knew I had got the job. Miss de Mordell Staines-Knight swept me a small
smile over her shoulder, for she had already started to leave the room.

‘Abigail’, said Ian Tooley when she had gone, ‘is a Virgo.’

My alarm at this saying was allayed by his going on to expound some part of his astral
studies, promising me that he would have my full horoscope cast as soon as I could
provide him with the exact hour and minute of my birth and that of my mother and
father. Their birthdays and mine, he assured me, were not enough. One needed the
hours, the minutes. And he ended the interview with the words I have already
recorded: ‘I suggest you start next Monday … October 12 will be the next
day, Tuesday, a full moon … a movement of authors.’

I believe it was only part-consciously that Ian Tooley, who was in
charge of taking on the senior personnel, invariably chose someone, in some respect,
not quite normal.

Because the office was peopled, although inefficiently, by a staff of secretaries,
book-keepers, filing clerks, typists, according to their various departments, all of
average tastes and appearance, it was some time before I noticed that those who were
in charge, who administrated or had to deal with agents or authors especially, were
in some way handicapped and vulnerable, either physically or in some other of their
circumstances. My awareness was gradual, because of the spontaneous sympathy these
colleagues of mine evoked. It was when I had begun to piece together the possible
motive for their having been appointed to their jobs in the first place, unconscious
though it might be, that I wondered what was ‘wrong’ with myself.

This process of increasing realization on my part took some months. Right away I could
be in no doubt that the office was run by agreeable people. Only, one way and another
one was obliged to feel sorry for them or embarrassed in their innocent company. It
was abundantly difficult to find fault, disagree or show any impatience with these
people. I didn’t try. But those who did try, outsiders for the most part
— printers, authors, binders, agents — seemed to place themselves in the
light of brutes, and probably felt themselves to be so.

Among the senior staff was a charming doctor of fifty who had been struck off the
rolls, an accountant with a thin, white face who had a dreadful stammer and who said
the most agreeable things when he did at last, word by word, form a sentence; my
fellow-editor was a sweet-natured, though vague, young woman, a vicar’s
daughter, her face frightfully marred all one side by a port-wine birth-mark. The
head of the production department, totally incompetent but very witty, had a duodenal
ulcer which he bore bravely, and limped from a war-wound. Ian Tooley’s
fellow-director and next-in-command was equally nice. We saw little of her. She
worked largely behind the scenes but when she made an appearance to deal with a
specially difficult problem or to arrange an important contract for a best-seller
with a high-powered agent, she was treated with hushed deference, tough
business-woman though she was; she was the daughter of a notorious mass-murderer of
the early ‘thirties; her father had been hanged; nobody could be tough with
her.

There was also, attached to the firm and often in evidence, a very small, raddled and
parchment-faced photographer who called himself Vladimir, a White Russian, who was
said to beat his mother. He had a small retainer fee from Mackintosh & Tooley,
and his job was to photograph authors in the most ‘interesting’ which is
to say unbecoming and grotesque aspects. Those foolish enough to sit for him were
reproduced on the book-jackets. The rejected photographs Vladimir sold to a
clandestine shop in Soho for a modest fee, so supplementing the pittance he derived
from Mackintosh & Tooley and a few other publishers who desired to take their
authors — always, to them, overweening — down a peg. Vladimir had an
unfortunate destiny; he died of leukemia three years later, in 1957, at which point
he turned out to be not Vladimir of White Russian princely origin, but Cyril Biggs
from Wandsworth. But in 1954 he flourished and was an obliging ally to Mackintosh
& Tooley. I think if there had existed a known descendant of Jack the Ripper they
would have taken him on. It was their way of doing business as surely as crippledom,
in the Far East, is still a profession and a way of life.

Ian Tooley himself was his own alibi. Vegetarian, graphologist and astrologist, he
would put all trouble and vexation down to the stars rising in a certain sign or a
phase of the moon. All ailments were caused by meat-eating, and these he held could
be cured by a combination of vegetable diet and radionics. This latter treatment was,
and still is, known as the Box. Ian Tooley possessed a Box and had trained his
secretary, the tall, charming Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight, to operate it. Ian
Tooley proclaimed her to be highly talented at Box-operating, or radionics as he
called it; and this, apart from her bringing in to him (but not making) a tray of
morning coffee and one of afternoon tea, was her entire job. As it happened, Abigail
didn’t believe in radionics. She thought the Box was a complete fake. She only
did this job because it was to her a merry, effortless occupation, a joke for which
she got paid.