Loitering With Intent (6 page)

I noticed by the correspondence that the four members who had not shown up at the meeting were already trying to wriggle out of it, and I too had decided that as soon as my vague uneasiness and my suspicions about Sir Quentin’s motives should crystallize into anything concrete I would simply leave.

The four retreating members were a pharmaceutical chemist in Bath who pleaded pressure of business, and the much-cherished and widely-connected Major-General Sir George Beverley who wrote in to say his memory was sadly failing, he couldn’t, alas, recall any-thing of the past at all; there was also a retired headmistress from Somerset who wrote first to explain that her activities at the Tennis Club unfortunately precluded her giving time to her memoirs as she had hoped, and then, when further coaxed by Sir Quentin, gave a further excuse that her arthritis prevented her from the constant use of her typewriter or from taking up her pen. The fourth member to withdraw was that friend of mine who had got me the interview for the job. Now that I was established in. the job I supposed she thought better of revealing her life-story to Sir Quentin since it would go through my hands. She wrote and told him that her biography was so interesting that she was going to write it with a view to publication; she also wrote to me on the same lines, begging me to sneak out the preliminary pages she had already given to Sir Quentin and post them back to her. Which I did. And Sir Quentin, I think, knew I had done this, for although he looked for my friend Mary’s three pages and failed to find them in their place, he didn’t ask me if I had done anything with them. I was quite ready to tell him I’d sent them back, but he merely looked at me with a smile and said, ‘Ah, well—interesting, were they not?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never read them.’ Which was true.

After some further cajoling letters from Sir Quentin to the four defectors, and ever more determined and, in a way, frightened replies from them, they got out of it. The chemist in Bath actually went so far as to get his solicitor to write to Sir Quentin firmly withdrawing from the Association. I sensed hysteria in the action of going to a solicitor when in fact the mere ignoring of Sir Quentin’s letters would have had the same effect.

Well, what I found common to the members of Sir Quentin’s remaining group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes. At the same time it is elementary wisdom always to fear weaknesses, including one’s own; the reactions of the weak, when touched off, can be horrible and sudden. All of which is to say that I thought Sir Quentin was up to something quite dangerous in his evident attempt to get that group of weak people under his dominion for some purpose I couldn’t yet make out. However, I confided all this tot Dottie before I brought her into the Autobiographical Association. I warned her not on any account to give herself away but to get some amusement if she could out of the proceedings. For I wanted some joys to enliven and transfigure those meetings and those writings, the solemn intensity of which was so vastly out of proportion to the subject-matter. However sinister the theme of my
Warrender Chase
which was then uppermost in my mind, no one can say it isn’t a spirited novel. But I think that ordinary readers would be astonished to know what troubles fell on my head because of the sinister side, and that is part of this story of mine; and that’s what I think makes it worth the telling.

Dottie immediately set about making friends at the Autobiographical Association. She easily entered into the spirit of nostalgia; she felt herself persecuted and she had a great longing to be loved. I was alarmed at her sincerity and inability to detach herself from the situations of the others. I warned her, I kept on warning her that I suspected Sir Quentin was up to no good. Dottie said, ‘Have you planted me in that group for your own ends?’

‘Yes. And I thought it might amuse you. Don’t get dragged into it. Those people are infantile, and every days becoming more so.’

‘I shall pray for you,’ said Dottie, ‘to Our Lady of Fatima.’

‘Your
Lady of Fatima,’ I said. Because, although I was a believer, I felt very strongly that Dottie’s concept of religion was of necessity different from mine, in the same way that, years later when she made dramatic announcements that she had lost her faith, I was rather relieved since I had always uneasily felt that if her faith was true then mine was false.

But now in my room after returning with me after a meeting at Sir Quentin’s, Dottie said, ‘You planted me. I’ll pray for you.’

‘Pray for the members of the Autobiographical Association,’ I said.

I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she didn’t really like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them. Life on the intellectual fringe in
1949
was a universe by itself. It was something like life in Eastern Europe to-day.

We were sitting talking over the meeting. It was already late November. I had argued with Dottie all the way home, on the bus and standing with her in a queue at a food shop which ran out of stock of whatever it was Dottie had her eye on while the queue was still forming, and we the tenth; and anyway, it was closing time so that the brown-aproned grocer shut his doors with a click of the bolt and we plodded away.

The Autobiographical Association had taken her mind off Leslie. Neither of us had seen him for over three weeks. I had decided to finish with him as a lover, which was easy for me although I missed his face and his talk. Dottie was infuriated by my indifference, she desired so much that I should be in love with Leslie and not have him, and she felt I was cheapening her goods.

That afternoon was the third time I had attended a meeting of Quentin’s autobiographers since I had been at the job. So far Dottie had produced no biographical writing of her own for the others to see. She had in fact written a long confessional piece about Leslie and his young poet and her consequent sufferings. I had torn it up, violently warning her against making any such true revelation. ‘Why? ‘ said Dottie.

I couldn’t tell her why. I didn’t know why. I said I would be able to explain when I had written a few more chapters of my novel
Warrender Chase.

‘What has that got to do with it?’ Dottie reasonably said.

‘It’s the only way I can come to a conclusion about what’s going on at Sir Quentin’s. I have to work it out through my own creativity. You have to follow my instinct, Dottie. I warned you not to give yourself away.’

‘But I like those people and Beryl Tims is so sweet. Sir Quentin’s odd, but he’s very reassuring, isn’t he? Like a priest I once knew as a girl when I was at school with the nuns. And I’m sorry for him with that dreadful old mother. He has real goodness …’

I sat with Dottie in my room trying to muddle my way into clarity. Whereas Dottie, with perfect clarity, was arguing a case for her own complete involvement, and I sensed trouble, either for her or from her.

‘If you feel as you do,’ Dottie said, ‘you should leave the job.’

‘But I’m involved. I have to know what’s going on. I sense a racket.’

‘But you don’t want me to be involved,’ she said.

‘No, it’s dangerous. I wouldn’t, myself, dream of getting involved with—’

‘First you say you’re involved. Next you say you wouldn’t dream of getting involved. The truth is,’ said Dottie, ‘that you resent me getting on so well with everybody, Sir Quentin and the members and Beryl.’

She did get on well with everybody. That afternoon all of the remaining members had turned up, including Dottie, seven in all.

Mrs Tims had immediately cornered Dottie to enquire in low tones, there in the entrance hall, if she had heard from her husband. Dottie murmured something with a soulful look. I was busy with the arrival of Maisie Young, sportily managing with her bad leg, and nervous Father Egbert Delaney, but I had heard Beryl Tims exclaim from time to time in the course of Dottie’s confidences, phrases such as, ‘The swine!’, ‘It’s an abomination. They ought tot be put on an island.’ I tried tot get Dottie out of this but she was in no mind to follow me into the study until she had finished her chat with Beryl Tims. I had to abandon the two English Roses and be about my business.

During the past seven weeks the members who had remained faithful to the Association had seen some alarming changes made to their biographies. There was a certain day, late in October, when Sir Quentin told me, ‘I think your amusing elaborations of our friends’ histories have so far been perfectly adequate, Miss Talbot, but the time has come for me to take over. I see that I must. It’s a moral question.’

I didn’t object, but I had always found that people who said, ‘It’s a moral question’ in that precise, pursed way that Sir Quentin said it were out to justify themselves, and were generally up to no good. ‘You see,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘they are being very frank, most of them, very frank indeed, but they have no sense of guilt. In my opinion …’

I had stopped listening. It was only a job. In many ways I was glad to be rid of the task of applying my inventiveness to livening up these dreary biographies.

With the exception of Maisie Young who was still producing a quantity of material about the Beyond and the Oneness of life, they had started drafting out their first amorous adventures, egged on by Sir Quentin. I wouldn’t have called them frank, as Sir Quentin rather too often did. All that had been achieved so far was Mrs Wilks having had her blouse ripped open by a soldier before her escape from Russia in 1917; Baronne Clotilde had been caught in bed with her music tutor in the charming French chateau near Dijon; Father Egbert Delaney, he who had taken up his pen with some trepidation, had continued with the same trepidation for many pages to delineate the experience of impure thoughts the first time he had heard a confession; Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert had effected a flashback to her teens, devoting a long chapter to her lesbian adventure with the captain of the hockey team, to which many descriptions of sunsets in the Cotswold hills lent atmosphere. With timid Sir Eric, it was a prep-school affair with another boy, the only interesting part of this adventure being that, while doing whatever he had unspecifically done with the other boy, young Eric’s mind had dwelt all the time on an actress who had come to stay with his parents the last half-term.

Sir Quentin called these offerings ‘frank’, with a most definite emphasis, and it bored me. ‘It’s time for me to take over. It’s a moral question,’ he said.

‘I wish you hadn’t torn up my piece,’ Dottie said as she sat with me in my room that late November evening. ‘It made me feel awful having nothing to offer.’

‘You seemed tot have offered the whole story to Beryl Tims,’ I said.

‘One has to confide in Someone. She’s a real friend. I think it’s a scandal the ways she has tot run around after that revolting old woman.’

In the past few weeks a nurse had been employed to take care of Lady Edwina. This nurse was a quiet woman, much despised by Beryl Tims. Certainly, Edwina was now no burden on Mrs Tims and the old lady was wilder and funnier than ever. I really loved her. At the latest meeting of the Autobiographical Association, which I was now chewing over with Dottie, Edwina had made her appearance with the tea, dressed in pale grey velvet with long and many strings of pearls. Her rouged wrinkles and smudgy mascara were wonderful to behold. She had behaved with expressive graciousness and was continent: only when it was time to withdraw and the nurse tiptoed bashfully into the room to fetch her, Edwina had given vent to one of her long cackles followed by, ‘Well, my dears, he’s got you where he wants you, hasn’t he? Ha! Trust my son Quentin.’ The bony index finger of her right hand pointed to Maisie Young. ‘Except you. He hasn’t started on you, yet.’ Maisie’s eyes were hypnotized by the long red fingernail pointed at her.

‘Mummy!’ said Quentin.

I had looked over to Dottie. She was murmuring with Beryl Tims, nodding wisely, very sympathetically.

I didn’t reply to Dottie when, sitting sulkily that night in my room, she continued to emphasize how sorry she felt for Beryl Tims and how strongly she felt that Edwina should be sent to a home. It seemed to me Dottie was trying to provoke me. I could see Dottie was tired. For some reason I seldom remember feeling tired, myself, in those days; I suppose I must have felt exhausted at times for I got through an amazing variety and number of things in the course of every days; but 1 simply can’t recall any occasion of weariness such as I could see in Dottie at that moment.

I made tea and I offered to read her a bit of my
Warrender Chase.
I did this for my own sake as much as to entertain, and, in a way, flatter her; for my own sake, though, because I intended to write some more pages of the book after Dottie went home, and this reading it over was a sort of preparation.

Now I had come to the bit where Warrender’s nephew Roland and his wife Marjorie have decided to start going over Warrender’s papers in preparation for Proudie, since Prudence, Warrender’s ancient mother, has appointed the scholar Proudie to deal with them. This is three weeks after the quiet country funeral for the family, which I described in detail. Dottie had already heard the funeral bit which she said was ‘far too cold’, but that hadn’t bothered me; in fact I felt her criticism was a rather good sign. ‘You haven’t brought home the tragedy of Warrender’s death,’ Dottie had said. Which hadn’t bothered me, either. Anyway, this was the new chapter which is written from Roland’s point of view. Which was that his uncle, Warrender Chase, had been a great man tragically cut off in his prime; it has been abundantly acknowledged, it is a public commonplace. He has successfully established his importance.

The family, secretly enjoying their stricken status, are counting on Roland and Marjorie to do their job conscientiously, to go through his papers with Proudie and eventually produce a
Life and Letters
or a memorial of some sort for Warrender Chase; whatever they do, even if it takes years, can’t help but be interesting. The task naturally saddens Roland, who leafs through the dead man’s papers. Warrender Chase, so vital a few weeks ago, and now so absolutely gone. Roland is sad, a bit unnerved. Why then has Marjorie, hitherto a rather neurotic and droopy woman of thirty, begun to perk up? Her new bloom and spirits have been increasingly noticeable day by days since the funeral. Proudie is very well aware of Marjorie’s new happiness.