Loitering With Intent (7 page)

The above is of course a rough reminder. But when I read it to Dottie that evening in my bed-sitting-room I could see she wasn’t liking it. I will quote the actual bit she finally objected to:

‘Marjorie,’ said Roland, ‘is there anything the matter with you?’

‘No, nothing at all.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said.

‘You seem to accuse me,’ she said, ‘of being all right.’

‘Well, I do, in a way. Warrender’s death doesn’t seem to have affected you.’

‘It’s affected her beautifully,’ said Proudie.

(I changed ‘beautifully’ to ‘very well’ before sending the book to the publisher. I had probably been reading too much Henry James at that time, and ‘beautifully’ was much too much.)

It was at this point Dottie said, ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at. Is Warrender Chase a hero or is he not?’

‘He is,’ I said.

‘Then Marjorie is evil.’

‘How can you say that? Marjorie is fiction, she doesn’t exist.’

‘Marjorie is a personification of evil.’

‘What is a personification?’ I said. ‘Marjorie is only words.’

‘Readers like to know where they stand,’ Dottie said. ‘And in this novel they don’t. Marjorie seems to be dancing on Warrender’s grave.’

Dottie was no fool. I knew I wasn’t helping the readers to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think. At the same time Dottie had given me the idea for that scene, towards the end of the book, where Marjorie dances on Warrender’s grave.

‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’

I was really annoyed by this. To show her I was a woman I tore up the pages of my novel and stuffed them into the wastepaper basket, burst out crying and threw her out, roughly and noisily, so that Mr Alexander looked over the banisters and complained. ‘Get out,’ I yelled at Dottie. ‘You and your husband between you have ruined my literary work.’

After that I went to bed. Flooded with peace, I fell asleep.

Next morning, after I had fished my torn pages of
Warrender Chase
out of the wastepaper basket and glued them together again, I went off to work, stopping on the way at the Kensington Public Library to get a copy of John Henry Newman’s
Apologia,
which I had long promised to Maisie Young. She could quite well have procured it for herself during all those weeks, disabled though she was, but she belonged to that category of society, by no means always the least educated, who are always asking how they can get hold of a book; they know very well that one buys shoes from a shoe-shop and groceries from the grocer’s, but to find and enter a bookshop is not somehow within the range of their imagination.

However, I felt kindly towards Maisie and I thought the sublime pages of Newman’s autobiography would tether her mind to the sweet world of living people, in a spiritual context though it was. Maisie needed tethering.

I found the book on the library shelves and, while I was there in that section, I lit on another book I hadn’t seen for years. It was the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. It was like meeting an old friend. I borrowed both books and went on my way rejoicing.

I began to take Edwina out for Sunday afternoons towards the end of November. It solved the problem of what to do with her when the nurse wasn’t on duty and Mrs Tims was off to the country with Sir Quentin. It suited me quite well because in the first place I liked her and secondly she fitted in so easily with my life. If the weather was fine I would fetch her in a taxi and then set her up in her folding wheel-chair for a walk along the edges of Hampstead Heath with a friend of mine, my dear Solly Mendelssohn, and afterwards we would go to a tea-shop or tot his flat for tea. Solly was a journalist on a newspaper, always on night duty, so that I rarely saw him except in daylight hours.

There was nothing one couldn’t discuss in front of Edwina; she was delighted with all we did and said, which was just as well, because Solly in his hours of confiding relaxation liked to curse and swear about certain aspects of life, although he had the sweetest of natures, the most generous possible heart. At first, in deference to the very aged Lady Edwina, Sollys was cautious but he soon sized her up. ‘You’re a sport, Edwina,’ he said.

Solly had a limp which he had won during the war; our progress was slow and we stopped in our tracks frequently, when the need to rest from our push-chair efforts somehow neatly combined with a point in our conversation that needed the emphasis of a physical pause, as when I told him that Dottie continued to complain about my
Warrender Chase
and consequently I was sorry I had ever started reading it to her.

‘You want your brains examined,’ said Solly, limping along. He was a man of huge bulk with a great Semitic head, a sculptor’s joy. He stopped to say, ‘You want your head examined to take notice of that silly bitch.’ Then he took his part of Edwina’s pram-handle, and off we trundled again.

I said, ‘Dottie’s sort of the general reader in my mind.’

‘Fuck the general reader,’ Solly said, ‘because in fact the general reader doesn’t exist.’

‘That’s what I say,’ Edwina yelled. ‘Just fuck the general reader. No such person.’

I liked to be lucid. So long as Dottie took in what I wrote I didn’t care whether she disapproved or not. She would pronounce all the English Rose verdicts, and we often had rows, but of course she was a friend and always came back to hear more. I had been reading my book to Edwina and to Solly as well. ‘I remember,’ said Edwina in her cackling voice, ‘how I laughed and laughed over that scene of the memorial service for Warrender Chase that the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers put on for him.’

Several people turned round to look at Edwina as she spoke with her high cry. People often turned round to stare at her painted wizened face, her green teeth, the raised, blood-red fingernail accompanied by her shrieking voice, the whole wrapped up to the neck in luxurious fur. Edwina was over ninety and might die any time, as she did about six years later. My dear, dear Solly lived into the seventies of this century, when I was far away. He started during his last illness to send me some of the books from his library that he knew I would especially like.

One of these books, which took me back over the years to wintry Hampstead Heath, was a rare edition of John Henry Newman’s
Apologia pro Vita Sua
and another was a green-and-gold-bound edition, in Italian, of my beloved Benvenuto Cellini’s
La Vita.

Questa mia Vita travagliata io scrivo
…

I remember Solly at his sweetest during those walks at Hampstead, with our Edwina always ready to support the general drama of our lives, crowing like a Greek chorus as we discussed this and that. I had not yet finished
Warrender Chase,
but Solly had found for me a somewhat run-down publisher with headquarters in a Warehouse at Wapping who on the strength of the first two chapters was prepared to contract for it, on a down payment to me of ten pounds. I recall discussing the contract with Solly on one of our walks. It was a dry, windy day. We stopped while Solly scrutinized the one-page document. It fluttered in his hand. He gave it back to me. ‘Tell him to wipe his arse with it,’ said Solly. ‘Don’t sign.’ ‘Yes, oh yes, oh yes,’ screamed Edwina. ‘Just tell that publisher to wipe his arse with that contract.’

I wasn’t at all attracted tot obscenities, but the combination of circumstances, something about the Heath, the weather, the wheel-chair, and also Solly and Edwina themselves in their own essence, made all this sound to me very poetic, it made me very happy. We wheeled Edwina into a tea-shop where she poured tea and conversed in a most polite and grand manner.

This, about the middle of December 1949. I had sat up many nights working on
Warrender Chase
and already had a theme for another novel at the back of my mind. I was longing to have enough money to be able to leave my job, but until I could get enough money from a publisher there was no possibility of that.

And here comes a further point. My job at Sir Quentin’s held my curiosity. What went on there could very well have continued to influence my
Warrender Chase
but it didn’t. Rather, it was not until I had finished writing the book in January 1950 that I got some light on what Sir Quentin was up to.

It was the end of January 1950 that I began to notice a deterioration in all the members of the Association.

I had been down with ‘flu and away from work for two weeks. Just after the New Year Dottie had fallen ill with ‘flu and I had spent most of my evenings with her in her flat, feeling fatalistically that I would catch her ‘flu. I’m not sure that I didn’t want to. During those first weeks of January when I went to Dottie’s every night with the bits of shopping and things that she needed, Leslie often came round. He was no longer living with Dottie, having moved in with his poet. But something about the ‘flu made Dottie very much more relaxed. She was less of the English Rose. She refrained from telling Leslie that she was praying for him. It is true she had some relics of her childhood, a teddy-bear, some dolls and a gollywog in bed with her, all lying along Leslie’s side of the bed. She had always draped these toys on top of her bed, along the counterpane. I knew that they had got on Leslie’s nerves but now that she was ill I suppose he felt indulgent, for he sometimes brought her flowers. There were no recriminations between us and we merrily skated on thick ice, while I privately wondered what I had ever seen in Leslie, he seemed so to have lost his good looks, at least in a virile sense. However, we were happy.

Dottie even managed to laugh at some of my stories about Sir Quentin although at heart she was taking that Autobiographical Association very seriously.

Now that it was my turn to be ill I lay in bed all day with my high temperature, writing and writing my
Warrender Chase.
This ‘flu was a wonderful opportunity to get the book finished. I worked till my hand was tired and until Dottie showed up at six in the evening with a vacuum flask of soup or some rashers of bacon which she fried on my gas ring, cutting them up kindly into little bits for me to swallow for my health’s sake. She had got thinner from her own ‘flu and wisps of her hair fell down from its handsome upward twist so that she looked less English Rose for the time being. She had been to Sir Quentin’s to give a helping hand in my absence.

‘Dottie,’ I said, ‘you simply mustn’t take that man seriously.’.

‘Beryl Tims is in love with him,’ she said.

‘Oh, God,’ I said.

I had just that day been writing the chapter in my
Warrender Chase
where the letters of my character Charlotte prove that she was so far gone in love with him that she was willing to pervert her own sound instincts, or rather forget that she had those instincts, in order to win Warrender’s approval and retain a little of his attention. My character Charlotte, my fictional English Rose, was later considered to be one of my more shocking portrayals. What did I care? I conceived her in those feverish days and nights of my bout of ‘flu, which touched on pleurisy, and I never regretted the creation of Charlotte. I wasn’t writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them. I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. I am sparing no relevant facts.

Now I treated the story of Warrender Chase with a light and heartless hand, as is my way when I have to give a perfectly serious account of things. No matter what is described it seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with a pen and paper or before a typewriter. I enjoyed myself with Warrender’s mother, Prudence, and her sepulchral sayings: and I made her hand over the documents to the American scholar, Proudie, whom she thought so comical. I did it scene by scene: Marjorie’s obvious release from some terrible anxiety after Warrender’s death and the consequent disapproval of her husband, Roland, with his little round face and his adoration of his dead uncle; then came the discovery of those letters and those notes left by Warrender Chase, pieced together throughout the book, which finally show with certainty what I had prepared the reader slowly to suspect. Warrender Chase was privately a sado-puritan who for a kind of hobby had gathered together a group of people specially selected for their weakness and folly, and in whom he carefully planted and nourished a sense of terrible and unreal guilt. As I wrote in the book, ‘Warrender’s private prayer-meetings were of course known about, but only to the extent that they were considered too delicate a matter to be publicly discussed. Warrender had cultivated such a lofty myth of himself that nobody could pry into his life for fear of appearing vulgar.’ Well, he was supposed to be a mystic, known to be a pillar of the High Church of England; he made speeches at the universities, wrote letters to
The Times.
God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

I know only that the night I started writing
Warrender Chase
I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper. I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day. I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table. One of them said, ‘There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.’

It was all I needed. That was the start of
Warrender Chase,
the first chapter. All the rest sprang from that phrase.