‘I want to speak to her.’
‘Alas, that is not possible.’
In the end I went, having first bundled the autobiographies back into my clothes cupboard and locked it. Anyone who has read Warrender Chase will know what happened to those autobiographies during my absence. In fact, the possibility was already half in my mind that I was falling into the same trap as Marjorie in my novel when she was called away from Warrender’s papers on the pretext that the ancient Prudence needed her. But the very fact that it was half in my mind almost, to the other half of my mind, precluded the possibility that my suspicions cold be valid. It seemed quite unlikely that my own novel could be entering into my life to such an extent. I very often err by taking the side of rationality in my distrust of suspicions.
I reached Hallam Street within half an hour.
‘Miss Talbot,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘would you step into my study for a moment? Mummy has fortunately, most fortunately, dropped off to sleep. It would be such a pity to disturb her after all this, after all this …’
‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to stay.’
But he had me by the arm and was propelling me into the study. ‘Take off your coat, please do, Miss Talbot,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘There are just one or two small items we have to discuss.’
‘If you mean the files of your Association,’ I said, ‘I’ll discuss them when I’ve studied them better. So far as I can see you’ve plagiarized my novel Warrender Chase. I assure you that I’ll sue.’
‘Ah, your novel, your novel, I don’t know anything about that. I don’t wonder you’ve been unable to give your full attention to your job here with us when you’ve been scribbling novels at the same time. Delusions of grandeur.’
From the other end of the house came a crash and a shriek. ‘Fleur! Is that you, Fleur? Leave me alone, Tims you bitch. I want to see Fleur. I know she’s here. I know that Fleur’s in the house.’
Sir Quentin continued, ‘It is I who shall sue.’
I sat still, as if agreeing to ignore Edwina’s noise.
‘The question arises,’ I said, ‘why Bernice Gilbert took her life.’
‘It is I who shall—’
But I had leapt up and got out into the passage where Edwina was trying to rid herself of Beryl Tims’s restraint.
‘Fleur, how wonderful to see you, what a surprise,’ croaked Edwina. ‘Come along to my room.’
I shoved Beryl Tims out of the ways and followed Edwina. From the other end of the passage came Sir Quentin’s frail cry, ‘Mummy!’
Before I left Hallam Street that night I got my pay and my employment cards. I also got an envelope from Edwina which she cunningly drew out of her pillowcase and crammed into my coat-pocket, shrieking the while; so that Beryl Tims, who had gone into Edwina’s bathroom to get some water for Edwina to take with her sleeping pill, wasn’t aware of our transaction.
I promised Edwina I would drop in and see her again very soon. There was always some reason why I couldn’t break with Hallam Street once and for all. This put me in mind of those scenes in Warrender Chase where my character, the scholar Proudie, repeatedly comes across letters from Marjorie to Warrender making excuses for not being able to come to see him in the country, and yet obviously she has continued to do so right up to the time of Warrender’s death in the car crash. When Proudie asks Marjorie why she went back to the house continually, Marjorie says, ‘I wanted to break. But the Greek girl was helpless there. And Prudence, I had to see Prudence.’
I thought of this as I sat in the taxi going home. I remembered the opening scene of my novel, how the group of people are waiting for Warrender to join them. He is late. He doesn’t come. He has been killed in a car crash.
My thoughts went like this: Warrender Chase was killed in a car crash while everyone is assembled, waiting for him. Quentin Oliver’s destiny, if he wants to enact Warrender Chase, would be the same. It was a frightening thought but at the same time external to me, as if I were watching a play I had no power to stop. It then came to me again, there in the taxi, what a wonderful thing it was to be a woman and an artist in the twentieth century. It was almost as if Sir Quentin was unreal and I had merely invented him, Warrender Chase being a man, a real man on whom I had partly based Sir Quentin. It is true that I felt tight-strung, but I remember those sensations very clearly.
That Sir Quentin was real became obvious when I got back to my room. Nothing seemed amiss, it is true. I got the key of the cupboard out of my bag and opened it. Solly’s hold-all was in its place. I opened it and gazed into its emptiness, hypnotized by my predicted loss and the extent of my own folly in not having followed my instinct. The mouth of the bag gaped at me, ha-ha. It had been a professional job. There was no sign of a tampering with the lock of my door, no scratches of a bungling amateur on the cupboard. I had to wait till the morning to confirm with the house-boys that nobody to his knowledge had been to see me. No callers in the house at all? He replied with a lot of thunder, from which there flashed like sheet-lightning in my mind the simple fact that I knew already: a professional thief had been employed to come to the house, straight to the spot where I kept the biographies. The lays-out was known to Dottie, and plainly it was she who, unwittingly perhaps, had provided the information. That night, I looked for my Warrender Chase in a suitcase under the bed where I now kept it. In my anxious state I had forgotten that I had abstracted the original manuscript before I had gone out; I had put this under my pillow.
So that in the suitcase I found only the spare copy of the new transcript, the two others of which I had given to Solly. But where, where, were my foolscap manuscript pages? I searched my room for an hour and it wasn’t till I got into bed that I felt them under my pillow.
This brought to mind the envelope Edwina had thrust into my coat-pocket. I jumped out of bed, quite refreshed and strengthened by this exciting recollection; I’m one of those people who can quickly recover from physical exhaustion if they are in the least stimulated mentally. The blank and crumpled envelope contained some handwritten pages evidently torn out of a diary. They had been torn roughly, so that some of the words at the beginning of each line were partly missing and equally at the end of the lines on the reverse sides. It seemed to me that the handwriting was Sir Quentin’s and as I read the first page it was plain that the diary entries were his.
This is the document, which I’ve kept ever since in memory of marvellous Edwina:
26th April, 1950.
I have gained the confidence
Miss Talbot’s friend, Dorothy
ottie’, Mrs Carpenter, with
whose husband, Leslie, Miss Talbot
ad an affair.
‘Dottie’ has obtained for
the printed proofs of a novel
titled ‘Warrender Chase’ as an
xample of a morbid literary pro-
duction which in her (‘Dottie’s’)
pinion should be suppressed.
I have read this production
Miss Talbot’s inflamed and in-
ne imagination. That such an one
hould have entered my ken!!
The book is an attempted roman
à clef if ever there was one!
Query: Is Miss T. a mind-reader?
a medium?
?Evil
I turned over the page:
28th April, 1950
‘Dottie’ informed me that tw
Authors, Theodore Clairmont an
his wife Audrey (N.B. not list
in ‘Who’s Who’) have read the
so-called novel. They vehementl
disapprove of that same. I was
informed that the piece of wri
already in printers’ proof, is
be published by Messrs Park,
Revisson Doe, a minor but recogni-
establishment.
I have consequently made a
rendez-vous with a director of
firm,
Mr Revisson Doe himself.
(N.B. Nothing in ‘Burke’s’, ‘Haydn’,
etc. etc. Undistinguished entry in
‘Who’s Who’.)
Next page:
1st May, 1950.
As a result of my visit to the
emises of Park, Revisson Doe,
is afternoon, when I saw Mr
evisson Doe himself in his office
stressed the seriousness of the
bellous aspect of the novel so-
alled by Miss Fleur Talbot vis
vis my Autobiographical Asscn.
He promptly agreed to withdraw
the novel from publication. (The
heat of libel is never-failing
ith these people.) I judged Mr
e to be a sound business man but
f no family antecedents to speak
f.
He mentioned that ‘Dottie’ had
shown him some chapters of a novel
hich her husband is writing, quite
a tour de force, in which his past
elations with a young ambitious
emale were to those ‘in the know’,
idently an account of his doings
ith the redoubtable Fleur Talbot!!
1st May [contd]
He remarked that ‘Dottie’
was ‘a very pretty girl’. He
remarked that he used this phrase
‘as man to man’, which I appreci-
ated. I commented that I would do
my best to further his interest i
‘Dottie’ at which we enjoyed som
innocent laughter. I expressed m
gratitude for his co-operation and
assured him of mine.
Before I left Mr Doe offered
to ‘confirm in writing’ his under-
taking to scrap the contract for
the said ‘Warrender Chase’. I beg
him not to make any written record
of our tête à tête, assuring him tha
on my part any written record would
be merely a note assigned to a loc
drawer for seventy years. I proffered
this information true to my prince
of complete frankness.
2nd May, 1950
Pleasurable sensations: Early this
oring, walking in the Park I observ-
d a striped cat among the shrubbery,
orming as it were a pattern with the
pale light and the shadows of the wet
eaves. How nature is at one! I was
ellbound, rapt within a magic ring,
assive, receptive, all unknowing.
I thought in that moment ‘twere sweet
to die. My dearest, I would that we
could die together. Had I not my
Mission which I, and I alone, am subtly
illed to fulfil. But who are your
riends? Where are they?
Be not discomfited. I etc. etc.
Above letter to Bucks?
Yes, I have done it. And delivered
it!! But
Now what infuriated me more than anything in these scraps of Quentin Oliver’s diary was this last entry, 2nd May. It was straight out of Warrender Chase, where I make my character Proudie find the absurd letter to the Greek girl who thought it far from absurd.
When I had got over my fury at this raid on my Warrender Chase I put the diary papers back into their envelope and stuffed it down at the bottom of my handbag, determined never to part with it. To whatever use I might put the knowledge it conveyed, I felt relieved to know with precision what I had obscurely suspected. Also, I was highly amused at the thought of Sir Quentin’s discovery of the missing leaves of his diary. I was sure he would imagine I had hired a professional burglar. This amused me greatly and I fell asleep rejoicing.
Next morning I had an interview for a job at the B.B.C., which I didn’t get. I sat at a long board-room table with many men and women to ask me questions. But I didn’t have the required experience and, said the most elderly of the men, did I realize that the six pounds a week that I was asking was three hundred pounds a year? I said I thought it was three hundred and twelve. Anyway, I didn’t get the job. I certainly wasn’t looking my best. A little later on in my life, when my fortunes had changed and I was writing for the B.B.C., my new friends on the production side fell upon the official file in which that interview was duly recorded and we all made merry of it.
I typed out a fair copy of those leaves of Sir Quentin’s diary and took them along at tea-time to Hallam Street.
Undoubtedly he was a lunatic. I felt sure that was what Edwina had intended to convey by giving me those torn-out sheets.
‘Lady Edwina is asleep,’ said Beryl Tims. ‘But you needn’t bother to come and see her any more. There’s nothing in it for you. We’ve made a discovery, and do you know what that is? We’ve discovered that she has no money at all, not to leave to anybody. She bought an annuity and when she dies the money dies with her. She’s very, very, cunning, that’s the word. Sir Quentin has only just found out. Her fortune’s all a myth.’
I had known this for a long time, for one Sunday when I was wheeling Edwina out with Solly she told me, ‘I married for money.’
‘I consider that very immoral of you, Edwina,’ said Solly.
‘I don’t see why. My husband married me for money. We were a devoted couple. We had several things in common. One was expensive tastes and the other was no money.’
She had then rambled on about Quentin ‘coming as a surprise’ and ‘his own father, of course’ had provided for him and a little for Edwina. So that we were fairly in the air as to Quentin’s parentage, and we left Edwina’s story at that, all charming as it was and unspoiled by explanations.
‘Not a penny,’ the English Rose was saying, ‘beyond her annuity, which just covers her own keep and the nurse.’
Miss Fisher came out of the kitchen just then. ‘Good-afternoon, Fleur. Lady Edwina will be delighted to see you. She’s getting up for tea.’
I said I’d come in as soon as I’d seen Sir Quentin.
Mrs Tims said, ‘You want Sir Quentin? Well—’
I opened the study door and found him at his desk, staring into space.
‘Is your new secretary here?’ I said.
‘Why, Miss Talbot. I—She had to go home early.’ He waved me to a chair.
‘Read this,’ I said, putting the typed pages of his diary in front of him. I continued standing.
He looked at the first page and said, ‘Where did you get this?’
‘From your diary. I have the pages.
‘How did you get at my diary?’
‘I have professional help. The originals are locked in a bank vault. Maybe for seventy years, maybe not.’
He got up and started walking round the room, putting things straight. He stopped and looked at the other pages I had typed. He gave a laugh. ‘Why, that diary is a little joke of mine. There’s nothing serious in it.’
I said, ‘You will have to see a psychiatrist. That’s number one. Second, you must wind up the Autobiographical Association. If you don’t do both by the end of the month I shall make a fuss.’
‘Ah, but the members themselves will have something to say about that.’
I left him and went to see Edwina where she was propped up for tea in the drawing-room, wrapped in an Indian shawl. Sir Quentin came in with a leather-bound book in his hand, his diary. He was followed by Beryl Tims.
‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘I want you to know that your friend Miss Fleur Talbot is not our friend. She belongs to the underworld. She has arranged for a professional thief to enter this house and abstract some pages from my private diary. On her own admission. Miss Fisher, have you missed anything? Is Lady Edwina’s jewellery intact?’
Edwina stood up and wet the floor.
‘Miss Talbot, I must ask you to leave this house.’
‘No har
m in asking,’ said Edwina. ‘I pay the rent. Your home is in the country, Quentin.’
Miss Fisher came mopping up round Edwina who finally agreed to be taken back to her room to be tidied up. I waited for her return, helping myself to a sandwich, while Sir Quentin simply stared at me and Beryl Tims moved the plate of sandwiches out of my reach.
The door-bell rang and Beryl Tims went to answer it. ‘You are a fiend,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘Your enthusiasm for John Henry Cardinal Newman was pure hypocrisy. Did he not form under his influence a circle of devoted spiritual followers? Am I not entitled to do the same?’