A Far Cry From Kensington

  ‘I’m afraid, Miss Loy —’

  ‘Call me Emma, for goodness sake.’

  ‘I can’t be of much help to anyone at the present time.’

  ‘But, Mrs Hawkins, you are a tower of strength, I say it in quotes of course.’

  ‘What’s the problem, Emma,’ I said.

  ‘Well, could we meet and talk?’

  ‘Do you know of a job for me?’ I said. ‘A job in publishing?’

  ‘Mrs Hawkins, I think you’ve misunderstood the situation. I honestly didn’t want you to leave Mac’n Tooley. On the other hand, believe me, my dear, between ourselves, you’re well out of it. Will you lunch with me at the Ivy?’

  ‘To-day?’

  ‘To-day.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, can’t you?’

  ‘No, I’m lunching with my boyfriend.’

  This was true. I had a date with William at the ABC in Old Brompton Road.

  ‘Mrs Hawkins,’ said Emma, ‘I understand your state of mind. I’m not a novelist for nothing. If you would only let me explain. I myself am in great difficulties. And I personally would greatly appreciate your giving me an hour, a half-hour, of your time which I genuinely appreciate is very …’

  I agreed to meet her at six at Grosvenor House in Park Lane. It is useless to conceal the fact that I looked forward to the meeting with the usual excitement that Emma managed universally to invoke. Although many people deplored her I never met anyone who would willingly miss a date with her.

  I had no sooner put down the phone but Wanda came down the stairs. ‘Who was that, Mrs Hawkins?’

  ‘A friend of mine.’ I think my voice was harsh. Certainly I was afraid of psychic contagion. Wanda was no longer as she used to be, amiably receiving her ladies, those clients who used to call for fittings or with alterations to be done. It seemed to me there were very few customers for Wanda these days.

  ‘You spoke to Father Stanislas. I heard you.’

  My fear was irrational but strong. I must have appeared guilty; probably I backed away from her.

  ‘No, Wanda. You need to see a doctor.’

  ‘What! You have talked to my enemies that say I am mad. You plot. All in this house are plotting to take me away by a doctor.’

  ‘Why don’t you see Father Stanislas first?’

  She ran upstairs to her room, wailing.

  I sat with William in the ABC while he ate his sandwich and the spare half of mine. I was absolutely at ease with William, and always have been.

  ‘Wanda’s in a bad way again this morning,’ I said. ‘She thinks we are all plotting against her.’

  ‘With the result’, said William, ‘that we’ll have to sort of plot against her. At least she ‘should see a doctor.’

  ‘Or a priest. There’s a Father Stanislas, one of the Polish community.’

  ‘Get him to come and see her,’ said William, ‘and then forget her. You take on too much. Leave something for the specialists.’

  ‘I’d like to make some arrangement for Wanda before Milly comes home. I’m thinking of Milly,’ I said.

  ‘We should do something about ourselves before Milly returns,’ said William.

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Take a flat. A small flat, and share.’

  It seemed to me the clear and obvious thing to do, so evident that I was surprised there were no complications. I was accustomed to obstacles. I said, ‘Aren’t we being a bit precipitate?’

  ‘Nancy, do you think so, yourself?’

  ‘Not if I find a job.’

  ‘Then look for a flat. Fairly quiet for my studies. You’re a capable woman, Mrs Hawkins.’

  ‘I’m getting a bit tired of being capable.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t take on unnecessary responsibilities, and simply abandon anything you’ve taken on, except me. That’s my advice. You’re looking lovely.’

  ‘I went to the hairdresser,’ I said.

  That afternoon I went to Brompton Oratory, and after many enquiries which involved waiting about and being passed from hand to hand, priest to priest, I finally obtained a telephone number for Father Stanislas. Something about this search wore me out so much that I couldn’t make the last effort to ring him up. I remembered a story I was told by a man who was invited to dinner in a provincial city at the home of a girl he was in love with, a nervously important occasion for him. It was a rainy night. He couldn’t find the house, having first mistaken Aldington Way for Aldington Gardens, then having tried ‘Street’, ‘Avenue’, ‘Crescent’ and ‘Terrace’, up and down both ways; finally, after stopping people to enquire, and being misdirected, looking into fruit and tobacconist shops with his problem, and tramping around, he approached 10A Aldington Way, which he knew was certainly the right house at last, with the name on the door and the light on behind the curtains. But he didn’t ring the doorbell. He walked away and on, past the house, and never saw the girl again.

  With me, too, the last lap was just too much. With Father Stanislas’s number on a slip of paper in my handbag, I made my way early to Grosvenor House. I spent some time making myself presentable in the ladies’ room, then came out to await Emma Loy.

  Grosvenor House was not my idea of the best place for a serious talk. There were too many smart and scented people about, girls and women with furs and A-line dresses or black box-coats and skirts, men too carefully dressed, some with over-padded shoulders, obvious spivs, as we then called the post-war crooks. In that ambience of spivs and their molls, one elderly couple, newly arrived with their battered leather bags from the country, wearing their shapeless country things with raincoats over their arms, looked furtively around, totally bewildered by this brave new world. The porters ushered them out of sight as Emma Loy appeared, handsome in her swinging fur coat, her smart grey dress and pearls.

  ‘Mrs Hawkins, how nice you look with your hair done like that. And you’ve lost weight, it suits you.’

  ‘You look nice, too.’

  We ordered gins and tonic. ‘What amazing people,’ said Emma, looking round. She had been quick to see that her choice of meeting-place was a mistake. ‘I think we should have met somewhere quieter.’

  ‘But the scene is amusing,’ I said. ‘Quite new to me.’

  ‘And to me,’ she said. ‘I suppose, as a novelist, I should welcome any experience. Of course, a novelist doesn’t really have to undergo every experience, a glimpse is enough.’

  I felt, almost, as if it was I, not she, who had chosen the place. But she, quick to thought-read, added, ‘I should have picked a more suitable spot. But let’s make the best of it.’

  Our drinks were served, and Emma nibbled a peanut. Then she said, ‘Mrs Hawkins, why do you hate Hector Bartlett?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’s got nothing to do with me. I’ve got nothing to do with him. I’m out of publishing, now. He only wants to use people.’

  ‘Now, if it’s a job in publishing you want, you can, I think, count on me. Not right away of course, but eventually. I want to talk about Hector. He’s very, very hurt by you, Mrs Hawkins. I think it all began one morning last summer …’ said the novelist,’ and he met you in the park on the way to your office. Hector was delighted. It was a lovely day in the park, Green Park, I think, or St James’s, one or the other… He admired you so much, caring as you do for everybody. Then suddenly, without warning you turned on him with that deadly appellation.’ Emma lowered her voice: ‘Pisseur de copie. Do you know what that means to a writer, how it affects him? Look at it from the human point of view.’

  I was fascinated by her rhetoric. It was a new side of Emma Loy. She was saying things she wouldn’t dream of writing or putting her name to. Her tone was not that usually associated with Emma Loy. This meaningless coinage, Took at it from a human point of view’, as if I were another species, must either be put on for my benefit, in which case she had miscalculated my intelligence, or she herself was under some emotional strain; and I had n
oticed before, once or twice in my job, that the most intelligent and sophisticated of writers are often banal and incoherent under an emotional pressure of real life. I decided to sip my gin and tonic and let her continue.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving next week for the United States where I’ll stay for some time, I think. My books are doing rather well over there. And before I leave, I do want to make things all right between Hector and you. How can I go away with an easy mind if you put it about every time you get a job in publishing that he’s a (lowered voice) pisseur de copie? It’s a very hurtful term. And it’s not at all like you, Mrs Hawkins.’

  I was myself putting on an air while Emma Loy was speaking; it suggested that I was only partly attending to what she was saying. I was assisted by the fact that a more elegant clientèle had begun to replace the lurid six-o’clock set. People were arriving in evening dress in small groups, young and middle-aged, mainly handsome, all very happy.

  I turned my gaze from the passing scene to Emma Loy, and I said, ‘Any better phrase that you can honestly suggest might apply, I’ll be willing to give it careful consideration.’

  ‘Aren’t you being rather hard?’

  ‘You must be relieved to be getting rid of him, Miss Loy.’

  ‘Please call me Emma. I know that you stick to Mrs Hawkins and it suits you. It’s a matter of your own preferences. I don’t at all want to get rid of Hector. In fact I shall miss him very much while I’m in America. Do you realize how dedicated he is to my work? He knows all my works by heart. He can quote chapter and verse, any of my novels. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Does he quote it right?’

  ‘No. He generally gets it wrong, I’ll admit. But his dedication to me is there. But that’s by the way. I was hoping to appeal to you on a personal level.’

  ‘What a marvellous colour, that orange chiffon dress, see, on that girl over there,’ I said.

  Emma had to admit it was a glorious colour. She let a silence fall for a moment.

  Then, ‘Hate can turn to love,’ she said.

  I gave this a moment’s thought. ‘Maybe on the Continent,’ I said, ‘or Latin America. But you know very well, Miss Loy, that here in England love and hate are two entirely different things. They are not even opposites. According to my outlook, love comes in the first place from the heart and hate arises basically from principle.’

  ‘You’re being very insular,’ she said. But I think, from her tone, she realized at this point that her mode of argument had been badly chosen. Anyway, I said, no doubt I was insular, not surprising since I had been born and brought up on an island. Then I looked round at the evening-dress scene. I’m dazzled by all this, I must say,’ I said; and I started to gather up my bag and gloves as if to go.

  ‘We’re getting away from the point,’ said Emma. ‘You know, Mrs Hawkins, time goes on, and you must think of your future. You don’t want to be a lonely woman all your life.’

  I sat back again in my chair and told her that she had no hope whatsoever of getting rid of Hector Bartlett on to me. ‘And if he ever comes my way again, should I get another job as an editor, I’ll still put him down as a pisseur de copie.’

  ‘It’s slanderous, he could sue,’ said Emma.

  ‘Let him sue. It’s fair comment.’

  ‘Well he’s bound to come your way again, not necessarily in publishing. You know, I only want to see Hector settled before I leave for the US. And I’m surprised if you mean to imply that you haven’t seen him around. He spends a lot of time with that woman in your house at Church End Villas. You must have seen him come and go, and know what’s going on.’

  In fact, I didn’t spend so very much time in the house. I was out all day, and if I wasn’t out in the evening I would mostly be in my top-floor room or in the kitchen with Milly. I imagined Emma was referring to Isobel’s past relations with Hector Bartlett, but I doubted she had entertained him in her room. The only comings and goings in the house had been people visiting Wanda, although lately she had fewer visitors; they no longer crowded the landing outside the room, waiting while she made her fittings. I hadn’t noticed any comings and goings at all for Isobel. She obviously carried on her affairs elsewhere.

  ‘No,’ I said to Emma. ‘The girl only knows him casually.’

  ‘What girl?’ said Emma in a way that made me cautious.

  ‘A girl who lives in the house. She knows Hector Bartlett, but it’s only a casual friendship.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the one who’s expecting a baby and wants to pin it on to Hector?’

  ‘To my knowledge, she doesn’t want to pin it on to anyone, especially not him.’

  ‘That’s not how I heard it, really, Mrs Hawkins.’

  ‘God knows what you’ve heard, Miss Loy. I don’t think it’s our business, anyway.’

  ‘But I wasn’t discussing the girl,’ said Emma.

  ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It’s a woman he met last spring. He met her through the girl, that’s true. He obtained a dinner suit second-hand, poor fellow, for some occasion and had to have it altered. The woman is a dressmaker, don’t tell me you don’t know. As a novelist, I find the story enthralling, of course, Mrs Hawkins. There are no end of subtleties and interpretations involved.’

  I could see Emma Loy was genuinely enthusiastic about the story element. I could never resist feeling flattered when she spoke to me ‘as a novelist’, for she usually reserved that side of herself for other writers on her own level, or those hand-picked interviewers whom she occasionally agreed to talk to.

  ‘The possibilities are numerous and extremely fascinating,’ mused Emma, it’s been going on since last spring.’

  ‘You must mean Wanda Podolak,’ I said. ‘I had no idea she knew Hector Bartlett.’ I gathered up my gloves again. ‘Well, I wish her well of him, whatever the subtle possibilities. I hardly think he has much to do with Wanda. She’s a poor woman, not very strong. And I don’t think he would take up with anyone, far less a poor dressmaker, who couldn’t be of the slightest use to him.’

  I now had it fixed in my thoughts that Emma was somehow trying to make me jealous, and was obscurely promoting the desirability of Hector Bartlett. Emma wanted to get rid of him.

  ‘Must you really go? We could go somewhere nice for a bite,’ said Emma.

  I thanked her but said I had to go. On the way to the door Emma said, ‘I haven’t really explained the whole situation. You must think I’m being very mysterious.’

  ‘You want to get rid of Hector Bartlett on to me,’ I said.

  ‘Not necessarily on to you,’ she said. ‘But it would be a solution. You have to stop using that nomenclature.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘Can I drop you in a taxi?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m going to walk.’

  Out in the street, Emma said, ‘Hector has been taking the most absurd steps to stop you calling him that name and to win your approval. If you, Mrs Hawkins, want to obtain a job in publishing, and what’s more keep the job —’

  ‘Hector Bartlett,’ I said, ‘is a pisseur de copie.’ It did me good to repeat the phrase; I enjoyed it. Emma looked at me with a smile that suggested she understood just that.

  A taxi drew up full of people. Before Emma went to claim it I said, ‘Why don’t you give him money to keep away?’

  ‘He’d use it to follow me to America. That’s always what people do when you give them money to keep away. They use it contrary to your wishes,’ said Emma Loy.

  It was well after seven o’clock. Park Lane was full of traffic and people. It had started to rain but there were long bus-queues and I decided it was better to walk and get wet than stand waiting for a bus with its steamy and stuffy interior. What I wondered most on my way home along Park Lane, Knightsbridge, Brompton Road, was how I had never seen Hector Bartlett in the house, at the door, on the stairs, on the landing, and if it was true that he spent a lot of time with Wanda. I was sure Emma had exaggerated
; he probably knew poor Wanda casually, and all her cryptic talk and her warnings were simply geared to a wild idea of making Hector’s life easier so that she could rid herself of him and his demands, and his knowing her books by heart, and the embarrassments which surely arose when he constituted himself her literary spokesman, as he was already inclined to do.

  It was not till over twenty years later that the Pisseur started writing his malicious pieces about Emma, and thirty years later that he published his memoirs in which Emma featured in what would have been a sensational light, had his book been capable of attracting any great attention. His fictions about his life with Emma were by then well known; and at that later date she ignored it as she had ignored the Pisseur, to his rage all those years, starting about or perhaps before the time when she sat with me at Grosvenor House, trying to get rid of him. Certainly, it seems to me that she already had a fear, a premonition, of the dangers of knowing him.

  Splashing home, all wet, in the rain, I thought possibly Hector Bartlett had only seen Wanda once, to get an alteration done. But also, I reflected, it was quite likely that he had come to the house several times. I would ask Milly when she returned, if she remembered anyone of that description coming to the door.

  In fact, I have often observed throughout my life that we tend to notice what we expect to notice. I had hardly put myself out to notice Wanda’s clients, and I had mostly been away from the house, myself, for long hours every week-day. I was troubled by the thought of Wanda’s present condition; I foresaw fuss and nuisance and when I opened my bag to get out my key to the front door, I saw the slip of paper with Father Stanislas’s telephone number. I regretted not telephoning to him. I was very dripping wet.

  I knew as I entered the house that there was something wrong. As I mounted the stairs I saw that Wanda’s door was open. Voices came from inside. Not the voices of fuss and nuisance, but those of something serious. Wanda must be ill.

  William came out followed by Kate, as I reached the first landing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.