‘Can you come in a minute?’ William said. I think the Carlins were there, too, in Wanda’s room. A man in a loose trench coat stood there and a young woman who looked official, although she wore no uniform, only a plain brown coat and skirt. No Wanda.
I said, ‘Has something happened?’
‘Yes,’ said the man in the trench coat. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘These are the police,’ said William. ‘Wanda’s been drowned.’
It was nearly eight o’clock.
At about seven o’clock, explained the man, police inspector as he was, Mrs Podolak had jumped into the Regent’s Canal, and had been fished out too late.
‘Nothing you can do to stop these cases,’ said the policeman. ‘If they want to do it they’ll do it.’ They had found Wanda’s handbag, and got her address from the papers inside it. They had come to see if she had left a letter and find out where her next of kin resided. And he asked me if Wanda had shown any symptoms, anything strange? Had she mentioned suicide?
I told him Wanda had been very strange indeed, for some time. She hadn’t mentioned suicide. The others had obviously already given some such information about Wanda. ‘And the anonymous letters?’ said the policeman. ‘Any idea who sent them?’
‘No idea. It was a man,’ I said, ‘because he phoned one night and she heard his voice.’ I couldn’t believe what had happened, and said so.
‘These cases …’ said the policeman. His female colleague said, ‘It’s always a shock to everybody.’
‘She was a Catholic. I wanted her to see a priest but she didn’t want to. A devout Catholic, it’s so unlike her to commit suicide. I was going to ring up a Polish priest, anyway, to ask him to come and see her.’
‘Catholic doesn’t help with an unsound mind,’ the policeman said. He spoke with an Irish accent, and probably knew what he was talking about.
I thought of the slip of paper in my bag. I might have been in time.
‘You can see by the mess in this room she was of unsound mind,’ said Kate. ‘The poor woman.’
‘Dressmakers are always untidy,’ said Eva Carlin. ‘Thank God she didn’t do it in the house. The poor soul!’
Basil Carlin said, ‘The anonymous letters stopped, I seem to think, after she settled up with the income tax. I reckon the letters can’t have been the motive. Poor thing!’
‘Can any of you suggest a motive?’ said the Inspector.
‘The motives of suicides’, said William, ‘are often quite trivial if they exist at all. There was one known to us in the medical school where there had been a row with the laundry, they had lost a pair of this fellow’s under-drawers, and he gassed himself.’
The policeman agreed: ‘The motives for any crime can be quite futile,’ he said.
We were all struck by the word ‘crime’; we had been shocked into thinking in terms of Wanda’s tragedy.
I wondered wildly if she could have been pushed in. ‘Are you sure it was suicide?’ I said.
‘Witnesses saw her jump. She gave a sort of howl, threw away her handbag and jumped. Someone fished her out but it was too late.’
I told them all that I knew about Wanda’s family. Three sisters in Poland, one married in Scotland. No, I didn’t know the address in Scotland. Perhaps some cousins in London….
The other tenants were murmuring with awe and putting in distressed exclamation marks after their sad comments. I felt as if we were trespassing in Wanda’s room with the two strangers. My clothes felt very wet.
The police sent other men later that night to search Wanda’s room. They found her sister’s address but no sign of the anonymous letters. Verdict: suicide while of unsound mind.
I remembered the wild scream Wanda had given the night before when I had put it to her that I would ring Father Stanislas. I remembered now in greater detail the confusing scene in Wanda’s room after we had met at the Carlins to discuss Isobel. Much of it, at the time, had merged into a general impression that she was thoroughly unhinged. ‘She needs therapy,’ William had said. ‘She needs a specialist.’ And Wanda’s anxiety, when I was talking on the phone to Emma Loy that morning, lest I was ringing Father Stanislas on her behalf; that wail of hers again, as she ran upstairs: it was the last I had heard or seen of Wanda. She was afraid, plainly, of mild Father Stanislas, or something he stood for; she was afraid of something being revealed.
‘The motives for suicides are often quite trivial,’ William had said. Trivial to the rest of us, but not to them, obviously not to them. I realized how very little I knew about Wanda, far less her mind. It was strange that Emma Loy had been discussing her with me, probably at the very moment when she gave her last cry and jumped into the dark, cold canal. ‘The motives quite trivial …’ Yes, but not to Wanda, not to Wanda.
I remember hardly anything about what I did or said after the police left, that night of Wanda’s death.
Somebody in the house rang Milly’s daughter in Cork to warn her of the event. Milly herself rang back, and asked for me.
‘Why don’t you stay there, Milly, till it all blows over?’
Milly wouldn’t hear of this. And she wasted no sympathy on Wanda. ‘The nerve of the woman,’ said Milly, ‘to commit suicide from my house!’
For some odd reason this made me feel better. Milly’s point of view always offered an element of defiant courage. I looked forward to Milly’s return.
After the inquest and the funeral Wanda’s sister from Scotland came to the house to collect Wanda’s possessions. The others were all out at work. I let her into Wanda’s room and asked if I could help her. She said no, she could manage by herself, but I could see she was in a daze, vaguely lifting things up and putting them down in the same place. She was a darker version of Wanda. Her name was Greta; she spoke in a slightly broken English with a Scottish accent.
Now, I had to remind her that all the stuff piled about the room was not necessarily Wanda’s. Some, I said, belonged to her clients, and generally speaking we would be safe in assuming that only the clothes which were packed in Wanda’s suitcases, or folded in the drawers, or hanging in the wardrobe, were Wanda’s property. And even then, I said, sometimes Wanda used to hang up in her wardrobe special dresses she had made for her ladies: one would have to judge by size. For the rest we would have to wait, I rattled on, until the clients came to collect their clothes.
‘They’re not all women’s clothes,’ said Greta, fingering through a pile.
‘No,’ I said, ‘Wanda was very clever at altering men’s clothes. The owners will turn up for them.’
‘Those photographs on the mantelpiece,’ said Greta. She sat down and started to cry. ‘The bed’s not even made,’ she said, and picked up a pair of Wanda’s well-worn shoes.
‘The photographs are undoubtedly Wanda’s,’ I said. ‘Look for an empty suitcase and start putting the photographs together. I’m going to get some newspaper to wrap them in and bring you a cup of tea.’
The sadness of these last gatherings of personal effects, the sittings and sortings and parcelling-up, is more inexpressible than the funeral, where at least there is a fixed rite, there are words, the coffin has a shape and the grave a certain depth, and even the sorrow of the mourners has some silent eloquence if only conveyed and formally interpreted by their standing still. But the grief which is latent in relics like Wanda’s pair of worn shoes has no equivalent at all.
When I returned with the tea Greta was examining her sister’s bank deposit book. ‘Six hundred and thirty pounds,’ said Greta. ‘I’d no idea she was so well off.’ I was called away again just then to answer the doorbell. It was Abigail, Ian Tooley’s secretary. She had come primarily to see me, she said, and also to take away some radionics equipment which Wanda had on loan.
I doubted she had come mainly for my sake, but I appreciated Abigail’s politeness. I took her up to Wanda’s room and, avoiding the big mouthful of Abigail’s name, introduced them as Abigail and as Mrs Podolak’s sister Greta. Abigail murmured that she was sorry to
hear of the tragedy.
‘Abigail would like to take away certain equipment that belongs to someone else,’ I said. ‘In fact I think it’s that black box over there. And maybe those books and manuals stacked beside it.’
‘Yes,’ said Abigail, ‘the literature is Mr Tooley’s as well.’
‘Do you have a receipt for them, Miss?’ said Greta, surprisingly awakened out of her vagueness. I was equally surprised to hear Abigail say that she had all the documents with her, and a letter to authorize her to take Mr Tooley’s property away. Greta seemed to understand this, and immediately got out her glasses to examine the business on hand, while I stood there marvelling at the acuity of both sides. I had already had some experience of death in my family, and I had been struck, there too, by the way in which people who were stricken with sorrow would be able to deal with rapid lucidity with anything concerning what they conceived to be valuables; and that any claimants to goods in possession of the dead person, or creditors, seemed to have all their documents and receipts ready to present. To see Abigail, efficiently explaining the papers to Greta, and Greta earnestly examining them, one might have thought they had both foreseen and prepared for Wanda’s death.
I went to get some tea for Abigail and left them getting down to business.
‘But Wanda was a good Catholic!’ was what Greta was saying when I returned with fresh tea for Abigail. Greta appealed to me: ‘Wanda was devout, no?’
‘I believe she was,’ I said.
‘There is some old Catholics, her friends, told me she shouldn’t have had a Catholic burial by reason she committed suicide. But I say she was devout and the Father would not have given her a Catholic funeral if she wasn’t all right with the Church.’
‘The verdict was unsound mind,’ I said. ‘It’s an illness like any other. She wasn’t to blame for it.’
‘But now I see she practised this magic,’ said Greta. ‘This black box of works.’
‘It’s supposed to do good to people,’ said Abigail. ‘It isn’t magic, as I say, it’s radionics. It’s supposed to work cures on people thousands of miles away.’
‘Take away that box, girl,’ said Greta, ‘and all the books. I have to tell the priest about it. Yes, it’s on my conscience.’
I had in my mind’s ears that cry of Wanda’s when I had offered to talk to Father Stanislas. That cry, that cry. Wanda, in her madness, had been terrorized. And her fearful suspicion, that morning, when I had spoken on the phone to Emma: ‘You spoke to Father Stanislas. I heard you …’ Her wail, as she ran upstairs. ‘Is it my fault you are ill? You are wasting. You will die,’ she had said the day before.
I determined to get out of Abigail what Wanda was doing with that radionics instrument, or rather, what she thought she was doing. If it hadn’t been that Wanda evidently had it in her disordered mind that she was doing me some harm, I would have taken no further interest. Wanda was dead. People commit suicide for quite trivial reasons, William had said. But whatever Wanda’s reasons I was disturbed by the words that had involved me in her mind, ‘You are wasting. You will die,’ when in fact I had no previous idea that I was specially in her mind at all.
‘Don’t go just yet,’ I said to Abigail.
‘No, I’m not going. There’s something I came to talk to you about.’
So Abigail stayed and helped us to pack Wanda’s boxes, to sort out in separate piles the clothes that were obviously Wanda’s and those that were presumably her customers’. In the wardrobe was a man’s suit of clothes, an ordinary dark-blue suit. I grabbed it and said, ‘This must be a client’s.’ It flashed through my mind immediately that it might be Hector Bartlett’s. I remembered what Emma had told me: ‘Hector has been taking the most absurd steps to stop you calling him by that name …’
Now, holding this man’s suit in my hand, I was convinced that Hector Bartlett had been somehow using Wanda to work against me. Isobel introduced him to Wanda to have his dinner suit altered. ‘I think it all began last summer and he met you in the park …’ — I could hear Emma Loy’s words. But already, Wanda had been blackmailed by Hector Bartlett, probably seduced, the foolish woman. And he had gone on to use Wanda, and used her beyond her endurance. Because I had insulted him in the park … The theory grew in my mind, wild as it was, and took various forms. I filled in details.
Abigail waited till Greta had left in a taxi with her first load of stuff. Greta was to return next day to go through Wanda’s letters and papers, and see what she could throw away. We had already glanced through them, with the police, to see if there was any clue to Wanda’s death, but it appeared the papers were all old receipts and even older letters written in Polish, mixed up with old photographs.
I have always liked Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight, as she then was, Abigail Wilson as she is now. It turned out to be true she had come to Church End Villas that day primarily to see me, and only incidentally to claim back the Box. She told me she was leaving Mackintosh & Tooley’s to join the staff of an interesting new magazine, the Highgate Review, so called because the editors, a group of American refugees from Senator McCarthy’s political persecutions, had settled in Highgate. The High-gate Review would be devoted to cultural and political events. They needed a capable managing editor. ‘So I thought of you, Mrs Hawkins. They don’t pay much but it could be a wonderful job. Would you be interested?’
My savings were getting low and I felt ready for a new job. Abigail agreed to arrange for me to go for an interview. I would have shown more enthusiasm then and there, if I had not had heavily weighing on my mind the mystery of Wanda’s suicide and my suspicions of Hector Bartlett’s involvement in it, which I was to talk to William about later that night. If Wanda’s belief that I was wasting away because of some curse she had put on me was sincere, she was totally mistaken. But the fact that anyone should wish me ill to such an extent appalled me, already depressed as I was by Wanda’s death.
I sat with Abigail in Milly’s kitchen, thinking of the Pisseur’s suit, as I thought it was, hanging upstairs in Wanda’s wardrobe. I only half-listened to Abigail’s deb-chat conversation, which usually I found very diverting. I had known, before Emma Loy told me, that I had made an enemy of Hector Bartlett on the morning in Green Park when I had hissed in his face ‘Pisseur de copie’. Since then I had lost two jobs for this crime and the repetition of it, and I didn’t think of repenting. On the contrary, I had counted it one of the prime duties of the jobs.
‘And the name of the party,’ Abigail was saying in her description of one of the founders of the Highgate Review, ‘is Howard Send. Too killing. I called him Passage to India, he was amazed. Of course, he’s that way, but they often make better friends.’
I agreed to go for an interview with Howard Send. ‘Abigail,’ I said, ‘tell me about this Box of yours.’
‘Not mine, it’s Ian Tooley’s. He’s a spiritualist, you know, and a psychic researcher, all that. I’m really sorry for his wife because he’s rather sweet in spite of it all.’
‘How did he get hold of Wanda Podolak?’
‘She’s on his list, introduced by a general organizer who hasn’t any skill at it himself, but he’s clever at finding people who are, Hector Bartlett, you know, that hanger-on of Emma Loy’s. He’s the organizer, gosh, isn’t he awful? Imagine him running around with a sample of your blood or a strand of your hair and trying to get someone to diagnose what’s wrong with you.’
‘Surely he doesn’t believe in it?’ I said.
‘Ardently, said Abigail,’ ‘unutterably ardently.’
‘I can’t imagine that man being sincere about anything,’ I said.
‘But his operators get results. Apparently they get amazing results. Ian Tooley gets letters from grateful patients, I’ve seen the letters.’
‘About Hector Bartlett?’
‘About him, yes. They say he’s a wonder at the Box. They don’t know he doesn’t do it himself, but of course he does teach his operators, so in a way he deserves the credit. Pers
onally, I can’t stand the man, frightfully smarmy.’
‘Why doesn’t he stick to radionics as a profession, I wonder? Why does he try to write?’
‘I suppose he wants to see his name in print, and be famous. You know how they all do. Ian Tooley has tried to reason with him, but he considers himself a great critic, a sort of thinker.’
‘He’s a pisseur de copie,’ I said.
Abigail was delighted. ‘The French’, she said, ‘always have a word for it, don’t they? You’re looking so very young these days, Mrs Hawkins.’
‘I’m not so very old,’ I said.
Much later that night when I propounded to William, in its various stages of logic, my theory about the Pisseur’s influence on Wanda, I was persuaded to discard it. ‘First of all,’ William said, ‘that blue suit in Wanda’s wardrobe is mine and I’ll thank you to hand it over. It’s the only decent suit I’ve got.’
William said other things that sounded like common sense. I forget what they were. But the fact that I had jumped to the wrong conclusion about the owner of the suit in Wanda’s wardrobe waylaid me into doubting my own suspicions about Hector Bartlett’s relationship with Wanda. I was anxious to impress William with my reason-ability and intelligence. But in fact William was wrong and I had been quite near the truth.
Radionics was already flourishing in England by the mid-‘fifties. It was a pseudo-scientific practice that had started in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. It claimed to diagnose and cure at any distance disorders and ailments in people, animals and vegetables. It gained a following, and to-day still enjoys a considerable number of believers. That it is a totally irrational method of healing is not to discount it and certainly the claims of ‘radionics’ (the word is not in the dictionary) are no more a subject for mockery than the claims of all our religions. Personally, I think it a lot of bosh and object to the tenacious efforts of the practitioners over the years to establish a scientific basis for the efficacy of this Box with its coloured liquids, its bit of hair on a metal plate, its rows of knobs which the operators twiddle, its claptrap about ratings, coded instructions, electromagnetic fields, its chabras (rays) and its L-fields (life), T-fields (thought), its O-fields (organizing), and its emanations. Oh God! — the Box has no relation to any scientific instrument; it is not electronic, it is not electrical; it has no radiation. It was discredited in the United States, but not in England where to-day farmers put their crops on the Box and horse-trainers their sick horses.