A Far Cry From Kensington

  In 1955 I knew much less about what the Box claims to do than I do now. At the time I had only two clear ideas about it, which I still hold. The first was that it was a crank activity, not necessarily fake in that its practitioners and followers were apparently in good faith. The second was the purely academic proposition that if the Box is able to do good it follows logically that it is capable of doing harm. So that if you believe it can bless the crops then it can curse the weeds. If you believe it can affect your health beneficially, then you have to believe it can affect it malevolently. My advice to anyone who wants to try the Box is, treat it as an experience but believe nothing. And above all, don’t spend much of your good money on it.

  Before Abigail left I asked if I could borrow some of the literature on the subject, which she had taken from Wanda’s room. She lent me a book and a pamphlet. I wanted to see if I could find how Wanda had worked it out that through her efforts I was wasting away. I couldn’t make head or tail of the mumbo-jumbo, and in fact spent very little effort in trying to grasp what radionics was all about.

  In a later publication I saw the claim that with a sample of hair or blood it was possible to treat someone radionically without their knowledge. The Radionics Association, formed in 1960, ‘prohibits this practice’. But since there is no way of enforcing such a rule, these ‘prohibitions’ are worthless. Some publications, which I have consulted to refresh my opinion of what happened in 1955, confirmed my disbelief in the efficacy of the practice. The subject was aired in the High Court of Justice in a famous case of 1960, when it was generally established that while the Box had no scientific basis for its diagnostic claims, the practitioners and their followers might be perfectly sincere. A large number of medical witnesses said the Box was utter rubbish, and a large number of respectable people said it wasn’t. And I daresay that from the point of view of a visitor from outer space the Box is no more ridiculous than a Catholic catechism or the Mass.

  When I returned to my real young life, later that night, William made me laugh about my ‘wasting away’. I thought he was unduly callous about Wanda’s madness, but at the same time I saw he was trying to lift my spirits out of morbid reflections, and he succeeded. He had a fine collection of gramophone records.

  I went by tube on the Northern line to Highgate for my interview next morning. I had had enough of the buses of my long, sad peregrinations during the past month.

  Abigail was waiting to introduce me.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Send.’

  ‘Nice to see you, Mrs Hawkins.’

  Abigail went to another room to wait for me and file her nails. I got the job, on the basis of a month’s trial starting early April, which was the next week. ‘When you are editing copy, Mrs Hawkins, what sort of things do you look for?’ said Howard Send. ‘Exclamation marks and italics used for emphasis,’ I said. ‘And I take them out.’ It was as good an answer as any. ‘Suppose the author was Aldous Huxley or Somerset Maugham?’ he said. I told him that if these were his authors he didn’t need a copy-editor. ‘Too true,’ he said. He pointed to some piles of manuscripts on another desk. ‘We have to look through all those. But they aren’t by Maugham or Huxley.’

  The place they had rented in Highgate was a tall Victorian house, not unlike Milly’s in South Kensington, only wider. My job there was the most interesting and amusing one of my life. The excitement was purely connected with events and people. But when, in my waking hours of the night, I look back at ‘Highgate’ as an experience I think of it as shell-pink. This can be partly explained. First, it was Howard Send’s habit to bring in armfuls of flowers to the house, tall pale apple, pear, peach and plum-blossom, white and pink, forming an all-over pink effect. Tulips and bowls of hyacinths too, but it is one of my memory’s impressions, rather than a memory, that I am describing. I think Howard’s friend and editorial partner, Fred Tucher (pronounced Toocher) wore one of the first men’s pink shirts I had seen. One way and the other, I see it in shell-pink. The sitting-room wás a large front room across the hall from an equally proportioned room which formed the office. Both had bow windows. The sitting-room had very deep and comfortable beige-covered sofas and chairs; the office had a light wall-to-wall carpet, pale walls, light wooden desks and shelves.

  And shell-pink is what emerges as a general effect. Perhaps, if I delved deeper into this impression it would emerge that my memory is coloured shell-pink by the tepid politics of the refugee Highgate set. I had expected them to be rabid reds or extremists of the left as their enemies in America claimed, and I had always associated people of crusader-like left-wing leanings with grim faces and glum rectitude, with plans and statistics, and coming home from night schools at the London School of Economics, in the rain, sucking acid drops. But the Highgate set were moneyed and sophisticated. Their politics were more or less liberal. They were so like the ordinary educated English in their tastes and ideas that one wondered how they could possibly have been accused, as they had been, of allegiances with the rigid Soviets. In fact they were simply typical expatriate Americans, with an abundance of money at the current rate of exchange, culturally informed, and very much at home in England. I had not travelled much at that time, or I would have known that many other Americans were becoming very much at home, too, in France and Italy.

  On that day of my interview Howard Send said, ‘Well, thanks, Mrs Hawkins, you’re hired for a month’s trial. We’re on first-name terms around here. I’m Howard. You’re Agnes, I take it?’ I said, ‘Nancy.’

  ‘Well, Nancy, see you next week. You’ll find plenty to do.’

  Abigail and I found somewhere to lunch. We decided we could largely make what we liked of the job, and went on to talk of more important things, such as Abigail’s passion for Giles Wilson who had a job in Lloyd’s to which he went bowler-hatted every week-day morning, and whose evenings were devoted to managing and supporting a small pioneer rock-and-roll group. He fitted Abigail into these evenings, which she loved, and took her away for weekends in the country to as many of their friends as would have them, preference being given to those who didn’t have big dinner parties on Saturday nights, ‘and make you help with the washing-up on Sunday.’ Abigail’s parents were divorced. Her father, she told me, lived with some sisters and male cousins in a big old house ‘where you have to make yourself useful the minute you put your foot in the door. You spend all your weekend outside getting the tomatoes or vegetables or eggs or picking strawberries, and inside, cleaning the silver which they save up for you to do. All that, so that everyone can sit round the table sticking their fork into a brussel-sprout and expressing adulation for Anthony Eden.’ Nor did Abigail care to spend weekends at Giles’s family home which was a charming converted barn, but with too small a family for her to sleep with Giles: ‘In a house like that you would be noticed.’ They intended to get married as soon as they had the money for the honeymoon, which might be next year.

  I loved Abigail’s knack of portraying her world in these inconsequential phrases, without any rancour, explanations or many details.

  I told her I was looking for a small flat.

  ‘I like your digs in Kensington,’ she said.

  So I told her about William, and how we intended to set up together and get married when he had passed his finals. She said she would keep a look-out for a cheap flat. We went home together as far as Knightsbridge where Abigail left me with a flick of her red scarf. I was feeling restored, for the moment thinking of my new job and William, instead of that death, that death, of Wanda.

  It was just after three when I got home, to find Milly’s suitcases in the hallway. She had just arrived back from Ireland, almost at the same time as Wanda’s sister had turned up to go through the last remains of Wanda’s property. I found Milly upstairs in Wanda’s room with Greta.

  ‘Milly, oh, Milly,’ I said, standing in the door.

  ‘How thin you are, Mrs Hawkins. Are you all right?’ Milly said.

  ‘Do call me Nancy,’ I said.

&n
bsp; ‘Are you well?’

  In fact I had been getting thinner before Milly had left, but so gradually, she hadn’t noticed. I told her I was feeling fine. Nothing, however, then or later, would remove from Milly’s mind the idea that the shock of Wanda’s death had affected me in such a rapid and dramatic way as to reduce my former bulk by half.

  ‘You see what happens,’ she said to Greta who was sitting by the window looking through a bundle of photographs — ‘You see what happens when this sort of thing happens? It happens that people’s hair goes white overnight and they waste away. Suicide, and a person in my house.’

  Greta hardly noticed Milly’s agitation; it seemed she was puzzling over the photographs.

  I went into the room and tried to calm Milly down.

  ‘Most of her things, her clothes, went yesterday,’ I said. ‘Let’s go through the rest and finish. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Later,’ said Milly. ‘There are things to do here.’ I had never seen her so agitated. She had taken out a drawer full of old-looking papers, letters, bills of no account dating from five years back. Obviously Wanda had been a hoarder. ‘What I’m looking for,’ said Milly, ‘is one of those anonymous letters. Someone drove Wanda to suicide.’

  ‘They certainly did,’ said Greta.

  The drawer full of papers was on Wanda’s bed. Milly and I sat, one on each side of it, Milly fingering the papers aimlessly. Greta put aside her bundle of photographs and took up another bundle from the dressing-table. Watching them for a moment it struck me they were trying to reconstruct Wanda, and I thought of a passage in Frankenstein where the scientist-narrator dabbles in the grave for materials to construct his monster. I have looked up this passage. Here it is precisely:

  Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

  That is putting it strongly in the literal sense, but it portrays the impression I had, there in Wanda’s room, while we looked through Wanda’s pitiful papers.

  I started putting the contents of the drawer in a preliminary order — letters here, postcards there, old bills elsewhere. With my office training I was able to do this quickly. There were five or six little piles. Then I started putting each pile in date order. ‘Most of this stuff is useless,’ I said.

  ‘Any sign of those anonymous letters?’ said Milly. ‘Look carefully.’

  ‘No, Wanda must have destroyed them.’

  I felt it necessary to say something about Wanda’s merits.

  ‘She was a very good dressmaker,’ I said, inspired by an old receipt for threequarters of a yard of moiré ribbon, ‘and very reasonable in her prices.’

  ‘A hard-working woman,’ said Milly.

  ‘She didn’t deserve it,’ said Greta.

  I could tell that Milly really wanted to agree to this proposition, but that her Catholic beliefs wouldn’t let her go so far as to attribute the victim’s role to Wanda. She tried to speak, but didn’t.

  Greta said, looking at me for confirmation, ‘They gave her a Catholic burial. Unsound mind is a disease like any other.’

  Milly brightened at this news. ‘Is that a fact?’ she said.

  ‘Somebody or something turned her brain,’ I said.

  ‘That I believe,’ said Milly.

  ‘What a fool,’ said Greta.

  ‘It looks as if she owes nothing. There are no bills unpaid,’ I said.

  ‘Her rent,’ said Greta. ‘She didn’t pay her last week’s rent, did she? — I’ll pay it.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Milly. ‘I wouldn’t touch her last week’s rent. It would be blood money.’

  Among the correspondence, I was looking only for the handwriting as I remembered it of the first anonymous letter, but I found nothing resembling it. Most of the letters were from Poland, and written in Polish; evidently the postcards were those sent from friends on holiday. There was one from Kate, one from myself. I handed the bundle to Greta. ‘You’d better take these home and destroy what you don’t want to keep,’ I said.

  ‘And the photographs?’ said Greta, as if asking for permission.

  ‘They’re all yours,’ I said. ‘We can destroy these old bills and things.’

  ‘The photographs I don’t know how to explain,’ Greta said. ‘There are snaps of the family, our sisters in Poland, and me, and our children. There is the uncle and our two aunties. That is good. But here is some photos, I don’t know what.’ She handed me a postcard-sized photograph. ‘It’s Wanda’s face, but that isn’t Wanda. And who is the fellow?’

  I saw immediately that the fellow was Hector Bartlett, pisseur de copie. He was standing beside a girl, or at least it was Wanda’s face poised on a girl’s shape, not Wanda’s. It was a model girl’s shape dressed in a neat shirt and slinky trousers. The background was a sea-front, somewhere like Margate or Ramsgate. Obviously the photograph was faked. However, it was harmless. I showed it to Milly, and not to alarm her with what was really beginning to go on in my mind, I said, ‘This has been faked, it’s a joke, Wanda’s head on another woman’s body. Do you recognize that man with her?’

  Milly said at once, ‘That’s one of her cousins.’

  ‘What cousin?’ said Greta.

  ‘The cousin that’s studying for the priesthood, a late vocation,’ Milly said.

  ‘We have no such cousin, said Greta,’ ‘I never saw that person before.’

  Milly was aghast. I thought she was inclined to disbelieve Greta.

  ‘Did he come to see her?’ I said.

  ‘Often,’ said Milly. ‘He came often in the afternoon to keep Wanda company, after all that shock she had with the letters.’

  ‘He is no cousin,’ Greta said.

  I said, ‘I never saw him here.’

  ‘Oh, you were out at work. He had to get back to his seminary at five, don’t forget. There’s surely no harm in him,’ said Milly.

  ‘There is no such cousin,’ Greta said.

  ‘She told me he was her cousin, a student priest.’ Milly was agitated.

  ‘It was a joke,’ I said. ‘Like the photo. A harmless joke.’

  ‘Some joke!’ said Greta. ‘Look at these other pictures.’

  The other pictures were equally harmless, Wanda and Hector in the street, Wanda in her normal dumpy guise but Hector with his face imposed upon another, a small man’s body. There was a picnic photograph, both Wanda and Hector Bartlett faked into an elegant pose they couldn’t possibly have assumed in real life. I took the photographs from Greta and went through them. I found five of these obvious fakes. Then I found one without Wanda. It showed Hector Bartlett and a short man standing in profile. They were feeding ducks on a lake which I couldn’t identify. I thought I vaguely recognized the man in profile but couldn’t place him at the time.

  I turned all the photographs over to see if there was anything written on the back and, finding nothing, returned them to Greta. ‘Take them away,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ said Greta.

  ‘Fancy him fooling me,’ said Milly. ‘I thought he was a seminarian.’

  I bustled to get a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe in order to pack Wanda’s final things. I wanted to get rid of Greta but I knew my thoughts would take shape later on, perhaps in the course of my waking night. We made a separate package of Wanda’s correspondence; we packed the suitcase with the belongings of Wanda’s clients which Greta was arranging to leave with a friend in London whose address she gave to Milly. We put the old bills in a heap to throw away. There were various untidy and useless odds and ends and scraps of old paper left in some of the drawers. ‘Leave them to me,’ said Milly. ‘I’ll clear them all up tomorrow.’

  She took Greta downstairs for a cup of tea. We called a taxi, and sent her away. Milly was tired after her journey, and anguished by the disaster that had come into her life. ‘I wonder why that fellow said he was her cousin? A student priest …’

 
‘Forget it for now, Milly,’ I said. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning. And so will I.’ I was upset that the latest perplexities of Wanda’s death had put out of my mind, for the rest of the afternoon, the prospective happiness of my new job, and the beautiful story, as it seemed to me, of Abigail and Giles, he with his bowler hat going to work at Lloyd’s and in the evening going to manage his rock-and-roll group. I wanted a flat to share with William. In fact I was good and tired of being Mrs Hawkins. I wanted to be Nancy with my new good shape.

  The telephone rang shortly after Greta’s taxi had driven away. We had wished her a good journey home. We had told her not to worry. I was going to sit Milly down and give her a drink.

  I answered the phone. ‘Mrs Hawkins, I wonder if you would be free for dinner one evening this week, perhaps Friday or Saturday? I want your advice about Isobel. She’s having difficulty settling in to the new flat. Curtains and so forth. And besides, we could have a rollicking good time, you and I, if you …’

  ‘No, Mr Lederer, it’s not possible.’

  Your advice, Mrs Hawkins … Was I still Mrs Hawkins with my face superimposed on the shape of another woman, like Wanda’s in the photograph?

  Later that evening we had a sort of wake for Wanda; the tenants collected in the kitchen round Milly to welcome her home and keep her company in the astonishing course of events; in her absence, Isobel had left the house, pregnant, and Wanda had jumped in the canal. Some show of solidarity was called for.

  The news about Isobel did not shake Milly very much, especially as she had already left the house.