‘Do you mean’, I said, ‘that you have the basement free, here in this house?’
There was a basement flat free, and within our means. T’m looking for a flat for my boyfriend William and me,’ I said.
I phoned William and he came to look at the flat that evening. It was not too dark, the windows being partly above street level. There was one other occupant, Mrs Thomas, who did the cleaning and shopping for the house. ‘She shares the facilities,’ Howard explained, meaning the bathroom. ‘The trouble with houses in England, there are so few facilities,’ he said. But this sharing meant that our three rooms were extraordinarily cheap; we had a sitting-room, a bedroom and a kitchen. There would be the extra strain of travelling for William but none for me. I thought this fair enough, starting, as I did, worse than I meant to go on. William didn’t seem to mind this attitude. It actually made him happy.
We went out to dinner with Howard and Fred to seal the bargain. The Boys were enchanted to hear that William was almost a doctor, and lost no time in consulting him over dinner about their various ailments. William lost no time in switching the subject to music, referring to the musical articles he had read in the first two numbers of the Highgate Review.
Milly knew why I was leaving South Kensington. But she pretended not to know. She was happy with my promise to come and see her every Sunday. She said, ‘It’ll be better for your health, Nancy. All that travelling on the underground. And if William’s with you, so much the better. It’s awful the way that Isobel comes here to consult him, about to be a mother, and sitting up there in his room keeping him back from his studies.’
Isobel’s new flat was off the Cromwell Road. In the past two weeks I would often find her when I got home in the evening sitting on William’s bed, talking. I knew that he usually threw her out, for he was studying hard for his finals. But I was furious because she didn’t for a moment think I could be the part of his life that I now was, and if she had realized it, she wouldn’t have cared. She continued to think, speak and act as if I was motherly, and she was wrong as far as she was concerned. To be motherly, I felt, was her role.
One of the perquisites of the job which made life good for William and me were the occasional tickets we got for musical events that spring of 1955. William wrote a few short pieces for the Highgate Review, using his hours on the underground to do them. I begged Fred Tucher, who was in charge of this section, not to accept these pieces merely because William was my boyfriend, but he assured me William was both lucid and expert. Fred said many other good things about William, for Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main idea. So that you didn’t have to listen much at all, but just wait for the big splash. And so, from his long rippling eulogy I was able to report to William that his musical criticism was lucid and expert.
‘Glad the Jessies approve,’ William said. Jessies was his name for the Boys.
If in the early spring of 1955 you went to concerts at the Wigmore Hall, the Festival Hall, the Albert Hall and the smaller recital rooms of London, and Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House you must have seen the steamy and scruffy young couples and groups of eager young, sometimes on a cold night wearing woollen gloves and wrapped in scarves, waiting in queues for the cheap seats or hanging round the foyer. William and I were among them. When we didn’t get tickets from the High-gate Review we bought them. Don Giovanni at Sadler’s Wells; the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer playing Mozart and Bruckner; at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, an unknown string quartet gave us Tippett, Dvořák and Beethoven; Daphnis and Chloë at Sadler’s Wells; at the Wigmore, Britten’s Three Canticles; and I remember a charming piano and song recital at the Arts Council, though not the performers; La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells.
‘Do you have any religion, William?’
‘No, I don’t believe a damn thing.’
‘I can’t disbelieve,’ I said.
‘Well, you can go on believing for two, as the pregnant women eat.’
I was in no doubt that William was the love of my life. For his part he behaved as if our future together wasn’t even in question. Looking back, it was good even then to have this area of certainty which in fact has never been shaken.
Our love affair in the basement at Highgate was strangely enhanced by the sterile affair going on upstairs between the kindly, well-informed and urbane Boys. Sometimes they came down and had a drink or supper with us, always anxious to consult William on medical matters. ‘Of course I’m not qualified,’ William said, ‘I’ve never practised fully.’
William had been a poor boy. His origins were not merely of the working class with their pride and clean-scrubbed habits, their church-going. William came from the sub-poor. He was now the product of scholarships and bursaries, with a brain so exceptional that he had emerged from an infancy of dire want and wretched slum poverty without effort or much explanation. It was natural that good grammar schools and colleges of those days should take him up and want him as a pupil, that he should later travel to foreign universities on grants and scholarships, and enter the profession of his choice. He was now twenty-eight, already a cultivated man of easy humour. What moved and astonished me most was that he knew no nursery rhymes and fairy stories. He had read Dostoevsky, Proust, he read Aristotle and Sophocles in Greek. He had read Chaucer and Spenser. He was musical. He could analyse Shostakovich and Bartok. He quoted Schopenhauer. But he didn’t know Humpty Dumpty, Little Miss Muffet, the Three Bears, Red Riding-Hood. He knew the story of Cinderella only through Rossini’s opera. And all that sweet lyricism of our Anglo-Saxon childhood, a whole culture with rings on its fingers and bells on its toes, had been lost to him in that infancy of slums and smelly drains, rats and pawnshops, street prostitutes, curses, rags and hacking coughs, freezing bare feet and no Prince Charmings, which had still been the lot of the really poor in the years between the first and second world wars. I had never before realized how the very poor people of the cities had inevitably been deprived of their own simple folklore of childhood. At night, I used to sing nursery rhymes to William. I told him fairy stories. Occasionally one of them would vaguely recall to his mind something he had heard before, somewhere along the line. But most of them were quite new to him. They were part of our love affair.
I felt that any day Hector Bartlett would show up at the office in Highgate, if you could call such a cloudy décor of shell-pink and floral arrangements an office. Out of the way though we were, the magazine was now of sufficient importance and the personality of its editors magnetic enough to attract visitors who came without appointment, usually with manuscripts of essays or poems to offer. If neither Howard nor Fred was available, Abigail and I would give these visitors a cup of coffee and listen to them for half-an-hour. Sometimes people I had met in my previous jobs would turn up, which forced me to put aside the work mounting on my desk while we chatted about the same things as before. I would promise to bring their work to the attention of the editors while Abigail rattled busily at her mound of correspondence. Sometimes we were positively entertained. An interesting girl used to put in an appearance almost every week, dressed in different costumes; one week she was a milkmaid, another week a sort of cavalry officer. But she talked the same sense, evenly, all the time. Although she didn’t manage to get her poems into the Highgate Review, I wasn’t surprised when, many years later, she wrote a successful play.
Others came to discuss religion and to talk of their Anglo-Catholic retreats, and discuss the Thirty-nine Articles. The Anglo-Catholic movement at that time was in ferment over one particular subject: should they or shouldn’t they ‘go over to Rome’. Myself, I frequented both churches according as it suited me. When I revealed this fact to the religious intellectuals of the Highgate set, it never failed to lead to lengthy and fascinating discussions with no bearing whatsoever on the Christian faith.
So the spring passed. The manuscripts piled up on my desk and the letters on Abigail’s, far more th
an she could manage. I helped her to open the mail in the mornings. Those letters which didn’t appear to be urgent or personal for Howard Send or Fred Tucher bothered Abigail, not because she couldn’t find anything to say to the writers but because there were so many. Fred had told her it would be ‘nice’ to reply to everyone, however hopeless or silly. So I told Abigail to work through them in such a way that they would be answered within quarterly intervals. And it is my advice to everyone with too much casual correspondence, to treat it in the same way that some companies pay their dividends. The mail that comes in before Christmas should be answered by Lady Day, the next pile by Midsummer Day, that accumulation by the Michaelmas term, and the last quarter by Christmas. It is the only proper system.
One morning the post held a manuscript with a covering letter from Hector Bartlett, enclosing a letter of recommendation from Emma Loy. ‘It’s from the pisser of prose,’ said Abigail.
‘I’ll look at it later,’ I said. Abigail went to put the large opened envelope containing the typescript and Emma Loy’s letter on the pile of manuscripts on my desk. But, as if it were contagious, I took it out of Abigail’s hand and put it down on the desk in a place by itself. I detested Hector Bartlett beyond all reasoning, but reasoning alone now began to justify my feelings.
Emma Loy’s covering letter came from New York, thanking Fred Tucher for a copy of the Highgate Review which he had evidently sent her in the hope of persuading her to write something for it. ‘I find it extremely interesting, especially as it is not available in this country,’ wrote Emma. ‘Be assured that if I have anything suitable to offer for publication I will send it to you.’
Now, I cannot remember word for word the text of this letter, written so long ago. But Emma went on something like this:
I take this opportunity of recommending to you an article by the essayist Hector Bartlett which will accompany this letter. It describes an authentic experiment in the field of ESP and esoteric practises of that nature, under the specific heading of radionics. While I am not myself an adherent of the cult of radionics, Mr Bartlett, a convinced follower and student of radionic activities, describes an authentic experiment, the results of which cannot be ignored.
In many ways Hector Bartlett may be described as ‘the poor man’s Kierkegaard’.
The essay itself might need some editorial attention but the substance is, I think, worthy of your interest.
Yours sincerely,
Emma Loy.
My feelings about Emma Loy at that moment, so far away in 1955, have been overlaid by later considerations, and my knowledge of how throughout her years of fame she was to be harassed and bothered continually by Hector Bartlett’s writings about her, by his accounts of Emma Loy when he knew her, the falsities and the vaunted sensational revelations and the pathetic inventions. For when she finally cut him clean out of her life he was furious. As it happened nobody took much notice of what Hector Bartlett said. Emma was right not to sue and suppress, and waste her time with lawyers. ‘I believe that’s what he would like,’ said Emma. ‘It would draw attention to him.’ But it annoyed her to see Hector Bartlett quoted by innocent students as one of the authorities on Emma Loy. And I think she knew she had only herself to blame through her persistence in those earlier years of trying to promote and appease him. Already, she was doing this with the idea of getting rid of him easier by making him out to be some sort of equal. It was perverse. More plainly than ever, she knew very well he was nothing more than the pisseur de copie that I called him.
So, at the time, I was enraged against Emma for her letter of recommendation. But the frightful essay of ten pages, unprintable though it was on literary grounds, and of insignificant interest from the general point of a good magazine, fascinated and chilled me so much that I wasn’t able to think of anything else all day. Abigail, too, was astonished.
It was entitled Radionics A Power Against Evil. It gave a short explanation and history of the workings of the Box and its curative effects. Then came the case history which was the purpose of the essay. Hector Bartlett’s claim was that the effectiveness of the Box depended on the sensitivity and psychic skill of the operator. These operators were at their best when directed by Organisers (his spelling). He went on to describe how an Organiser, knowing of an evil woman, had induced a naturally skilled operator to curse the evil one through the means of radionics. Since the victim of the curse was evil it was a benevolent accomplishment for the Organiser to induce the operator, a devout Catholic ‘with all the psychic energy of her faith’ to effect this curse. Within a few months of treatment, the evil victim, an extraordinarily obese woman, began to waste away and was unable to hold down a job.
Throughout the experiment, the essay explained, the Organiser had to work in very close and intimate cooperation with the operator which involved ‘what might be termed a sexual-psychic relationship’. But the experiment was a success. In this case, the operator, apparently weakened in her powers by terror of the priesthood and her reputation amongst Catholics, had to be dropped from the programme and, incidentally, eventually went mad and committed suicide. But that in no way detracted from the obvious success of the experiment during the months that the operator came gradually under the full control of the Organiser. For future experiments it would probably be advisable to choose operators free from the oppressive influence of the mass-religions.
‘He must mean Wanda Podolak,’ said Abigail. ‘Who is the poor fat woman?’
‘Me,’ I said.
‘I don’t remember you were so very fat.’
‘I was when I first went to Mackintosh & Tooley. I started losing weight some time afterwards.’
‘Yes, now I remember,’ Abigail said. ‘I didn’t know you so well, then.’
She knew I always ate small portions but hadn’t connected this with my now normal shape.
‘If it’s you, why does he think you’re evil?’
‘Because I met him in the park one morning last year when he was bothering me to do something about his career, and I called him to his face pisseur de copie.’
‘He’s bonkers,’ said Abigail.
‘I know, but Wanda’s dead,’ I said.
That night I took the letter of Emma Loy’s and the article down to our basement flat to show William.
William had always been reserved about my hatred of Hector Bartlett. He felt, I think, that it was too personal. It is possible that William wanted all my strong feelings, of whatever sort, for himself. Not long before, I had told him patiently about the connection I felt sure existed between Hector and Wanda’s death, the logical sequence. ‘He came to the house always when I was at work. I suppose he slept with her. He taught her to work the Box under his influence, and induced her to work it against me,’ I said.
‘Oh, God,’ said William. ‘Even if it’s all true you still can’t say the man drove her to suicide. It takes two to make that sort of relationship. It’s a pact between the oppressor and the oppressed. Whatever she did she must have wanted to.’
But I had pressed on. Wanda was under his influence and when she wanted to stop he showed her the fake press-cuttings and some no doubt obscene faked-up photographs. And it was just too much. She gave her long desperate scream and jumped into the canal.
‘Wouldn’t stand up in a court of law,’ said William. He was tough; but he was also tough on himself.
Now I took Hector’s essay to show him. ‘It’s all there,’ I said.
First he read Emma’s letter. ‘… poor man’s Kierkegaard …’ was his comment. ‘The poor man doesn’t need a Kierkegaard, he needs a job.’
‘Read that essay,’ I ordered. — ‘Essay so-called.’
He put it aside. ‘Later on,’ he said. ‘Come on, Mrs Hawkins, I’ll take you out to supper.’ (William still gives me the ‘Mrs Hawkins’ from time to time, as when he says, ‘I’ll have a bit less of your advice, Mrs Hawkins.’)
There was a great row going on upstairs when we got back. It wasn’t the first ti
me since we had come to live in the basement that our nights had been disturbed by the raised voices of Howard and Fred, in the daytime so mild and sweet to each other and everybody. Mrs Thomas, the cleaning lady, came out of her room. ‘The Boys are at it again,’ she said. ‘This time it sounds bad. Should we go up?’
‘No, don’t interfere,’ said William.
‘Doesn’t it disturb your studies?’ said Mrs Thomas, who was really looking for company in the crisis, much as people had gathered together during the war, under the bombs.
‘I’ve studied through worse rackets,’ said William, firmly shutting our door behind us.
Perhaps it was the fact that homosexual practices were still against the law that made homosexuals in those days much more hysterical than they are now. The screaming emotions from upstairs were far worse than usual tonight, and it was clear that objects were being thrown about both in the sitting-room and in the office above our heads. They were now having a real fight, with thuds and shouts and the crash of glass.
‘Shouldn’t we try to stop them?’ I said.
It’s no good at the moment,’ said William with his street-savvy. ‘You have to wait for a lull. You then go in and start shouting yourself.’
‘Call the police?’
‘The police will come anyway if they go on like this.’
Someone bounded down the basement steps and banged at our door. It was Fred, the younger partner, his handsome brown face smeared with blood. ‘We need a doctor,’ he said. ‘Howard has collapsed. He hurt his leg.’
We went up, with Mrs Thomas in the wake. Howard had not hurt his leg, he had some broken ribs. He lay on the carpeted floor of the office, moaning. ‘Don’t worry,’ Fred told him. ‘We have a doctor in the house.’