‘Who’s going to clean all this up?’ said Mrs Thomas.
We got Howard into hospital in an ambulance and put plasters on Fred’s face. The office was completely wrecked, with manuscripts torn and watery from overturned flower-vases. The typewriters were somewhere in the street having been heaved through the window. Nobody asked for or gave a single explanation.
It was a week before we could set up the office again. The Highgate Review was held up for two months. Abigail and I pieced together some of the typescripts and proofs and wrote apologies to the authors we could trace, explaining there had been an accident, begging them to re-submit their work.
But most of the papers were irretrievable, soaked, and trampled to shreds. We swept up the sodden mess over the weekend and threw it all out. William gave us a hand.
‘The thing about the Boys,’ I remember Abigail saying, ‘they’re basically charming. When homosexuals are charming it sugars the pill.’
Howard, home from hospital, was in bed in his room above the office, and Fred was mildly carrying on with his work, his affable meetings and his flower arrangements. William and I stayed on in the basement till just before Christmas when we were married, and there were no more disturbances. ‘The fight to end fights,’ said William.
But in that first week when Abigail and I, with the help of Mrs Thomas, the carpenters and glaziers, were putting things straight and searching for lost letters and manuscripts, it was in our own flat that I searched the most. The article by Hector Bartlett and Emma Loy’s letter had completely disappeared.
‘I brought them down here, what did you do with them, William?’ I finally said, for I knew he must have put them somewhere.
‘I took them back up to the office the morning after the fight, and dumped them among the wreckage,’ William said. ‘That’s where they belonged.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘We don’t have room for rubbish like that down here.’
I went to console Howard in his bed of pain among his flowers. ‘It’s all straight down there, now,’ I said. ‘Only we’ve lost nearly all the letters and manuscripts.’
‘We’ll get more, I guess,’ said Howard.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘there was a letter from Emma Loy. She hadn’t anything to offer herself, but she sent an essay on radionics by an author called Hector Bartlett. It’s lost, and so is the letter.’
‘What’s radionics?’
‘A sort of witchcraft,’ I said. ‘The essay was no good. Have you heard of Hector Bartlett?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘He’s a pisseur de copie,’ I said.
‘Jesus, please don’t make me laugh,’ said dear Howard, holding his poor ribs.
Later that year, when we were planning the wedding, I lay awake for a while, then drowsily falling asleep I thought how Wanda could make my dress, until I remembered she was dead.
More than thirty years later, I saw Hector Bartlett again. It was in Tuscany in a restaurant that had been constructed within a restored medieval castle famous for Dante’s having once slept there. It was about three in the afternoon. We had finished our lunch. William had to go and make a promised phone call to England, where the time was then two o’clock. We often go to Italy. That afternoon, the Italian voices lilted the doings of the day. The sun blazed outside, Apollo as he is, on the wine- and oil-soaked skins of our friends and fellows who set off with great cheer in their Alfas, their Fiats and their Lancias. William said, ‘You pay the bill. I’ll make that call.’
I paid the bill, waited for the change, and set off towards the door. The serving counter was surrounded by people, mostly visiting English. A voice said something about its being a lovely place. Another voice replied, ‘Yes, there’s a wealth of wild flowers and butterflies.’ Something about the tourist-brochure quality of the phrase made me look at the speaker. Thin, with a grey face and white wispy hair, it was, after all these years, Hector Bartlett. He noticed my searching look, and staring back, recognized me. I believe some of the people around him were friends or travelling acquaintances in his group. He looked at them then back at me, and started to laugh nervously.
‘Pisseur de copie,’ I hissed.
He walked backwards so that the people behind him had to make way for him, still with his short staccato laugh like a typewriter.
William was waiting for me at the car.
‘Did you settle the bill?’ he said.
I said, ‘Yes.’
It was a far cry from Kensington, a far cry.
ALSO BY MURIEL SPARK
available from New Directions:
THE ABBESS OF CREWE
THE BACHELORS
THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE
THE COMFORTERS
THE DRIVER’S SEAT
THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS
MEMENTO MORI
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: NEW & COLLECTED STORIES
THE PUBLIC IMAGE
Copyright © 1988 by Muriel Spark
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as a New Directions Classic in 2000
Published by arrangement with Dame Muriel Spark, and her agent Georges
Borchardt, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Spark, Muriel.
A far cry from Kensington / Muriel Spark.
p. cm. — (A New Directions classic)
Originally published: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
eISBN 0-8112-2014-9
1. Publishers and publishing—Fiction. 2. Literature publishing—Fiction.
3. London (England). 4. Women editors—Fiction. 5. Widows—Fiction.
I. Title. II. New Directions classics.
PR6037.P29 F33 2000
823’.914—dc21
00-055022
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
10 9 8 7
Muriel Spark, A Far Cry From Kensington
(Series: # )
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends