A Far Cry From Kensington

  Wanda’s troubles were now known throughout 14 Church End Villas, South Kensington. She was unable to keep it a secret at the same time as she lamented that everyone was talking about her. Even the people at No. 16, the Cypriot and his English wife, were by some means thoroughly informed of the affair before the week was out. They even called to express their solidarity, the husband earnestly offering to break the neck of the offender should we ever be in a position to name him or her or them. ‘They call themselves “Organisers”,’ I said, hoping it might mean something to the couple.

  ‘Organizers!’ said the wife. ‘I’ll organize them, just let me get my hands on them.’

  Mr Twinny, the odd-job man who lived at No. 30, was equally indignant. ‘No gentleman’, he told me in a hushed, confiding tone, ‘would ever do such a thing to a lady. A widow at that.’

  Wanda was now in difficulties with her work. Her clients were puzzled at her sullen tearfulness; they came for their fittings and asked Milly on the way out, had they done anything to offend?

  ‘Wanda’s not herself just now,’ Milly would say.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’ll pass, mark my words,’ Milly always said.

  But her Polish friends were not to be put off. Within a fortnight they had all got to hear of her anonymous letter; within another fortnight they came asking Wanda to be reasonable and shake off the shock — ‘After all, what can they do to you? … After all, there is no threat and extortion … After all, it is some crazy person, he sends out this letter by the hundreds, the thousands, this person.’

  When I described the letter to Martin York I was impressed by his spontaneous generosity in offering the services of his own lawyer, at his own expense, to help Wanda. He was genuinely outraged at the story. At that time Martin York was himself more deeply in trouble than I knew. Some months later, when the judge at his trial told how ‘Commercial life cannot be carried on unless people are honest,’ and sentenced him to seven years, I remembered his simple gesture to Wanda, an obscure immigrant seamstress in South Kensington whom he had only heard of through me.

  At the same time Martin York was full of unconventional advice which savoured of officers’-mess lore. ‘The way to throw the income tax, Mrs Hawkins,’ he said, ‘is to send them, out of the blue, a cheque for eight pounds seventeen and three. Something like that. They can never tally up a sum of that kind with any of their figures; your file goes from hand to hand for months and years, and eventually gets lost.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to try it,’ I said. ‘It would be one’s money that would get lost.’

  ‘I daresay, Mrs Hawkins.’

  I took things more or less literally in those days; perhaps that was why he felt I was reliable and safe.

  In the event Wanda didn’t consult the lawyer about the letter; she was too terrified. But eventually she let the Ullswater Press accountant put her income tax right. She owed a little over twelve pounds, of which, some months later, she got a rebate of four. For the time being there was no further anonymous letter, and generally the first high tide of horror, puzzlement and suspicion died down in the house. It died down but it didn’t quite die. I would find myself looking strangely at one of the tenants or at one of Wanda’s visitors; I would wonder. And since I wondered and even sometimes pondered, I supposed that the other tenants did more or less the same. They must have thought, they must have speculated. I know that Milly was vigilant about everyone who came to the door for Wanda. ‘A lady for a fitting,’ she would report; ‘the old priest; her young cousin that’s going to be a priest; that fellow from the Post Office with a suit to be altered; that Polish family that bring her those cakes; those two Polish sisters that teach music …’

  But I was more active in my investigations. It is amazing what one progressively learns about people through an attempt to dispel suspicion. I went about it by simply getting more friendly with each one of them.

  Then, Wanda herself was far more subdued than she had ever been before. She slowed down; she seemed to age and begin to fade. Time would have done these things for her anyway, as for us all. But then and there, for Wanda, it was the work of the anonymous letter-writer, the infamous ‘Organiser’. Wanda had left the letter in my hands, for I promised her I would continue to investigate and try and find who her enemy was. I felt that samples of handwriting were things to get hold of as unnoticeably as possible. I bought a book about handwriting, and I remember going over the letter, alone in my room, night after night, studying the formation of the letters through a magnifying glass. I am a neat note-taker: I bought a quarto-sized notebook and began to make notes of the graphological features of the letter — looped ‘I’s and unlooped ‘h’s, closed ‘o’s and unclosed ‘a’s, ‘f’s exaggerated in such a way as to suggest a fake. For the letter yielded all the symptoms of a disguised hand, that is, small inconsistencies, like the contradictions of a guilty person under interrogation. Above all, I was looking for the organizer spelt with an ‘s’. I tried collecting as many examples of handwriting with words ending in ‘ize’ as I could. But in most cases — for instance ‘realize’ and ‘recognize’ where the alternative spellings ‘realise’ or ‘recognise’ are common — one could draw no conclusion.

  But there was some element in Wanda’s life, I was sure, which held the clue; it was perhaps something of which Wanda herself was unaware, or some person she had completely forgotten.

  In the meantime she mourned, no longer so much for her own potential plight in the hands of the Inland Revenue department but on the much more reasonable grounds that someone she had known was gratuitously vicious.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Hawkins.’ This was the Cypriot next door cleaning his bicycle as I left for the office. ‘Good morning, Marky.’ That was the name he demanded to go by; he was decidedly embarrassed when any of us made to call him Mr something. It was to be a while before I found myself being addressed by my first name. This certainly coincided with the time when I was moved to lose my great weight. Then, I invited people to call me Nancy, instead of Mrs Hawkins as I was to everyone in that summer of 1954, when I went to my office in the morning partly by bus and partly across Green Park, whether it rained or whether it didn’t.

  Suicide is something we know too little about, simply because the chief witness has died, frequently with his secret that no suicide-note seems adequate to square with the proportions of the event. But what we call suicidal action, an impetuous career towards disaster that does not necessarily end in the death of the wild runner, was going on at the Ullswater Press. That spring I had reason to reflect on Martin York’s precipitous course towards a heavy reckoning when I heard on the wireless — it was May 6th — that the runner, Roger Bannister, had beaten the world record: a mile in under four minutes. Martin York, I reflected, was going faster than that, he was going at something like a mile a minute, even when he sat hemmed-in, drinking whisky. One day he called me to his office. He was signing some documents. ‘Will you witness these signatures, Mrs Hawkins?’ I poised my pen and drew towards me the papers he had already signed, while he signed one further document. But I didn’t sign my name: I saw they were letters to banks and I saw that the signatures, although they were in Martin York’s natural writing, were not his. And I saw that one of the signatures was ‘Arthur Cary’. Sir Arthur Cary was in those days the top financier, always in the news with his larky wife. I had no time to see anything else. Martin York, foreseeing my objection, had snatched back the documents.

  ‘You aren’t forging signatures are you, Mr York?’ I said in a joking way, not absolutely to offend.

  ‘Forging? Of course not. Forging is copying someone else’s signature. Arthur told me I could write his name, it’s all right. But I see there’s no need to get the signatures witnessed.’ Martin York put the papers in a drawer.

  Many months later I knew that what I had seen was part of a fraudulent act so naive that it was bound to be discovered. At the time I decided it couldn’t p
ossibly be a serious fraudulent act simply because it was so naive. I thought at the time that it was one of Martin York’s bits of self-irony on his suicidal career to business ruin. For ruin was certainly ahead. He had that year taken on a few ‘literary advisers’, mostly young men of good family and no brains whose fathers had pleaded them a job. They were on the payroll. They amused us when they came into the office, which was usually on Friday, the pay day. They lasted for three or four weeks, and replaced each other in quick succession. The reason why their terms of office were so short was that Mr Ullswater would remonstrate with Martin York: ‘Who was that young man I saw downstairs?’ or ‘Who is that insufferable youth making scented tea in the general office?’ Martin York would explain to the effect that the young man was learning the business. But so frequently did they find no paypacket waiting for them that they drifted away, much to the typist Ivy’s regret.

  But more serious for the failing firm were the hangers-on who now got round Martin York to agree to publish their frightful books.

  Sometimes, I think, his desire to sign up these books for his publishing house was not due to a lack of discrimination so much as to the common fallacy which assumes that if a person is a good, vivacious talker he is bound to be a good writer. This is by no means the case. But Martin York had another, special illusion: he felt that men or women of upper-class background and education were bound to have advantages of talent over writers of modest origins. In 1954 quite a few bright publishers secretly believed this.

  Publishers, for obvious reasons, attempt to make friends with their authors; Martin York tried to make authors of his friends. He promised contracts to the most talkative, gossipy, amusing members of his own class, his old schoolfellows, their wives, his former army companions and their wives.

  This was where I had to intervene. It often fell to me to turn down a book for which Martin York, during a drinking session, had offered a contract, without even looking at the work. His friends would know where Martin York spent his after-office hours, between six and nine. They went there shamelessly to listen to his woes, and although everyone in the publishing and literary worlds knew that the Ullswater Press was falling to bits, the flocks of carrion crow descended on Martin for the last-minute pickings. I had to shoo them off the next day.

  At this point the man whom I came to call the pisseur de copie enters my story. I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in the phrase ‘pisseur de copie’, but the description remained in my mind, and I attached it to a great many of the writers who hung around or wanted to meet Martin York; and finally I attached it for life to one man alone, Hector Bartlett.

  The term ‘upper class’ in those days meant more than it does now. Hector Bartlett claimed at every opportunity, both directly and by implication, to be upper class, to the effect that I presumed him to be rather low-born; in fact, I was right, and I wasn’t alone in my suppositions. But a great many people fell in with Hector’s pretensions, a surprising number, especially those simple souls who quell their doubts because they cannot bring themselves to discern a blatant pose; the effort would be too wearing and wearying, and might call for an open challenge, and lead to unpleasantness.

  He used to waylay me in Green Park on my way to work or on my way home. Occasionally this amused me, for I might egg him on to show off his social superiority, and, not less, the superior learning that he claimed. For he knew the titles of all the right books, and the names of the authors, but it amounted to nothing; he had read very little.

  What he wanted from me was an introduction to Martin York and through him to his uncle, a film producer.

  Pisseur de copie! Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it.

  ‘Mrs Hawkins, I take incalculable pains with my prose style.’

  He did indeed. The pains showed. His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.

  I became aware one morning that his meeting me in Green Park on my way to the office was not by chance. He had met me once too often. It was a clear day in June, and that it was a Monday I know from the fact that I was thinking with a happiness, new to me for many years, of young Isobel’s Daddy to whom she telephoned from her room in our house every night, and whom I had met, in church, the day before. It was an Anglo-Catholic church in Queen’s Gate. As I stood for the ‘Kyrie Eleison’ I noticed Isobel with an older man two rows in front. I assumed it was her father and so it proved to be when we came out of church and Isobel introduced him. Hugh Lederer. I had thought for the first time for the many years of my widowhood, when I had seen him with Isobel to the sweet music of the ‘Kyrie’: there’s an attractive man. And now, crossing Green Park on this fresh Monday morning in June, the ‘Kyrie’ sang in my head, and the meeting in church, and the unpremeditated lunch to follow, and the rest of the sweet Sunday afternoon retold itself to my mind. It was no pleasure at all to see Hector Bartlett hovering in my path, I didn’t feel in the mood to humour him that morning. He had seen me approaching before I had seen him, and now he stood by a bench affecting to wonder whether to sit down on it. He stood there, at nine-fifteen in the morning, the last person I wanted to enter into my sensations just then, but emphatically determined to do so. Red hair en brosse, brown corduroy trousers, tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, a yellow tie and a green check shirt: this was gaudy for those days, and Hector Bartlett was always dressed in bright colours. He was tall, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders which made him seem older than he was — I imagine, at that time, he would be in his mid-thirties. His face was round with a second fat chin. He had a small but full baby-mouth as if forever asking to suck a dummy tit.

  On the path, walking in front of me, was a young couple with their arms affectionately round each other’s waists. They blocked Hector, the pisseur de copie, from my view. They looked as if they were on their way to work, probably in the same office, for this was the hour of the office-workers. When they passed the park-bench around which Hector Bartlett had been hovering I saw that he had sat down; he was waiting for me, and now rose to meet me.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Hawkins, what a pleasant surprise!’ He indicated the two lovers who had passed. ‘Dalliance!’ he said.

  I don’t know what got into me, for I said, not to myself as usual, but out loud, ‘Pisseur de copie!’

  ‘What was that, Mrs Hawkins?’ He looked dismayed, then incredulous, and finally he decided not to believe his ears. He didn’t wait for me to answer or explain but gave a little joyless laugh and said, ‘Beautiful morning.’

  ‘Aren’t you working to-day?’ I said.

  I forget what he replied. He had no regular job that I was aware of. He sometimes reviewed books in provincial papers and lived mostly on his wits and a novelist called Emma Loy. But I had nothing against him on that score. I knew a great many obscure writers, it is true mostly younger than Hector Bartlett, who had to scrub around for a living and share their casual earnings with a partner, or who lived on other writers more fortunate than themselves. And as for Hector Bartlett, I had once, some years before, put him in the way of a job that would have suited him very well: door-to-door encyclopaedia-pushing in the suburbs. He would have been able to blab and enthuse about the encyclopaedias, and impress the housewives. But he turned down the job, as he had every right to do. What I found so frightful about him was that he was always trying to use me, or further some scheme of his through my presumed influence with Martin York.

  That morning, he walked with me as far as the office door, pressing on me an idea he had to turn a novel into a film. Martin York’s uncle was a film producer, a very rich man, all of whose riches however could not, in the end, save Martin York from gaol. At the moment this was not to be foreseen, and Hector Bartlett was spoiling my fresh June morning with his unwanted compa
ny, aggravating the situation by starting to describe the novel which he wanted to adapt.

  ‘I know the novel,’ I said.

  It was one of Emma Loy’s novels. She was then already in her forties, a well-known writer. Hector Bartlett had recently established himself as her hanger-on. Wherever she went these days he had to go. It was a phenomenon nobody could explain. Emma Loy was a beautiful writer, and had enough sense to know that he was not. Yet she tried to get him published by all the magazines and publishers who wanted her work. She introduced him to everyone she knew who might be influential and they, amazed, did nothing for him whatsoever.

  Emma Loy was a striking woman with a strong face and light brown hair combed back off her face. She always wore grey, and it suited her. I had known her for some time. I don’t know what had got into her head when she took up Hector Bartlett. It probably flattered her to have a man nearly ten years her junior in constant attention. I don’t believe she was in love with him. How could she have been? She was a sensible and imaginative woman, she had wit, on some occasions magic. Later, when it became too embarrassing for her to carry her world-wide reputation, a new and real man in her life, and the Pisseur as well, she wriggled out of the relationship. But she had to pay for it.

  That time had not yet come and here was Hector Bartlett with her permission to make a film-script out of her novel.

  ‘I have the exclusive rights from Emma,’ he said. It’s a must for S. T. York.’

  ‘Then write to S. T. York,’ I said.

  ‘It would be preferable to procure an introduction from Martin York,’ he said. ‘It would be let us say a decided feather in Martin’s cap. You yourself should have a word in Martin’s ear with regard to the possibility of transmuting this fine work of fiction to a saga of the silver screen. Nepotism is still I believe the order of the day.’

  How could Emma Loy stand him? We got as far as the office door. It was just before nine-thirty. He wanted to come upstairs with me and continue his ‘talk about the film-script’.