Although I hadn’t been to a dinner party as formal and upper-class as this before, I felt quite up to it. I had never considered, in fact, what class I belonged to: I presumed it was Ordinary Class, something like O blood group. I didn’t think upper-class habits were so very different from any other English habits. It is true that I had read in novels about such eccentricities as ‘the ladies left the men at the table with their port’ but I didn’t attach these performances to real life. I might as well have been a foreigner. And I will say, now, that I learned a lot about upper-class habits while I was with Mackintosh & Tooley. In the end I concluded it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own.
The dinner itself was coming to an end but the chatter went on. At a certain moment there was a hush, not quite a silence. Lady Philippa was looking at me very intensely, and I hadn’t the slightest idea why. I supposed she had asked me a question and I looked back enquiringly. Suddenly Lady Philippa got up as if someone had said something that touched her on a tender spot; I thought she was going to make a scene about it. The other women got up, too. But I didn’t see what the men had done wrong that the women should leave them like that, haughty and swan-like, sailing out of the room. I would have liked to advise them to pull themselves together. The men shuffled to their feet and looked at me curiously, as if they couldn’t believe that I, too, wasn’t offended. But, touchy as I was at that hungry period of my life, I perceived nothing to take umbrage about. I, for one, refused to behave rudely just to show solidarity with these oversensitive women, possibly prudes. Lady Philippa murmured, as she passed my chair, ‘Are you coming?’ But I felt the men had done nothing to deserve such treatment. I was Mrs Hawkins. I sat on.
Although I had something to acquire in social savvy, looking back I can now say I wasn’t immature in my common sense. In fact, from the time of the dinner party I seemed to perceive that the Tooleys felt more confidence in me, not less, as one might have expected. It was as if they put me into that reliable category of the nanny or the cook who would never let them down. However, my days with Mackintosh & Tooley were numbered; they were numbered to the extent of two more months. I used those two months well.
A large part of an editor’s job is rejection. Perhaps nine-tenths. In those days at least, it was not only rejection of manuscripts but of those ideas that seemed to come walking into my office every day in the shape of pensive men and women talking with judicious facial expressions about such mutilated concepts as optimist/pessimist, fascist/communist, extrovert/introvert, highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow; and this claptrap they applied to art, literature and life to the effect that all joy, wit and the pleasures of curiosity were quite squeezed out.
But along came Emma Loy. She had decided to publish her new novel with Mackintosh & Tooley, who gave a welcoming cocktail party for her in the office boardroom. Along came Emma with her egocentricity, her capriciousness, and her magic and her charm. About so good a writer it seems pointless to say she might have made an excellent actress, but this was a thought her presence evoked.
She had decided to forget her complaints about me to Martin York, and simply presumed that I had decided to forget.
Now, my advice to anyone who knows a person with charm, wit, and talent like Emma, and with some wisdom and intelligence, too, and should fall out with them, is to accept any opportunity of making it up. Because life offers only a few of such people.
And in fact I was genuinely pleased when Emma Loy said, as soon as she saw me at the party, ‘Mrs Hawkins, Mrs Hawkins, I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you’re here. I don’t know another soul. I hope you’re going to look after my books.’
‘Your books look after themselves,’ I said.
Which was true. Opinions varied about Emma Loy, but nobody could ever deny that she was a marvellous writer. Ian Tooley had let me read the typescript of her new novel. After the drivel I had been dealing with, Emma’s work was a decided relief, it was sheer pleasure, that way of composing a book like a piece of music, that Loy style of ferreting out facts and juxtaposing them with inventions.
I told Emma Loy of my admiration while I eked out my one glass of sherry and she sipped her second. She radiated delight. I was glad, then, that my quarrel with Emma Loy was over and forgotten. Whether I could trust her or not was beside the point; in fact, I think she didn’t believe in friendship and loyalty beyond a certain limit, and maybe she was right; they are ideals that can put too much of a strain on purposes which are perhaps more important. I couldn’t see that protecting Hector Bartlett’s reputation was much of a purpose, and Emma must have known that he was the pisseur de copie that I had called him. But he was her protégé; I imagined the bond between them was sex; and it wasn’t till much later that she told me, quite by chance, how he had been useful to her. He had helped her with research and brought her the books she needed. Useful, merely … But that explanation was Emma Loy’s way of brushing off her own folly. I think she was emotionally lazy, too bound up in her literary activities to form a new relationship or fall in love. She had a morbid dependence on Hector Bartlett even while she knew he was a disaster. Years later he tried to do her a lot of damage.
But now, as was inevitable, Hector Bartlett turned up at the party, and seeing him among the crowd I merely marvelled that Emma could bear to have that pisseur breathing down her neck. And I think I wasn’t alone in this thought. He made a sort of hole in the crowd as the people he wanted to talk to moved away from him as politely as possible; and Emma, discerning this, went to join him; whereupon the gap closed up again. The people Hector Bartlett hadn’t wanted to talk to then hovered warily round the fringe; these were people like myself, including editors and employees from other publishers, literary agents and authors of little fame.
Ian Tooley made his rounds very civilly, explaining here and there how Mars had passed into the sign of the Fish (or maybe it was that Venus or Mercury had moved into Scorpion), and that, as a consequence, various national problems might be resolved. The ebb and flow of the party soon brought Emma my way again. I remember her getting into an argument with Ian Tooley over his arcane beliefs. It was typical of Emma Loy, and part of her attractiveness, that she ignored all the cocktail-conventions in her conversation. She liked to discuss general subjects. What I heard her say to Ian Tooley on this occasion, or he to her, has largely gone into a flashback blur; except for one clear passage. Ian Tooley said she was a sceptic: ‘Don’t you even believe in God?’
‘Some days I do and some days I don’t,’ said Emma Loy. ‘But one thing I do know — in fact I think it obvious — is that God believes in me.’
That was Emma Loy, and no doubt still is. Standing by Ian Tooley’s side at that moment, I gave her my advice that if I were in her place, with my beliefs coming and going some days yes, some days no, I would have a jolly good time the days I believed and repent the days I didn’t.
‘Mrs Hawkins,’ said the famous lady, ‘if I take your advice will I become an editor?’
‘There’s no guarantee about that,’ I said.
‘Well it’s good advice. But I have no matter for repentance.’
Ian Tooley remarked that the study of radionics was taking us beyond good and evil.
Sir Alec Tooley hardly ever appeared. How he arrived at the offices or how he went was a mystery; there must have been some back door exclusive to himself.
About the end of February he called me on the intercom and wearily invited me to come to his office when convenient. I went right away and took his hand, limply held out to me and carelessly withdrawn once the touch had been achieved.
‘Mrs Hawkins, we know you are a remarkably reliable woman and so we have decided, after long reflection, to entrust you with a work of criticism which we have decided to publish but which needs a great deal of that application, that scrupulous attention and editing which we believe only you can give.’
My attention was waylaid by the phrase ‘remarkably reliable woman’ which was almost exactly what Mr Twinny the odd-job man had once said about me to Milly, in my presence. His actual words were, ‘Mrs Hawkins is a remarkable reliable woman.’ They had been spoken in robust friendship with a good deal of force above the wireless which was chattering in the background.
Sir Alec’s utterance and subsequent words of praise were like the cry of a bird in distress, far away across a darkening lake. I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus; and by no means, at that moment, did I want to be a remarkably reliable woman.
‘The manuscript’, he said, ‘needs putting into shape.’
‘Do you mean re-writing?’ I said.
‘Well, of course, that, too. But there are facts to be verified and so on. Grammar and syntax and so forth. Dates.’
My intuition revealed to me there and then that he was talking about a book by the Pisseur de copie which had been pushed on to them by Emma Loy as part of her price.
‘The book,’ said Sir Alec, ‘is entitled The Eternal Quest, a study of the Romantic-Humanist Position. Somewhat deep. It is a comparative study of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Wilhelm Meister and Peer Gynt, or at least, purports to be. I know very little of the subject.’
‘I, less,’ I said. ‘Quite above my head. Who is the author?’
‘A Hector Bartlett. He is highly recommended by our Miss Loy.’
I said, ‘Oh, don’t touch him. He’s a pisseur de copie. He has no clear ideas. He gets all the facts thoroughly wrong to start with, then he strings them together to form a cooked-up theory.’
‘Yes, yes. But what was it you called him in that French designation?’
But I considered Sir Alec’s health and well-being unequal to a full explanation. I calmed down. I said I would have a look at the manuscript. I said that, after all, the advice of St Thomas Aquinas had been to rest one’s judgement on what is said, not by whom it is said. ‘So never mind the author. I’ll look at the actual book.’
‘We are committed to publish it. A small edition of course. It will involve considerable …’
I took the book away; I took it from his hands, so eager to be rid of it, and into mine, which I suddenly felt should be wearing rubber gloves.
I misspent a week in which the book got thoroughly on my nerves. I took it home to read, hoping to be able to concentrate on the incomprehensible pages.
‘Perhaps it’s above my head,’ I said to Milly.
‘No fear,’ said Milly. if you can’t understand it, Mrs Hawkins, it can’t be a Christian book.’ (By Christian Milly meant human. She would describe the cat as looking at her ‘like a Christian’.)
I was suffering from hunger and my diet. The resentment I felt against the book had something in it that I was unable to locate. After all, I could have treated it with the indifference I showed to all the other bad manuscripts that passed through my hands. But this book The Eternal Quest was a personal threat. It was Emma Loy who desired it to be put into shape for publication. She knew I was not a fool. But one might as well have taken a carpet-sweeper to clear the jungle as edit that book.
I took it to William Todd, our medical student, always friendly, and in recent weeks, even more friendly towards me. He was an intellectual fellow, accustomed to ideas and the study of them. He brought it back to my room after reading two chapters, the first and the last. ‘A lot of balls,’ he said. ‘Completely phoney. On every page Nietzsche, Aristotle, Goethe, Ibsen, Freud, Jung, Huxley, Kierkegaard, and no grasp whatsoever of any of them. Send it back.’
We had a drink on that.
For the rest of the week I practised what I would say to get out of the job. I practised the speech in my mind and I practised it on Milly. ‘What I’m going to say,’ I told her, ‘is that despite Emma Loy’s sponsorship of the work, I myself feel that —’
‘Keep that woman’s name out of it,’ Milly said. ‘You know she’s dangerous.’
Before the week was out Ian Tooley came to my office with an important expression on his face. I imagined at first he had come to discuss the Pisseur’s book.
‘How are you, Mrs Hawkins?’
‘It’s all quite beyond me,’ I said. ‘I can’t possibly cope.’
‘Four days of rain on end. I quite agree,’ he said. ‘But the weather apart, Mrs Hawkins, there is something I want to discuss. Something rather jolly, in fact.’
‘It is not jolly,’ I said, getting ready for my speech.
‘The march of ideas,’ he said, settling himself in the chair where my authors generally sat.
He had in fact come to offer me the job of assistant editor of a new quarterly magazine called The Phantom which he was founding. It was to publish essays, poems and stories on the supernatural and extra-sensory perception.
There was an upsurge of interest in the supernatural in those years, probably as a result of the uncontemplatable events which had blackened the previous decade.
‘Yes,’ said. ‘That would be jolly.’
It was jolly, too, that he offered me a rise in pay.
Before he left, he said, ‘Are you keeping well, Mrs Hawkins?’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Mr Tooley. And you?’
‘Oh, I’m all right. It’s only that you look different, if I may be personal.’
‘Yes, I’m losing weight.’
‘Oh, dear. Shall you be thin?’
‘No, only normal, I hope.’
‘Oh dear. Of course, you could try the Box.’
That was on a Thursday. Friday morning I sent Hector Bartlett’s manuscript to Sir Alec with a note, the wording of which I had pondered well: ‘I consider that it cannot be improved upon.’
I was looking through some notes about The Phantom that Ian Tooley had sent me when the intercom buzzed. It was noon.
The angel of the Lord brought the tidings …
‘Mrs Hawkins speaking,’ I said.
It was Sir Alec. And she conceived by the Holy Ghost.
‘Mrs Hawkins, if you could see your way to be free at two-thirty this afternoon I should be obliged if you would come and see me here in my office.’
Hail Mary … the Word was made flesh.
‘Yes, of course, Sir Alec.’
I went to lunch at a pub nearby to eat half a delicious ham sandwich, and drink half a cup of watery coffee and half a glass of port. It was a popular pub for journalists as well as for the people who worked at Mackintosh & Tooley’s and publishers in the vicinity of Covent Garden. I was early enough to get a place at a table, but others who came in after me had to stand. The place was soon full of people and noise, the smell of beer, cigarettes and of people. The door swung open and shut as more and more came in. One man had a spaniel on a lead. He let it loose and it ambled round everybody’s legs to see what treats it could pick up from friendly customers by way of bits of sandwich or sausage rolls. My eyes followed the dog, for I was going to give it the left-over half of my sandwich if it should come my way. It was at the bar, now, and was nosing a sausage roll which a man was idly letting hang from his left hand while his right hand was holding a glass of beer. Rather comically, the dog just helped himself to a bite of this dangling sausage roll. The man turned and swore at the dog. I now saw who this man was: Hector Bartlett. All in one second, he now took a large dab of mustard from the pot on the counter, dabbed it on the rest of the sausage roll, and gave it to the greedy dog.
‘Oh, no,’ shouted the few people who had seen this happen, including me. Too late, also, was the dog’s master who also had been just in time to witness the nasty work, and to whom the poor beast ran, whining and shaking its head from side to side. I got the barman to give me some water in a deep, clean, glass ashtray. Fortunately, very soon the dog was sick on the floor, and there was a flurry of people with sawdust to mop it up, and a great fussing round the dog. The owner, a young thin man, went over to big Hector Bartlett and said, ‘I say, old b
oy, that was pretty rotten of you.’ Which I thought quite a restrained reaction.
But the Pisseur de copie, who had obtained a second sausage roll, merely said, in an off-hand way, ‘It stole the first half, so I thought it might as well have the second.’ The owner of the dog turned away in disgust, fixed the lead on the dog’s collar and went out. There was a feeling of relief in the place, for everyone had been expecting a fight.
The Pisseur, his chins folded into the collar of his sheepskin coat, his baby-mouth consuming a fresh sausage roll, lolled over the counter, with his eyes on the crowd, and his back to the barman. He was often to be seen in pubs in this neighbourhood at lunch-time and immediately after office hours, hoping to catch the eye of some editor or journalist who could be useful to him. He caught my eye.
‘Mrs Hawkins, what a pleasure,’ he said, and, with his back still to the barman, turned his head just enough to throw an order for another beer over his shoulder. ‘Mrs Hawkins, I understand you’re my new editor.’
I didn’t reply. I got up and left. It occurred to me on the way to the office that I couldn’t stand the publishing scene any longer. Then it occurred to me that this was unfair; the pub was hardly the publishing scene nor was Hector Bartlett representative of it. But there was a residue of uneasiness in my mind about the publishing scene, a weariness of authors, agents, books, printers, binders, critics, editors, when I went in to Sir Alec Tooley’s office punctually at half-past two. He hadn’t arrived back from lunch yet. I sat down with my thoughts. I was tired of the whole scene and longed to be able to go into a bookshop as in former times and choose a book without being aware of all that went into its making. Besides being weary, I was hungry, but I took pride in that.