Loitering With Intent (3 page)

‘No, I write poetry. I want to write. Marriage would interfere.’ I said this in a natural way and without previous calculation, but it probably sounded lofty for she looked at me in a shocked sort of way and said, ‘But you could get married and have children, surely, and write poetry after the children had gone to bed.’ I smiled at this. I was not a pretty girl but I knew that I had a smile that transformed my face and, one way and another, I had made Beryl Tims furious.

That shocked look of hers reminded me very strongly of the look on the face of my lover’s wife, Dottie, on another occasion. I must say that Dottie was a better educated woman than Beryl Tims, but the look was the same. She had confronted me with my affair with her husband, which I thought tiresome of her. I replied, ‘Yes, Dottie, I love him. I love him off and on, when he doesn’t interfere with my poetry and so forth. In fact I’ve started a novel which requires a lot of poetic concentration because, you see, I conceive everything poetically. So perhaps it will be more off than on with Leslie.’

Dottie was relieved that she wasn’t in danger of losing her man, at the same time as she was horrified by what she called my unnatural attitude, which in fact was quite natural to me.

‘Your head rules your heart,’ she said in her horror. I told her this was a stupid way of putting things. She knew this was true but in moments of crisis she fell back on banalities. She was a moralist and accused me then of spiritual pride. ‘Pride goes before a fall,’ said Dottie. In fact if I had pride it was vocational in nature; I couldn’t help it, and I’ve never found it necessarily precedes falls. Dottie was a large woman with a sweet young face, plump breasts and hips, thick ankles. She was a Catholic, greatly addicted to the cult of the Virgin Mary about whose favours she fooled herself quite a bit, constantly betraying her quite good mind by simpering about Our Lady.

However, having said her say, Dottie left it at that. I saw a bottle of scent in her bathroom called ‘English Rose,’ and this both repelled me and gave me happy comfort as confirming a character forming in my own mind. I learned a lot in my life from Dottie, by her teaching me some precepts which I could usefully reject. She learned nothing of use from me.

But Beryl Tims was the better English Rose and the more frightful. And just then, I saw her more frequently than I did Dottie. But I didn’t see Beryl Tims fully in action until some weeks later, at an informal gathering of the Autobiographical Association whose members’ memoirs I had been typing and puffing into recognizable English sentences. Up to then I had seen how Beryl treated Sir Quentin, always with a provocative tone which failed to provoke in the way that she wished; Beryl could not see why, but then she was stupid.

‘Men like you to stand up to them,’ she said to me, ‘but Sir Quentin sometimes takes me up wrongly. And I’ve got his mother to watch over, haven’t I?’ She positively battled with Sir Quentin; obviously she was trying to arouse him sexually, to no avail. Only a high rank or a string of titles could bring an orgiastic quiver to his face and body. But he kept Beryl Tims in a state of hope. Also, I had watchfully noted Beryl with the ancient Lady Edwina, Sir Quentin’s Mummy. Beryl was her prison warder and companion.

The memoirs written by the members of the Autobiographical Association, although none had got beyond the first chapter, already had a number of factors in common. One of them was nostalgia, another was paranoia, a third was a transparent craving on the part of the authors to appear likeable. I think they probably lived out their lives on the principle that what they were, and did, and wanted, should above all look pretty. Typing out and making sense out of these compositions was an agony to my spirit until I hit on the method of making them expertly worse; and everyone concerned was delighted with the result.

A meeting of the ten members of the Association was called for three in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 4th, five weeks after I had started the job. So far I hadn’t met any of them, for their last monthly meeting had been held on a Saturday.

That morning Beryl Tims made a scene when Sir Quentin said, ‘Mrs Tims, I want you to keep Mummy under control this afternoon.’

‘Under control,’ said Beryl. ‘You might well say under control. How can I keep her ladyship under control and serve tea at the same time? How can I check her fluxive precipitations?’ This last phrase I had taught Beryl myself to while away a dull moment when she had been complaining of the old lady’s having wet the floor. I had only half expected my version to catch on.

‘She should be in a home,’ Beryl said to Sir Quentin, ‘She needs a private nurse,’ and so she wailed on. Sir Quentin looked troubled but impressed. ‘Fluxive precipitations,’ he said, with his eyes abstractly on the side wall, as if he were tasting a wine new to his experience, but which he was prepared to go more than half way towards approving.

Now, by this time I had become rather fond of Lady Edwina, I think largely because she had taken an extraordinary liking to me. But also I enjoyed her dramatic entrances and her amazing statements. I could see she was more in charge of her senses than she let appear to her son or to Beryl, for sometimes when I had been alone with her in the flat she had rambled on in a quite natural tone of voice. And for some reason on these occasions alone with me she would sometimes totter off to the lavatory in time. So that I presumed her incontinence and wild behaviour with Sir Quentin and Beryl was due to her either fearing or loathing both of them, and that in any case they got on her nerves.

‘I can’t take responsibility for your mother this afternoon, not me,’ Beryl stated through her English Rose lips, that morning before the meeting.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘Oh, dear.’

In swayed Lady Edwina herself to add to the confusion. ‘Think I’m ga-ga, don’t you? Fleur, my dear, do you think I’m ga-ga?’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘They want to hush me up but I’m damned if they will hush me up,’ she said.

‘Mummy!’ said Sir Quentin.

‘They want to give me sleeping pills to keep me quiet this afternoon. That’s funny. Because I’m not going to take any sleeping pills. This is my flat, isn’t it? I can do what I like in my own flat, can’t I? I can receive or not receive according to my likes, is that not so?’

I assumed that the old woman was rich. She had rattled on to me one day how her son wanted her to do something to avoid death duties, hand over her property to him, but she hadn’t much property and anyway she was damned if she was going to be Queen Lear. And I hadn’t responded much to this line of talk, preferring to switch her over to a quite lucid and interesting speculation as to the possible nature and characteristics of the defunct Queen Lear herself. There was really nothing wrong with Lady Edwina except that her son and Beryl Tims got her down. As to her bizarre appearance, I liked it. I liked to see her shaking, withered hand with its talons pointing accusingly, I liked the four greenish teeth through which she hissed and cackled. She cheered up my job with her wild eyes and her pre-war tea-gowns of black lace or draped, patterned silk always hung with glittering beads. Now, as she stood confronting Mrs Tims and Sir Quentin with her rights I wondered about the history of it all. This must have been going on for years. Beryl Tims was looking in a frigid sort of way at the carpet beneath Lady Edwina’s feet, no doubt waiting for another fluxive precipitation. Quentin sat with his head thrown back, his eyes shut and his hands touching at the finger-tips as in precious prayer.

I said, ‘Lady Edwina, if you’d like to take a rest this afternoon then afterwards you could come home to supper with me.’

She accepted the bribe with alacrity. They all accepted the bribe, with a gabble and clack: Take her in a taxi, I’ll be delighted to pay, we can book a taxi for six, no it’s not necessary to book, I’m delighted to accept, my dear Miss Talbot, what an excellent, what a very original idea. The taxi will…. We can come and fetch you home, Mummy, in a taxi. My dear Miss Talbot, how grateful we are. Now, Mummy, after lunch you will go and rest in your room.

Lady Edwina wavered out of the study to call up her hairdresser on the telephone, for she had a young apprentice girl who always came at her bidding to do her hair. I remember how Sir Quentin and Beryl Tims went on about being so very grateful; it didn’t occur to them that I might actually want to spend an evening with my new and ravaged friend, an embarrassment to them but not to me. I thought of what there was for supper: tinned herring roes on toast with instant coffee and milk, a perfect supper for Lady Edwina at her age and for me at mine. The ins of roes and the coffee were part of a small hoard I kept of precious rarities. Food was tightly rationed in those days.

By half-past two she had gone to bed for her rest, having first looked in to tell me she had decided to wear her dove grey with the beaded top if only to spite Mrs Tims, who had advised her to put on an old skirt and jumper that would go better with my bed-sitter. I told her she was quite right, and to wrap up warm.

‘I have my chinchilla,’ she said. ‘Tims has got her eyes on my chinchilla but I’ve left it to the Cochin Mission to be sold for the poor. That will give Tims something to think about when I die. If she survives me. Ha! But you never know.’

Only six out of the ten members called to the meeting could come.

It was a busy afternoon. I sat at my typewriter in a corner of the study while in straggled the six.

I had probably expected too much of them. For years I had been working up to my novel
Warrender Chase
and had become accustomed to first fixing a fictional presence in my mind’s eye, then adding a history to it. In the case of Sir Quentin’s guests the histories had been presented before the physical characters had appeared. As they trooped in, I could immediately sense an abject depression about them. Not only had I read Sir Quentin’s fabulous lists of Who was Who among them, but I had also read the first chapters of their pathetic memoirs, and through typing them out and emphatically touching them up I think I had begun to consider them inventions of my own, based on the original inventions of Sir Quentin. Now these people whose qualities he had built up to be distinguished, even to the last rarity, came into the study that calm and sunny October afternoon with evident trepidation.

Sir Quentin dashed and flitted around the room arranging them in chairs and clucking, and occasionally introducing me to them. ‘Sir Eric—my new and I might say very reliable secretary Miss Talbot, no relation it appears to the distinguished branch of that family to which your dear wife belongs.’

Sir Eric was a small, timid man. He shook hands all round in a furtive way. I supposed rightly that he was the Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., a sugar-refining merchant whose memoirs, like the others, had not yet got farther than Chapter One: Nursery Days. The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents’ absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver.

Sir Quentin’s method at this early stage was to send round advance copies of the complete set of typed and improved chapters to each of the ten members so that each of the six members present, and the four absent, had already seen their own and the others’ typescripts. Sir Quentin had at first considered my additions to be rather extravagant, don’t you think, my dear Miss Talbot, a bit too-too? After a good night’s sleep he had evidently seen some merit in my arrangement, having worked out some of the possibilities to his own advantage for the future; he had said next morning, ‘Well, Miss Talbot, let’s try your versions out on them. After all, we are living in modern times.’ I had gathered, even then, that he had plans for inducing me to write more compromising stuff into these memoirs, but I had no intention of writing anything beyond what cheered up the boring parts of the job for the time being and what could feed my imagination for my novel
Warrender Chase.
So that his purposes were quite different from mine, yet at the same time they coincided so far as he had his futile plans as to how he could use me, and I was working at top pace for him: photocopy machines were not current in those days.

At the meeting I gave close attention to the six members without ever actually studying them with my eyes.

I always preferred what I saw out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak. Besides little Sir Eric Findlay, the people present were Lady Bernice Gilbert, nicknamed Bucks, the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, a Mrs Wilks, a Miss Maisie Young, and an unfrocked priest called Father Egbert Delaney whose memoirs obsessively made the point that he had lost his frock through a loss of faith, not morals.

Now Lady Bernice Gilbert swam in and at first dominated the party. ‘Bucks!’ said Sir Quentin, embracing her. ‘Quentin,’ she declared hoarsely. She was about forty, much dressed up in new clothes which people who could afford it were buying a lot of, since clothes had come off the ration only a few months ago. Bucks was got up in an outfit called the New Look, a pill-box hat with an eye-veil, a leg-of-mutton-sleeved coat and long swinging skirt, all in black. She took a chair close to me, her physical presence very scented. She was the last person I would have attached tot her first chapter. Her story, unlike some of the others, was by no means illiterate in so far as she knew how to string sentences together. The story opened with herself, alone in a church, at the age of twenty.

However, I was called, at that moment, to shake hands with Miss Maisie Young, a tall, attractive girl of about thirty who walked with a stick, one of her legs being encased in a contraption which looked as if it was part of her life, and not a passing affair of an accident. I took considerably to Maisie Young; indeed I wondered what she was doing in this already babbling chorus; and still more I was amazed that she belonged to the opening of the memoirs attached to her name, this being an unintelligible treatise on the Cosmos and how Being is Becoming.

‘Maisie, my dear Maisie, can I put you here? Are you comfortable? My dear Clotilde! My. very dear Father Egbert, are you all comfortable? Let me take your wrap, Clotilde. Mrs Tims — where is Mrs Tims?—Miss Talbot, perhaps you would be so kind, so very kind as to take la Baronne Clotilde’s…’