Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘Of course. Why upset the planets in their orbits?’

  This bit of humour escaped Albert, who made his hmmph sound again.

  Leaving his father’s office, with Mrs Partridge’s rejected manuscript under his arm, Quentin paused at Miss Marr’s desk. He pointed to the galaxy of black and white photographs dotting the wall above it. ‘Which one is Louisa Partridge?’

  Miss Marr regarded them with characteristic gravity, pointing to a photo near the epicentre of that galaxy. ‘That’s from her glory days, 1935. Her Book of British Housekeeping has never been out of print since.’ Miss Marr sat back down, her hands poised over the typewriter like Liszt at the keyboard.

  ‘My wife got a copy for a wedding present.’

  ‘From Mrs Partridge?’

  ‘I don’t know. Florence did the thank-you notes. But I don’t think so. Mrs Partridge didn’t come to our wedding. I wonder why. She’s been an author with us for years.’

  In her portrait, Louisa Partridge rested two fingers against her left cheek, but unlike the other authors, she did not look world weary, nor did she wear a hat at a jaunty angle, nor did she hold a cigarette. Marcelled curls rippled down one side of her head and her beautifully manicured hand sported large smooth rings. Opal? Jade? The black and white photo made it impossible to tell. She had a direct, dark-eyed gaze, and a confident smile with surprisingly good teeth. She was one of the more attractive women authors.

  ‘Her hair is longer now. Everyone’s is. It’s the New Look,’ said Miss Marr in an authoritative voice which Quentin found odd on a small, narrow woman whose brown skirts were silvered with cat hairs, whose collars had frayed, and whose lank hair was twisted in a knot at the back of her neck. Rimless spectacles rested atop her long, restless, pointed nose, and her brown eyes were close-set.

  ‘Yes,’ Monica added, lighting up and turning round from her typewriter, ‘but New Look or old, Mrs Partridge is still a fearful old battleaxe.’

  Miss Marr chastised Monica for disrespect to a client. ‘What if we had another client in here, and they heard you? Why, they’d never come back.’

  Monica shrugged. ‘I don’t see ‘em lining up, do you?’

  ‘Nonetheless.’ Miss Marr was firm, the pillar of propriety. ‘Quentin, I have contracts for you to look over, and I’ve put your post on the desk in your office, and I shall need to know your schedule for the rest of this week.’

  ‘It takes all the running I can do to stay in one place,’ he said.

  ‘Do not quote poetry at me, Quentin. I shall need the schedule.’ Quentin ducked into his own office, and closed the door behind him.

  Quentin Castle found himself sometimes bedevilled by random lines of poetry. Carroll, Donne, Blake, Byron, Yeats, Auden, Shakespeare, Eliot, Lawrence, Hardy, assorted others battered his brain like that sparrow flinging itself against the ceiling. One line fell away and another would take its place. Always bookish, an eclectic reader, the literary agent’s profession – linking the lone author scribbling away and the vast reading public – suited him. Fortunate, since his life’s work was settled as surely as if he’d been born to a family of nobles, or rabbis, or miners. Quentin had no other path than following his father. Indeed, his whole life seemed rather like a chess game in which he was made to move in predictable patterns. He had no reason to complain. He did not complain. He had a university education (an undistinguished third from St John’s, Oxford), and he was happily married to a beautiful girl. He was comfortable in a country where many lived in want and soul-killing misery. (He knew this from reading George Orwell, not from experience.) Quentin Castle was no T. S. Eliot labouring for Mammon at the bank by day, and serving the god of poetry by night. No, he was content to toil in the agency aspect of literature’s vineyard, though his authors were mostly inherited from Albert and Miss Sherrill, frowsy female mystery writers, ageing historians whose theories had been rendered obsolete by the Cold War, the dull, the passé, authors Albert and Miss Sherrill could no longer be bothered with.

  Rather like Mrs Partridge, he thought ruefully, untying the strings that bound her rejected book.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE AFRICAN VIOLET, THE ASPIDISTRA

  Quentin Castle was an inveterate early riser, and this created something of an ongoing domestic dispute. In general, Florence and Quentin’s newlywed difficulties were tempered by their love for one another, and eased because they had known each other all their lives. Too, they both subscribed to a certain code of civility. But in this small matter, Quentin could be stubborn. He rose early and observed his small solitary morning rituals: to bring in the milk, make a pot of tea and drink it while reading The Times in the kitchen. Florence maintained that Quentin should not be in the kitchen at all. It wasn’t suitable: Effie, the maid-of-all-work, should see to these things. He smiled and agreed with his bride, soothed, but persisted in rising early, bringing in the milk, making tea and reading the long grey columns of The Times, so he was there, at the kitchen table, when Effie slunk in through the back. Quentin nodded, though he did not speak.

  Effie hung her coat and hat on the hooks by the door. ‘I would’ve got the milk,’ she said, tying on an apron. ‘I always tell you that.’ She was eighteen or nineteen, sullen, not very bright, with bad teeth, much-gnawed nails, lank hair framing her face like a greasy helmet, though inoffensive otherwise.

  ‘Never mind.’ He did not like Effie. By simply arriving, being, taking up oxygen, she intruded.

  ‘Missus won’t say no never mind. She’ll think I’m shirking.’ Effie always spoke in a tone that suggested an unspecific grudge against the universe. ‘I might lose my position cos of you.’

  Quentin did not dignify this with a reply. Effie’s wages were his mother-in-law’s wedding gift to them. It seemed to Quentin undemocratic, stuffy, pretentious and Edwardian to have the luxury of a servant when so many were making do with so little. Oh, a charwoman to come in now and then, shine the brass, that sort of thing, fine, but Effie, the maid-of-all-work? Quentin assumed that Effie herself resented the title since she did all the work badly, like a music-hall parody, lacking only the feather duster and the good looks of a music-hall maid. Once she had lit her first fag of the day, as she did now, Quentin folded the paper and took it to the bathroom with him. His wife would not yet be awake.

  They had been married about six months. Florence was the daughter of the doughty garden author, Rosamund Phillips, a client of Castle Literary since 1928 when she had published the first of her successful series of garden books. Rosamund was herself once a sort of garden nymph in her heyday, but she had grown enormously fat, despite wartime and post-war privations, despite rationing, and shortages of sugar and butter and eggs and meat. By 1945 her bulk had become an impediment to movement itself, and so her pretty daughter, Florence – aptly named for the child of a garden writer – acted on her behalf. Florence typed her mother’s manuscripts, and personally delivered them, usually to the Castle home which was not far from their own. Margaret and Rosamund were good friends, and the two families sometimes took holidays together, especially after Rosamund was widowed. As Florence and Quentin were much in each other’s company, it was no surprise – not even to them – that they should court and wed. Everyone said it was a perfect match. Their wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, on a beautiful day in June, 1949, had seemed to Quentin rather like a reunion of many old people rather than the union of two young people.

  The daughter of a writer, the son of a literary agent, their honeymoon was a fittingly literary pilgrimage to the Lake District where the weather was uncooperative, and their walks were rain-sodden and generally unromantic. Florence finally declared she wouldn’t take another step outside till the weather changed. He offered to go alone, but she laughed and reminded him they were married now and they would do things together.

  Sex, for instance, making love, they would do that together. Married, there would be no more furtive relieving oneself by hand, no more furtive groping on the occasional drunke
n evening – or on those two occasions in Quentin’s university days, something more. On the first, a lively girl he had met at the Anchor took him, after a few drinks, to her nearby bedsit. Afterwards she asked for money. Quentin hastily paid, embarrassed that he had mistaken the encounter for something else – not love, he was not stupid or mooning – but something at least good-natured; he had not guessed that the rollicking and her squeals would come at a price. On the second occasion, the girl, a student at Lady Margaret Hall with whom he had romped in a secluded spot near the river, collected herself afterwards, plucked her knickers out of the grass, nodded, said something trivial and bolted. Quentin had not thought that was love either, but he was disappointed that she never spoke to him again and always studiously looked away from him, even when they were in the same overheated rooms for tutorials.

  Still, he had some quiet pride at coming into the marriage with experience, though Florence early on whispered wasn’t it nice that they were both pure, and he agreed that it was. She hoped he would be tender and gentle and he promised he would be, and was. She blossomed under his touch, and she always murmured, ‘Wasn’t that nice?’ And he agreed that it was.

  By the time they had returned from their Lake District honeymoon, however, Florence made it clear that she regarded making love as a charming necessity but hardly an outright pleasure. She likened it, using her mother’s garden imagery, to digging a furrow in order to plant. Not a pleasure in itself, necessarily, but pleasant just the same, part of a process. Quentin was about to laugh, but he saw she was serious. He thought her attitude bloody strange. Then she let it be known they would only be digging their furrow – so to speak – two weeks of every month. One week, of course, she had her monthlies, and couldn’t be expected to comply with his demands. He had not thought they were demands, but he listened anyway. Listening was the one thing Quentin excelled at. And, she went on, one week per month, well, one had to be careful, didn’t one? It was called the rhythm method. Quentin had never heard of it. Florence laughed – she had fine, rippling laughter – and called him naive, which he disputed without actually saying that he was not a virgin when they married. Florence kissed him lightly, and said when she was ready to have a baby, it would be different. She kept a calendar under the bed with certain forbidden dates marked with Xs. If he rolled towards her, swung his leg atop her thigh, caressed her breast, she leaned over the edge of the bed and consulted the calendar before she responded. Or not. Last night was one of those marked with an X.

  This morning, as usual, by the time Quentin had finished his morning ritual, bathed, shaved, and dressed, Florence was in their small dining room with the tea. The drapes opened to emit a grey wedge of morning light spilling over the purple African violet on one windowsill, and the pale aspidistra in the other. Workmen were already at their jobs across the street, rebuilding a structure that had been bombed.

  Quentin gave Florence a swift kiss on the cheek, and The Times. She again reminded him that Effie ought to be getting the milk bottles, and he ought not to be in the kitchen. He listened, nodded. He noticed that her dressing gown fell slightly open; it was a lovely shade of peach, and the rounded mounds of her breasts reminded him of scoops of vanilla ice cream. Pre-war scoops. Everything was bigger and finer and richer in the past.

  ‘Mother read somewhere that Orwell asked to be buried in London, but there’s no room for him. More likely no one wanted him in their churchyard. He was such a scoffer.’

  ‘What great writer isn’t?’ Quentin had felt Orwell’s death in a drab London hospital some ten days before as something of a personal loss. Quentin admired his books, his stringent, precise writing, his tempered passion, the deeper and more intense for its being so tempered. There was no thrashing splashing emotion in Orwell; Orwell’s passions were coolly put. But Quentin did not defend the author to Florence. Their minor differences of opinion extended to literature, films and music, though in films and music he easily acquiesced to her superior taste and knowledge; he had a tin ear and little interest in films.

  ‘Lucky for you Orwell isn’t your client. He married some woman just days before he died. That’ll be a right jolly old mess! Oh, and look, here’s a notice of John McVicar’s death. Margaret called Mummy yesterday afternoon and told her the shocking news. It says here he died from a fall in Nepal. What was he doing in Nepal?’ she asked.

  ‘I expect he was scouting new climbs. Looking for new challenges.’ Quentin borrowed the first page of The Times and immersed himself in its endless litany of the dreary. Someone selling a dinner jacket, like new, hadn’t been worn since 1939… .

  ‘Yes, well, the high altitudes must have addled his brains.’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘McVicar. Wife, ex-wife, mistress, and estranged adult children. He certainly left a mess for the Old Family Firm.’ She often referred to the Castle Literary Ltd in that fashion, as though they had some sort of royal patent. ‘I thought Albert was great friends with him. Didn’t you spend one summer at his place near Montreux?’

  ‘It wasn’t a summer. It was a winter holiday. He taught me to ski. I wasn’t very good at it.’ As a child Quentin had dutifully learned to ski. He had learned to swim. He had learned to race, and play cricket and lawn tennis, but he had never been any good at any of it. If he had any latent talents, they were perhaps in amateur theatrics. Useless.

  ‘What about the wife and children? What about the mistress?’

  ‘What about them, Florence?’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘I hardly think my father and mother and I would have been introduced to the mistress. It was a long time ago. I was just a boy. I think McVicar was married to the first wife then, and his children were all experienced skiers and nasty bullies.’

  ‘Well, it seems they haven’t changed.’

  ‘McVicar and his warring family are my father’s concerns. Thank God. I could not bear to deal with all that.’

  ‘You’re too modest, dear. You are an excellent literary agent. One day you will be the best. Better than your father.’ She leaned forward to pick up the teapot and her dressing gown opened over her breasts like a theatrical curtain. Florence exuded a kind of fleshy opulence. One day that opulence would expand to obesity like her mother (she would out-flesh Rosamund before she was fifty) but now Florence’s rosy skin seemed to testify against the grey and grainy world all around them. Quentin thanked her, though whether for the tea or for embodying an antidote to rubble, to rationing, the retreat of Empire, all that he could not say.

  ‘Two lovely lumps of sugar, dear. The Black Market Lady made her weekly stop yesterday at the back door. Aren’t we lucky? And you heard they’ve upped the bacon ration from four ounces to five and the sweets ration from four ounces to four and a half.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘Well, no reason you should. The housekeeping is my job.’

  Effie came through the door bearing two plates of scrambled powdered eggs enlivened with bits of Spam. She plopped them down with a snap in front of Florence and Quentin and returned to the tiny kitchen where she had left a cigarette burning.

  ‘I’ll be going to Mother’s later, naturally, to type for her,’ said Florence. ‘And then Mother and I might go to the pictures. Linda St John’s new film. Why not meet us there, Quentin? Do you good to get out of the office a bit. Albert works you too hard.’

  ‘I’m not much for American pictures, Florence. They’re too … too loud. Too noisy.’

  ‘Yes.’ Florence gave him an affectionate smile. ‘One could never say that about a book, could one?’

  ‘Some books are loud. Noisy. It’s possible.’

  ‘Didn’t I read somewhere that Linda St John is starring in some film they’re making … one of the agency’s clients, dear, you know who I mean.’

  ‘Francis Carson’s Some of These Days.’

  ‘She is so beautiful, so very glamorous.’

  ‘That’s odd, since the main character, Elsie Rose, is an old
bawd with a great voice.’

  Florence laughed her fine rippling laughter. ‘Anything special on today at the office? Any bright new literary lights to be discovered?’

  He shook his head as he put a dab of marge on a slice of dry toast. The scrape of the knife sounded ominous. He could not bear to discuss Louisa Partridge who, in any event, was neither bright, nor new, nor literary for that matter. He had only barely skimmed her book. Thumbed through it. Apricot Olive Lemon seemed to him an unsettling mix of exotic place names and cooking gibberish. The thought of meeting Louisa Partridge today drained his appetite, but he applied himself to the powdered eggs, eating quickly.

  ‘Your mother and father expect us for Sunday lunch,’ said Florence.

  ‘Yes. The planets in their orbits.’

  ‘Oh, Quentin, you are always so irreverent.’

  ‘Hard to be reverent about my mother’s cooking. Do you think she cooks the cabbage in dishwater?’

  She was about to laugh when Effie brought the post in on a china saucer, which annoyed Florence. Effie fled to the kitchen before she could be chastised.

  Quentin rose and said he must be leaving. He brought his lips swiftly to Florence’s and longed to move down her pearly throat, to that tiny little lake formed by her clavicles, or run his hand over the silky robe to reveal the apricot glow of her breast, but it was morning and time to be about one’s tasks.

  Unlike his father’s spacious, gracious domain, Quentin’s office was narrow, spare, spartan; grey filing cabinets, a fraying wing chair and a rug that had long ago given up the ghost of blue. A struggling African violet, a wilting aspidistra, gifts of Florence, sat atop the radiator, the only bit of colour. His view, too, was grimy and looking across the roof into the brownish brick building next door. Sagging shelves high and on either side of his desk held manuscripts which originally he had kept in alphabetical order by author, but those good intentions had long since been superseded by the general higgledy-piggledy mentality of Castle Literary Ltd, which relied on eccentric memory and gnomic cues. In contrast, Quentin’s desk, his own little acre, was neat, not slavishly so, but had a pleasing order about it. He disliked hodge-podge. Unlike Albert or Miss Sherrill, Quentin had his own typewriter, and typed his own letters which he signed with a fountain pen, gift of his father when he had joined the family firm.