by Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark
LOITERING WITH
INTENT
1981
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The quotations from the Life of Benvenuto
Cellini are gratefully taken from Miss Anne
Macdonell’s translation in the Everyman
edition.
Chapter One
One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me. He was shy and smiling, he might have been coming over the grass to ask me for a game of tennis. He only wanted to know what I was doing but plainly he didn’t like to ask. I told him I was writing a poem, and offered him a sandwich which he refused as he had just had his dinner himself. He stopped to talk awhile, then he said good-bye, the graves must be very old, and that he wish me good luck and that it was nice to speak to somebody.
This was the last day of a whole chunk of my life but I didn’t know that at the time. I sat on the stone slab of some Victorian grave writing my poem as long as the sun lasted. I lived nearby in a bed-sitting-room with a gas fire and a gas ring operated by pre-decimal pennies and shillings in the slot, whichever you preferred or had. My morale was high. I needed a job, but that, which should have been a depressing factor when viewed in cold blood, in fact simply was not. Neither was the swinishness of my landlord, a Mr Alexander, short of stature. I was reluctant to go home lest he should waylay me. I owed him no rent but he kept insisting that I should take a larger and more expensive room in his house, seeing that I had overcrowded the small single room with my books, my papers, my boxes and bags, my food stores and the evidence of constant visitors who stayed to tea or came late.
So far I had stood up to the landlord’s claim that I was virtually living a double-room life for single-room pay. At the same time I was fascinated by his swinishness. Tall Mrs Alexander always kept in the background so far as the renting of rooms was concerned, determined not to be confused with a landlady. Her hair was always glossy black, new from the hairdresser, her nails polished red. She stepped in and out of the house with a polite nod like another, but more superior, tenant. I fairly drank her in with my mind while smiling politely back. I had nothing whatsoever against these Alexanders except in the matter of their wanting me to take on a higher-priced room. If he had thrown me out I would still have had nothing much against them, I would mainly have been fascinated. In a sense I felt that the swine Alexander was quite excellent as such, surpassingly hand-picked. And although I wanted to avoid him on my return to my lodging I knew very well I had something to gain from a confrontation, should it happen. In fact, I was aware of a dæmon inside me that rejoiced in seeing people as they were, and not only that, but more than ever as they were, and more, and more.
At that time I had a number of marvellous friends, full of good and evil. I was close on penniless but my spirits were all the more high because I had recently escaped from the Autobiographical Association (non-profit-making) where I was thought rather mad, if not evil. I will tell you about the Autobiographical Association.
Ten months before the day when I sat writing my poem on the worn-out graves of the dead in Kensington and had a conversation with the shy policeman, ‘Dear Fleur,’ came the letter.
‘Dear Fleur.’ Fleur was the name hazardously be-stowed at birth, as always in these cases before they know what you are going to turn out like. Not that I looked too bad, it was only that Fleur wasn’t the right name, and yet it was mine as are the names of those melancholy Joys, those timid Victors, the inglorious Glorias and materialistic Angelas one is bound to meet in the course of a long life of change and infiltration; and I once met a Lancelot who, I assure you, had nothing to do with chivalry.
However all that may be, ‘Dear Fleur,’ went the letter. ‘I think I’ve found a job for you!…’ The letter went on, very boring. It was a well-wishing friend and I have forgotten what she looked like. Why did I keep these letters? Why? They are all neatly bundled up in thin folders, tied with pink tape, 1949, 1950, 1951 and on and on. I was trained to be a secretary; maybe I felt that letters ought to be filed, and I’m sure I thought they would be interesting one day. In fact, they aren’t very interesting in themselves. For example about this time, just before the turn of the half-century, a book-shop wrote to ask for their money or they would ‘take further steps’. I owed money to bookshops in those days; some were more lenient than others. I remember at the time thinking the letter about the further steps quite funny and worth keeping. Perhaps I wrote and told them that I was quite terrified of their steps approaching further, nearer, nearer; perhaps I didn’t actually write this but only considered doing so. Apparently I paid them in the end for the final receipt is there, £5.8.9. I always desired books; nearly all of my bills were for books. I possessed one very rare book which I traded for part of my bill with another book-shop, for I wasn’t a bibliophile of any kind; rare books didn’t interest me for their rarity, but for their content. I borrowed frequently from the public library, but often I would go into a bookshop and in my longing to possess, let us say, the Collected Poems of Arthur Clough and a new Collected Chaucer, I would get into conversation with the bookseller and run up a bill.
‘Dear Fleur, I think I’ve found a job for you!’
I wrote off to the address in Northumberland setting forth my merits as a secretary. Within a week I got on a bus to go and be interviewed by my new employer at the Berkeley Hotel. It was six in the evening. I had allowed for the rush hour and arrived early. He was earlier still, and when I went to the desk to ask for him he rose from a nearby chair and came over to me.
He was slight, nearly tall, with white hair, a thin face with high cheekbones which were pink-flushed, although otherwise his face was pale. His right shoulder seemed to protrude further than the left as if fixed in the position for shaking hands, so that his general look was very slightly askew. He had an air which said, I am distinguished. Name, Sir Quentin Oliver.
We sat at a table drinking dry sherry. He said, ‘Fleur Talbot—are you half French?’
‘No. Fleur was just a name my mother fancied.’
‘Ah, interesting… Well now, yes, let me explain about the undertaking.’
The wages he offered were of 1936 vintage, and this was 1949, modern times. But I pushed up the staring price a little, and took the job for its promise of a totally new experience.
‘Fleur Talbot…’ he had said, sitting there in the Berkeley. ‘Any connection with the Talbots of Talbot Grange? The Honourable Martin Talbot, know who I mean?’
I said, ‘No.’
‘No relation to them. Of course there are the Talbots of Findlay’s Refineries. Those sugar people. She’s a great friend of mine. Lovely creature. Too good for him if you ask my opinion.’
Sir Quentin Oliver’s London flat was in Hallam Street near Portland Place. There I went to my job from nine in the morning till five-thirty in the afternoon, passing the B.B.C. edifice where I always hoped to get a job but never succeeded.
At Hallam Street every morning the door would be opened by Mrs Tims, the housekeeper. The first morning Sir Quentin introduced her to me as ‘Beryl, Mrs Tims,’ which she in a top-people’s accent corrected to Mrs Beryl Tims, and while I stood waiting with my coat on, they had an altercation over this, he maintaining politely that before her divorce she had been Mrs Thomas Tims and now she was, to be precise, Beryl, Mrs Tims, but in no circumstances was Mrs Beryl Tims accepted usage. Mrs Tims then announced she could produce her National Insurance card, her ration book and her identity card to prove that her name was Mrs Beryl Tims. Sir Quentin held that the clerks employed in the ministries which issued these documents
were ill-informed. Later, he said, he would show her what he meant under correct forms of address in one of his reference books. After that, he turned to me.
‘I hope you’re not argumentative,’ he said. ‘An argumentative woman is like water coming through the roof; it says so in the Holy Scriptures, either Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, I forget which. I hope you don’t talk too much.’
‘I talk very little,’ I said, which was true, although 1 listened a lot because I had a novel, my first, in larva. I took off my coat and handed it somewhat snootily to the refined Mrs Tims, who took it away roughly and stalked off hammering the parquet floor with her heels. As she went she looked contemptuously at the coat which was a cheap type known then as ‘Utility.’ Utility was at that time the People’s garment, recognizable by the label with its motif of overlapping quarter-moons. Many of the rich, who could afford to spend clothing coupons on non-Utility at Dorville, Jacqmar or Savile Row, still chose to buy Utility, bestowing upon it, I noticed, the inevitable phrase, ‘perfectly all right’. I have always been on the listen-in for those sort of phrases.
But perfectly all right was not what Beryl Tims thought of my coat. I followed Sir Quentin into the library. ‘Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,’ said Sir Quentin. I acknowledged his witticism with the smug smile which I felt was part of my job.
In the interview at the Berkeley he had told me the work was to be of a ‘…literary nature. We are a group. A group, I may add, of some distinction. Your function will be highly interesting, although of course on you will depend the efficiency and typewriting— how I hate that word stenography, so American—and of course the stationery cupboard is dreadfully untidy at the moment and will need seeing to. You will have your work cut out, Miss Talbot.’
I had asked at the end of the interview if I could get some pay at the end of the first week as I couldn’t hold out for a whole month. He went aloof, a little hurt. Perhaps he suspected that I wanted to put the job on a week’s trial; this was partly true but my need for speedy pay was equally true. He had said, ‘Oh well, yes, of course if it’s a case of hardship,’ as one might say a case of sea-sickness. In the meantime I had wondered why he had called the interview at a London hotel instead of at the flat where I was to work.
Now that I was actually in the flat he answered that question himself. ‘It isn’t everybody, Miss Talbot, whom I invite to enter my home.’ I replied agreeably that we all felt like that and I cast my eyes round the room; I couldn’t see the books, they were all behind glass. But Sir Quentin was not satisfied with my ‘We all feel like that’; it put us on an equal footing. He set about making plain that I had missed the point. ‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that here we have formed a very special circle, for a very delicate purpose. The work is top secret. I want you to remember that. I interviewed six young ladies, and I have chosen you, Miss Talbot, I want you to remember that.’ By this time he was seated at his very splendid desk, leaning back in his chair, eyes half-closed, with his hands held before him at chest level, the finger-tips of each hand touching the other. I sat at the opposite side of the desk.’
He waved towards a large antique cabinet. ‘In there, he said, ‘are secrets.’
I wasn’t alarmed, for although he was plainly some sort of crank and it struck me, of course, that he might be up to no good, there was nothing in his voice or manner that I felt as an immediate personal menace. But I was on the alert, in fact excited. The novel I was writing, my first, Warrender Chase, was really filling my whole life at that time. I was finding it extraordinary how, throughout all the period I had been working on the novel, right from Chapter One, characters and situations, images and phrases that I absolutely needed for the book simply appeared as if from not-where into my range of perception. I was a magnet for experiences that I needed. Not that I reproduced them photographically and literally. I didn’t for a moment think of portraying Sir Quentin as he was. What gave me great happiness was his gift tome of the finger-tips of his hands touching each other, and, nestling among the words, as he waved towards the cabinet, ‘In there are secrets,’ the pulsating notion of how much he wanted to impress, how greatly he desired to believe in himself. And I might have left the job then and there, and never seen or thought of him again, but carried away with me these two items and more. I felt like the walnut cabinet itself towards which he was waving. In here are secrets, said my mind. At the same time I gave him my attention.
After all these years I’ve got used tot this process of artistic apprehension in the normal course of the day, but it was fairly new to me then. Mrs Tims had also excited me in the same way. An awful woman. But to me, beautifully awful. I must say that in September of 1949 I had no idea at all if I could bring off Warrender Chase. But whether I was capable of finishing the whole book or not, the excitement was the same.
Sir Quentin went on to tell me what the job was about. Mrs Tims brought in the post.
Sir Quentin ignored her but he said to me, ‘I never deal with my correspondence until after breakfast. It’s too upsetting.’ (You must know that in those days the mail arrived at eight in the morning and people who didn’t go out to work read their letters with their breakfast, and those who did, read them on the bus.) ‘Toot upsetting.’ In the meantime Mrs Tims went to the window and said, ‘They’re dead.’ She was referring to a bowl of roses which had shed their petals on the table. She gathered up the petals and stuck them into the rose bowl, then lifted the rose bowl to carry it away. As she did so she looked at me and caught me watching her. I continued to watch the spot where she had been, as if in glaze-eyed abstraction, and perhaps, thus, I succeeded in fooling her that I hadn’t been consciously watching her at all, only looking at the spot where she stood, my thoughts on something else; perhaps I didn’t fool her, one never knows about those things. She continued to grumble about the dead roses till she left the room, looking all the more like the wife of a man I knew; Mrs Tims even walked like her.
I turned my attention to Sir Quentin, who waited for his housekeeper’s exit with his eyes half-shut, and his hands in an attitude almost of prayer, his elbows on the arm-rests of his chair, his finger-tips touching.
‘Human nature,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘is a quite extraordinary thing, I find it quite extraordinary. You know the old adage, Truth is stranger than Fiction?’
I said yes.
It was a dry sunny day of September 1949. I remember looking towards the window where intermittent sunlight fingered the muslin curtains. My ears have a good memory. If I recall certain encounters of the past at all, or am reminded perhaps by old letters that they happened, back come flooding the aural images first and the visual second. So I remember Sir Quentin’s way of speech, his words precisely and his intonation as he said to me, ‘Miss Talbot, are you interested in what I am saying?‘
‘Oh yes. Yes, I agree that truth is stranger than fiction.’
I had thought his eyes were too shut-in on his thoughts to notice my head turning towards the window. I know that I had looked away to register within myself some instinctive thoughts.
‘I have a number of friends,’ he said, and waited for this to sink in. Dutifully now, I kept my eyes on his words.
‘Very important friends, V.I.P.s. We form an association. Do you know anything about the British laws of libel? My dear Miss Talbot, these laws are very narrow and very severe. One may not, for instance, impugn a lady’s honour, not that one would wish to were she in fact a lady, and as for stating the actual truth about one’s life which naturally involves living people, well, it is quite impossible. Do you know what we have done, we who have lived extraordinary—and I mean extra-ordinary—lives? Do you know what we have done about placing the facts on record for posterity?’
I said no.
‘We have formed an Autobiographical Association. We have all started to write our memoirs, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we are lodging them for seventy years in a safe place until all the living people mentioned
therein shall be living no longer.’
He pointed to the handsome cabinet faintly lit by the sun filtering through the gathered muslin curtains. I longed to be outside walking in the park and chewing over Sir Quentin’s character in my mind before even finding out any more about him.
‘Documents of that sort should go into a bank vault,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Sir Quentin in a bored way. ‘You are quite right. That is possibly the ultimate destination of our biographical reminiscences. But that is looking ahead. Now I have to tell you that my friends are largely unaccustomed to literary composition; I, who have a natural bent in that field, have taken on the direction of the endeavour. They are, of course, men and women of great distinction living full, very full, lives. One way and another these days of change and post-war. One can’t expect. Well, the thing is I’m helping them to write their memoirs which they haven’t time to do. We have friendly meetings, gatherings, get-togethers and so on. When we are better organized we shall meet at my property in Northumberland.’
Those were his words and I enjoyed them. I thought them over as I walked home through the park. They had already become part of my memoirs.
At first I supposed Sir Quentin was making a fortune out of the memoir business. The Association, as he called it, then comprised ten people. He gave me a bulky list of the members’ names with supporting biographical information so selective as to tell me, in fact, more about Sir Quentin than the people he described. I remember quite clearly my wonder and my joy at:
Major-General Sir George C. Beverley, Bt., C.B.E., D.S.O., formerly in that ‘crack’ regiment of the Blues and now a successful, a very successful businessman in the City and on the Continent. General Sir George is a cousin of that fascinating, that infinitely fascinating hostess, Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert, widow of the former chargé d’affaires in San Salvador, Sir Alfred Gilbert, K.C.M.G., C.B.E. (1919) whose portrait, executed by that famous, that illustrious, portrait painter Sir Ames Baldwin, K.B.E., hangs in the magnificent North Dining Room of Landers Place, Bedfordshire, one of the family properties of Sir Alfred’s mother, the late incomparable Comtesse Marie-Louise Torri-Gil, friend of H.M. King Zog of Albania and of Mrs Wilks who as a debutante in St Petersburg was a friend of Sir Q., the present writer, and daughter of a Captain of the Horse at the Court of the late Czar before her marriage to a British Officer, Lieutenant Wilks.
