by Muriel Spark
‘Oh, but everybody was delighted,’ I said.
Sir Quentin said, ‘But speaking personally I had a mauvais quart d’heure; one never knows with my poor mother what she may say or do. I decline responsibility. A mauvais quart d’heure—’
‘Let her sleep on,’ said Beryl Tims.
As I left Sir Quentin said to me, ‘We have a gentleman’s agreement, you and I, that none of the Association’s proceedings will ever be discussed or revealed, don’t we? They are highly confidential.’
Not being a gentleman by any stretch of the sense, I cheerfully agreed; I have always been impressed by Jesuitical casuistry. But at the time I was thinking only of the meeting itself; it filled me with joy.
It was after seven when I got home. My landlord, Mr Alexander, lumbered downstairs to meet me as I let myself into the hall. ‘An elderly party’s waiting for you. I let her into your room as she needed to sit down. I let her use the bathroom as she needed to go. She wet the bathroom floor.’
There, in my room, I found Lady Edwina, wrapped in her long chinchilla cape; she sat in my wicker armchair between the orange box which contained my food supply and a bookcase. She was beaming with pride.
‘I got away,’ she said. ‘I foiled them completely. There wasn’t a taxi anywhere but I got a lift from an American. Your books—what a lot there are. Have you read them all?’
I wanted to telephone to Sir Quentin to tell him where his mother was. There was a phone in my room connected to a switchboard in the basement. I got not reply, which was not unusual, and I rattled to gain attention. The red-faced house-boy, underpaid and bad-tempered, who lived with his wife and children down in those regions, burst into the room shouting at me to stop rattling the phone. Apparently the switchboard was in process of repair and a man was working overtime on it. ‘The board’s asunder,’ bellowed the boy. I liked the phrase and picked it out for myself from the wreckage of the moment, as was my wont.
‘Lady Edwina,’ I said, ‘will they know where you are? I can’t get through on the phone.’
‘They will never know I’m out,’ she said. ‘As far as they’re concerned I’ve gone to bed with a sleeping pill, but I dropped the pill down the lavatory pan. Call me Edwina, which I don’t permit, mind you, of Beryl Tims.’
I got out cups and saucers and plates and set about making an evening of it. I propped the old lady’s feet on three volumes of the complete Oxford English Dictionary. She looked regal, she looked comfortable; she had no difficulty with her bladder and only asked to be taken to the lavatory once; she cackled with delight over her herring roes comparing them to caviar ‘which is the same thing only a different species of fish’.
‘Your studio is so like Paris,’ she said. ‘Artists I have known…’ she mused. ‘Artists and writers, they have become successful, of course. And you, too …’
Now I hastened to assure her that this wasn’t likely.
It rather frightened me to think of myself in a successful light, it detracted in my mind from the quality of my already voluminous writings from amongst which eight poems only had been published in little reviews.
I looked out an unpublished poem by which I set great store even though it had been rejected eight times, returning to roost in my own stamped and addressed envelope among my punctual morning letters, over a period of a year. It was perhaps because of its outcast fate that I felt an attachment to it. The old lady’s hands clutched her chinchilla with her long red fingernails dug into the silver-grey pelt. The poem was entitled Metamorphosis.
This is the pain that sea anemones bear
in the fear of aberration but wilfully
aspiring to respire in another,
more difficult way, and turning
flower into animal interminably.
As I was reading this first verse my boy-friend Leslie let himself in the door with the spare keys I had given him. He was tall and stoopy with a lock of blond hair falling over one eye and a fresh young face. I was proud of him.
‘How are you?’ said Edwina when I introduced him. She had told me that since she was forgetful of names and faces she always greeted people with ‘How are you?’ in case she had met them before.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Leslie without returning the question. Very often he irritated me in the extreme by small wants of courtesy. He was very much absorbed with numerous private anxieties which he was too self-centred tot overcome now, when I was presenting him with this splendid apparition, Edwina, an ancient, wrinkled, painted spirit wrapped in luxurious furs.
Edwina enquired kindly, as he took off his coat and sat on the divan bed, ‘What is your profession, Sir?‘
‘I’m a critic,’ said Leslie.
I was suddenly disenchanted with Leslie. It was a feeling that came over me ever more frequently, leading to quarrels in the end. Leslie just sat there and let himself be interviewed, unable to forget himself and his own concerns, with his young face and good health contrasting with Edwina’s dotty shrewdness, her scarlet nails, her bright avid eyes. I saw in the pocket of Leslie’s coat the top of a bottle which he had evidently brought along for the two of us. I pulled it out; smuggled Algerian wine.
‘You’re a music critic?’ Edwina asked Leslie.
‘No, a literary critic.’ He turned to me, ‘As a matter of fact, that poem you were reading—what was that line, “aspiring and respiring”…?’
I put down the bottle and took up my poem.
‘They think I’ve got a screw loose,’ said Edwina. ‘But I haven’t got a screw loose. Ha!’
‘A very bad line,’ said Leslie.
I read it out: ‘Aspiring to respire in another… ‘It seemed to me Leslie was right but I said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Is that a bottle of something?’ Edwina said.
Leslie said, ‘Too feeble. Bad-sounding.’
I said, ‘Edwina, it’s Algerian wine. I would love you to have some but I think it would be bad for you.‘
‘Let me open it,’ said Leslie, finding the corkscrew in a proprietory way. He was ambivalent about my writings, in that he often liked what I wrote but disliked my thoughts of being a published writer. This caused me to reject most of his criticism. As for his being a literary critic, that was not an untrue claim for he reviewed books for a periodical called Time and Tide and for other little reviews, although for his daily job he was a lawyer’s clerk.
Leslie uncorked the bottle while Edwina assured him she was equal to a sip of Algerian wine.
There was a knock on my door. It was the irate house-boys with Mr Alexander, my landlord, at his back.
‘Someone is ringing up on Mr Alexander’s private number, ‘tis a great inconvenience,’ said the boys. Mr Alexander himself said, ‘The house phone’s out of order. I can let you take this call in our sitting-room as your friend says it’s urgent. But please tell your friends not to intrude further.’ He went on like this as I followed him to his sitting-room where his wife with her bubble-cut black hair sat stretching her long legs.
It was Sir Quentin on the phone. ‘Mummy is not here,’ he said, ‘We—’
‘She’s here with me. I’ll bring her home.’
‘Oh, we’ve been so anxious, my dear Miss Talbot. We had great difficulty getting hold of you. Mrs Tims—’
‘Please don’t ring this number again,’ I said. ‘The people object.’ I hung up and started to apologize to the Alexanders: ‘You see, there’s an elderly lady… ‘They were looking at me with icy dislike as if my very voice was an offence. I got back to my own room quickly, where I found Leslie and Edwina drinking happily together. Edwina’s charm was beginning to work on Leslie. He was reading her my poem and attacking it line by line.
He agreed to take Edwina home. He went out to phone someone and to find a taxi which he brought back to the door.
‘I’ll go straight home afterwards,’ he said tome as she toddled out on his arm. ‘Got to have an early night.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I’ve g
ot a lot to think about.’
Edwina said, ‘He’s jealous of you, Fleur,’ although what she meant I was not sure.
Before she was put in the taxi she said, ‘Is that a real Degas you have in your room?’
‘School of,’ I said.
Leslie laughed, very delighted. I saw them off and went back to my room. I remember looking at my painting of two women with red pompoms in their brown hard hats, driving a carriage; and I wondered how it could be thought a Degas. It was an English painting signed J. Hayllar 1863.
I had started to clear up and get ready for bed, on the whole deeply satisfied with my days, when I heard a woman singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ down in the street below my window. Now this was the signal that a very few of my friends used so that I could let them in at night without incurring the complaints of the implacable management and staff. I opened the window and looked out. I was astonished to see the large bulk of Leslie’s wife Dottie in the lamplight, for it was already getting on for midnight and she had never so far called on me so late, if only for the reason that she might find her husband there. I imagined some emergency had brought her. ‘What’s the matter, Dottie?’ I said. ‘Leslie’s not here.’
‘I know. He phoned me that he’s taking an old woman friend of yours home and then he has to go to some literary party in Soho that he can’t get out of. Fleur, I want to see you.’
I heard a window open above my head. I didn’t look up. I knew it was one of the Alexanders about to make a fuss. I merely said, ‘I’ll let you in, Dottie.’ The upstairs window closed. I went down and let Dottie in, her sweet face swaddled in scarves, smelling of her English Rose scent.
I poured some Algerian wine. She began tot cry. ‘Leslie,’ she said, ‘is using us both as a cover. He has someone else.’
‘Who is it?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. But it’s a young poet, a man, I know for sure,’ said Dottie. ‘The love that dares not speak its name.’
‘A homosexual affair,’ I said, daring to speak its name somewhat to Dottie’s added distress.
‘Aren’t you surprised?’ she said.
‘Not much.’ I was wondering how he found the time for us all.
‘I was flabbergasted,’ Dottie said, ‘and hurt. So deeply wounded. You don’t know what I’m suffering. I’m starting a novena to Our Blessed Lady of Fatima. I didn’t suffer so much when I knew you were his mistress, Fleur, because—’
I interrupted her to cavil at the word ‘mistress ‘which I pointed out had quite different connotations from those proper to my independent liaison with poor Leslie.
‘Whys do you says “Poor Leslie,” whys “poor”?’
‘Because obviously he’s in difficulties with his life. Can’t cope.’
‘Well, he calls you his mistress. It’s his word.’
‘It’s an affectation. Poor Leslie.’
‘What am I to do?’ she said.
‘You could leave him. You could stay with him.’
‘I can’t decide. I’m suffering. I’m only human.’
I had known that sooner or later she would say she was only human. I sensed that in a short while she would come round to accusing me of not being human. Suddenly I had an idea.
‘You could write your autobiography,’ I said. ‘You could join the Autobiographical Association where the members write their true life stories and have them put away for seventy years so that no living person will be offended. You might find it a relief.’
It was after two in the morning before I got to bed. I remember how the doings of my day appeared again before me, rich with inexplicable life. I fell asleep with a strange sense of sadness and promise meeting and holding hands.
Chapter Three
While I recount what happened to me and what I did in 1949, it strikes me how much easier it is with characters in a novel than in real life. In a novel the author invents characters and arranges them in convenient order. Now that I come to write biographically I have to tell of whatever actually happened and whoever naturally turns up. The story of a life is a very informal party; there are no rules of precedence and hospitality, no invitations.
In a discourse on drama it was observed by someone famous that action is not merely fisticuffs, meaning of course that the dialogue and the sense are action, too. Similarly, the action of my life-story in 1949 included the work I was doting when I put my best brains into my Warrender Chase most nights and most of Saturdays. My Warrender Chase was action just as much as when I was arguing with Dottie over Leslie, persuading her not to get him with child, as she came round the next night to tell me she was determined to do. My Warrender Chase, shoved quickly out of sight when my visitors arrived, or lest the daily woman should clean it up when I left home in the morning for my job, took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy with the affairs of the Autobiographical Association. I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did. I took no notes, except in my mind.
Now the story of Warrender Chase was in reality already formed, and by no means influenced by the affairs of the Autobiographical Association. But the interesting thing was, it seemed rather the reverse to me at the time. At the time; but thinking it over now, how could that have been? And yet, it was so. In my febrile state of creativity I saw before my eyes how Sir Quentin was revealing himself chapter by chapter to be a type and consummation of Warrender Chase, my character. I could see that the members of the Autobiographical Association were about to become his victims, psychological Jack the Ripper as he was.
My Warrender Chase was of course already dead by the end of my first chapter, where the family, his nephew Roland and his mother Prudence are waiting for the eminent ambassador-poet and moralist to arrive, and where the car accident in which the great man Warrender dies is announced. You remember, perhaps, that, before his death is actually established, at the point where Roland’s wife, Marjorie, finds that his face is unrecognizable, she says, ‘Oh, he’ll have to have operations, like wearing a mask for the rest of his life! ‘I intended this to come out as one of those inane helpless things people says at moments of hysteria and shock. But it does transpire that he dies and it does in fact transpire that the mask is off, not on, for the rest of his life. His life, that is, in the pages of my novel, after Prudence, against the wishes of the rest of the family, confides Warrender’s letters and other documents to the American scholar, Proudie. In my novel the documents were already in Proudie’s hands when I began to see the trend of Sir Quentin’s mind.
As you know I had already suspected that Sir Quentin was engaged in some form of racket, with maybe an eye to blackmail. At the same time I didn’t see where the blackmail came in. He was not losing money on the project; on the other hand he was apparently quite rich and the potential victims of the Association were more marked in character by their once-elevated social position than for that outstanding wealth which tempts the crude blackmailer. Some of them had actually fallen on hard times.
I noticed by the correspondence that the four members who had not shown up at the meeting were already trying to wriggle out of it, and I too had decided that as soon as my vague uneasiness and my suspicions about Sir Quentin’s motives should crystallize into anything concrete I would simply leave.
The four retreating members were a pharmaceutical chemist in Bath who pleaded pressure of business, and the much-cherished and widely-connected Major-General Sir George Beverley who wrote in to say his memory was sadly failing, he couldn’t, alas, recall any-thing of the past at all; there was also a retired headmistress from Somerset who wrote first to explain that her activities at the Tennis Club unfortunately precluded her giving time to her memoirs as she had hoped, and then, when further coaxed by Sir Quentin, gave a further excuse that her arthritis prevented her from the constant use of her typewriter or from taking up her pen. The fourth me
mber to withdraw was that friend of mine who had got me the interview for the job. Now that I was established in. the job I supposed she thought better of revealing her life-story to Sir Quentin since it would go through my hands. She wrote and told him that her biography was so interesting that she was going to write it with a view to publication; she also wrote to me on the same lines, begging me to sneak out the preliminary pages she had already given to Sir Quentin and post them back to her. Which I did. And Sir Quentin, I think, knew I had done this, for although he looked for my friend Mary’s three pages and failed to find them in their place, he didn’t ask me if I had done anything with them. I was quite ready to tell him I’d sent them back, but he merely looked at me with a smile and said, ‘Ah, well—interesting, were they not?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never read them.’ Which was true.
After some further cajoling letters from Sir Quentin to the four defectors, and ever more determined and, in a way, frightened replies from them, they got out of it. The chemist in Bath actually went so far as to get his solicitor to write to Sir Quentin firmly withdrawing from the Association. I sensed hysteria in the action of going to a solicitor when in fact the mere ignoring of Sir Quentin’s letters would have had the same effect.
Well, what I found common to the members of Sir Quentin’s remaining group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes. At the same time it is elementary wisdom always to fear weaknesses, including one’s own; the reactions of the weak, when touched off, can be horrible and sudden. All of which is to say that I thought Sir Quentin was up to something quite dangerous in his evident attempt to get that group of weak people under his dominion for some purpose I couldn’t yet make out. However, I confided all this tot Dottie before I brought her into the Autobiographical Association. I warned her not on any account to give herself away but to get some amusement if she could out of the proceedings. For I wanted some joys to enliven and transfigure those meetings and those writings, the solemn intensity of which was so vastly out of proportion to the subject-matter. However sinister the theme of my Warrender Chase which was then uppermost in my mind, no one can say it isn’t a spirited novel. But I think that ordinary readers would be astonished to know what troubles fell on my head because of the sinister side, and that is part of this story of mine; and that’s what I think makes it worth the telling.
