‘Ee, well, you do lead exciting lives,’ said Hilda Machin. ‘I’d never have guessed.’
‘Others just buy and sell them,’ continued Kronweiser lugubriously. ‘Regular black market. Three thous the going rate, or was a few years back. No go nowadays. The bottom’s dropped right out of the market.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Hell, with eighty per cent of Ph.Ds unemployed, what’s the point?’
‘So that’s why you keep your transcripts at home, is it?’ said Hilda, still looking at Kronweiser with an expression of absorbed interest. ‘I suppose it is safer.’
‘Hell yes. And I mail a carbon to Jackson’s. That way we’re triply safe. Anyway, I’m through with the fiction, so that side of it’s sewn up.’
‘Really? Is it all transcribed?’
‘Yep. Finished the last short story today–barring unforeseen discoveries, naturally.’
‘Which one is that?’ asked Hilda, putting out her hand towards the manuscript on the desk. Mr Kronweiser sprang into his earlier stance of crouching flabby tiger, then with a deprecatory smile he relaxed stiffly and began rummaging in the top drawer. ‘That’s my manuscript there,’ he said hesitatingly; ‘naturally I feel its manifest imperfections.’ He took out a typescript, to which was attached a handwritten manuscript. With visible reluctance he handed it to Hilda Machin.
‘Oh, one of the early ones,’ she said brightly, handling the work of her late husband with no notable reverence, and casually flicking through it. ‘Handwritten. Yes, I remember it. He wrote it–let’s see–one wet Sunday. It must have been about nineteen thirty-seven or eight. It’s a poor piece, or so he thought. He didn’t include it in Cotton Town.’
‘Very true. But there were one or two deeply interesting passages in that story, invaluable for the thesis I shall present in my study of his work. And it will fill out the new volume of shorter pieces too.’
Hilda, deep in her reading, nevertheless perked up at this and shot a sharp glance in Mr Kronweiser’s direction. ‘Oh, so there will be two new volumes, will there?’
‘That’s right. The second novel, of course, and then the shorter pieces–stories and some newspaper articles, and so on. We should easily make it into two hundred pages or so.’
‘Well, I’m glad about that. What are you going to call them? I suppose it will be you as will give them their titles?’
‘In the case of the novel that won’t be necessary. He left behind a list of alternatives. Perhaps you’d like to have a look at them?’
On Hilda Machin’s nodding, Mr Kronweiser calmly took back the copy of the short story and the original manuscript, clipped them together, and put them back carefully in their right place in the drawer. Then he went to another drawer and extracted a piece of paper, squinting at it carefully before he handed it over.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Just as he left it.’
The typescript (with odd mis-spellings and typing errors reproduced from the original) ran to nine or ten titles. Hilda Machin read it with every appearance of interest. ‘Spinning Jenny’, she said with contempt. ‘Pretty obvious that. The Loom of Age–now that really would put people off: what was Walter thinking of? Satanic Mills–bit overdone: he made a nice enough living out of them. . . . Ee, they’re all a bit tired, aren’t they?’
‘You have no preferences, then?’
‘Not I. You might as well call it Trouble up at t’ Mill and have done with it as far as I’m concerned. You know, I think the thing was that he was out of date, and by the time he wrote the second book he knew it. He began too late. If he’d started in the early ‘thirties, when we were courting and when the Depression was really biting, then he’d have done all right. But all Walter thought about at that time was slap and tickle in the grass, and you can quote me on that, as knows. But it was years before he got started, and ‘thirty-nine before he got published. By then it was too late. People were tired of that sort of thing. Then there was t’war and all. Poor old Walter. He missed the band-wagon.’
The list dropped from her hand, and Mr Kronweiser seized on it to restore it to its place.
‘It’s heart-warming,’ volunteered Mr Kronweiser, ‘that justice will be done to him at last.’
‘I don’t suppose it will warm his heart,’ said Hilda.
‘So I’ll note down that you have no special wishes about the title, then, Mrs Machin.’
‘Not really. I haven’t read the book, or not much of it, that I remember. I suppose Tripe and Onions was the best of them. One of the ones with “tripe” in it, anyway.’
Dwight Kronweiser looked at her hard, blinking his pale, short-sighted eyes. Hilda Machin pulled herself up and looked at her wristwatch in mock consternation.
‘Well, this isn’t getting the cow milked. What I came for was, I brought that letter you were talking about.’
‘The one from London?’
‘That’s the one. I found it in my old snap album. Daft place to put it, but there . . . He talks about seeing his publisher, and getting a better contract for the next book. It was June, ‘thirty-nine, as you can see. I knew I’d had a letter from him then, because it was the last time we were apart before he was called up.’
‘Hmm, hmm,’ said Mr Kronweiser, reading the letter through with little snuffles of academic contentment. ‘Neat! Very good. I’m deeply grateful to you, Mrs Machin, deeply grateful. I’ll see you get it back in no time at all.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Hilda, getting up to go. ‘I’m not sentimental about him, you know–far from it.’
‘Now you do yourself an injustice there, I know. As I say, I’ll get it back to you just as soon as I’ve managed to make a copy of it.’
‘And you’ll file it with the other stuff, will you?’ asked Hilda Machin at the door. ‘Infinite riches in a little room?’
As she closed the door after her, Mr Kronweiser looked at it for a minute or two in puzzlement. Wasn’t that some sort of quotation? He couldn’t quite place it. Not his period, anyway. Or was it a proverb? Either way, he couldn’t make that dame out. What’s more, he didn’t like her–which meant, in Kronweiser idiom, that he didn’t trust her–which meant, in its turn, that she was not wholly devoted to the interests of Dwight Kronweiser, MA, Ph.D. What was she up to? What made her tick? How sharp was she? He didn’t like the way her accent changed, he didn’t like the way she’d sit there looking cosy as a mother chook and then shoot a sharp glance at him, like she understood him through and through. Mr Kronweiser didn’t know where he stood with her, and he hated that feeling.
He looked back to the letter, and went through it again–still thinking and frowning.
• • •
That night, as Hilda Machin was boiling milk in the kitchen for her good-night cup of coffee, an unusual thing happened. Viola Machin came to the kitchen. Came quite deliberately, though as usual Hilda had made plenty of noise coming down the stairs to ensure that her presence was known. On Viola’s approach down the hall, Hilda turned up the gas and made preparation for a hasty departure, but this, it seemed, was not the idea.
‘No, no, don’t hurry, Hilda,’ said Viola, sailing in, all arrogant bosom and cold cream, but smiling condescendingly. She went to the bread bin and seemed to be preparing to make herself a piece of toast. Hilda did not turn down the gas. ‘We have been a little silly sometimes in the past, don’t you think, Hilda?’ went on Viola. ‘I’m sure that once in a while we can be in the same kitchen without explosions occurring, don’t you agree? We are civilized people, after all.’
‘Aye, ‘appen,’ said Hilda.
Nothing annoyed Viola Machin more, as a general rule, than Hilda putting on the broad Lancashire. It seemed to her like an assertion of closeness to the dead Walter that she could not match. But tonight her face seemed frozen into its gracious expression, like royalty in a traffic jam, and if she wished to herself that Hilda would make the odd concession so that civil conversation with her could be easier, nothing of this appeared in
her manner.
‘Mr Kronweiser seems to be getting on very nicely with the transcriptions,’ said Viola, slotting the bread into the toaster.
‘Oh aye?’ said Hilda.
‘You went to see him this morning . . .?’
‘That’s right.’
Viola Machin repressed a sigh. ‘Did you have anything interesting to show him?’
‘Well,’ said Hilda, raising her voice slightly, ‘I didn’t go for the pleasure of his company. I didn’t go because I was suddenly seized by an overwhelming passion for him, we didn’t make love on the tiger-skin rug in that little box of a room you gave him, his pear-shaped body pressed against my ageing but still voluptuous frame.’
Viola Machin left a few moments’ pause. ‘You know, I’ve always thought it was your sense of humour that attracted Walter to you, Hilda.’
‘Because otherwise it’s totally inexplicable, eh?’
‘Now, Hilda, let’s not start that silly bickering, please. You can’t say I came here tonight wanting a row–that you can’t say.’
‘No, you came here wanting to know what I’d been saying to Mr Kronweiser today.’
Viola Machin, seated in a dignified pose on the corner of the kitchen table, her white and pale blue brunch coat billowing around her, found her pose of aggrieved innocence difficult to keep up.
‘All right, all right. I admit it,’ she said.
‘And the answer is: I took him a letter.’
‘Oh yes–er–one of Walter’s?’
‘One of Walter’s,’ said Hilda, looking concentratedly at Viola. ‘When he was in London. Seeing his publishers. June nineteen thirty-nine. OK?’
‘Was there anything in it? Anything . . . personal?’
‘He sent his love. Is that all right? Not too hot to handle, for an old-fashioned family publisher like Jackson’s? Oh, and there was love and kisses for Rose too.’
‘I see. So there was nothing more . . . controversial. Well, I’m glad. I’m sure he’ll find it very useful. I’m looking forward to reading his book.’
‘So’m I. Don’t get many good laughs these days.’
‘Now Hilda! I’m sure he’ll do a very good job . . . ’
‘The idea of a chap like that, writing a book on Walter: it’s enough to make the cat laugh.’
‘Well, he was interested–and he was the first. Of course, if I’d waited just a few months, I could have had anyone I liked. But there: I couldn’t have known the interest there’d be.’
‘There’s one comfort,’ said Hilda, sipping her coffee. ‘He treats his manuscript like a mummy lion her cubs. With a bit of luck he won’t be able to bear to part with it to a publisher. Save us all a lot of red faces.’
‘I don’t think, Hilda, that you’re approaching this revival of interest in Walter’s work in the right frame of mind.’
‘Oh me–I’m tickled pink. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have kept quiet about you and him, would I?’
Viola Machin, torn between a desire to protest that she had nothing to hide, and a feeling that she had, said at last, reluctantly: ‘Well yes, that’s true: and I’m grateful to you for that, Hilda.’
‘So you should be. But there’s one thing, Viola, that I don’t think you really realize.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That Kronweiser. You think he’s an idiot, because he gets things wrong–the background, the politics, Walter, us. And he does, all the time. But: he’s not stupid, Viola. He’s not stupid. And I think we both ought to realize that. Otherwise–’
Hilda Machin looked at her husband’s second wife, raised an eyebrow, and then flopped in her furry slippers down the hall. Viola Machin bent heavily over the table buttering her toast–very, very thoughtful.
CHAPTER VI
RELATIONSHIPS
ROSE CLOUGH, née Machin, lived on the outskirts of Oswaldston on a spick and span, jerry-built private estate. The houses were each slightly different from each other; here a window was larger, there a door had been moved round the corner–no one family’s was quite the same as his neighbour’s. In spite of which, the impression they gave was of being identical, and it was left to the owners to give their property whatever signs of individuality they could, by making neat little gardens, or by not doing so, by cleaning the windows once a month, or by not doing so. Rose Clough’s was one of the not doing so houses.
Rose had married late. She had had a good time in her twenties: a good job as a doctor’s receptionist (she had gone against the general rule for the species by being warm and sympathetic, though she stood no more nonsense than was inescapable). She had had plenty of boyfriends, some casual, some of longer duration. Some of them had asked her to marry them, but life had seemed too good to settle down. But then she had been thirty, and then thirty-three, and the panic that overtakes women of that age, even in the nineteen seventies, had come upon her, and the desire to have a child, which she had hardly thought about before. When Bill Clough proposed, she accepted him and came to live at Petworth Estate.
Bill Clough was a small grocer, with a nice little shop in a working-class area, where he had managed to survive the competition from the big chains by being convenient, not outrageously dear, and usually cheerful. You could always have a bit of fun with Bill, people said. After marriage he had got fatter, and less lively. He had married because he too thought he was of an age to settle down, and he had settled. He liked big fatty meals, twice a day if possible, and a noisy sleep after them. He loved his little daughter, but he wished she had less energy. He watched the television at night, all night, making remarks like ‘That’s a bit of all right’ at the girls, or ‘Kill him’ to the wrestlers. On Saturday afternoons he shouted advice to the televised footballers, but often fell asleep the next minute, with a can of light ale in his hand.
It was not the marriage Rose would have chosen for herself, now.
When Jackson’s, from courtesy, sent six copies of the new edition of The Factory Whistle to Hilda Machin, she was round to her daughter’s with one the same day. Rose left it on the coffee table by her husband’s chair, and when he had had his usual mixed fry-up and was preparing to have his snooze, his eye caught it as it lay there.
‘Oh ah, that’s your dad’s book, is it?’ he said, and picked it up. Rose realized with a shock that she had never seen him handle a book before, and watched him curiously.
‘Well I never,’ he said, uncertainly.
‘It’s nicely got up, isn’t it?’ she said, to help.
‘Looks champion to me, not that I’d know,’ said Bill. He lost interest when he found there were no pictures. ‘Now I come to think of it,’ he said, easing himself down into the depths of his very easy chair, ‘that Mrs Entwhistle from the corner said there was something about your dad in one of the Sunday papers, I don’t remember which.’ He had an odd air of being impressed, but quite bewildered. ‘A whole article, she said.’
‘That’s right. I should have gone out and bought them, but I forgot. Mum’s got them all.’
‘Seems funny, after all this time. I can’t make head nor tail of it.’
‘He’s being rediscovered. They’re going to do a piece on Mum in the local paper–the reporter’s been along already. She’s very chuffed it’s her and not Viola.’
‘Oh aye? That’ll make folk talk. Good for business. You’d better tell me all about your dad, so I can keep my end up.’ He seemed about to drop off as he said: ‘Pity it’s Viola who’ll be raking in the dough, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said Rose. An eye opened, enquiringly. ‘She owns the copyright, but Mum owns the manuscripts. Dad left them to her when he died.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Bill Clough, fighting sleep.
‘That’s really how they came to team up as they did, and live in the same house. The stuff had just stayed there for years, and Mum hadn’t been interested, but then people started talking about Dad, and writing to her, and sending pieces they’d written on him. Then whe
n her house was due for demolition, she and Viola met, and Viola asked what should be done with the manuscripts, as she was thinking of selling the house. It was too big for her when the boys left home, and she couldn’t really afford it any more. So they decided to split the house in two.’
‘I don’t see the use of a lot of old papers, though. You can’t make anything out of them.’
‘There’s a lot of unpublished manuscripts–one of them’s Dad’s second novel. They’ll be coming out over the next year or so. I think Mum’s come to some sort of agreement with Viola over the profits. She’ll be getting her share. Do you know, they say Dad might become some sort of classic?’
‘Never,’ said Bill.
‘So Mum says. She thought it was a huge joke. You know her. But if so, there’ll be money coming in. And it’ll go on, too–a real little nest egg.’
Bill Clough lay thinking about this for some time. ‘Well, I don’t know owt about that sort of thing, but it seems rum to me,’ he said. ‘Let’s just hope so, eh, Rosie? Because it’ll come to you, won’t it? I mean, there’s no one else in the family, is there? It’ll be yours when she goes.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rose, ‘it’ll be mine.’
• • •
Later that evening Rose Clough, walking her dog, met Hilary Seymour-Strachey, walking his dog. This happened rather often, and if the inhabitants of Oswaldston had not mostly been shut up in front of their televisions at this time of day, it might already have given rise to some talk. Anyone seeing them together on the common outside Oswaldston would have taken them for husband and wife, though Hilary was by nearly three years the younger. He was stocky, gay (in the antiquarian use of the word) and nut-brown-haired, with a great sense of daring and mischief. He was a freelance commercial artist, and a painter of potential but too little application. Rose, fairer, with a good slim figure and a large share of her mother’s charm, had the same confidence and pleasure in life. They made a good pair, people would have said who saw them. Rose had often thought the same. Tonight, though, she kept her distance.
Death of a Literary Widow Page 5