Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigram

  PART 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART II

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  PART III

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART IV

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  PART V

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  This book is for Juliet Burton

  What is the knocking?

  What is the knocking at the door in the night?

  It is somebody wants to do us harm.

  No, no, it is the three strange angels.

  Admit them, admit them.

  Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through

  D. H. Lawrence

  Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?

  Or wilt thou ask the Mole?

  Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,

  Or Love in a Golden bowl?

  The Book of Thel

  William Blake

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE JUNIOR PARTNER

  Shivering in the bitter January chill, the very air grainy with soot and fog and exhalations of the quietly desperate, Quentin Castle left his home near Tavistock Square and hurried towards Russell Square tube station. One among many men huddled under black umbrellas, alike as an army of weekday beetles, Quentin joined this undistinguished throng descending into the bowels of the city. Every morning he was reminded of the story his father loved to tell of Sydney Thaxton, the great novelist. The story had smoothed and grooved over time, become amusing so that the bitter little nugget at its core was undetectable. His father, Albert, clothed the story in charm, but Quentin thought he missed, misunderstood its poignance.

  Sydney Thaxton was among the earliest of Castle Literary’s clients, a difficult, brilliant writer whose mercurial star had risen in the early twenties, and never quite set, even after his death in 1934. On his last visit to the agency, Sydney Thaxton had wheezed up three flights of stairs to Castle Literary Ltd. He was a man of middle years, the celebrated author of modernist fiction, but lax in matters of personal hygiene, generally unshaven, and usually unwashed. He smoked three packs of fags a day, and his fingers were brown from nicotine, and black from so often changing typewriter ribbons. Thaxton hulked there in Albert Castle’s office, wafting the obnoxious odour of wet genius. He had come to lash out at the critics who had savaged his latest novel, and Quentin’s father, Albert Castle, as befits the literary agent, agreed all critics were dogs, which wasn’t enough for Thaxton, who blathered on, inspired invective describing them as spineless, puling, gibbering, frogspawn in stained underwear; he blasted their morals, their mating habits, their teeth, their flabby shanks and filthy hands, their minds, if they had any, which he likened to darkened sewers, their general sense of self-congratulation, a habit they shared with pigs living in shit. (This last bit Albert Castle left off if there were ladies present when he told the story.) Albert soothed the author with cups of tea sweetened with whisky, and at last, worn out by his diatribe, the genius rose, and was about to leave, commenting on the beastly weather, rain sluicing down. He ranted on a bit about the English weather too, speaking of it in that odd combination of nostalgia and loathing, which, after all, were the signature features of his work.

  Albert Castle took his second-best black umbrella from the stand, and gave it to the writer. ‘Here, you must take it.’

  Thaxton declined.

  Albert insisted, adding, ‘I should like to think of you huddled under a black umbrella like the rest of us.’

  Thaxton replied, ‘You wish to compromise me, then?’

  Albert always gave himself some witty riposte when he told the story, but in truth he was flummoxed and without the least idea what to say, or what Thaxton meant. When Sydney Thaxton left, he did take the umbrella, but without a word of thanks, nor promising to return it, or any such conventional palaver. He died a week later. His wife found him slumped over, his face in the typewriter.

  Albert Castle, in his genial fashion, always ended the anecdote with the observation that one could not part with one’s best umbrella, even for a genius.

  But Quentin understood what Albert had not. In cowering under a black umbrella, Thaxton had become indistinguishable from the narrow, priggish people he detested. Under a black umbrella no one would know the great genius from the wheezy clerk, the soaring eagle from the burrowing mole, the peacock from the sparrow. Quentin Castle sympathized with Sydney Thaxton though Quentin personally had no genius and nothing to compromise, no gifts spurring him to rebellion, much less achievement. He was nearly twenty-five, tall, lanky, like his mother’s people, near-sighted. Thick glasses over his hazel eyes gave him a studious air. He had the usual sallow colouring of a Londoner, a mass of brown hair, a thin nose, high cheekbones in a rather gaunt clean-shaven face. Quentin Castle hunched under a black umbrella nearly every day.

  Quentin emerged into the air again at Oxford Circus. He glanced idly at the kiosks with their peeling bills promising Michael Redgrave as Hamlet and other more garish entertainments. Vendors hawked headlines from the newsstands, 31 January 1950, a new year – a new decade, 1950 – but the headlines only chronicled pallid political bits, Mr Wilson and the Board of Trade, how to make the Germans pay their debts, to keep the Soviets from boycotting the UN, the future of Jerusalem, the brutal weather closing roads in the north. All of it merely grim in a grey way. Not like during the war when one read even the bleakest articles eagerly, anxiously, almost savagely, religiously, desperately seeking any information that might shed light on the fate of people one loved, soldiers far away. Now one endured because one must, had stamina because one must, lived with ongoing austerity because one must, but utterly without the glory or sustaining solidarity of the war years. Quentin, with all the other men – black flotsam in an ocean of post-war grey – made his way up into the street where grit and litter blew against his legs, clung there like the beggar children of Rome.

  He marched on towards Mayfair. Sleet-needles stung his face as he pulled his Burberry close. Like everyone else’s, Quentin’s overcoat was old; the lining had been replaced three times, and he had lost more than one coin in the hole in the pocket. He could sometimes hear the shillings rattling in the hemline. His suit was newer, though it had still seen a couple of years’ wear. It had been fashioned by the same London tailor patronized by his father, though his father habitually wore a bowler and Quentin chose a fedora. The hat did not make him jaunty or debonair, but at least he didn’t look like his father. His tie reeked lightly of benzine used to remove an unfortunate mustard stain. His white shirt was freshly laundered and ironed as befits a newly married man.

  He came to a quiet, narrow street in Mayfair, where the buildings had Regency flair though that flair and the street itself were enveloped in a hundred years of effluvia from coal fires, smoke penetrating the stone, and even now the light snow hung like grey granular curtains. Castle Literary’s offices were not near the great hotels or ambassadorial residences of Mayfair, but they had a Mayfair W1 address just the same. The rent was exorbitant, but Albert Castle was a f
irm believer in appearances, and even in the earliest days of the firm, 1920, he justified the cost with the Mayfair cachet. The street had been spared both German bombs and neo-Gothic enthusiasms of the 1890s; it had hardly been touched or changed since the 1840s. Quentin passed solicitors’ firms dating back fifty or sixty years, and a few newer firms, architects and accountants, and even something called Public Relations. Street level were small upscale art galleries, a new travel agency and an old stationery shop. The buildings, three or four storeys tall, had marble steps and brass plaques by the doors, the steps and plaques kept polished by night-working charladies.

  Opening the door to Number 11’s large, airy foyer, Quentin shook out his umbrella. Once there had been a hall porter who would have taken the umbrella. Quentin remembered him from childhood visits to his father’s office, a Mr Jobson, maimed in the Great War, lacking the fingers on one hand, and the sight in one eye. Jobson deferred politely to everyone who entered the building, even the boy, Quentin. Jobson had held the door, taken the umbrellas, collected the post and delivered it to each office. He barely made a living wage and received bonuses at Christmas. But by the time Quentin came to work at the agency, neither Jobson nor his job existed at all.

  A noisy fluttering overhead caught his attention and he stopped at the second landing, and looked up. A sparrow caught under the high skylights flung itself against the grey, wired glass. Time after time the bird swooped and twirled and hit the ceiling with the barely audible thud of its tiny body against the high grey glass. Again and again it dove down and flew up, as though surely, surely on the next try the heavens would open to him. The bird made no sound, no frantic cries, but as Quentin ascended the stairs, he watched each swoop lose energy and momentum as the sparrow darted, trying for the light. By afternoon the sparrow would be dead. Once Mr Jobson would have removed its carcass from sight immediately. But now its feathered remains would lie in ignominious state on the ground floor till the charwoman, Mrs Rackwell, came at night to sweep it out to the dustbins.

  At the top of the third floor, Quentin came to the door of Castle Literary Ltd with its distinct castle logo. He walked in, and amid the typewriters clanging, the bells, tapping keys, ringing phones, he greeted Miss Marr, the fierce, didactic secretary. She ran the office with an iron hand. Her fingertips were blue from carbon paper.

  ‘Your father would like to see you in his office.’ Miss Marr spoke as if Quentin were a child called into the headmaster for a thrashing in which she would secretly delight. ‘Not at the moment, however. He’s on the telephone.’

  He hung his coat on the ornate brass coat rack by the door and put his hat there at a rakish angle. ‘Good morning, Monica,’ Quentin called out over the typing and bells of carriages crashing. Monica, the typist, waved, but kept her back to him. All that he saw of her was a high, untidy bun atop a brown cardigan. Her desk was up against the grimy window and bookended by tall, grey filing cabinets with papers stacked atop, creating a sort of cavern. (After thirty-plus years in the literary business, paper, the storing of paper, was something of a problem for the agency.) In these utilitarian offices, Miss Marr had a rather more spacious desk behind the low gate separating the working space and the office foyer, which is to say the line of four chairs and the coat rack. Miss Marr’s desk protected the door of Albert’s office. Above Miss Marr there hung a galaxy, perhaps a hundred, framed black and white photos, most of them signed: Castle Literary’s many clients, some illustrious, some not, some living, many dead. Sydney Thaxton’s grizzled portrait was in the centre.

  ‘My father wants to see me with regard to …’ Quentin had an ingrained, reflexively deferential habit of letting others finish his sentences.

  ‘I can answer that,’ said Enid Sherrill, bustling in from her own office, a cigarette in one hand, a sheaf of hand-written letters in the other. She deposited the letters on Miss Marr’s desk to be typed. ‘Selwyn and Archer have declined Louisa Partridge’s latest book, and you will be the one to tell her.’

  Monica’s typewriter fell silent, and she turned round in her chair, mouth agape. ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘I do say,’ replied Miss Sherrill. ‘It will be a dreadful blow to her pride. She was expecting, well, her hopes hardly matter at this point. But you, Quentin, will handle her with tact and decorum.’

  ‘But I have never dealt with Mrs Partridge before,’ Quentin protested. ‘She’ll expect to hear the news from you or my father.’

  ‘She has been advised by Miss Marr to come in tomorrow lunchtime.’

  ‘To see me?’

  Enid paused. ‘Not exactly. However, she will see you. We will be out. Deal with her you must. Do not send her round to us.’ Miss Sherrill often spoke of herself and his father in this way, as though they were yoked in a testy but durable marriage, and in some ways, that was exactly what they shared. ‘You are a partner, are you not?’ she inquired with her usual condescension. ‘You must accept a partner’s responsibilities.’

  Quentin nodded or shrugged, or some self-effacing combination. He was a partner by virtue of nepotism as everyone well knew. In fact his father had actually given him the partnership as a wedding present six months before. Everyone (in what was, after all, a small, sniping, close-knit world of agents, authors and publishers) considered Albert’s foolish mingling of the professional and the personal to be evidence that he was losing his grip, that age or alcohol was eroding his judgement. Enid Sherrill certainly thought so. Enid Sherrill was a partner. Enid had earned the title, fought for it, threatened to leave him in 1935 unless she was granted a partnership and her name on the letterhead. She had given her entire working life to Castle Literary Ltd, and though a partner, she was not quite Albert’s equal. She had her own strong client list, mostly women authors. (Certainly all the unattractive women authors, the young and lovely, if there were any – authors are notoriously plain – belonged to Mr Albert Castle.) Enid detested Quentin for his easy ascension, and had scant respect for his abilities or insights. If he had any.

  Miss Sherrill blew out a long, indignant banner of smoke. ‘Your father has the returned manuscript and Bernard’s letter in his office. He’ll give it to you. You will have a look through the manuscript and give Mrs P. some ideas how to revise it.’

  ‘But they’ve declined it. They don’t want it revised. We should just send it out to another firm. After all, Louisa Partridge is a well-known cookery writer, and her books …’

  ‘This is not like her other books.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Enid raised her eyes to the light fixture overhead, as if seeking divine guidance. Monica’s machine fell silent. Miss Marr lit up a cigarette. Finally Miss Sherrill said, ‘Consider the books of your mother-in-law, Rosamund Phillips.’

  Behind his heavy-framed glasses, Quentin kept his gaze studiously blank.

  ‘Rosamund Phillips is the doyenne of British garden writers: roses, perennials, garden design, formal gardens, English gardens. Fearless, with a spade in one hand and a pen in the other, wouldn’t you say?’

  He nodded. His wife’s mother was the sort of authoress – and that was what she called herself – Quentin secretly detested.

  ‘Then just imagine if she suddenly took herself to Siberia or some such place, and started writing about potato farming there. Would anyone publish her? I think not.’ Miss Sherrill spat out these last three words, as if aiming for an unseen spittoon. She was a spectrally thin woman who sometimes seemed to wobble with suppressed emotion. She always wore a navy-blue suit and white blouse. The skirt was long to cover her thin legs, the jacket cinched tight at the waist, and her gaunt cheekbones were laying siege to thin, compressed lips.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mrs Partridge’s book?’ Quentin offered reasonably.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said his father, flinging open his office door and joining them. ‘She’s forgotten how to preach to the choir, and she’s gone off to convert the heathen! Like most of the heathen, they don’t want it, don’t want to hear it, don
’t want to read it, and Selwyn and Archer most assuredly don’t want to publish it.’

  The three women regarded Albert Castle with rapt admiration. He had this gift, had Albert, for aphorism and pithy replies, a gift he had augmented over time with considerable practice. His glib charm endeared him to those who, like bluebottle flies, preferred to skim over the surface of things and watch their own reflections flicker below.

  Quentin followed Albert into his office, which (in contrast to the rest of the Castle Literary premises) was a gracious room, like the chambers of an Oxford don, bathed in lamplight, warm against the grey rain pelting down the window and the view of London rooftops and sooty chimneys. Splotches of pigeon dung ran white in the deluge, and brown sparrows huddled under eaves. But inside, leather-bound books glowed on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The wheeled library ladder served as an informal open file for current projects; manuscripts tied in string or black ribbon lay on the steps. No one ever used it as a ladder because the books on the shelves were unread, part of the traditional ambience, as were the polished wood cabinets with shining brass handles, the inlaid rosewood side table with three crystal decanters, sherry for the ladies, single-malt Scotch and a fine old brandy (not so very fine in truth; it was mainly for show) and six clean crystal glasses. Framed prints and awards dotted the walls and mementos from thirty years dotted the shelves.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ said Albert, wagging his finger towards the small fireplace. On the mantel was a short, framed letter from Sydney Thaxton, dated 1922, and filled with obsequious gratitude for his dear agent, Albert Castle. Alongside it sat a photograph of Quentin’s brother, Robert, and a rock from Kilimanjaro given to Albert by the famous climber and adventure writer, John McVicar. ‘Go on, have a look.’

  Quentin sat in one of the four leather chairs that faced each other on either side of the fire. On the low tea table in between sat Mrs Partridge’s rejected manuscript, wrapped in brown paper, like a parcel, and tied with string, the rejection letter on the top.