Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  Sorting through his post, he was pleased to see a letter from a novelist, a man of his own generation, whose work Quentin had championed. Castle Literary’s cachet rang with the names of great writers of the twenties and thirties, but Francis Carson’s meteoric Some of These Days was a long time ago, 1939, and the halcyon heyday of Sydney Thaxton long before that. Castle Literary needed a new shining light. Quentin was looking for the next Orwell, and he had had high hopes for this new voice. But after one novel, the writer turned querulous, prickly and, worse, unproductive. Now he wrote nagging Quentin to seek foreign sales for his one minor novel. ‘Humph,’ Quentin snapped, knowing how like his father he sounded. He put a sheet of creamy agency letterhead in his typewriter and was about to reply when he glanced at Louisa Partridge’s parcel.

  The rejected manuscript seemed to scowl at him, to remind him almost audibly of the very few hours between now and Mrs Partridge’s arrival. There wasn’t time to take the typescript to the London Library to read. Miss Sherrill often chided Quentin for not staying in the office to do his reading; she reminded him that every minute Miss Marr spent taking messages for him was time deducted from Miss Marr’s other important work. Miss Marr, too, always made carping demands when he left: Where are you going, Quentin? How might you be reached, Quentin? How long will you be gone? Her grip on the workings of the agency was firm and not to be trifled with.

  He glanced at the framed photo of his brother Robert on the shelf, and felt a surge of unworthiness. Would Robert sit here wondering if he could evade two old spinsters? No. Robert would simply take the parcel, tip his hat and say I’m off to the London Library, Miss Sherrill! Cheerio, Miss Marr! But then, Robert did not allow himself to fall into the family firm. Robert had insisted on being a journalist, and Albert finally capitulated, even using his literary contacts among the firm’s American authors to get Robert a place on the Paris Tribune. Robert went to Paris, to a life that promised raffish company, experienced women and uncertain hours. Adventure. When war came, Robert, with characteristic panache, resigned from the Trib, and joined the tank corps with half a dozen of his best friends. They were a lively lot, Robert and his cadre of fine companions, and Quentin, the bookish boy, had admired them immensely. He had kept a map on his wall following their exploits in the desert. He wrote them weekly letters. Robert and all his friends were so vibrant, so alive. And then they were not. Not vibrant, and not alive. Each death seemed to young Quentin a sort of knell, the whispered conviction that Quentin himself might be alive but he would never be vibrant, that the obliteration of Robert and his generation had left the world somehow singed and forever ashen. Quentin turned away from Robert’s photo, and succumbed to the imperative demands of Apricot Olive Lemon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  APPETITE, NOT SUSTENANCE

  It was not a voice one could ignore. Behind his closed door, Quentin overheard her words, and felt the sting of her indignation. ‘Quentin Castle? You must be mistaken. The call came from Albert.’ Louisa Partridge’s voice was unmistakable, cawing, raspy: the voice that, through nine editions in fifteen years, had admonished the women of England to revel in work well done and, indeed, how to do that work better.

  ‘The call came from me, Mrs Partridge,’ said Miss Marr in her schoolmarmish way. ‘And it’s Mr Quentin Castle who wishes to discuss your book with you.’

  ‘Did he read it?’

  ‘He loved it.’

  This was the standard Castle Literary Ltd response.

  Quentin put down his fountain pen and smoothed his hair. Meet this like a man, he told himself, as he opened his door and strode towards her, offering his hand.

  Mrs Partridge had thickened since the photo on the wall above Miss Marr’s desk. Solid rather than stout, she might be said to be arresting, but no longer attractive. She wore a hat with a long, gorgeous feather, and earrings in the shape of snakes. She carried a handbag of enormous proportions, and made of some strange substance like snakeskin or alligator, now the colour of dusty rouge. Many bracelets bangled on her gloved wrists. She wore a mannish suit. Her nose was red from the cold, and her greying hair was straight, and dry, cut evenly at the chin-line.

  Quentin rattled on how delighted he was to meet her, and that he had indeed loved her book, though he hadn’t had the chance to savour all …

  ‘I insist on seeing your father, young man. Or Enid Sherrill.’

  He opened the low gate for her, asked Miss Marr for tea, and showed the reluctant Mrs Partridge into his narrow, utilitarian office. She put her handbag down on the floor with a thud, and removed her gloves the way a prize-fighter removes his robe. She sat in the well-worn wing chair across from Quentin’s desk and plucked at its arms, which were threadbare, then applied her gimlet gaze to the whole place. The African violet seemed to wither even more under her scrutiny.

  ‘What is the problem with my book?’ she asked, folding her gloves. Her hands were very different from the photograph too. Ringless, veiny and strong. ‘I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a problem. I’d be lunching with Bernard.’

  ‘Well, there is a bit of a problem, Mrs Partridge,’ he said after he had cleared his throat several times.

  ‘Just spit it out, my lad. I’ve no time for this sort of shilly-shallying.’

  Quentin considered his father’s instructions to soften the blow, to paraphrase Bernard’s outright rejection. Perhaps Albert Castle could mollify her, jolly her along, but Quentin certainly could not. He handed her the publisher’s letter. She scanned it quickly, then went back and reread it without any haste. Then the redoubtable author of The Book of British Housekeeping burst into tears, sobbing into her hands.

  Quentin was shocked to his core. A bad beginning. Should he rise and pat her shoulder? Should he sit it out? Leave? Should he go get Miss Marr? What would Miss Marr think? That he had offended this important client? This was his first weeping author. Should he commiserate and call the publisher a hack? Should he offer his handkerchief? It was clean and neatly ironed by Effie, though, as he shook it out, it smelled of Effie’s fags. Mrs Partridge took it, but she wept on for some moments more. She sniffed a little at the handkerchief’s odour.

  ‘So, this is what it’s come to.’ She composed her body, back straight, shoulders squared, before she could compose her features. Her lip still trembled, her hands too, as she opened her handbag and took out a cigarette case and a silver lighter. ‘Bernard wants me to revise again a book that has been left behind, in the dustbin of another time, another era, and rejects my … my …’ Masterpiece hung in the air. Mrs Partridge did not say it because she did not wish to seem too egotistical. Quentin did not say it because even after a brief glance, he thought the book unsaleable.

  ‘Bernard is a throwback, a dinosaur,’ she went on, ‘a complete dodo bird, flapping around in the second half of the twentieth century. What an ass.’ She lit up, the silver lighter making a sharp snap on closing, like a pair of shears coming down, snipping Bernard’s testicles. She smoked in short puffs. ‘Does he not know there is no going back? No lovely little pre-war dream, no Edwardian childhood, no flappers, no Bright Young Things. All that is finished. Over. Ended. Look at the world as it is!’

  ‘But that’s exactly what your book doesn’t do,’ said Quentin reasonably. ‘Don’t you see? Readers will expect that Louisa Partridge will tell them how to better their immediate lives.’

  ‘What do you think the book is trying to accomplish?’

  ‘Mrs Partridge—’

  ‘Louisa. You must call me Louisa. I could count on one hand the number of men who have seen me cry. I cannot possibly have wept in the presence of a man who calls me Mrs Partridge.’ She looked around for an ashtray.

  ‘Louisa, with all due respect to your housekeeping expertise …’ Quentin dug in a desk drawer for an ashtray; he did not smoke, and he did not often entertain clients in his office.

  ‘Sod housekeeping expertise.’

  ‘No one in Britain today is going to be making …’ He le
afed idly through the manuscript. ‘Figs? Honey? Butter? Liqueur? Meringues?’ He flipped through the typewritten pages. ‘Olive oil? Almonds? Oranges? Limes? These might as well come from the moon.’

  ‘They are not from the moon, young man. However, you won’t find them delivered with the milk! We can no longer live insular on this isle, however green and pleasant, and if you ask me, it is certainly not green, and no longer pleasant.’

  ‘I meant only that they are not here.’

  ‘Here has changed altogether, young man!’

  ‘Please call me Quentin.’ He took the saucer from under the African violet, and passed it to her.

  ‘We must accept that we are more connected to the world. And let us begin with our diet. You are what you eat! Isn’t it ghastly to think so? Tell me, what did you have for breakfast?’

  ‘Powdered eggs and Spam, toast and tea.’

  She gave a distinct snort and asked after last night’s dinner.

  ‘Whatever I ate last night, it is a dim and dreary memory.’

  ‘Best remembered by your bowels, which are no doubt constipated.’ He did not reply to this.

  ‘You see, the effect, the overall effect of the way we eat is not nourishing. It’s deadening. It’s killing us from the inside out!’

  ‘There are shortages everywhere, Mrs Partridge, rationing. What would you have the British housewife do?’

  ‘Will you please stop talking about housewives and housekeeping! Don’t you see? I am talking about something much, much larger.’ She stood, strode up and down, as though she could not suppress her own sheer vitality, and this narrow office could not confine it. ‘Who has not buried someone in a land we will never see? Who would ever have believed that their loved ones would be buried in Burma, or Egypt or Crete, or Dunkirk for that matter? Remember your Rupert Brooke! “If I should die –” ’ She cast her gaze dramatically to the drab ceiling ‘ “– think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England!” ’

  ‘My brother and his friends died at El Alamein.’

  ‘Then you know whereof I speak.’

  He didn’t, but it seemed unwise to say so. Quentin sought to bring the conversation back to the book. To the rejection of the book. ‘Selwyn and Archer are happy to give you an advance on a revision of The Book of British Housekeeping.’

  Louisa sat down and tapped her cigarette in the saucer. ‘And I am happy to give them the kiss-off. That’s a lovely, vulgar expression, don’t you think? I learnt it during the war. An American phrase.’

  Miss Marr knocked and brought in a tray with a small, chipped brown pot, two cups and saucers, a jug of milk that was a curious yellow colour, and a tiny dish of sugar. Two spoons. She retreated as soon as Quentin took the tray from her. He brought it to the desk. Mrs Partridge picked up the milk jug and sniffed it. Her nose wrinkled.

  ‘Have you nothing stronger, Quentin?’

  ‘Stronger?’

  ‘Oh God, the younger generation. Do you not drink?’

  Albert Castle had three crystal decanters and six crystal glasses on a silver tray in his office. Quentin had a bottle of Dewar’s White Label stashed in a cupboard. He had bought it ten months after joining the family firm, to privately commemorate, to congratulate himself on the first author whose work he had actually selected and successfully put forward. Since then he had returned to the Dewar’s for perhaps three other small triumphs, and a half-dozen instances when courage was called for. From the dark cupboard he withdrew the half-empty bottle and a single glass. ‘Not very clean, I’m afraid,’ he said. She was, after all, the Queen of British Housekeeping. In reply, Mrs Partridge handed him his own handkerchief, and he wiped it out then set the glass on the desk.

  ‘Where’s your glass?’ she asked.

  ‘That is my glass.’ He poured her two fingers full of whisky.

  Her bangle bracelets jangled as she took a short swig. ‘As I recall of the contract with Bernard, they have the right of first refusal. They have refused. I shall never publish with Selwyn and Archer again, no matter what they offer.’ Clearly she wanted him to congratulate her on her spirit, but he merely nodded. ‘And I will never again write a book like British Housekeeping. What was that book but a soothing bit of tripe, telling women, live as you always have, dearie, keep your feather duster in one hand, and your knickers tight. Fear everything you don’t understand, embrace nothing but convention.’ She took another swig.

  ‘I don’t think that’s how readers saw your book. I think many women saw that book give dignity to what they were doing, especially since no one had staffs of servants by the time you wrote it. Or now,’ he added, thinking of Effie. ‘My mother always said your book seemed like having a friend in the house. A wise friend.’

  ‘Really? Margaret said that? I never thought she liked me.’

  Margaret had never said that, and he had no idea if his mother liked Louisa Partridge or her book. Actually, he thought not.

  ‘I only wrote The Book of British Housekeeping because I couldn’t do anything else. If I had been able to teach, I would have waded into a schoolroom. If I had been able to preach, I would have got up into the pulpit. I had no decent education, no special skills – I taught myself to type! – no training, no real imagination. All I had was all this … this … this unseemly energy!’ She opened her arms, her ringless fingers, to the file cabinets and bookshelves, the radiator, the African violet. ‘I had energy, even ambition, but what could I do? After I’d cleaned the bloody house, and done the bloody shopping, prepared the bloody meals and looked after the whining brats, what was left? Well? I suppose I could write a book about doing just that. And that’s what I did.’

  He was surprised at her shameless use of the vernacular. She was middle-aged after all, and her reputation was that of the most proper housekeeper in the British Isles. ‘I’m surprised to hear you speak so harshly …’

  ‘What? Finish your sentence!’

  ‘To disparage the kind of work you were famous for.’

  ‘I didn’t always feel that way,’ she confessed, nodding towards the glass. He poured her some more. ‘The book changed my life. It got me out of the house and into the world. I was feted and respected, and the magazines were forever giving me lovely assignments. I travelled everywhere. Met important people. Did you ever see my series on the wives of British ambassadors?’

  ‘When would that have been?’

  ‘Oh, before the war.’

  ‘I was a schoolboy.’

  ‘Oh.’ She put out the cigarette and its last plumes of smoke serpentined in the air above them.

  ‘I’m not surprised that you became a household name,’ Quentin went on. ‘The Book of British Housekeeping did very well. It made money. For everyone.’

  ‘Spoken like a true agent.’

  ‘I include our firm, naturally.’

  ‘It might surprise you to know your father took me on as a client at some risk. I was determined to have an agent, not trotting my book around to London publishers like the Little Match Girl. I hardly dared hope that Castle Literary, with their great reputation – Sydney Thaxton, and the dreary rest of them. That Francis Carson for instance! Unreadable! – would take me on. Nonetheless, I brought my manuscript to the agency, and the great Albert Castle himself asked me to lunch.’ Her sharp features momentarily softened. ‘Soho, all those years ago. When he told me he would represent a book of housekeeping, well, I was flattered. Thrilled, in truth. It was the happiest day of my life so far. Truly. I was a nobody then.’

  Quentin nodded, thinking of Mrs Partridge in the picture above Miss Marr’s desk. Her good looks might have had something to do with his father’s taking a literary chance. And the affaire de coeur? No doubt.

  ‘I have remained a loyal author to this firm.’

  ‘Indeed you have.’

  ‘And to Selwyn and Archer. Those dogs. After all the money I made for them! They decline? Telling me I must plough the same furrow!’

  Unwill
ingly Quentin thought of Florence and her digging the furrow in order to plant. He agreed that Selwyn and Archer were thankless wretches.

  ‘But I am not that same woman,’ she explained. ‘After what I have been and done and seen, would I ever – ever! – again want to sit with the wife of some ambassador or another and talk about native servants? The gorge rises! No,’ she continued, gathering steam and passion, ‘I am not the same woman, and I would venture to say readers are not the same. No one is the same! Neither men or women. How could we be? We won the bloody war, and what have we to bloody show for it? We’ve lost the bloody Empire. There’s rubble everywhere! Unexploded bombs. Queues for the simplest necessities! Not enough coal or butter or eggs. Children evacuated for six years who returned, and did not even know their own parents. Men who will never be coming home. And those who did, well, they’re not the same, are they? We must see ourselves beyond the confines of our island. We must regard with some respect those immigrants washing up on our shores. What might they have to teach us? Let us begin with our diet! Let us eat beyond fried fish and chips in newspapers, the sweets that rot our teeth, the tea that serves for every purpose. My book is not about sustenance, it’s about appetite!’

  He leafed through the rejected typescript. Apricot Olive Lemon. Appetite? His eye fell on words he could not begin to imagine: saffron, basil, pomegranates. Appetite? He raised his gaze to the solitary light fixture, and pondered her words. ‘What kind of woman are you now?’

  ‘Pardon?’ She looked more quizzical than offended.