Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘You say you are not the same woman who wrote The Book of British Housekeeping. Tell me about the woman who wrote Apricot Olive Lemon.’

  Her expression changed and a smile lit her lips, as though she suddenly forgave him his grim office, his waning African violet, his dirty glass and smelly handkerchief. ‘Cairo, summer 1939. I was on assignment for The Lady, interviewing the British ambassador’s wife. You can’t even begin to imagine what Cairo was like. Oh, never mind the cries from the minarets, the flies, the heat, the stench, the unthinkable squalor.’ She spoke of these things with positive relish. ‘The place was mad with rumour and innuendo, a great broth of intrigue everywhere, everyone terribly tense, drinking too much and falling into bed. Every day that passed, people grew more nervous, frightened, one day closer to the brink. Everyone knew it was coming. When it finally did, war declared, I think people were actually relieved, but then, suddenly, everyone was scurrying about, panicked, packing, getting visas, passports, booking tickets, hurried goodbyes, English women and children to be evacuated immediately. There were only so many ships leaving for home. Home.’ She glanced into the bottom of her glass as if it might reply.

  He replenished it, but he waited for her to speak. He was a listener.

  ‘You have no idea, Quentin.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’ He leaned back in his wooden chair, hands behind his head.

  ‘Home for me was back to Mr Partridge. Herbert is a good sort, an honest man, a total bore to whom I was married off before I had any idea what the world might hold for me, or how I might navigate its shoals.’ She paused as though noting the phrase for future use. ‘I was nineteen when we married. I didn’t exactly love him, but I didn’t not love him, if you know what I mean. He was well-to-do, good prospects, house in Chiswick, which, truth be told, he had actually inherited from a spinster aunt. Mummy and Daddy approved. Herbert’s politics were respectable, his religion strictly C of E. He worked in insurance. He still does, for that matter. He was too young for the Great War, so he didn’t have any of that beastly shell shock that other men carried round. I was a beautiful bride, and we had one of those lovely weddings that girls are supposed to cherish all their lives. Their one big day. Really, Quentin, I ask you! One big day out of fourscore and ten years? Well, never mind. Herbert and I married and had three lovely children in very short order, all exactly like their father. Three out of four is rather good for odds.’

  Quentin frowned.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’ She drew a short sharp breath in through her nose. ‘I was in Cairo, September, 1939, quayside with all the rest of them, shuffling forward among the tearful women and children, loading on ships to return to England, everyone having their papers and passports and tickets checked, their names on rosters, and passenger lists, everyone so anxious and afraid of what the future would bring. War was about to engulf everything. I looked up to that hard sky, like a pitiless bowl of blue, and I could all but see an enormous wave cresting overhead, about to splash down, and carry everything we knew with it, to crash down, to kill some and leave the others beached wherever they might be. And if I got on that ship, that wave would crash down, and I would be beached sitting across from Herbert Partridge. And I thought, if I am to die – everyone does – then let it be in Egypt.’ She took another sip. ‘I gave the ticket to a girl who had been a nanny for a rich family – they were prepared to abandon her there – and I went to British headquarters and said, “Put me to work. There’s nothing I can’t do.” ’

  ‘You have a supreme confidence, Louisa.’

  ‘Hard won,’ she replied, finishing off the Dewar’s.

  ’You were gone the entire war, then?’

  ‘I spent three years in the Middle East and when the Americans came into the war, they made me the liaison with the staff of an American general, a colonel in particular. I will not say which one,’ she added with a cryptic smile. ‘I lived all over the Mediterranean in those years. I lived deeply, fully, richly. I know I ought not to say it, but the war unshackled me, don’t you see, not just from Herbert, but from British Housekeeping altogether! I was, am, forever changed. And then it was over. My American colonel returned to Tallahassee, Florida. Really, what kind of name is that? Tallahassee? He returned there. To his wife. I returned here.’ Mrs Partridge looked from the glass in her hand to the grey-brown bricks outside the dirty window where a pigeon huddled at the sill. ‘The cab left me off in front of the house in Chiswick. My key still fit in the door. I opened it, and Herbert was exactly where I had left him. As if nothing had changed. He asked if I’d like a cup of tea and some bacon and eggs. Powdered eggs, but he had been saving the bacon for my return. I said yes. What else was there to say?’

  ‘One might say you were still beached there with him, as if you’d used the ticket.’

  She clearly gave this some thought. ‘The children had been evacuated during the war, so Herbert hardly knew them. They were certainly all strangers to me, and I to them. How could I go back? I was utterly changed.’

  He was curious if she were still married to Mr Partridge. She wore no rings, only bracelets. However, to ask such a question was unthinkable, and in fact, divorce itself was unthinkable, the act of the brave or foolhardy, the desperate or demented. Quentin rested his hand atop the rejected manuscript. ‘None of that is in here in this book. It’s as though you’ve pared away all your experience, and left only the food, the cooking.’

  ‘That’s sufficient. Everyone has to eat, after all.’

  ‘Perhaps if you enlivened it with some personal reminiscence.’

  ‘Oh no. I told you I would be perfectly willing to teach or preach, but not to stand up on the stage and wave my knickers about.’

  That isn’t exactly what he had meant, though he could see why she would think so.

  ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘writing isn’t like a recipe, you know, where you can prescribe a bit of this and that, a pinch. Once you start writing, once you open it up, open up your actual experience, then you’ve got the whole imperial pound, or nothing. No—’ Her lips pursed ‘—I saw, experienced things and people I shall never forget, things and people I shall cherish always, no matter what, no matter that we are parted forever. I saw such cruelty, such crass, swaggering stupidity that will haunt me as long as I live. I saw heroism too, not the lofty sort, not that vainglorious sort, the quiet, ongoing sort, the more heroic for its being so unsung. If I’d been a different sort of writer, braver, smarter, I would have addressed all that, met it with clarity. If I’d been George Orwell, for instance, poor sod. But I am not. Indeed, I have been uncharitably described as a housemaid with a pen rather than a feather duster. Perhaps that’s true. I may be a writer with more energy than talent. But this book? Apricot Olive Lemon. This book is unlike any other. This book should shake up all the dear old things!’

  He paused, as though her words, like the smoke from her cigarette, needed time to dissipate. He did not think the book a masterpiece by any means, but he would follow her lead. ‘All right, then. It’s Bernard’s loss. We’ll send this out and find another publisher for your book, though I have to warn you, you probably will not get the sort of advance you might like. It will be a risky proposition, to publish a book like this in the world we live in.’

  ‘It is risky not to.’ She rose and pulled her gloves back on. ‘Then we are in accord, as the French say.’

  ‘We are.’ He rose too. ‘Oh, and do you have any more copies of the manuscript? Other than your carbon. I’d like to send it out to more than one publisher, I think.’

  Mrs Partridge beamed at him ‘I do indeed. I have two others. You shall have them tomorrow. Give your father my regards, but tell him I shall expect in future to deal with you and you alone when I come to Castle Literary. I feel confident that you are a man of understanding, and not a literary grubber, pushing print from a barrow, and crying in the streets of Gomorrah.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ he replied, a little alarmed at the image.

  �
�No need to see me out. I know my way round.’

  The following day Enid Sherrill happened to be talking to Miss Marr when the redoubtable Louisa flung open the office door. Enid braced, expecting a tongue-lashing for having fobbed her off on the junior partner. However, Mrs Partridge was cordial, or rather, crisp. She carried a shopping bag and declined to take a seat. She asked for Quentin.

  Miss Marr alerted him via the intercom. The office was not that large, and the intercom was simply a gesture towards modernity.

  ‘Louisa,’ he said, emerging.

  Mrs Partridge’s face lit and she took his proffered hand warmly. ‘How good to see you, Quentin.’ She followed him through this door without another look back at Enid Sherrill and Miss Marr, who exchanged puzzled glances.

  He showed her again to the wing chair, but she did not sit. From the shopping bag she took out two solid manuscripts tied up in brown paper. She put them on his desk. He began to speak of his thoughts on the letter he would write, but she waved all that away.

  ‘I have complete trust in you, Quentin, complete faith. I’m sure you will write a lovely letter, and I have no doubt you will find me a wonderful publisher. I have something for you, a gift, a reward, if you will, for your understanding, for I feel certain that you do understand.’ She smiled and reached into her enormous alligator bag, and pulled out a shopping bag. From this she drew several fluttering thin pages, and a small bottle containing an amber-unto-golden liquid. ‘Pure Sicilian olive oil.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘It’s not to be looked at, Quentin! It’s to be used! It’s a gift. My gift to you.’

  ‘You’re too kind, Louisa.’

  ‘And!’ She pulled from the bag a half-dozen soft black orbs, greenish at the tip, which he stared at. ‘They’re figs, Quentin! Have you never seen a fig?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I got them off the black market, of course. Don’t tell your father. He can be such a prig.’

  ‘Thank you. My wife will be …’

  ‘Not your wife. Do not hand this to your wife and expect her to understand. You understand. She does not. Mind you, I’m casting no aspersions on your wife, whom I do not know. I heard you married Rosamund’s daughter. I’m sure she’s charming, but this experience is for you.’ Beneath her hawkish nose, Louisa’s lips curled into a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’ll leave the bag with you too. Keep it close to the vest, Quentin, but once you try this, you will understand what my book is trying to do. And don’t tell them, out there.’ She nodded, perhaps to the outer office, perhaps to the great world. ‘This is our secret.’

  The six figs sat on the windowsill all that day and the next, fat little black apostrophes signifying nothing, save that they looked entirely out of place, utterly foreign, and a little forlorn to find themselves in the draught. The occasional pigeon eyed them through the glass. The jar of Sicilian olive oil Quentin put in the cabinet alongside the Dewar’s White Label. He did not take it home. He didn’t quite know why. Nor did he mention the olive oil and the figs, though he certainly told Florence about his conversation with Mrs Partridge. Florence applauded him for his acumen, reminded him that he was good at his job, excellent at handling difficult authors. Quentin accepted her praise, but he knew that all he had really done was listen well, and agree with Mrs Partridge that Selwyn and Archer were thankless wretches.

  Before he could undertake the letter to send Apricot Olive Lemon out on its new quest, he had to read the whole of the book, a task he found complicated, especially difficult when Mr Weedon appeared after lunch. Twice a week he shared the office with Mr Weedon, the bookkeeper. Quentin found it hard to concentrate not simply because the bookkeeper punched his numbers into the Exacta adding machine, but because he also percolated resentment. Once this had been Mr Weedon’s office alone. Now he did his work in what amounted to a closet while Quentin had the big desk fronting the window. Quentin took Louisa’s typescript, and informed Miss Marr (in a tone he hoped worthy of a partner of the firm) that he would be at the London Library, and he left before she could object.

  His father belonged to an exclusive club where he could go to be undisturbed, to drink or eat or read or think in peace. Quentin had no wish to join that club. To read, to think, for peace in general, the London Library in St James’s Square was his retreat, his favourite place in the whole city. The ambience was studied, cultured, rich in a dry and unpoetic way, and Quentin always imagined the people working around him to be great writers and scholars, men (and a few women) unearthing secrets, writing books that would illuminate the past, the present and the future. He liked the knowledge that he, Quentin Castle, had been admitted to this sanctuary, a place where great minds had once worked, and would work again. He pleasured in the quiet, the occasional cough, the rustle of paper, the scrape of chairs, and the fact that absolutely no one could reach him here. Oh, perhaps if his father fell over dead, someone could insist that the librarian find Quentin Castle and advise him of these dire events. But barring that, the London Library seemed to Quentin like Keats’s unravished bride of quietness. Here he seriously read Apricot Olive Lemon.

  On truly diving into the book as a whole, rather than sampling, he found Louisa wrote with such colour and vivacity, such crisp, tart prose that he had to remind himself that just outside the door, even in elegant St James’s Square, people sank under the weight of yet another frigid, austere winter. The wartime Mediterranean life Louisa Partridge had lived (complete with adulterous affairs, cruelty, crass stupidity, quiet heroism, danger, deprivation, folly and death) was nowhere present in these pages. The war had vanished. All that remained was the sun and the sea and the sky, the golden stones, the narrow streets, the calls from nearby mosques, the bells of ancient churches, unsubtle voices haggling in foreign markets, coloured awnings and doors where beads sufficed for curtains. Mrs Partridge spoke of an undifferentiated ‘we’. We went here or there, we found lemons glowing in the marketplace; we peeled the oranges and breathed in their damp brightness; we poached a silvery fish in briney water. Quentin also better understood how writing the book, minus the war itself, must have seemed to Louisa like the chance to relive all the best of it. And to have done so while the indelible experience was still fresh, and before time had eroded or buried it. The book left him hungry, an unspecific kind of hunger, perhaps more a sense of being unfilled. Appetite, not sustenance. Isn’t that exactly what she had said?

  When he finished it, dark had descended. He left the London Library and walked to Hatchards, browsed there till he was quite certain nearly everyone at Castle Literary would have left for the day. Having just read Apricot Olive Lemon, he could not endure the thought of talking to the narrow-nosed Miss Marr.

  He climbed the three flights and let himself into the Castle Literary Ltd premises. In his own office, he lit the gooseneck desk lamp, rolled paper into the typewriter, and considered how best to write his letter. More funda-mentally still, to whom? John Murray? Faber? The Bodley Head? Jonathan Cape? Wherever the book went, it would already carry with it the odour of failure. In the small, gentlemanly world of London publishers, everyone would ask: why had Bernard declined? What could Quentin say to a new potential publisher? Should he describe her book as a travelogue with recipes? Should he say it was a clarion call for a new and better British diet? Calling for courage and change and boldness was utterly out of step with the times. People had had enough of change and courage and boldness. Mend and make do while the Americans contemplated making a hydrogen bomb.

  Drafting and re-drafting, he found no satisfactory words. He paused and spied the six fat figs on the windowsill. He reached for one, snipped off the stem, and sliced it clumsily with a letter opener. He put one half in his mouth. The tiny seeds scattered over his palate, and the soft parts dissolved, yielding to his tongue. Eyes closed, he savoured it, and did the same with the second glorious fig. He had no experience to parallel what the taste did for him, no metaphorical connection to make. How could he possibly
convey the experience in a letter? To a jaded publisher. A jaded public.

  He opened the cabinet and took out the jar of Sicilian olive oil, unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. Again, he had no parallel. He dipped his finger in and licked it. Honey? A single-malt Scotch? It wasn’t like either of those. He had no words to describe it. He returned to his letter. Paper littered the floor; the hour grew late, and still his typewriter clattered away, but he had no satisfactory draft.

  He heard a broom and bucket banging in the front office. ‘Alloooo, anyone ’ere?’ the charlady called out. Mrs Rackwell was certain that Regency ghosts remained in the building, and that they were not respectable.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Rackwell, I’m back here.’

  She opened his door. ‘Oh, young Mr Castle,’ she said, her hand going to her scrawny bosom. She wore a headrag and a dirty apron. ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘I always do when I’m working late.’ He winced to see that Mrs Rackwell’s pallid cheekbone bloomed in a greenish-blue, a bruise, a serious bruise probably delivered some days past. Mrs Rackwell, lacking both the funds and expertise for make-up, sometimes dusted flour over her face to hide the bruises after Old Rackwell beat her.

  ‘Not many works as late as you, sir. Very dedicated, you must be.’ She smiled and her ramshackle teeth heightened the garish impression, the greenish-white of her face and the gash of red lipstick across her mouth. Her eyes were full of pain, old, ongoing, ignoble pain.

  Quentin stood and struggled against the urge to touch the woman’s shoulder, to say she oughtn’t to let Rackwell vent his rage and ugliness on her, to commiserate with her in some basic human fashion, but he could not. Some combination of reticence, chagrin, fear stopped him. Instead he said, ‘The bird the other day, the battered bird who got trapped, did you find it?’

  ‘I did. I put it in the bin, but ’oo’d ever notice one drab sparrow more or less?’

  ‘I guess not,’ he said, wondering if she were referring to herself.