Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  Francis and Claire recognized in one another the kind of heedless hunger that would characterize their union for a long time. For over a year they rousted and wrestled, rolled over one another like puppies, and made love, meeting early mornings on the beach at Broadstairs, on warm evenings behind fences, along the hedgerows. Their choices were limited since Claire had no place of her own and Francis lodged with a nosy widow. They were ardent lovers and they had ardent rows, occasioned by pregnancy scares, by his roving eye, by her demands. He gave her books to read, books he loved and many she didn’t, and they argued about those as well. Her uncle knew she was running wild, and raised his hand to her. However, he struck her only once. Touch me again, and I’ll leave you alone with your old mum forever, she threatened. In the meantime, she was making plans to bolt in any event, to leave with Francis, not simply that she should be rid of the Dunstans, but to free Francis to write. She fostered Francis’s fine, high idea of himself as a writer. As she told Quentin Castle over the bottle of Dewar’s that night, when she read Frank’s book, the still unfinished The Moth and the Star, she had cried into her hands because the work was so lovely, so moving, the characters so heart-rending, the language so poetic.

  The Moth and the Star, like many first novels, was a re-imagining of Francis Carson’s youth. A schoolmaster, rather like Frank’s father (or, rather, how Frank had conceived of his father) was a man with the wisdom of Samuel Johnson, a man of moral magnitude, with fine abilities and literary ambitions, cast into wretched circumstances by unkind fate. This character had a carping, penny-niggling Quaker wife, an elder son, pious and dutiful, and a younger son, intelligent but rebellious, whom the father tries to break but secretly admires. The father’s hopes for the son are dashed when his wild ways oblige him to run away to sea, leaving a local girl in the proverbial family way. (The lovers’ passion described in lush prose, more lush and lyrical after Frank ran off with Claire.) The girl’s own family casts her out and the schoolmaster – to the bitter ire of his wife and pious son – takes her and her bastard brat in. The son returns, and to the father’s everlasting sorrow, takes the girl and the child away with him. Not a happy ending.

  Claire believed in Frank’s genius, just as she believed escape was essential if he were to fulfil it. Francis, for his part, was not altogether unhappy there in Broadstairs. Left to his own devices, he might have stayed, teaching school, bedding the local ladies, but Claire insisted. Train fare was out of the question, and so one spring dawn they hitched a ride with a market gardener going into London. Claire carried only the carpet bag she’d brought from Idaho. Francis never did learn to travel light, and he had three suitcases (one full of manuscripts). They were prepared to pose as man and wife to rent a tiny set of rooms in theatrical digs, but the Brixton landlady didn’t care if they were Wallis Simpson and the King as long as they coughed up the rent. First. The place had a lumpy bed, a wardrobe, a washstand and cupboard and table that faced the window to serve as a desk.

  Claire made a bargain with Frank: on the promise that he would not drink, nor idle, nor diddle the oversexed landlady, Claire would free his time to write, to finish The Moth and the Star. She would get a job and support them. Claire’s good looks, long legs and choir-trained soprano landed her a place in the undistinguished chorus at the Brixton Odeon. By 1936 the music hall, that venerable British institution, was then in its twilight glow, but audiences still flocked there for the beer, the pretty girls, the songs that everyone could sing.

  The young couple’s days assumed a kind of rhythm. They laughed, they loved, they fought, they stayed out late, they stayed up late, they rose late the next day before starting all over. When she woke in the mornings, Claire took what Francis had written the day before out of the suitcase by the door, and read it. She offered praise, and made suggestions, and if scenes proved difficult or the characters recalcitrant, she acted them out for him. Claire and Frank were in love, their health and high spirits and affection, their hopes for the future were a daily tonic against the otherwise constricted circumstances of their present life. They shared a sense of destiny.

  The writing and rewriting, the revisions of The Moth and the Star moved forward, and Francis kept to his part of the bargain (or at least to the spirit of it: the oversexed landlady was too good to pass up). After writing all evening, Francis would walk to the Odeon in time for the late acts. He had a few drinks at the bar, applauded the girls in the chorus, heckled the comics, laughed at the dog act, and joined in enthusiastic choruses to all the songs. One act, however, left him spellbound: the blowsy, ageing mudlark Rosie Evans belting out her trademark ‘Some Of These Days’.

  Rose Evans’ rendition of ‘Some Of These Days’ did not have the usual uptempo conviction – the singer certain that her erring lover would soon be back in her arms. On the contrary, in Rosie Evans’ delivery, the singer knew that those days would never come again, that she had been utterly forsaken, abandoned, left clutching cold pride and defeated dreams. Rosie’s grandeur, her tawdry beauty, were allied to her being old and blowsy and still having the strength to break hearts every night in a place where broken hearts and broken hopes and dusty dreams were strewn on the floor like once-lit matches The deep parentheses of her cheeks, caked with stage make-up, were accentuated by the harsh electric light ringing the proscenium. Her voice, still clear and strong, though wavering on the long-held notes, rang all the way up to the gallery while the rouge ran down her face, and her lipstick fanned out into a delta of lines round her mouth, and the wattles of her thick neck shook with emotion. She wore a long, lacy gown, the lace gone sepia and the bright yellow satin faded in patches. She carried herself with tragic aplomb. Rosie Evans stood till the last bit of applause fell away in the gallery, then she left the stage.

  In Rosie’s youth, thirty or forty years before, it was said that she had brought down many a thousand-seat Empire theatre up and down Britain with her spirited, sensual delivery of music-hall standards. She could sing even the Victorian saccharine-sweet ‘Come Into The Garden, Maud’ so that men got erections and women prickled happily between their thighs. She fell desperately in love with a man who refused to share her with an adoring public. She disappeared from the stage for a time, perhaps a dozen or so years, and in that time she lost her lover, her looks, and two children. When she returned, far from playing the Empire music halls, she was reduced to this backwater Brixton Odeon. Some of these daaaaaaaaaaays you’re gonna miss my lovin’ … you’re gonna miss my kissin’ … you’re gonna miss me, baby, when I’m faaaaaaaar away … I feel so lonely …

  Francis Carson was easily moved to emotion. Routinely he gulped back tears at her every performance. And he was not alone. At the Odeon bar, gruff men surreptitiously wiped their noses with the backs of work-stained hands. Stout matrons and experienced tarts blubbered outright.

  After the last act, and the curtain came down on the chorus, Francis waited for Claire at the Odeon stage door. Rosie Evans usually exited first, still wearing the gown she had performed in, a hat, a coat, long, soiled gloves, her stage make-up still smeared about the eyes. Francis always removed his hat and greeted her respectfully, but she never spoke to him. She spoke to few people, though she might occasionally tell the stage manager to sod himself; certainly she never bestowed any camaraderie on the giggling gaggle of chorines that Claire belonged to. But her character fired Francis’s imagination and some years later he would fashion from Rosie Evans his immortal character Elsie Rose in his second and most famous novel, Some of These Days.

  But first he struggled to finish The Moth and the Star. When he did, Claire rented a typewriter from a Brixton shop. She put it on the table and by day taught herself to type. Then she went to work, transcribing his spidery, Spenserian hand into typescript. Her fingers were stained blue from the carbon paper. There was much pounding on the door and floor and ceiling, cursing on the stairs from the other lodgers: her constant tapping was keeping them awake; these were theatre people and they needed to sleep by d
ay. Claire typed on.

  When she finally finished, Claire got some brown paper and twine from the butcher down the street, both gratis (a pretty girl is like a melody, after all) and wrapped up the typescript, tied it as though the twine were satin ribbons. She told Francis to take it into London and get it published, to make her proud. She kissed him on the lips and he slapped her on the backside.

  Francis Carson had his heart set on having The Moth and the Star published by one of the great literary houses, as befits the work of a great writer. However, as he wandered London that rainy afternoon in the autumn of 1937, and faced the doors – John Murray, The Bodley Head, Chatto and Windus, Jonathan Cape, Selwyn and Archer – his nerve failed. He needed a drink to fortify himself. And then another. And a third for the road, though he did not leave, and in fact, had a fourth. He gathered courage in pub after pub as he worked his way towards Mayfair. Such was his strong constitution that his only awareness of alcohol tingling in his veins came with the impulse to recite Shakespeare or Byron, Shelley or Yeats, or his latest enthusiasm, Auden.

  When the pubs closed for the afternoon, he found the autumn weather had turned blustery, and rain pelted down. He opened his umbrella and made his unsteady way down the street. A sudden gust of wind snatched his open umbrella and blew it away; he ran after it, but he tripped and dropped the precious parcel in a filthy puddle. He scrambled to snatch it, and continued after the umbrella, comically staggering, splashing, finally nabbing the runaway umbrella in front of a doorway where the wind again had at it, and turned it inside out. He pushed into the building to get out of the rain until he could right the umbrella.

  A Mr Jobson, the hall porter, eyed him dubiously, summed him up as a writer, and said he’d hold the umbrella, fix it even, while the gentleman (Jobson used the word loosely) kept his appointment with the literary agents on the third floor.

  Francis thanked him, shook off his wet hat and started up the stairs. There indeed, stencilled on the glass along with the distinctive castle logo, he read:

  Castle Literary Ltd. Authors’ Representatives.

  Miss Marr gave him the gimlet eye. She was less forgiving than Mr Jobson and had scant patience with those authors who looked so seedy and disreputable, in short, so authorish. Moreover this one was wet and wafted an unpleasant combination of odours. She asked his business.

  ‘Here to see Mr Castle, madam. I have a book for him. A novel.’ Francis drew the parcel out from beneath his wet jacket, and brushed it tenderly.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I do. Mr Castle’s not in, so he couldn’t possibly be expecting you.’

  ‘I’ll wait, madam,’ said Frank, flashing her a good-natured grin that used to slay them in Broadstairs.

  Miss Adeline Marr, however, was made of sterner stuff and returned to her typewriter. Moreover, Miss Marr knew that Albert Castle was lunching with Mrs Partridge, and these lunches were always long, lubricated with alcohol, high spirits, beefsteaks, a rich dessert, and no doubt some forbidden fruit for the finale. Miss Marr was no fool. Miss Marr said none of this to this Mr whatever his name was. Let him wait.

  Francis had nothing else to do. Outside the rain was still pouring in buckets. He opened his typescript and read it with audible pleasure, shaking each of the top pages dry, blowing on them when necessary. Francis’s personal, raffish odour, intensified by cigarettes and beer, did not improve on drying, but drifted towards Miss Marr, whose long nose wrinkled.

  Earlier than expected, Albert Castle could be heard on the stairwell singing, each staccato syllable from Princess Ida. ‘While Love, the housemaid, lights the kitchen fire …’ booming the last as he opened the door, and tipping his hat, and popping through the low gate that separated Miss Marr’s desk from the unwashed author, who rose to his feet.

  ‘And how was your lunch with Mrs Partridge, sir?’

  ‘Excellent, Miss Marr! Excellent. Between ourselves—’ And here he bent towards her, balancing his tipsy self on her desk ‘—we have our literary cachet to uphold, but the wheels are greased by The Book of British Housekeeping while we await the next Sydney Thaxton.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Francis, rising. ‘Mr Castle, I presume.’

  ‘This man has no appointment,’ said Miss Marr.

  ‘But I have this book,’ said Francis, extending his parcel, open now, the creamy sheets of paper glowing like a pale flower in wet brown leaves. ‘This novel. It’s … it’s very good.’

  As a literary agent Albert Castle was often pressed to read novels that their authors thought very good. Wasted time was an occupational hazard. He gave such books fifty pages, and not a dot or comma more. If, in fifty pages, he was compelled to page fifty-one, there was perhaps something to be said to the author. At this moment the bedraggled Francis Carson did not inspire confidence, but the smell he exuded was somehow familiar to Albert Castle. What was it? He frowned and scrabbled after memory. Wet genius. Thaxton and the second-best umbrella. ‘Leave your manuscript and address with Miss Marr, and I’ll have a glance at it and get back to you.’

  All the way back to Brixton, A glance at it and get back to you rang in Francis’s ears, and with these words he heard as well the rush and rustle of turning pages exuding the sweet smell of fresh print. Success! The editor’s delight! Publisher’s pride! Booksellers beaming happiness, as The Moth and the Star flew off the shelves, so swiftly it had to be plucked from the front window of Hatchards to satisfy demand. He stood in front of Hatchards and imagined this very scenario. After a stop or two for a celebratory drink, Francis also heard waves of delighted critical acclaim, noisy as the waves washing up on Broadstairs beach, the ripple of readers’ laughter and tears, rapture, excitement, delight, second and third editions, translations, oh, it all lay there before him, fuelled by the same capacity for fiction that allowed Francis Carson to see a grand manor in a Jacobean dump.

  Castle Literary Ltd had two form letters that covered the swathe of their experience with potential authors. One, signed simply Castle Literary Ltd, said, in a florid and roundabout fashion, replete with good wishes, nothing doing. The other used words like ‘delighted to read your ms’ and ‘looking forward to meeting with you at your earliest convenience’. Albert Castle or Enid Sherrill signed these personally. This latter short letter, postmarked 30 September 1937, signed and with a cheery postscript by Albert Castle, launched the lifelong (and the afterlife-long) connection between the firm of Castle Literary Ltd and Francis Carson, their agreement solidified by a handshake, nothing more. Albert Castle’s nose for genius was truly vindicated. Selwyn and Archer published The Moth and the Star in 1938, and critics hailed Francis Carson as the best writer since Thomas Hardy, or D. H. Lawrence, or Compton Mackenzie.

  Even before publication, on the strength of the modest advance, and convinced that bright days lay ahead, Francis and Claire left Brixton and moved to a chic flat in Chelsea they could ill afford. Their insular love affair opened up to include many friends who sought Francis out. They took up with – or rather were taken up by – a fine, fast crowd of people who flocked to toast Frank’s success, laud his genius, supply him with drinks, dinners and soirées in artists’ ateliers and country homes, in cafés, and restaurants. These were smart, lively, arty, educated, confident people; most of them were privileged, a few, like Lady Sybil Dane, still rich, despite the Depression.

  On the buoyant tide of this acclaim, and with Rosie Evans still fresh in his mind, Francis set to work on what would become Some of These Days. His own discipline was not always equal to this task, but Claire’s was. Claire recognized the central conflict of Frank’s life, his very nature: the struggle to balance the discipline to write and the energy to live. Claire put herself between Frank and noisy interruptions, no matter who rang or came to the door. She read, she acted out the scenes, offered dialogue; she wept and typed and lauded. He finished it in an inspired eight months.

  On publication in June 1939, Some of These Days was wid
ely regarded to be one of the great English novels. In retrospect, though it was not Brideshead Revisited, or Women in Love, it nonetheless represented the final flowering of a romantic tradition. Francis Carson, in his heart, subscribed to all those old values that made such novels possible, values which would be deemed cloying, stultifying, that would require rebellion from later twentieth-century writers. Carson’s reputation never quite rose again to the heights accorded Some of These Days, and suffered setbacks, notably the failure of Hay Days. But by the 1990s the tide had turned in his favour. On the basis of Some of These Days and two posthumous novels, An Inconvenient Wife and September Street, he was considered a major British novelist, thus making even more poignant his premature death by drowning in 1950.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE VOW

  In the predawn darkness Quentin put on his glasses, lit the candle by the bed, and consulted his watch: quarter past six. He was conscious of an encroaching hangover.

  Despite the drinking, he had slept only fitfully. Wind whistled at the window panes, and scooted in draughts and intermittent blasts, and the hot water bottle, as a substitute for human warmth, was insufficient against the cold. He dressed hurriedly and made his way down the dark staircase towards the kitchen. There he found lights on but the fire out. He busied himself making up the fire and putting the kettle on. He used the lav down the hall, glad he’d brought a toothbrush.

  The kitchen had barely begun to warm when he returned, and heard the door open. He went to the mud room and found her there, a lantern in one hand. She blew it out and handed him an apron full of brown, speckled eggs. She wore a man’s heavy coat, a scarf round her neck. Her cheeks were flushed with cold, and her eyes too were red-rimmed, ringed with fatigue. ‘I’m hungover,’ she confessed. ‘I feel like shite.’

  ‘It’ll pass,’ he said with the voice of experience, though he could not actually remember when he had last had a hangover, or had gone a day without shaving, or had done anything but drink tea and read The Times in the early morning.