Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘I don’t despise anyone any more. I haven’t that luxury.’

  ‘With the life insurance money, you could make your own choices.’

  ‘I have made them.’

  He put his hat on. ‘Anything you need from me, you have but to ask.’

  ‘Thank you, Quentin.’

  ‘I’m sorry I so failed you in California.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault they cremated him. You did what I asked. You brought him home.’ But she did not offer him her hand, or say she forgave him, or that she hoped to see him again, and he walked down the stairs and out into the cold February afternoon with a heavy heart, and the conviction that this failure was one he would rue for the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AUSTERITY AND DESIRE

  The Chelsea street where Louisa Partridge lived had had its bohemian heyday with the likes of Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and other late-Victorians. Even more raffish repute lay a few years in the future when Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Twiggy and their ephemeral entourages descended. But when Quentin Castle found her door, in late February 1950, he was disappointed. He expected to find Louisa Partridge in a space as exotic as her hat, her snake earrings and alligator handbag, but it was modest, very narrow, squeezed in on either side by more imposing homes of bankers, or wealthy businessmen. Unlike their immaculate steps, Louisa’s were crowded with pots of herbs, now in sad, frozen states of disrepute, grey, drooping, bitten by the February cold.

  ‘Coming,’ she called in her cawing, unlovely voice. ‘Ah, Quentin.’

  The hall was not broad enough for two people shoulder to shoulder, particularly as the hooks on the wall bulged with an assortment of coats, a brilliant-red poncho, an American army jacket. She enquired how he had come, and when he said the bus, she replied, ‘I suppose you’re one of those who sit up on the top, aren’t you? One of those “He who is tired of London is tired of life” types?’

  ‘I suppose I am.’ He did not know what else to say.

  She took his Burberry. ‘Follow me.’ She wore grey woollen trousers and a shirt of some thick weave with a colourful fringe and tassels at the bottom. Her bangles made a noise as they passed a door on the right, and she flung his coat without a thought on the chair in the tiny sitting room filled with strange and jumbled artefacts. ‘I knocked out a wall,’ she explained. ‘When I moved here, the sitting room was large, and the kitchen was small and squalid. And so I thought, why not change things around? Now the kitchen is big, and the sitting room is small. Of course it meant I had to buy the place, I mean, to knock out the wall, and fortunately, I have my own money, and Herbert has his. We have separate lives altogether, though every Christmas we do the whole grisly Yuletide family bit with the children.’

  ‘It’s like no other kitchen I’ve seen,’ Quentin confessed, coming into a long room that was at once functional and marvellous: a large, plain pine table in the centre, one end of which was taken up by a typewriter, a ream of paper on one side, a box of carbon paper on the other. The Aga monopolized one wall, and there were two fridges speckled with postcards taped to them, and a board across the top to serve as shelf. From a high brass rack hung copper pans and kettles, sieves and ladles and cooking instruments he could not begin to name. Shining knives and cleavers were on the wall, clinging to a two-inch-wide metal bracket, and the kitchen dresser held an array of mismatched plates.

  ‘Have a seat. What’s your poison?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what my Tallahassee colonel always said. It means what do you want to drink.’

  ‘Coffee, please,’ said Quentin, afraid to ask for the conventional cuppa in her demanding presence. ‘What is that wonderful smell?’

  ‘Onion tart.’

  ‘You needn’t feed me, you know.’

  ‘I want to feed you, Quentin. I like to see people eat as long as it’s not rubbish. Onions can be had off any barrow in the street, and this tart takes only two eggs, a bit of butter, and a bit of sugar for the caramelizing, and some bacon. It’s not out of the question even in London, especially since the bacon ration got raised last month. We’ll have coffee after lunch. Wine with. How about a martini?’

  ‘I confess I’ve never had one. I just do gin and tonic.’

  ‘Civilized people drink martinis. Are you civilized?’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘You’ve been to California. That ought to make you civilized.’ She turned to a bureau that held several bottles and a cocktail shaker. ‘You’re back rather sooner than I expected.’

  ‘I flew the whole way.’ Their talk turned to travel, air versus ship. Why are these conversations so predictable and tedious, he wondered, even with someone as original as Louisa Partridge? Should he wait for her to bring up the subject of the three declines, or just launch into it? After all, when he called her yesterday, he was the one who had insisted on secrecy. He had his reasons for not wanting to meet her in some public place, a restaurant, say, where no doubt she would find the food appalling, and might well make a scene. And the office? Never. If she disparaged his idea, she would not do so quietly. Not Louisa Partridge. No, he had specifically requested to see her on a Saturday in her own home. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the figs were shattering.’

  ‘Shattering?’ She looked pleased.

  ‘The figs you gave me. They had the same effect on my parents.’

  ‘You shared them with Albert?’

  ‘And my mother. ‘

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And my wife.’ He didn’t know how to say that his wife had made love to him without checking her calendar under the bed. He just said Florence had loved them too.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘They were … they seemed to shatter some wall or impediment between me and, well, I don’t quite know what. I can’t describe it. They were an experience I shall not soon forget.’

  ‘I have more!’ She brought a small woven basket from a shelf and there in mauve tissue paper were three more black figs. She took one out, placed it on a saucer and sliced it expertly. Its roly-poly body split evenly and fell in two halves. ‘Just look at them,’ said Louisa fondly. ‘I always think of figs as widows.’

  ‘Widows? That seems odd.’

  ‘Young widows. Look at them, clad in black, but inside they teem with possibility, swarm with these pale-pink seeds connected by tiny green threads.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ he said, unable to keep his thoughts away from a certain widow who, though not clad in black, certainly seemed to Quentin to suggest possibilities he tried not to imagine. ‘But it’s still very odd.’

  ‘I am odd. Haven’t you guessed?’ She gave one of her jagged laughs. ‘Now, the olive oil. Tell me, what did you think of that?’

  ‘I … I can’t describe it. I tasted it, of course, and I brought it home, but I hid it in a cupboard.’

  ‘But you must use it!’

  ‘Oh, I shall. I hid it because I didn’t want Effie using it.’

  ‘Who is Effie?’

  ‘A maid-of–all-work who comes every day. Her wages were Rosamund’s wedding present to us.’

  ‘So like Rosamund,’ she clucked in an unflattering way. ‘Finish that martini. Lunch is nearly ready. Oh, and by the way, there’s your letter. On the dresser. Take it.’

  He hoped it was not the one he had mailed from Mexico, but it was. It had been opened, and replaced in its envelope with the Mexican stamp he had bought at the hotel. He slid it into his pocket. He instinctively felt he ought to make some sort of social apology for writing a letter by turns chaotic and confessional, but he also instinctively knew that Louisa would scoff at social apologies. ‘Why are you returning it to me?’

  ‘Because you’ll need it. Oh, not today or tomorrow, or really, who knows when, but one day you will want to remember everything that’s in that letter.’

  ‘I might not,’ he said, colouring.

  ‘Fine. Destroy it if you like, it’s yours to decide
. Honestly, I thought that’s why you wanted to come here today. To ask for it back. It just arrived this morning.’

  He hoped she hadn’t read it, but she informed him that she had. ‘Most impressive.’

  ‘I’m not a writer.’

  ‘No, but it was passionate and headstrong, and that’s always impressive.’

  ‘And utterly unlike me.’

  ‘Yes, all the more reason that you must keep it, I should think.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘One day you’ll need that letter to remind you that this was a beginning. A harbinger. Next to panache, harbinger is one of my favourite words. I like the way it tastes. I like the way they both taste, but harbinger seems to me one of those salty words with layers of possibility.’

  ‘A harbinger of what?’

  ‘I don’t know you well enough to answer that. I hardly know you at all. But I feel there’s a sort of simpatico between us. Don’t you?’

  ‘I do, or I would not have written you such a letter.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t know what I was trying to say, really. I was in a sort of fog, and though it was only a week ago, it feels as though I am at a great distance.’

  ‘There’s the past for you!’ Louisa said. ‘Always inconvenient. Either failing to be retrieved, or so close, so vivid, it makes you cringe.’

  Quentin did cringe a bit, remembering the rest of the letter, the contrast of austerity and desire, and how, in going to Mexico with Gigi, he had flung off austerity like a dirty shirt and embraced desire. ‘Perhaps,’ he ventured, ‘you are one of the three strange angels in the D. H. Lawrence poem, “The Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through”.’

  ‘Well, I’d certainly be a damned strange angel, wouldn’t I? I prefer to think of myself as a retired demon, but you mentioned that poem in your letter. He was a marvellous poet, wasn’t he? A much better poet than a novelist. All that emotion! Who can bear to read it? Page after page!’

  ‘People do.’

  ‘Not over lunch.’ She took the onion tart from the oven, snapped a tablecloth out, put down some cutlery, rumpled napkins, and battered plates. The oniony fragrance wafted up to him, and he breathed deeply. She smiled and cut him a large wedge. The taste of the tart was a revelation, and he said so. The proud, harsh lines of her face relaxed, pleased at the compliment. In two mismated (but genuine Waterford crystal) glasses, she poured them each a splash of wine which she described as swill, but there was nothing else to be had. ‘What shall we toast to?’ she asked.

  ‘Expect great change?’ he replied, easing, feeling the martini’s tingle.

  Louisa Partridge lifted her glass to his, and lowered her voice. ‘Why are we meeting in secret?’

  Quentin collected himself, began in a businesslike way, repeating what he’d said on the telephone about the three declines.

  ‘I know all that,’ she interrupted. ‘What can’t wait? Why are we meeting on Saturday? Besides, sod them all, Chatto, Windus, John Murray, and The Bodley Head. Have they no insight, no sense of adventure at all?’

  ‘Only pirates make money from adventure, Louisa. Publishers are conservative men.’

  ‘What next, then? I’m assuming you have some ideas.’

  ‘I do, actually. I have had some thoughts, unconventional, but interesting. I thought they might appeal to you.’

  ‘Is it immoral, illegal or likely to frighten the horses?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he faltered.

  ‘Then out with it.’

  ‘I’ve come to have a new vision of Apricot Olive Lemon. You see, Louisa, when I first read the book, I didn’t know how to approach it. My letters to those editors were all wrong. Now I understand, it has to be read, for now, like a novel.’

  ‘I didn’t make it up.’

  ‘No, of course not. But when one reads a novel, one does so from a happy distance. You know, the adventures of whomever, whose life and bad judgement the reader watches from afar, the romance, the penalties, all that, without ever having that experience oneself. Think of Lawrence, or a writer like Frank Carson. They’re exhilarating to read, but who would want to actually live like those characters? All that lyricism and emotion.’

  ‘No one has the energy to live like that, investing everything with such significance.’

  ‘Exactly! But while the reader is in the pages, everything is invested with such significance, and the very best novels become one’s own experience. One carries them around in one’s head and heart, like memory.’

  ‘But my book is not fiction!’

  ‘No, but now, this moment in time, it has to be read like a novel. That’s what Bernard failed to realize. That’s what I failed to realize. The book is about appetite, not sustenance.’

  ‘Yes. I told you that.’

  ‘Bernard didn’t know the difference.’

  Louisa’s brow furrowed, but her eyes lit with interest.

  ‘Neither did Chatto or Windus, or John Murray, or The Bodley Head. Neither did I until …’ He took a bite and considered his words, keeping to the kernel, but not the whole plant, which is to say, not mentioning his insights gained in Mexico. ‘A man wouldn’t know the difference if he hadn’t had experience that made it clear. Sustenance, that is, the way we live now, that’s easy to describe. But appetite? A man who did not know the difference couldn’t possibly recognize appetite. It would be a grave error to confuse them, or believe they could ever be the same thing. You see?’

  ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘People expect sustenance of Louisa Partridge. The Book of British Housekeeping was sustenance. But Apricot Olive Lemon describes something we do not know, like fiction, like Frank Carson’s novels.’

  ‘Lyricism and emotion? I doubt that, Quentin!’

  ‘Think again, Louisa. All those lovely lemons and apricots, saffron and rice and Sicilian olive oil, all that rosemary and garlic, and cinnamon and honey, what are they but fiction? But one day, people will be able to read it as a cookbook. We will move beyond this… .’

  ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

  He groped for words. ‘In my office you quoted Rupert Brooke, remember? That we had all buried some part or another of ourselves far away. For my parents’ generation, even mine, everything we endured during the war is fresh and raw, and likely to stay that way, but right behind me there is a whole generation who may be in the schoolroom now, but in five years, say, they will be out in the world. For them, the anguish of the war, the losses, the tears, scars, the terrible price we paid, all that will be dulled. It won’t be fresh and raw. And for people born today, 1950, or next, or in ten years’ time, there will be a sort of creeping amnesia. Finally, only people like my parents, say, will still care – every day of their lives – that Robert died at El Alamein. They are the people who will never escape that past, any more than my mother’s brother who lived through Verdun escaped Verdun, which he never did.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I know it! My uncle was gassed in the trenches. He couldn’t work, and he had to move in with us, and he would wake in the night, screaming his bloody guts out. Scared my brother and me within an inch of our lives first few times we heard him.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then, it was just old Uncle Walter, foaming at the mouth, we used to say. That’s the way it happens, isn’t it? The horrifying becomes commonplace.’

  ‘And yet, when I was in California, Louisa, no one would ever guess there had ever been a war.’

  ‘Yes.’ She lit up a cigarette. ‘The Americans are not alone. A year ago I was in Italy with my daughter. I was astonished. I wanted to throttle the Italians, to cry out, to shake them by their national shoulders! How dare you drink aperitifs in your sunny squares, you happy bastards! How dare you have your beautiful women and fat babies, your noisy little scooters and your wine and opera? How dare you have your lovers strolling arm in arm, lost in one another? How dare you? We won the war, you happy bastards! You lost! Here, in London, we have rubble everywhere, and we’r
e crushed under it! The basic necessities of life are meted out to us with ration tickets. For us life has slowed to an ugly crawl, and we’re all of us, rich and poor, urban and rural, relentlessly grim and pinched and grey.’

  ‘You see, we recognize sustenance, but your book asks people to imagine appetite! You understand now why Bernard turned the book down, why those other three did as well? Like a novel, your book describes experience they have not had, not yet, appetite for things not just food, but a world that is bright and warm and gay, and for want of a better word, opulent, a world of desire. But it will not always be fiction. Life will not always be pinched and austere.’

  ‘Tell that to those narrow, pettifogging editors.’

  ‘We can’t tell them. We have to show them.’

  A slow, conspiratorial smile spread over her face. ‘I am going to like this.’

  Quentin’s idea – which, he stressed, she should not tell anyone else in the firm; he certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone in the firm that he was contemplating something so outside the bounds of standard practice – was nothing short of brilliant. At least that’s what Louisa Partridge called it, bloody brilliant.

  Quentin would choose three or four editors from likely houses, and Louisa would invite them all to lunch one afternoon in March. Louisa would cook for them. It must be magical, Quentin insisted, and everything from the book Apricot Olive Lemon. It must suggest a not-distant, not-dismal future. ‘You invite them for lunch, and you and I will be wonderfully charming and witty. You will be anyway. I’ll do my best. We will absolutely not mention Apricot Olive Lemon.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not asking them to buy the book. We’re telling them a story. When they read the manuscript, they’ll see it, they’ll understand.’

  ‘But maybe they’ll bring it up. Four publishers have turned it down, so it must be poison.’

  ‘Or nectar.’ Quentin finished off his second piece of onion tart. ‘Don’t worry. These men subscribe to a code of civility. They will want to talk about The Book of British Housekeeping, that wonderful tome that everyone knows and loves.’