Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘Except me.’

  ‘You must promise not to be savage about it. Think of it as a relic, Louisa. You wouldn’t savage a relic.’

  ‘I would.’ She smashed out her cigarette. ‘I’m something of a relic myself. They might not come.’ She poured his coffee from an instrument he had never seen, explaining, ‘This is how they make coffee in Africa.’

  ‘You still have a good deal of cachet. They’ll come.’

  ‘Will you tell them the others will be here?’

  Quentin sipped his coffee. ‘We’ll let them be surprised.’

  ‘Well, don’t invite all the old men. There must be one or two hungry young editors out there.’

  ‘Good idea. And when they leave, we’ll give them each a copy of the manuscript. A parting gift. And we’ll let them quarrel over who will publish it.’

  ‘I like the way you think.’

  The strategy hatched that Saturday afternoon earned Quentin Castle the cryptic dedication of Louisa Partridge’s Apricot Olive Lemon. It read:

  For Quentin Castle.

  For Quentin knows what and Quentin knows why.

  Florence was not amused. Albert said it sounded indecent. Rosamund thought it egregious bad taste. Margaret thought it cheeky, which it was, since Louisa lifted it wholesale from a book given to her by her Tallahassee colonel, Don Marquis’s Archie and Mehitabel Poems, a brash book of free verse ostensibly written by a cockroach.

  The Garden of Allah

  Thursday 16 February 1950

  Dear Louisa,

  A writer such as yourself can put paper in the machine and write, but I cannot simply put my thoughts in some sort of free-form expression, I must write TO someone. A letter. So I shall write to you, as, of my acquaintance, you alone, a person who has felt her life upended more than once. I should think you might understand what I am trying to convey, my thoughts, unsettled as they are, confused and contradictory, in a word, ambivalent.

  I have come from the land of austerity and stepped into the land of desire, Louisa. I am native to austerity, and find desire both attractive and repellant. Repellant in that excess offends me. I think. However, I wonder if I have actually ever met, experienced excess. Can one recognize excess in theory? This in itself is a conundrum. And desire? Not merely sexual desire, though I include that, but some larger overall aching desire. Can desire be theoretical? I am charmed here by the very things I disdain. I am torn, confused, unsettled, ambivalent about my duty to the agency. To Mrs Carson. To my father. (Quite apart from the agency.) To myself even. And then, to Frank Carson, that adulterous, egotistical destructive bastard, but I am his only ally, Louisa.

  Frank Carson and I both came from the land of austerity and walked into the land of desire. Could he have been as confused as I? Could he have got lost, unmoored, and finally just succumbed to the excess all around him, the desire, the artifice, the illusion, the condescension? Could all that have driven him, or made him stupidly plunge to a watery death? Or did something else befall him?

  Would that I had some wise counsel, Louisa. But all I had tonight was a fortune cookie. They gave them out at the Chinese restaurant. A bit of cheap wisdom on a scrap of paper. Mine said Expect Great Change. I am not equal to Great Change. I do not like it. I am a man of regular habits and practices. I know this of myself, and yet, I hear, battering at my brain – like the sparrow who flung itself against the grey wired glass – the lines from the D. H Lawrence poem, ‘Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through’ and the line about the three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them.

  Louisa, am I making any sense at all?

  This letter – or at least this much of it – was in the pocket of an old double-breasted suit thrust at the back of an unused closet, and it went to the jumble sale in 2000, undiscovered. With it there was a tiny scrap of paper that had all but disintegrated, on which, half a century earlier, the faded words that had promised great change could no longer be discerned.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  EVERYBODY BACK ON THEIR HEADS

  The following day, Sunday, as though he had never gone to California at all, Quentin sat in his parents’ sitting room, bound by the gravity of the planets-in-their-orbits luncheon. By tacit agreement, the conversation was local, evasive, and no one brought up Francis Carson, his death or his work. And yet, Quentin felt Frank’s presence vividly, a ghost, leaning against the mantel, full of mocking bonhomie, underscoring his own famous charm, contrasting it with Quentin’s weaknesses, which were so manifest his own family forbore to mention them.

  Returning to work on Monday Quentin found that gossip had percolated everywhere, far beyond Castle Literary. Colleagues and competitors, publishers and writers might ring Quentin up on some pretext or another, only to enquire sotto voce if it were true, what they’d heard, that Carson had come home in a box like the scrapings of a grate. Everyone seemed to know; some seemed to blame Quentin, not perhaps for Carson’s death, but for allowing him to be cremated. He had few defences. He wished more than ever that Robert were alive so he could follow his example, or that he had something of Louisa’s imperious aptitude, but he did not. Everyone back on their heads. He truly felt that he had waded into a room full of shit and coffee break was over.

  On Wednesday, 1 March , he came late to the office, and found atop the post on his desk a bright picture postcard, a beach dotted with umbrellas, Santa Monica, California, and on the side, a note from Gigi, typical Gigi, completely lacking in all discretion.

  Sorry our time together ended up so grim. Not yr fault. Not mine either. Hey! I’m taking yr advice, baby. Setting myself up as an agent. Anyone can do it. All I need is a phone, a business card, and letterhead, right? For my 1st client I called Don. The guy who 2 timed me. I told Don I owed him. He called me nasty names, but I said I’d work for free, and he agreed. He’s an OK writer. If I can place one of his scripts, think what I cd do with a really good writer! I have built-in connections. People are afraid to be rude to me because of RR. I’m still mad about being banned from the studio. Anyway, wish me luck. I’ve moved out of the Moroccan Mausoleum and into one of RR’s rentals. Home and office. You’ll be hearing from me, Mr. muy hombre! Adios and a little Margarita on the side! GGF

  Quentin literally groaned each time he read this. Of course Miss Marr – and probably Miss Sherrill, no doubt Monica and his father – had read it, parsing together its more cryptic references. He was about to bolt for the London Library, anything to escape their collective disapproval, when the intercom buzzed and Miss Marr, in an aggrieved tone, said, ‘You must come out here now. You have a visitor.’

  He opened his door to find the outer office frozen in a sort of tableau: Miss Sherrill emerging from the small staffroom and loo at the back, a stunned look on her face, Miss Marr wearing a particularly pruney expression, Monica turning round, mouth agape, and Albert, his face draped with wounded shock. Claire Carson stood behind the low gate.

  ‘Claire!’ Quentin cried, then modulated his voice to a professional register. ‘Mrs Carson! I didn’t expect you.’

  She wore her maroon coat, floppy velvet hat, a long, thick-knitted scarf of rainbow hues, and trousers. That probably accounted for Miss Marr’s disdain. What she said next accounted for Albert’s outrage and Miss Sherrill’s shock. ‘I should have been more specific, Quentin. I asked for Mr Castle and your father came out to see me, and I have been explaining to him, to them—’ She glanced uneasily round the office ‘—that I meant you. That you and I will be working together now. You will be representing Frank’s work.’

  The look on his father’s face so pained Quentin that his reflexes dictated he must defer, at the very least, say they should work together. But he did not. Whatever he ended up paying for his arrogance – oh yes, arrogance is how they would see it, Albert and Enid – he would pay the price. He went to the low gate and opened it. He shook her gloved hand (his gloves) and she held close a parcel tied with string. ‘This way, Claire.’ He nodded uneasily to office staff and led Claire to his of
fice. He did not dare look at his father.

  ‘So this is where you spend your days,’ she said, sitting in the battered armchair. ‘Very Pickwickian, if you ask me. Frank would have liked it.’

  ‘He was never here. He is – was – my father’s client.’ He quickly hid Gigi’s postcard, and sat across from her, thinking that he for once understood the phrase to feast one’s eyes. She radiated a kind of tonic quality that enlivened everything around her, and she brightened the grey confines of his native habitat. The room seemed happier with her in it, even the wan African violets seemed to turn merrily in their small pots.

  ‘Is that Robert’s picture? Handsome. Do you have a picture of Florence?’ From a drawer he produced a framed snapshot of Florence in front of Dove Cottage. Claire pronounced her lovely, and said all women should be lovely on their honeymoon. She laughed and added in a low voice, ‘Frank and I never had a proper honeymoon. We had a baby before we even got married.’

  This casual admission of Michael’s illegitimacy so shocked him, he had to clear his throat before he asked how he could help her.

  ‘I’ve come begging a favour.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘I’m meeting Sybil Dane for lunch to talk over the arrangements for Frank’s burial, or entombment or whatever it is now, whatever we have to call it, and even though I said I was prepared to be nice to everyone I once detested, I’m not equal to Sybil. I can’t go through with it.’

  ‘You mean, burying Frank, or rather, placing his ashes at Woodlands?’

  ‘No. Lunch. I need an ally for lunch.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, perplexed.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet Sybil at the Savoy. That’s why I wore trousers. I’m hoping they won’t let me in. I can’t bear the thought of sitting in that woman’s presence and listening to her rattle on. She’s embraced this mourning, this funeral, like Medea, or Medusa, or whoever that was, tearing out her snaky hair. She’s planning a vast, public spectacle, Quentin, two services, one for the family and one for Frank’s so-called friends, and a huge reception at Woodlands afterwards. So gruesome! I told her I just wanted something small and private, a farewell, but she’s absolutely intent on a great public show of … grief? Adulation? I can’t endure it, even though I said I would.’

  ‘Lady Sybil has no right to say how Frank ought to be buried. Change your mind.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ Discomfort knotted her features.

  ‘Is it money? Please, be candid with me. If you need something immediately, we’ll advance it. You have, or you will have, the twenty thousand American dollars. You are not beholden to her.’

  Claire stared at her hands in her lap, the left one atop the right, the thick gold wedding band gleaming. ‘Actually, I am beholden to Sybil. I didn’t tell you everything last week when you came to Oxford. The truth is, I made a sort of bargain with her, with them, really, Sybil and her husband, Sir Sanford.’

  ‘The newspaper magnate.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t quite know how it happened, but it has, and now … now I have to go to lunch with Sybil, and talk about all this face to face, and it makes me want to scream.’

  ‘What kind of bargain?’

  Colour rose to her face. ‘Sybil and her husband are paying for Dragon School for Michael, the finest, the most elite school in Oxford for my son, all the fees, uniforms, sports, everything. The fees are astronomical. Not only that, but Sir Sanford got him admitted immediately. The day after we moved to Oxford, somehow it was all beautifully and quickly settled, and Michael goes to school there.’

  The stark exchange shocked Quentin even more than her admission that Michael was born out of wedlock. He said, ‘I see,’ though he did not see at all.

  ‘Michael hates the Dragon School naturally. He’s full of anger and confusion. He’s full of rage, really. I’ve told him, you’ll get no sympathy from me, my lad. Hate it all you like, but being educated there will serve you for life. I’m not being a snob about it. It’s a fact of life here.’

  So that he should be absolutely clear, Quentin said, ‘They pay for the Dragon School for your son’s education, and in return, they – she – gets your husband’s ashes?’

  ‘What good are his ashes to me? I loved the man, not a box of …’ Then, deflated, she added, ‘Yes. Sybil gets Frank’s ashes in her mausoleum. I would do it again.’ Claire struck a note of bruised bravado that was, at least in Quentin’s experience, unlike her. ‘Whatever happens after this, it’s on me. I will protect my children. I will see to it they have opportunities and possibilities. I never want them to say, “Oh, if only Da hadn’t died, it would all be different.” I suppose you think I’m an awful hypocrite.’

  ‘No,’ he lied baldly. ‘As you’ve said, you are an American, and not likely to be laying wreaths on graves.’ He glanced down at the day’s appointments. He was supposed to lunch with an author of sporting books and later, an appointment with a journalist just back from the Soviet Union. He punched the intercom and asked Miss Marr to cancel everything for the rest of the day. ‘I’m going to lunch with Mrs Carson.’ The disapproval from the main office seemed to seep under the door, a rust-coloured, septic pool congealing at his feet. He turned back to Claire. ‘Of course I’ll be your ally. I’ll always be your ally.’

  ‘There’s something else. Before we go.’ She handed him the parcel, and pulled the string. ‘I’ve gone back out to Harrington several times, to pack, to collect what I couldn’t get in the first rush of moving out. I’ve found some really astonishing stuff, Quentin. Go on, open it.’

  He pulled out a thick sheaf of typed carbon pages. His fingers went instantly blue. ‘What is it?’

  ‘That suitcase of Frank’s, the one that was lost, well, he’s been writing so long now it wasn’t big enough for all his drafts. I found all this material, Quentin, you see? It was there, at Harrington all the time! I found the carbon I made of An Inconvenient Wife! Can you imagine?’

  Her favourite phrase, can you imagine, always struck him as both challenge and invitation. ‘But it wasn’t finished, was it? Was it finished?’

  ‘No.’ Her blue eyes met his candidly, searching his face. ‘Not yet. But it will be. Soon. As soon as I find the rest of it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. I see.’ He wasn’t quite sure that he did, so he said very carefully, ‘Shall we give it to Monica to retype?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s not ready yet.’ She took the pages back, laid them on the paper, wrapped and tied the string neatly. ‘I have so much to do. I have boxes yet to go through. There’s still, oh, scads of stuff at Harrington that I have to deal with before I can sell the place, but I wanted you to see this much of it. So you’d know it exists, and there’s enough for a posthumous novel. Maybe two. Frank’s work needn’t die with him.’

  ‘My father will be delighted.’

  ‘Only you’re Frank’s agent now, remember?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘And when I’ve found it all and put it in order – I don’t know when that will be, there’s so much to do – but when it is, you’ll come to Oxford and collect it, won’t you? I don’t think we can trust the Royal Mail with the only copy.’

  He smiled in spite of himself. She wanted to see him again. He agreed that anything that important should be hand-carried to London. He rose and opened the door for her, meeting, as he expected, Miss Marr’s disapproval, though Quentin could not tell if it stemmed from Claire’s choosing Quentin over Albert, or the fact that she wore trousers.

  As they walked towards the Savoy, Quentin’s mind scurried over everything he could remember of Lady Sybil Dane. He had met her, briefly introduced he remembered, at Selwyn and Archer’s elaborate cocktail party for Hay Days. Claire, clearly, had not deigned to come; he would have remembered her, no matter how numerous the crowd. But since Carson’s wife wasn’t there, Lady Sybil had rather carried the day as Francis’s consort, especially since the book was dedicated to her. He remembered watching
her, thinking that she was accepting accolades as though she’d written Hay Days herself. He remembered too that Lady Sybil Dane created around herself the impression, even the conviction, of beauty, though in fact her youth had long fled, and she had an olive complexion, an outstanding nose, short legs, and an undifferentiated waist. To compensate, she wore flowing clothes in peacock colours, blues, greens, and glints of gold. Her conviction of her own worth also remained unimpugned despite unflattering portrayals in any number of anecdotes, stories, novels and a few juicy memoirs over these past thirty years.

  He asked Claire several questions, and while her replies were tainted with dislike, Sybil’s story emerged: her unlikely pilgrimage from penniless bohemian to mistress of the vast Woodlands manor. In the mid twenties, at some avant garde gallery opening, Sybil, then an aspiring writer, aspiring actress, aspiring artist, artists’ model, and all-round poseur, captured the attention of the recently widowed Sir Sanford Dane, a man thirty years her senior. Having lived a life of unrelenting propriety with his first wife, Sybil blew into Sir Sanford’s milieu like the wind off the sea. (His grown children thought her a foul miasma and remained unreconciled.) He could have kept her as his mistress, but he was besotted, and married her. Sir Sanford remained enchanted with her and she remained enchanted with his fortune, an empire in newspapers. Sybil built her own little empire of literary magazines, small presses, and funded gallery showings for her variegated coteries of taste and expression, writers, painters, poets, critics, many of whom she slept with. (Sir Sanford adopted her casual approach to fidelity.) She preferred men, but she was known to be eclectic, and she was never exclusionary for more than a few months at a time.

  ‘Except possibly for Frank,’ Claire conceded as they approached the Savoy. ‘She might have actually loved him.’

  Quentin thought to himself that Linda might actually have loved him, and Claire certainly had loved him, and he wondered how three such different women could have been so devoted to (as Gigi would say) a two-timing bastard.

  ‘Their affair went on the whole time we lived at Woodlands, naturally. She gave us, the family, a suite of rooms on the fourth floor to live in, mostly so the children and I would be out of sight, and she gave Frank her whole vast library to write in. Sybil convinced him he could do no wrong, that every word that fell from his pen was golden. I refused even to type it. Never mind, Sybil typed it. We finally left Woodlands before the war ended, and took a cottage by the sea. We froze there, but I had him to myself again. Selwyn and Archer gave him that fine fat advance, everyone thinking Hay Days would be another Some of These Days. Frank bought Harrington Hall and, well, the rest you know. I ended up there alone with the children and the menagerie, and the place falling down around our ears.’