by Muriel Spark
I was anxious to get home and was still amazed at my stupidity in making that large prophecy for my Warrender Chase, and I wondered where the words had come from, ‘… a novel that’s going to be a success. I had placed myself at the man’s mercy by saying this; not that I regarded success as a disgrace, but that I wasn’t thinking of Warrender Chase in that light just then, and also, I had known for a long time that success could not be my profession in life, nor failure a calling for that matter. These were by-products. Why, then, I was asking myself all the ways home, had I fallen into Sir Quentin’s trap? For that was how I saw it. He had been able, then, to bring out those very words of Warrender Chase, ‘Don’t you think you’ve had delusions of grandeur?’
I had put away my copy of Warrender Chase. It was my manuscript copy, written on foolscap pages, from which I had typed the copy that went to the publishers. I hadn’t taken a carbon copy of the typescript, not seeing any point in wasting paper. But I had made a parcel of my manuscript, marked it on the outside, ‘Warrender Chase by Fleur Talbot’ and put it on the floor of my clothes cupboard.
When I got home, to make sure I wasn’t mistaken about Sir Quentin’s use of Warrender’s actual words, I decided to get the book out and look up the two passages. I was in a flutter, feeling partly that I had in fact some delusions of grandeur or of persecution or some other symptom of paranoia. I couldn’t have felt more paranoiac when I discovered that my copy of Warrender Chase was not in the cupboard where it should have been. The package, about the dimensions of a London telephone directory, was not there.
I started to search my room. I began by absurdly turning things over, the new pages of my current work All Souls’ Day included. No sign of Warrender Chase. I sat down and thought. Nothing came of my frantic thinking. I got up and started to tidy the room very carefully, very meticulously, shifting every piece of furniture, every book. I did it all rather slowly, moving everything first into the middle of the room, then moving everything back, piece by piece, book by book; pencils, typewriter, food stores, everything. This activity was pure superstition for it was obvious at a few glances that the package was not in the room, but so minute was my search I might have been looking for a lost diamond. I found many lost things, old letters, half-a-crown, old poems and stories but no Warrender Chase. I opened every other package that I had pushed into an old suitcase: nothing.
I poured some whisky into a tumbler, in a very careful and stunned manner, added some water from the tap, and sat sipping it. The cleaning woman must have thrown it out. But how? It had been left in the cupboard. She had worked in the place for years, she never opened people’s cupboards or drawers, never took anything. Besides, I had always asked her to be careful about my papers and packages and she always had been careful, not even dusting the table my work was lying on lest she should disarrange it. She grumbled so much about the mess in my room, she hardly flicked a duster anywhere. I started going over in my mind who had been in my room since last I had seen Warrender Chase in the cupboard. Wally had been briefly but only to pick me up to go out somewhere one evening. I thought, could the Alexanders have come rummaging? That was absurd. Leslie? Dottie? I passed them all over, forgetting completely for the moment that Dottie had in fact been in my room during my absence that first evening I went dancing at Quaglino’s with Wally. But I didn’t think of this till later. At the time I sat and wondered if I were going mad, if Warrender Chase existed or had I imagined the book.
I took up the phone to ring Wally. The switchboard was off; I saw it was already nearly midnight.
But the very act of thinking about Wally put me to rights; it didn’t matter so very much after all what had happened to my manuscript. The typescript and the proofs were safely with the publishers. I could get back my typescript from Revisson Doe.
I went to bed, and to take my mind off my troubles I started to flick the pages of my beloved Cellini. The charm worked, as I read the snatches of his adventures of art and of Renaissance virility, his love for the goblets and the statues he made out of materials he adored, his imprisonments, his escapes, his dealings with his fellow goldsmiths and sculptors, his homicides and brawls, and again his delight in every aspect of his craft. Every page I turned was, to me, as it still is, sheer magic:
… Sure, therefore, that I could trust them, I gave my attention to the furnace, which I had filled up with pigs of copper and pieces of bronze, laid one on top of the other, according to the rules of the craft—that is, not pressing closely one on the other, but arranged so that the flames could make their way freely about them; for in this manner the metal is more quickly affected by the heat and liquefied. Then in great excitement I ordered them to light the furnace. They piled on the pine logs; and between the unctuous pine resin and the well-contrived draught of the furnace, the fire burned so splendidly that I had to feed it now on one side and now on the other. The effort was almost intolerable, yet I forced myself to keep it up.
On top of all this the shop took fire, and we feared lest the roof should fall upon us. Then, too …
I flicked over the pages, back and forth, reflecting how Cellini had enjoyed a long love affair with his art, how Cellini was comically contradictory in his actions, how boastful he was about his work.
… When I reached Piacenza, I met Duke Pier Luigi in the street, who stared me up and down, and recognized me. He had been the sole cause of all the wrong I had suffered in the castle of St Angelo; and now I fumed at the sight of him. But not knowing any way of avoiding him, I made up my mind to go and pay him a visit. I arrived at the palace just as the table was being cleared. With him were some men of the house of Landi, those who were afterwards his murderers. When I came in, he received me with the utmost effusiveness; and among other pleasant things which fell from his lips was his declaration to those who were present that I was the greatest man in all the world in my profession …
And so, forgetting my troubles, I flicked back to the opening page, the opening paragraph of this magnificent autobiography:
All men, whatever be their condition, who have done anything of merit, or which verily has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.
One day, I thought, I’ll write the tale of my life. But first I have to live.
… In truth it seems to me I have greater content of mind and health of body than at any time in the past. Some pleasant happenings I recall, and, again, some unspeakable misfortunes which, when I remember, strike terror into me and wonder that I have, indeed, come to this age of fifty-eight, from which, by God’s grace, I am now going on my way rejoicing.
The other day, while I was working on this account of that small part of my life and all that happened in the middle of the twentieth century, those months of 1949—5 0, I read this last-quoted passage and went back in my thoughts to the spring of 1950 when I lay reading it in bed in my room in Kensington. I was reflecting that one could take endless enchanting poems out of this book simply by flicking over the pages, back and forth, and extracting for oneself a page here, a paragraph there, and while I was playing with this idea it came to me with all apparent irrelevance that Dottie, who knew very well how my possessions were disposed in my room, had certainly taken my package that night the house-boy had let her in to wait for me.
It was after two in the morning. I jumped out of bed and put on my clothes. While dressing I remembered those proofs in Sir Quentin’s desk and my curious passing notion that they were mine. Out I plunged into the cold night and trudged round to Dottie’s. I don’t know if it was raining, I noticed rain very little in those days. But I was cold, standing under her window singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. I was afraid of waking the neighbourhood but I was fairly enraged; I sang in as low a voice as I felt would penetrate Dottie’s bedroom window, but persistently. A light went on in someone else’s window, the sash went up and a head looked out. ‘Stop your bloody row at this time of night.’ I moved out of the light of
the street-lamp and as I did so I saw the curtain in Dottie’s room pulled aside. By the streetlight I saw a head, not Dottie’s, peering through the pane. It became apparent as I kept watch from the pavement that it was a man’s head. I assumed it was Leslie. Dottie’s outraged neighbour had withdrawn and slammed down the sash, and as the light went out in his window I saw more clearly, but only for a brief flash, that the head in Dottie’s room was not Leslie’s; it was a square face with a hairless head, and elderly; it seemed to me to be the face of Revisson Doe, my publisher.
I made quickly for home, convincing myself I had been mistaken. It is true I had Warrender Chase on my mind; it was altogether possible, considering the loss of my manuscript, that I had it on my brain.
Now Dottie, English Rose as she was, had always demonstrated herself to be a very pious, old-fashioned Catholic. I was convinced she had taken my Warrender Chase, but I still wasn’t sure if she had done it as a half-joke or in one of her fits of righteousness; she was perfectly capable of burning a book she considered evil but I felt she would hardly go so far with my foolscap sheets. All my experience of Dottie was that she was basically harmless and, so far as she herself was conscious of sincerity, sincere. I wondered, too, if she had taken the novel to show to someone—some Carmelite divine to ask his no doubt adverse opinion of it, or Leslie, to curry favour with him by showing him the last part which he had never seen. I wondered everything. What I wondered most after I got home was who could be spending the night with Dottie. It wasn’t her father, for I had met him. I thought perhaps it could be an elderly uncle. But back I came always to that glimpse I had got of the square face and bald head of Revisson Doe.
But it seemed impossible both that Dottie had a lover and that Revisson Doe could, at his age, be one.
I sat up all that night bothering myself over these two apparent impossibilities. On the part of Dottie I saw lying on the table the evidence of a little folded card she had once left me, and which had turned up in the course of my search for my package. It was typical of Dottie. She had paid two shillings and sixpence to enrol me in something with this card. ‘Guild of Our Lady of Ransom’ it was headed, going on to explain ‘for the Conversion of England. Jesus convert England. Under the Heavenly Patronage of Our Lady, St Gregory, and the Blessed English Martyrs.’ I sat and looked at this, drinking in Dottie’s piety. ‘Motto,’ it announced on the inside; ‘For God, Our Lady, and the Catholic Faith.’ This was followed by ‘Obligations.
1. To say the Daily Prayer for the Intentions of the Guild. 2. To work for the objects of the Guild. 3. To subscribe at least Two Shillings and Sixpence a year to the Ransom Fund. Fleur Talbot [in Dottie’s handwriting] is hereby enrolled a Red Cross Ransomer. Partial Indulgences. 1. Seven Years and Seven Quarantines. 2. One Hundred Days.’
And so it went on, with its bureaucratic Indulgences, its Souls in Purgatory and all the rest of Dottie’s usual claptrap.
I too was a Catholic believer but not that sort, not that sort at all. And if it was true, as Dottie always said, that I was taking terrible risks with my immortal soul, I would have been incapable of caution on those grounds. I had an art to practise and a life to live, and faith abounding; and I simply didn’t have the time or the mentality for guilds and indulgences, fasts and feasts and observances. I’ve never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist.
I say this, because it struck me as strange that a man’s head which was not Leslie’s should appear at Dottie’s bedroom window at two-thirty in the night. Again, as I pondered, I caught in my mind’s eye the head of Revisson Doe. I had only seen him a few times. Could it be possible? I began to feel I had perhaps misjudged his age. I had thought him about sixty. In fact, I was sure he was about sixty. The impossible, as I thought on and on, became possible. I hadn’t got an impression of a sexually active man, but then I hadn’t really looked at him from that point of view. The possibility existed, except, of course, that Dottie would die rather than be unfaithful to a living husband; she would consider it a mortal sin, she would sink straight to hell if she were run over in the street unabsolved. I knew Dottie’s way of thinking. It was impossible. And yet, as the birds of Kensington began to chirp in the early spring dawn outside my window, Dottie’s infidelity piped up its entire possibility.
I thought it possible she had made a point of meeting Revisson Doe with a view to getting Leslie’s novel published. It was possible she was immolating herself on the altar of Leslie’s book. She was a pretty woman and it was possible that Revisson Doe, sixty or seventy as he might be, should go to bed with her. It was all unlikely but it was all quite possible. I concluded my due process of induction with the thought that it was not very unlikely, and really quite probable; and I was left with the fact I still didn’t know for certain if Dottie had taken my Warrender Chase, and, if so, why. It was five in the morning. I set my alarm for eight and went to bed.
Chapter Eight
I got a letter by the first post in a Park and Revisson Doe Co. Ltd envelope, which I opened bleary-eyed.
Dear Fleur (if I may),
A small problem has cropped up with regard to your novel Warrender Chase.
I think we should talk this over face to face before proceeding further, as the details are too complicated to explain by letter.
Please ring me at your earliest opportunity to make an appointment for us to meet, to think out this delicate matter.
Always,
Revisson.
This letter appalled me. It is typical of a state of anxiety that it seems to attract ever more disaster. It was a quarter to nine. Park and Revisson Doe didn’t start business till ten. I decided to ring at half-past ten. I read the letter over and over again, each time with greater foreboding. What was wrong with my Warrender Chase? I took the letter sentence by sentence; each one looked worse than the other. After half an hour I decided I had to talk to somebody. I had no intention of returning to the Hallam Street carnival. Even before the letter arrived I had made up my mind only to wander in later in the days, collect some things that I had left behind, say good-bye to Edwina and look for another job.
I made an appointment with Revisson Doe for three-thirty that day. I tried to pump him on the phone, whether there was ‘something wrong’ with my Warrender Chase but he wouldn’t be drawn into any discussion. He sounded edgy, rather unfriendly. He addressed me as Miss Talbot, forgetting about Fleur if he might. I didn’t know then, as I know now, that the traditional paranoia of authors is as nothing compared to the inalienable schizophrenia of publishers.
Revisson Doe on the phone was plainly nervous about something, I supposed about the loss of money my book was likely to incur, I supposed he wanted to revise the terms of the contract, I supposed he might want me to change something vital in the novel and I decided throughout all this supposing that I would refuse to make any changes in the book. I wondered, then, if Theo and Audrey had expressed their adverse opinions on the book to my publisher when they had sent back the proofs. I had written a note to thank them for the proof-reading and had been inclined not to believe Dottie when she had reported with such ferocity what Theo and Audrey, always so good to me, had said.
But that morning, sleepless, and with a terrible yesterday behind me, I was fairly at my wits’ end. I rang up the Clairmont house; their maid answered and I asked for either Theo or Audrey. The maid came back to say they were both busy in their studies.
I went back to bed and by the afternoon felt ready for my interview with Revisson Doe. I was so far refreshed that I was able to rather look forward to the meeting, anxious to have another look at him from the point of view of his possibly being Dottie’s or anyone else’s bedfellow. I just had time on the way to stop at Kensington Public Library to look up his age in Who’s Who. Born 1884. He had been married twice, one son, two daughters. I got on the bus calculating that he was sixty-six. It seemed older to me in those days than it does now. When I saw Revisson Doe there in his office, I was sure
that his was the head I had seen at Dottie’s window. I took the chair he waved me into, wondering if Dottie had told the old goat that it was probably I who had been singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at two in the morning. At the same time I thought, whatever Dottie saw in him it was not sex-appeal.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want you to know that we value your work highly.’ I noticed the ‘we’ and felt uneasy. At the time when he had been considering Warrender Chase he had dithered between ‘I’ and ‘we’ quite a lot. To express his enthusiasm and keenness for the book as a new young piece of writing he had used ‘I’ both in his letters and conversations; to signify the risk of a loss on the deal he had always put it down to ‘we’. Now we were back at ‘we’ again.
‘We understand you’re working on a new novel?’
I said yes, it was to be entitled All Souls’ Day.
He said it didn’t sound a very selling title. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we can change the title.’
I said that was to be the title.
‘Oh, well, we have an option on it. We can discuss the title later. We were debating whether it wouldn’t perhaps be preferable to leave Warrender Chase aside for the time being. You see, a first novel is after all a pure experiment, isn’t it? Whereas we were going to suggest if you would let us see the opening chapters of the second novel, your All Fools’ Day—’