by Muriel Spark
‘But you know,’ I said, ‘you’re off your head. You had this desire to take possession of people before I came along and reminded you of the existence of Newman. You’ve read my novel, but only recently. You must see a psychiatrist and break up the Association.’
I could hear voices in the hall. I went out to says good-bye to Edwina and on the way I saw that the two new visitors were the Baronne Clotilde and Father Delaney, both looking extremely haggard yet not pitiable. These two were always arrogant, insolent in their folly.
In Edwina’s room, where the nurse was rummaging in her wardrobe for another wonderful dress, I said, ‘I’ve told him to see a mental doctor and disband his troupe.’
‘Quite right,’ said Edwina. ‘When am I going to meet your friend Wally?’
‘I’ll arrange it soon.’
‘Wally and Solly,’ she cackled with delight. ‘Don’t you think that’s a nice couple of names, Nurse?’
‘Very nice. Like on the stage.’ Then Miss Fisher said to me, ‘I’m concerned about the Dexedrine.’
I didn’t locate the word Dexedrine precisely. I thought she meant some medicine for Edwina. I said, ‘Would you like me to take a prescription—?’
‘Oh, no. It’s the Dexedrine that Sir Quentin gives to his friends. Didn’t he give you some?’
‘Not me.’
‘He does the others. It can be dangerous if the dose is high.’
‘They are all of age. I can’t feel sorry for them. They can surely look after themselves.’
‘Well yes, and no,’ said the good nurse.
Edwina was impatient to get into her purple dress. ‘They’re all on a fast. Except himself and Tims. And we like our food too, don’t we, Nurse?’
‘Dexedrine,’ the nurse explained, ‘is an appetite-suppressor. But it affects the brain.’
‘Watching their figures,’ yelled Edwina. ‘They’ll go off their heads.’
‘Presumably they all have friends,’ I said. ‘I suppose they have friends and relations who will notice if they fall ill.’
‘It still fits,’ said Edwina, patting her dress.
‘There’s nothing you can prove,’ said Miss Fisher, ‘but I know. Those poor people—’
‘They are not infants,’ I said.
I was thinking of my novel, Warrender Chase; now I had no publisher, thanks to Quentin Oliver. I was impatient with his bunch of self-indulgent fools—I thought of Maisie Young with so many possibilities in her life, ready to sacrifice them all in the name of a mad spiritual leader; and the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, so stunned by privilege that she didn’t know how to discern and reject a maniac.
I went home to get ready for a dinner date with Wally. But I didn’t say a word to him about Hallam Street. Instead I told him about the B.B.C.; and arising from this — I forgot by what route—he told me about getting demobilized from the army, how he and his friends all went along to an army centre which was a group of huts, and there they chose their demob clothes. Wally described in detail the range and styles of demob suits. He himself had taken a tweed coat and flannel trousers. ‘Perfectly all right,’ said Wally in his casual and comfortable way.
It was good to be reminded that there were other things in life besides Warrender Chase and the Autobiographical Association. But part of my mind was really elsewhere. I was longing to get home and read Newman. I wanted to see what these people could possibly be making of him. I was interested in that.
But Wally came home with me for a good-night drink. He loved my book-laden room.
‘There’s a drunk in the street singing “Auld Lang Syne”,’ said Wally. ‘She seems to be happy, doesn’t she?’
I let her sing on.
In the morning before I was up, Dottie was at my door. She had the nerve to bring her black bag with her knitting, now a dark green sweater.
‘I came round last night. Your light was on. ‘‘I know.’
‘Was Leslie here?’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Listen,’ said Dottie, ‘I’ve got to tell you. Sir Quentin has ordered us all to go to his house in Northumberland. He says we’re being persecuted here in London, and he’s going to make his house into a sort of monastery.’
‘Like Newman at Littlemore?’
‘Exactly. You must admit there’s something in Sir Quentin’s aims.’
I couldn’t see any resemblance between Newman and his band of Oxford Anglo-Catholics in their austere retreat at Littlemore, and Sir Quentin with his bunch of cranks. It is true that Newman suffered some real religious and political persecution for his views, and that he also suffered from a sense of persecution not always coinciding with a cause. Nothing else of Newman’s matched the Hallam Street set.
I said to Dottie, ‘One would think that Quentin Oliver had heard of only two books. One is Newman’s Apologia and the other is my Warrender Chase. He’s obsessed.’
‘He believes you’re a witch, an evil spirit who’s been sent to bring ideas into his life. It’s his mission to turn evil to good. I think there’s a lot in what he says, ‘Dottie said.
‘Well, you can put the kettle on,’ I said, ‘for I haven’t had my breakfast.’
She filled the kettle and put it on the gas ring. ‘They’re going to Northumberland, all except me.’ ‘You have to stays and keep Revisson Doe happy, of course,’ I said.
‘Was Leslie here last night?’
‘My business,’ I said.
‘My husband,’ said Dottie. ‘He’s mine.’
‘Why don’t you rent him out by the hour?’
‘I wish I could go to Northumberland,’ Dottie said. ‘Sir Quentin phoned urgently to everyone. They’re all going. Maisie rang me. She’s going. Father Delaney—’
‘It’s the best news I’ve heard for a long time,’ I said. ‘What about Edwina?’
‘Oh, they’re not taking her. She’ll stay in London with the nurse. You might as well know, if you don’t know already, that she won’t have anything to leave when she dies.’
I said, and I don’t know why I said it (but I was thinking of my character, old Prudence, who inherited my Warrender’s estate), ‘She might outlive her son and inherit the lot.’
‘You and your Warrender Chase,’ observed Dottie, making the tea.
‘Are you taking Dexedrine?’ I said.
‘No, I’ve stopped. My doctor made me stop. That’s why I can’t go to Northumberland, in fact. Sir Quentin wouldn’t have me.’
‘Is Beryl Tims going with them?’
‘Of course. She acts as High Priestess at the functions. They’re leaving right away. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Forget them,’ I said.
‘It’s easy for you to forget.’
‘No it isn’t. One day I’ll write about all this.’
I thought of Cellini: ‘All men, whatever be their condition … should write the tale of their life with their own hand.’
‘You’ve already written it,’ Dottie said, clanking down her teacup. ‘You know your Warrender Chase is all about us. You foresaw it all.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
When she had packed up her knitting and gone I turned up the passage I wanted in Newman’s lovely Apologia:
… I recognized what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes…
And I set it on the table against my Benvenuto Cellini:
…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.
I looked from one to another, admiring both. I thought that, one day, when the months between the autumn of 1949 and the summer of 1950 sh
ould become long ago and I should have achieved something which ‘verily has a semblance of merit,’ I would set it forth. I was in a state of acute happiness at Dottie’s news. I needed a job and my novel needed a publisher. But in the departure of the Autobiographical Association I felt I had escaped from it. Although in reality I wasn’t yet rid of Sir Quentin and his little sect, they were morally outside of myself, they were objectified. I would write about them one day. In fact, under one form or another, whether I have liked it or not, I have written about them ever since, the straws from which I have made my bricks.
Chapter Twelve
It was right in the middle of the twentieth century, the last day of June 1950, warm and sunny, a Friday, that I mark as a changing-point in my life. That goes back to the day I took my sandwiches to the old disused Kensington graveyard to write a poem with my lunch, when the young policeman sauntered over to see what I was up to. He was a clean-cut man, as on war memorials. I asked him: suppose I had been committing a crime sitting there on the gravestone, what crime would it be? ‘Well, it could be desecrating and violating,’ he said, ‘it could be obstructing and hindering without due regard, it could be loitering with intent. ‘I offered him a sandwich but he refused; he had just had his dinner himself. ‘The graves must be very old,’ said the policeman. He wished me the best of luck and went on his way. I forget what poem I was writing at the time, but it was probably an exercise in a fixed form, such as a rondeau, triolet or villanelle; also, I was practising Alexandrines for narrative verse about that time, so it might have been one of those; I always found the practice of metre and form for their own sake very absorbing and often, all at once, inspiring. I was waiting till my landlord, Mr Alexander, should be out of the way with his fussing over my overcrowded room.
I couldn’t afford to take a larger room, I could hardly afford to pay the rent for my small room. I had found some work, reading manuscripts and proofreading for the publisher in Wapping, I did some reviewing of poetry and stories. I was also well ahead with my second novel, All Souls’ Day, and had already planned my third, The English Rose. Warrender Chase was still unpublished in spite of Solly’s efforts and in fact I had given up hope of its being published; all my hopes were on All Souls’ Day. But my savings were running low and I knew I would have to start selling my books. I was seriously looking for a full-time job.
But that day in the middle of the twentieth century I felt more than ever how good it was to be a woman and an artist there and then. I had been depressed most of the past six weeks, but now it all suddenly passed, as depressions do.
My week-end at Wally’s cottage at Marlow on the days after petrol-rationing was lifted, the twenty-seventh of May, had been not quite a disaster, but certainly a mess.
It had started off very well, when I took Wally to Hallam Street to breakfast with Edwina before we set off. Sir Quentin had already fled to Northumberland and Edwina was alone with Miss Fisher and a new daily help. Edwina had decked herself out in egg-shell blue trimmed with swansdown that moulted considerably over our breakfast; the colour-scheme was repeated on her eyelids. She must have started preparations for the breakfast some hours before. Her hands were heavily laden with rings and tipped with the brightest varnish.
‘Are you Fleur’s boy-friend?’ she yelled at Wally.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s too good for you.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Wally in that genial way of his. We sat at a small lacy table set in the window of her own small sitting-room. She was alert, happy to have her flat to herself, and she enchanted Wally by her anecdotes about the late Arthur Balfour. When I asked her if Beryl Tims intended to remain in Northumberland, she said, ‘Beryl who?’ I didn’t see Edwina again until the following week when I wheeled her, all in heavy black with her strings of pearls, into her son Quentin’s funeral service.
Wally was greatly taken with Edwina, as he told me on the way to Marlow. ‘I’m in love with your Edwina, ‘he said. At Marlow Wally was upset to find that the woman who came to clean up had not been near the place. I think what annoyed him most was my seeing the evidence of a previous week-end for two. I really didn’t mind because the situation itself was a lively one; I do dearly love a turn of events. But I couldn’t help wondering who the other girl had been and, observing the mouse-nibbled, greenish crusts of the last breakfast toast on the floor, the black-rimmed green milk in the jug, the two coffee cups and saucers on the draining board, caked with hardened coffee, dry and old, I calculated the age of this evidence; how many week-ends ago, and what had I been doing with Wally the weekdays in between? As Wally stood and swore, I dumped my week-end case in the bedroom with a myopic airiness. The bed was very much crumpled for two, and, as if by a competent stage-manager, Wally’s blue cotton pyjama-top hung on the bed-post while the trousers lay, neat and unfolded, on the top of the chest of drawers. A near-empty bottle of whisky and two glasses, one lipstick-stained, were decidedly overdone from the point of view of scenic production, but they were there. We cleared up the place and went out for lunch.
Towards evening I was taken with an attack of nervousness, for no apparent reason, about my almost-forgotten Warrender Chase. I was wondering if I had handled that opening scene as well as I might. I had typed and retyped the novel so many times I almost knew it by heart.
‘You know, Fleur,’ said Wally. ‘Sometimes when I’m with you, a very odd thing happens—you’re suddenly not there. It’s creepy. Very often, even when I don’t say anything, I feel somehow you’re somewhere else.’
I laughed, because I knew he was right. I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about my first novel, Warrender Chase, it’s preying on my mind.’
‘Oh, don’t let it do that. I’ve had ideas for novels myself, but I really haven’t the time.’
‘Do you think you could write a novel?’
‘Oh, if one had the time I daresay one could write as good a novel as the next chap.’
He went out to call at his cleaning woman’s house to find out what was the matter with her. He had got over his earlier embarrassment but the week-end already seemed to me to have gone flat. Perhaps we had both been looking forward to it too much. It is as true as any of the copy-book maxims, that love is by nature unforeseen. And I was now so far away in my thoughts that I could only note in his absence that I had a soft spot for Wally, anyway.
We had brought some food with us. I began to set the table for supper and I lit two candles, but I was so abstracted that I can’t remember now anything but a general impression of his cottage, or anything about what we had to eat. I think there was a gramophone and that I put on a record.
My mind was unaccountably on Warrender Chase, the opening scene where Warrender’s mother Prudence, his nephew Roland and Charlotte the frightful housekeeper are waiting for Warrender’s arrival in the drawing-room of Warrender’s house in the country.
Roland has been playing with one of the South American Indian masks that Warrender collects. Charlotte takes it away from him: ‘Your uncle doesn’t like it if anyone touches his odds and ends.’ Marjorie, Roland’s wife, has just answered the telephone in the hall, dashed out and driven off. Prudence keeps saying, ‘Where did Marjorie go?’ and ‘Roland, go and see what’s happened to Marjorie. Take the bicycle.’ Roland is talking about the adding machines he’s selling on a commission basis. Charlotte says she isn’t interested in adders. Then she says, all right, adding machines. She says, things are getting to a point where they have nothing to add because Warrender is short of money with too many people to support. Prudence points out that the machines also subtract. She says Warrender has been pronouncing words in a new way. They all discuss the new ways. ‘Dense’ instead of ‘dance’, ‘interesting,’ ‘lawst’ for ‘lost’. Charlotte breaks in with the observation that ‘Mr Proudie speaks like that.’ ‘Proudie’s diction is not all that’s to be desired of a scholar,’ says Prudence. ‘However, we may assume that Warrender has been seeing a lot of Proudie. I’m anxious about Marjor
ie, running off wildly after that telephone call. And Warrender should be here by now. Where has he got to?’
Then I made my character Charlotte go to the window. ‘I can hear his car coming.’ Roland says, ‘No, I’m sure it’s Marjorie’s car. Warrender’s car goes tum-te-te-tum. Marjorie’s goes tum, tum, tum-te-te like this one.’
Prudence says, ‘Roland, stop playing with that mask, just to oblige me. Warrender paid a lot for it. I know it’s a fake, and so is Warrender, but—’ Marjorie comes into the room. ‘What’s the matter, Marjorie? ‘‘Oh, she’s ill, give her a drink, water, something.’ ‘Marjorie, what happened? That phone call. Are you hurt?’ At last Marjorie says, ‘Warrender is hurt. The car crashed. He’s terribly hurt. The police rang here. I went to the hospital. I couldn’t identify him at first. His face, Warrender’s face …’ She passes her hand over her own face and says, ‘I think his face is quite demolished.’ Roland here goes out to telephone the hospital. Charlotte: ‘Is he dead?’ Marjorie: ‘No, he’s still unconscious I’m afraid.’ Now Charlotte, the English Rose, seizes on those words ‘unconscious, I’m afraid.’ ‘What do you mean, you’re afraid? Do you want him to die?’
Roland comes back: ‘He’s dead.’
Wally’s car pulled up and he came in smiling. ‘Mrs Richards had an op. Good thing I called round. She can’t work for a few weeks yet. She’s awfully reliable, I knew something had happened. Nothing serious, anyway, she didn’t show me the op. The men always do.’
I said, ‘Did I tell you the Autobiographical Association has moved to Northumberland to Sir Quentin’s house?’
‘Oh, forget them, Fleur. It was a lousy job. Not your thing at all from the sound of it. Edwina’s well out of it too. Awful for her, having a crackpot for a son. Maybe she’s too old to care.’