Far Cry from Kensington (17 page)

‘Does he quote it right?’

‘No. He generally gets it wrong, I’ll admit. But his dedication to me is
there. But that’s by the way. I was hoping to appeal to you on a personal
level.’

‘What a marvellous colour, that orange chiffon dress, see, on that girl over
there,’ I said.

Emma had to admit it was a glorious colour. She let a silence fall for a moment.

Then, ‘Hate can turn to love,’ she said.

I gave this a moment’s thought. ‘Maybe on the Continent,’ I said,
‘or Latin America. But you know very well, Miss Loy, that here in England love
and hate are two entirely different things. They are not even opposites. According to
my outlook, love comes in the first place from the heart and hate arises basically
from principle.’

‘You’re being very insular,’ she said. But I think, from her tone,
she realized at this point that her mode of argument had been badly chosen. Anyway, I
said, no doubt I was insular, not surprising since I had been born and brought up on
an island. Then I looked round at the evening-dress scene. I’m dazzled by all
this, I must say,’ I said; and I started to gather up my bag and gloves as if
to go.

‘We’re getting away from the point,’ said Emma. ‘You know, Mrs
Hawkins, time goes on, and you must think of your future. You don’t want to be
a lonely woman all your life.’

I sat back again in my chair and told her that she had no hope whatsoever of getting
rid of Hector Bartlett on to me. ‘And if he ever comes my way again, should I
get another job as an editor, I’ll still put him down as a
pisseur de
copie.
’

‘It’s slanderous, he could sue,’ said Emma.

‘Let him sue. It’s fair comment.’

‘Well he’s bound to come your way again, not necessarily in publishing.
You know, I only want to see Hector settled before I leave for the US. And I’m
surprised if you mean to imply that you haven’t seen him around. He spends a
lot of time with that woman in your house at Church End Villas. You must have seen
him come and go, and know what’s going on.’

In fact, I didn’t spend so very much time in the house. I was out all day, and
if I wasn’t out in the evening I would mostly be in my top-floor room or in the
kitchen with Milly. I imagined Emma was referring to Isobel’s past relations
with Hector Bartlett, but I doubted she had entertained him in her room. The only
comings and goings in the house had been people visiting Wanda, although lately she
had fewer visitors; they no longer crowded the landing outside the room, waiting
while she made her fittings. I hadn’t noticed any comings and goings at all for
Isobel. She obviously carried on her affairs elsewhere.

‘No,’ I said to Emma. ‘The girl only knows him casually.’

‘What girl?’ said Emma in a way that made me cautious.

‘A girl who lives in the house. She knows Hector Bartlett, but it’s only a
casual friendship.’

‘Oh, you mean the one who’s expecting a baby and wants to pin it on to
Hector?’

‘To my knowledge, she doesn’t want to pin it on to anyone, especially not
him.’

‘That’s not how I heard it, really, Mrs Hawkins.’

‘God knows what you’ve heard, Miss Loy. I don’t think it’s our
business, anyway.’

‘But I wasn’t discussing the girl,’ said Emma.

‘I thought you were.’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It’s a woman he met last spring. He met her
through the girl, that’s true. He obtained a dinner suit second-hand, poor
fellow, for some occasion and had to have it altered. The woman is a dressmaker,
don’t tell me you don’t know. As a novelist, I find the story
enthralling, of course, Mrs Hawkins. There are no end of subtleties and
interpretations involved.’

I could see Emma Loy was genuinely enthusiastic about the story element. I could never
resist feeling flattered when she spoke to me ‘as a novelist’, for she
usually reserved that side of herself for other writers on her own level, or those
hand-picked interviewers whom she occasionally agreed to talk to.

‘The possibilities are numerous and extremely fascinating,’ mused Emma,
it’s been going on since last spring.’

‘You must mean Wanda Podolak,’ I said. ‘I had no idea she knew
Hector Bartlett.’ I gathered up my gloves again. ‘Well, I wish her well
of him, whatever the subtle possibilities. I hardly think he has much to do with
Wanda. She’s a poor woman, not very strong. And I don’t think he would
take up with anyone, far less a poor dressmaker, who couldn’t be of the
slightest use to him.’

I now had it fixed in my thoughts that Emma was somehow trying to make me jealous, and
was obscurely promoting the desirability of Hector Bartlett. Emma wanted to get rid
of him.

‘Must you really go? We could go somewhere nice for a bite,’ said Emma.

I thanked her but said I had to go. On the way to the door Emma said, ‘I
haven’t really explained the whole situation. You must think I’m being
very mysterious.’

‘You want to get rid of Hector Bartlett on to me,’ I said.

‘Not necessarily on to you,’ she said. ‘But it would be a solution.
You have to stop using that nomenclature.’

‘What nonsense,’ I said.

‘Can I drop you in a taxi?’

‘No thanks, I’m going to walk.’

Out in the street, Emma said, ‘Hector has been taking the most absurd steps to
stop you calling him that name and to win your approval. If you, Mrs Hawkins, want to
obtain a job in publishing, and what’s more keep the job —’

‘Hector Bartlett,’ I said, ‘is a
pisseur de copie.
’
It did me good to repeat the phrase; I enjoyed it. Emma looked at me with a smile
that suggested she understood just that.

A taxi drew up full of people. Before Emma went to claim it I said, ‘Why
don’t you give him money to keep away?’

‘He’d use it to follow me to America. That’s always what people do
when you give them money to keep away. They use it contrary to your wishes,’
said Emma Loy.

It was well after seven o’clock. Park Lane was full of traffic and people. It
had started to rain but there were long bus-queues and I decided it was better to
walk and get wet than stand waiting for a bus with its steamy and stuffy interior.
What I wondered most on my way home along Park Lane, Knightsbridge, Brompton Road,
was how I had never seen Hector Bartlett in the house, at the door, on the stairs, on
the landing, and if it was true that he spent a lot of time with Wanda. I was sure
Emma had exaggerated; he probably knew poor Wanda casually, and all her cryptic talk
and her warnings were simply geared to a wild idea of making Hector’s life
easier so that she could rid herself of him and his demands, and his knowing her
books by heart, and the embarrassments which surely arose when he constituted himself
her literary spokesman, as he was already inclined to do.

It was not till over twenty years later that the
Pisseur
started writing
his malicious pieces about Emma, and thirty years later that he published his memoirs
in which Emma featured in what would have been a sensational light, had his book been
capable of attracting any great attention. His fictions about his life with Emma were
by then well known; and at that later date she ignored it as she had ignored the
Pisseur,
to his rage all those years, starting about or perhaps before the
time when she sat with me at Grosvenor House, trying to get rid of him. Certainly, it
seems to me that she already had a fear, a premonition, of the dangers of knowing
him.

Splashing home, all wet, in the rain, I thought possibly Hector Bartlett had only seen
Wanda once, to get an alteration done. But also, I reflected, it was quite likely
that he had come to the house several times. I would ask Milly when she returned, if
she remembered anyone of that description coming to the door.

In fact, I have often observed throughout my life that we tend to notice what we
expect to notice. I had hardly put myself out to notice Wanda’s clients, and I
had mostly been away from the house, myself, for long hours every week-day. I was
troubled by the thought of Wanda’s present condition; I foresaw fuss and
nuisance and when I opened my bag to get out my key to the front door, I saw the slip
of paper with Father Stanislas’s telephone number. I regretted not telephoning
to him. I was very dripping wet.

I knew as I entered the house that there was something wrong. As I
mounted the stairs I saw that Wanda’s door was open. Voices came from inside.
Not the voices of fuss and nuisance, but those of something serious. Wanda must be
ill.

William came out followed by Kate, as I reached the first landing.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

‘Can you come in a minute?’ William said. I think the Carlins were there,
too, in Wanda’s room. A man in a loose trench coat stood there and a young
woman who looked official, although she wore no uniform, only a plain brown coat and
skirt. No Wanda.

I said, ‘Has something happened?’

‘Yes,’ said the man in the trench coat. ‘I’m afraid
so.’

‘These are the police,’ said William. ‘Wanda’s been
drowned.’

It was nearly eight o’clock.

At about seven o’clock, explained the man, police inspector as he was, Mrs
Podolak had jumped into the Regent’s Canal, and had been fished out too late.

‘Nothing you can do to stop these cases,’ said the policeman. ‘If
they want to do it they’ll do it.’ They had found Wanda’s handbag,
and got her address from the papers inside it. They had come to see if she had left a
letter and find out where her next of kin resided. And he asked me if Wanda had shown
any symptoms, anything strange? Had she mentioned suicide?

I told him Wanda had been very strange indeed, for some time. She hadn’t
mentioned suicide. The others had obviously already given some such information about
Wanda. ‘And the anonymous letters?’ said the policeman. ‘Any idea
who sent them?’

‘No idea. It was a man,’ I said, ‘because he phoned one night and
she heard his voice.’ I couldn’t believe what had happened, and said so.

‘These cases …’ said the policeman. His female colleague said,
‘It’s always a shock to everybody.’

‘She was a Catholic. I wanted her to see a priest but she didn’t want to.
A devout Catholic, it’s so unlike her to commit suicide. I was going to ring up
a Polish priest, anyway, to ask him to come and see her.’

‘Catholic doesn’t help with an unsound mind,’ the policeman said. He
spoke with an Irish accent, and probably knew what he was talking about.

I thought of the slip of paper in my bag. I might have been in time.

‘You can see by the mess in this room she was of unsound mind,’ said Kate.
‘The poor woman.’

‘Dressmakers are always untidy,’ said Eva Carlin. ‘Thank God she
didn’t do it in the house. The poor soul!’

Basil Carlin said, ‘The anonymous letters stopped, I seem to think, after she
settled up with the income tax. I reckon the letters can’t have been the
motive. Poor thing!’

‘Can any of you suggest a motive?’ said the Inspector.

‘The motives of suicides’, said William, ‘are often quite trivial if
they exist at all. There was one known to us in the medical school where there had
been a row with the laundry, they had lost a pair of this fellow’s
under-drawers, and he gassed himself.’

The policeman agreed: ‘The motives for any crime can be quite futile,’ he
said.

We were all struck by the word ‘crime’; we had been shocked into thinking
in terms of Wanda’s tragedy.

I wondered wildly if she could have been pushed in. ‘Are you sure it was
suicide?’ I said.

‘Witnesses saw her jump. She gave a sort of howl, threw away her handbag and
jumped. Someone fished her out but it was too late.’

I told them all that I knew about Wanda’s family. Three sisters in Poland, one
married in Scotland. No, I didn’t know the address in Scotland. Perhaps some
cousins in London….

The other tenants were murmuring with awe and putting in distressed exclamation marks
after their sad comments. I felt as if we were trespassing in Wanda’s room with
the two strangers. My clothes felt very wet.

The police sent other men later that night to search Wanda’s room. They found
her sister’s address but no sign of the anonymous letters. Verdict: suicide
while of unsound mind.

I remembered the wild scream Wanda had given the night before when I
had put it to her that I would ring Father Stanislas. I remembered now in greater
detail the confusing scene in Wanda’s room after we had met at the Carlins to
discuss Isobel. Much of it, at the time, had merged into a general impression that
she was thoroughly unhinged. ‘She needs therapy,’ William had said.
‘She needs a specialist.’ And Wanda’s anxiety, when I was talking
on the phone to Emma Loy that morning, lest I was ringing Father Stanislas on her
behalf; that wail of hers again, as she ran upstairs: it was the last I had heard or
seen of Wanda. She was afraid, plainly, of mild Father Stanislas, or something he
stood for; she was afraid of something being revealed.