Loitering With Intent (13 page)

I was sure, and it turned out that I was right, that Dottie had obtained for Sir Quentin a set of the proofs of
Warrender Chase
to read. I had been too free with that novel, I should never have made it known to Dottie in the first place. Never since have I shown my work to my friends or read it aloud to them before it has been published. However, it was our general custom at that time to read our work to each other, or send it to be read, and to discuss our work with each other; that was literary life as I then knew it.

At the flat in Hallam Street Mrs Tims was dabbing the corners of her eyes with a white handkerchief. ‘Where were you yesterday? Just when we needed you,’ she said. ‘Sir Quentin was most distressed.’

‘Where is he?’

She was startled by my tone. ‘He had to go out. The inquest is this afternoon. The poor—’

But I had gone into his study, shutting the door with a firm, sharp click. I went straight to the drawer where I had seen the proofs. The drawer was empty except for a set of keys. The other drawers were locked.

I went next to Edwina’s room. She was sitting up in bed with her breakfast tray. The nurse was in Edwina’s bathroom which led off from the bedroom, washing something. She put her head round the door.

Edwina was in a rational state, for her. She said, ‘Suicide. Just like the woman in your novel.’

‘I know.’

I sat on the edge of her bed and telephoned to Park and Revisson Doe to ask them to send me the typescript of my
Warrender Chase.

‘Hold on, please.’ The girl was away for some long minutes during which I told Edwina that my book wasn’t going to be published.

‘Oh yes it is,’ said Edwina, ‘I shall see to it. My friend—’ The secretary had come back on the phone. ‘I’m afraid the copy we had has been destroyed. Mr Doe put it on his desk for you to take, and you didn’t take it away. He thought you didn’t want it.’

‘I didn’t see it on his desk. I’m sure it wasn’t there.’

‘Well, Mr Doe says he had it out for you. He says he threw it out. We haven’t room to store manuscripts, Miss Talbot. Mr Doe says we take no responsibility for the manuscripts. It is stated in the contract.’

‘Tell Mr Doe I’ll see my lawyer.’

‘That’s right,’ said Edwina, when I had hung up, ‘tell them you’ll see your lawyer.’

‘I haven’t got a lawyer. And it would be no use.

‘But you’ve given them something to think about,’ Edwina said. She had buttered a piece of crisp toast from her breakfast tray, and handed it to me. I munched it, thinking how I could go about writing
Warrender Chase
all over again. But I knew I couldn’t. Something spontaneous had gone for ever if it were true that all the copies were destroyed including the proofs Sir Quentin had got hold of. I didn’t tell Edwina that Sir Quentin had been the cause of my losing my publisher; on the whole, the old lady bore very well the fact that she had spawned a rotter; it wouldn’t have done to rub it in. I thought of Edwina’s courageous facing of facts again, later on, when she sat in her wheel-chair in her pearls and black satin, quiet but fully alive, at Sir Quentin’s funeral.

It did me good to sit on Edwina’s bed that morning, eating the toast that she continued to butter and jam for me, with those ancient star-spangled banners, her long bejewelled hands, fluttering among the small porcelain dishes.

Beryl Tims came in once ‘to see if everything was all right’. The nurse, a kindly soul called Miss Fisher, came out of the bathroom to assure her on this point. Edwina glared at Beryl Tims. I went on munching.

‘I think,’ said Miss Fisher, ‘a fresh pot of tea might be called for and an extra cup.’

‘Oh, Fleur can come to the kitchen and have her morning coffee with me.’

‘Nurse said tea,’ said Edwina. ‘We want it brought in here.’

‘Fleur has her work to do. We wouldn’t want to keep Fleur back from her work, would we?’ said the English Rose. ‘And you know that Miss Fisher didn’t get her afternoon-off yesterday. We’re hoping Fleur will hold the fort this afternoon, aren’t we? I shall be at the inquest with Sir Quentin this afternoon. So you and Fleur can have your tea together, can’t you?’

Not a word of this was addressed to me, but I had a plan in mind which made this opportunity of spending some hours in the flat with no one except Edwina an exciting prospect. When Miss Fisher said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of leaving Lady Edwina at a time like this,’ I quickly put in that I’d be delighted to make afternoon tea and generally look after Lady Edwina.

‘Miss Fisher needs a rest,’ said Beryl Tims.

‘I quite agree with Mrs Tims,’ I said, and probably it was the first and only time I ever said such a thing.

So it was agreed. Miss Fisher with a bowl of washing followed Mrs Tims out of the room. I got on the phone, now, to Solly Mendelssohn.

I didn’t like phoning Solly during the day, for he slept most of the morning after his long night-duty. I always supposed, too, that he had some other private life, a woman we never met but who occupied his spare time; it wasn’t the sort of thing one would want to find out and there was always something about Solly into which no real friend of his could intrude. But at least I knew he wouldn’t have the phone off the hook in case of a call from the news-room at his paper, and in the emergency of the occasion I chanced it. He answered, half-asleep. But when he heard my urgent voice making of him a few brief requests, Solly agreed to do exactly what I asked without further explanations.

Solly arrived at a quarter to four at Hallam Street, big, bulky and unshaven, wrapped in scarves. He looked very much like a burglar with his big, brown travelling bag. Edwina was sitting up in her chair in the drawing-room.

Sir Quentin had not returned to the flat; he was to meet Beryl Tims at the Coroner’s Inquest on Bernice Gilbert’s suicide while of unsound mind. But as soon as Beryl Tims had left I had made a good snoop around Sir Quentin’s study. The proofs of
Warrender Chase
were nowhere to be found. But the keys in the unlocked drawer of his desk opened the cabinet wherein, as Sir Quentin always said, ‘were secrets’.

One after the other of the drawers contained the files, Sir Quentin’s notes of the members of the Autobiographical Association. Mrs Wilks was there, the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, Miss Maisie Young, Father Egbert Delaney, Sir Eric Findlay and the late Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert, widow of the former chargé d’affaires in San Salvador, Sir Alfred Gilbert … These were the files I was interested in. There was a file marked ‘Beryl, Mrs Tims,’ which I ignored. I had decided to take these files as hostages for my
Warrender Chase
which I was perfectly sure Sir Quentin had arranged with Dottie to steal from my room.

But as I had waited for Solly’s arrival I had also flicked through one of the memoirs, for I was curious to see what had been added under Sir Quentin’s management since he had taken them out of my hands. And I had time enough to see, as I turned over one file after another, that, although nothing had been added in the form of memoirs, sheets of notes, some typed, some in Sir Quentin’s hand had been inserted, familiar passages; they were lifted more or less directly from my
Warrender Chase.

I closed the cabinet again with its secrets when Solly rang the door bell. Edwina, dressed in her full regalia, exclaimed her joy to see him. I sat him down beside her, rather bewildered as he was, and I explained to them both: ‘I’m going to take away the memoirs of the Autobiographical Association to work on at home. Those biographies do need a literary touch.’

Solly seemed to begin to understand. Edwina uncannily seemed to perceive something that even I did not, for she said, ‘What a splendid idea! That will save more of ‘these tragedies. Poor Bucks Gilbert!’

I told Solly, then, that Lady Bernice had committed suicide, and that the inquest was proceeding at that moment. And I took his bag, leaving him with Edwina.

I put the files in Solly’s bag. It was an exhilarating affair. I thought how easy it was to steal, and I thought of Sir Quentin stealing my book, not only the physical copies, but the very words, phrases, ideas. Even from the brief look I had taken I could see he had even stolen a letter I had invented, written from my Warrender Chase to my character Marjorie. The bag was heavy. I lugged it into the hall and put it by the front door.

When I got back to the drawing-room, Solly had lit the pretty silver spirit-stove under the kettle which Edwina liked to use for her afternoon tea. It was a bit early for tea-time but Edwina was always ‘weary for tea’ as she put it. There were some buttered scones, some biscuits, which Solly had already started to help himself to. Edwina said, ‘Where are the files? Have you put them in that bag?’

I said I had. I said Sir Quentin would not miss them right away, no doubt, but he would realize I was really in better condition working on them at home.

‘Take them away, darling,’ shrieked Edwina. Then she came out with, ‘You’ll never get your novel back if you don’t do something about it.’

Solly then said to me, ‘Haven’t you managed to find a copy?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘the whole book’s disappeared.’

‘I knew it,’ said Edwina. ‘Somehow I knew it. They think I don’t know what’s going on in this house because I’m asleep most of the time. But I’m not asleep.’

She went on to list the names of the publishers she knew personally whom she could get to publish my book should she but crook her little finger. Some of them, it is true, had been dead half a century. But we let that go and made ourselves very optimistic over our tea.

Sir Quentin and Mrs Tims came in rather earlier than I had expected, before Solly left.

‘To whom,’ said Sir Quentin as he came into the room, ‘does that bag in the hall belong?’

‘It’s mine,’ said Solly, getting up.

‘Baron von Mendelssohn,’ I said, ‘is only passing through. May I introduce, Sir Quentin Oliver—the Baron von—’

‘Oh, please, please, dear Baron, do sit down …‘. Sir Quentin in his usual orgasm over a title fussed round unshaven Solly, begging him to sit down, to stay, not to leave.

But Solly, solid and unshaken by his new-found title, said polite good-byes all round and limped off, staggering a little at the door under the unexpected weight of the bag.

‘Suicide while of unsound mind,’ said Sir Quentin when he came back into the room. ‘An overdose of sleeping pills knocked back by a pint of whisky. I really must see that something more seemly goes on the death certificate.’

‘Tell them,’ yelled Edwina, ‘to wipe their arse with the death certificate.’

‘Mummy!’

I left shortly afterwards, and took an expensive taxi home to catch up with Solly.

It is not to be supposed that the stamp and feeling of a novel can be conveyed by an intellectual summary. My references to the book have been scrappy: I couldn’t reproduce my
Warrender Chase
in a few words; and anyhow, an attempt to save, or not save, anyone the trouble of reading it would be simply beside the point.

But I can certainly meet my essential purpose, which is to tell how Sir Quentin Oliver tried to arrange for the destruction of
Warrender Chase
as a novel at the same time as he appropriated the spirit of my legend for his own use. I can show how he actually plagiarized my text. And so I am writing about the cause of an effect.

I remember as a young child being obliged to write out in my copy-book, Necessity is the Mother of Invention. The sample had already been effected in beautiful copperplate on the first line, and to improve our handwriting it was our task to copy out this maxim on the lines below, which I duly did, all unaware that I was not merely acquiring an improved calligraphy but imbibing at the same time a subliminal lesson in social ethics. Another maxim was All is not Gold that Glisters, and another was Honesty is the Best Policy, and I also recall Discretion is the Better Part of Valour. And I have to testify that these precepts, which I was too flighty-minded to actually ponder at the time, but around which I dutifully curled my cursive Ps and my Vs, have turned out to my astonishment to be absolutely true. They may lack the grandeur of the Ten Commandments but they are more to the point.

Necessity, therefore, being the mother of invention, it was not surprising that the first thing I did after Solly had left me with the heavy bag of troubles I had taken from Hallam Street was to ring up a number of friends and alert them that I was now looking for another job.

When these seeds had been sown I heaved the bag of biographies into the bottom of my clothes cupboard for the time being. I started to lay plans for the retrievement of my stolen manuscript of
Warrender Chase.
I was tempted to ring up Dottie and confront her with the theft. Discretion is the better part of valour; with difficulty I restrained myself. I felt she wasn’t quite the same Dottie with whom I had been basically friendly with an occasional blazing row. Something had happened to change her; almost certainly Sir Quentin’s influence. I had torn up her biography; I hoped she had taken my advice and refused to take further part in memoir-writing for Sir Quentin.

I began to brood on the outrages perpetrated upon me and my novel by Dottie, Sir Quentin, Revisson  Doe; I tried to imagine the justifications they could have variously produced: that I was mad, the book was mad, it was evil, it was libellous, it ought to be suppressed. There came to my mind a phrase of John Henry Newman’s in his journals: ‘… the thousand whisperings against me…’ No sooner had I thought of this than I decided to put an end to my brooding. Finish. Cut it out.

In the meantime, as often happens when I brood, a plan of action had been forming in my mind. I didn’t think Dottie would be so far gone under Sir Quentin’s hypnotic influence as to have destroyed my book, but I wasn’t prepared to take the risk of alarming her to the extent that she might have time to do so. I determined somehow or other to retrieve my
Warrender Chase
by stealth. For which I would need to get the key of Dottie’s flat and I would need to get her out of her flat for some hours without fear of her returning. Furthermore I would have to be sure that Leslie shouldn’t burst in on me while I was searching the flat. I felt quite excited. It was like writing the pages of a novel, and I consciously kept these plans fixed in another part of my brain to transform into the last chapters of
All Souls’ Day,
as I eventually did in my own shadowy way. People often ask me where I get ideas for my novels; I can only say that my life is like that, it turns into some other experience of fiction, recognizable only to myself.