All that was so far apparent from this event was that the tormentor was not one of the tenants and that he was a man.
Did she recognize the voice? — No, said Wanda.
A foreigner? — No.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We should inform the police.’
Wanda gave a long loud cry of No. ‘Perhaps I know him. I can’t place him,’ she said.
Milly got out more cups and handed tea all round.
Before we sent Wanda to bed I gave her a notebook and told her to write down as soon as possible everything she could remember about the voice, and what it said. ‘I don’t want to write down things,’ said Wanda. I think already she had an inkling of who the voice belonged to. Perhaps, already, she had started putting two and two together.
Basil Carlin said confidingly to William Todd, ‘Next thing he’ll no doubt show up in person, and if I lay hands on him I’ll black his eye.’
‘I’d break his teeth,’ said William.
Neither of them achieved these ambitions. Much of our time was to be taken up, and many wits were to be tried, in the effort to identify Wanda’s tormentor. The idea hovered in the background of our lives for the next few months. But we were all too busy with the foreground of our lives to notice what was happening to Wanda.
But that night, while everyone was talking and exclaiming, and putting forward theories I went out in the garden by the kitchen door to admire the large bright moon which floodlit Milly’s flower-beds, her beloved tall hollyhocks against the wall, and her pansy borders. The other houses in Church End Villas were all asleep. I was aware of a great lightness having fallen upon our house. I knew that it wasn’t until this night’s phone call had proved that nobody among us was responsible for Wanda’s suffering that we realized the heaviness of the past six weeks. It is terrible to live with suspicions. Milly and I had privately scrutinized everyone, and now it came to me that each and everyone in the house, Milly excepted, had inevitably suspected, not only each other, but had also wondered about me.
Hector Bartlett was already far from my thoughts; there was no possible way I could have thought of him in connection with Wanda, not having yet come across that glint of a thin trail, like something a snail leaves in its slow path, which led from him to Wanda. But even if I had known, it would have been irrelevant to my feelings of relief: the persecutor was not one of us, not one of us.
Now, to cheer things up still further, someone had turned on the wireless to Radio Luxembourg with its late-night dance music. I could hear Milly begging everyone to keep it low. I could hear the tinkle of tea-cups and the voices loosening up in prattle in the kitchen; the household was garrulous with tacit deliverance. Even Wanda, now upstairs, had stopped wailing; she came down again only to proclaim, in a very insistent voice that reached me in the garden, her oft-repeated assertion that her persecutor was an agent of the Red Dean (as was known the widely deplored, the learned and the communist, then Dean of Canterbury).
Suddenly William Todd came out to the garden. ‘What a moon!’ he said. He took my hand and put his other arm round my large waist as far as it could reach, and danced me all over the lawn to the sound of the music, he in his cotton pyjamas and I, Mrs Hawkins, in my black lace party dress.
While waiting for another job I considered myself on holiday; I painted my rooms at Church End Villas and put up new curtains. I found a job for Cathy as bookkeeper and invoice-clerk, not with a publisher as she wanted, but with a small printer at Notting Hill, a kindly man who knew of our troubles at Ullswater Press, although it was actually through Milly that she got the job. And it was through Kate, the district nurse, that I got mine.
When you are looking for a job the best thing to do is to tell everyone, high and humble, and keep reminding them please to look out for you. This advice is not guaranteed to find you a job, but it is remarkable how suitable jobs can be found through the most unlikely people. For instance, if you are looking for a job as a management consultant or a television announcer, and can do the job, you will naturally apply for the jobs available, advertised in the normal papers, known to the appropriate agencies and to friends in the field of business. But you should also tell the postman, the mechanic in the garage, the waiter in the restaurant, the hotel porter, the grocer, the butcher, the daily domestic help; you should tell everyone, including people you meet on the train.
It is surprising how many people subterraneously believe in destiny. The word goes round, and in a relaxed moment a businessman will listen with interest to the barman or the doorman. Hearing of the very person he is looking for, he might well think that luck has come his way, and arrange to see the applicant next day. There is involved that fine feeling and boast: ‘I just happened to be looking for an accountant, and do you know I got a first-class fellow through the barman at the Goat.’ People love coincidence, destiny, a lucky chance. It is worth telling everyone if you want a job. In any case, while you are looking for a job you are always walking in the dark.
So it came about that Milly’s friend and neighbour Mrs Twinny, with whom she went to Bingo every Thursday afternoon, heard from Milly that I was called to the phone a great deal by a certain Cathy, a book-keeper in my former office, and that Cathy gave me little peace, she was looking for another job in publishing. Mrs Twinny remarked that Mr Twinny was putting in shelves for a publisher. In fact, she meant a printer, it came to the same thing. Milly reported this conversation to me, with dramatic eagerness a few days later; it came with the news that Mr Twinny had procured an interview for Cathy. ‘Funny enough he’s looking for a book-keeper,’ said Milly, ‘and he’s looking for someone he can trust, with a recommendation. They have to handle cash.’ So it was that I took Cathy on the bus to Notting Hill. Cathy had at first put up a resistance to applying for the job on the grounds that a printer in London W.8 was not the same as a publisher in W.1. I had met her at five-thirty near South Kensington station in one of the new espresso-bars that were then opening up all over London. She was still with Ullswater Press but knew it was doomed; she knew it only too well from the books she had to try to keep. She looked at me over the cappuccino raised to her lips, with her puckered face and balding dyed hair; she looked at me through her thick lenses and said, ‘I should put my head in the gas oven.’
I didn’t think for a minute that she would get the job. But I went along with her to the interview and she got it. And the only thing that could explain why she was taken on the spot, apart from her honesty which I had vouched for in a simple letter of recommendation (in place of one from Martin York which I didn’t feel would get Cathy very far, so near was he to the hour of his reckoning for fraud), was a certain superstition on the part of Mr Wells, the printer. I waited for Cathy in the noisy outer workshop, sitting on a chair which had been dusted specially for me. Mr Wells came out with Cathy, both smiling. ‘A most extraordinary coincidence,’ he said. ‘This man was putting up shelves, and we were having a chat at the coffee break, and he happened to remark …’ I assume the hiring of Cathy became his favourite anecdote. She kept the job for twelve years, retiring on the death of her employer.
I happened to get a job for Patrick very easily, having been actually asked by a bookseller in the Charing Cross Road, when I was in his shop one day rummaging around the second-hand shelves, if I knew of a young man capable of minding the shop, selling books and also packaging and posting the mail orders. But this brought on my head a series of reactions from his wife, Mabel, who rang me every day and sometimes twice on the same day with alternating expressions of gratitude and reproach. First I was a wonderful woman to have done this great good deed for Patrick, especially as he now got more pay; and secondly I was a fat old whore who was never done trying to wheedle him into my bed with my wiles and favours. For Patrick’s sake I tried to humour her as long as I could. I hardly listened to her on the phone, so that my answers didn’t always correspond to what she was saying: it was a pleasure, Mabel. No trouble on my part. I hope everything will go well with you,
now,’ I said, once, when she was actually accusing me of ‘doing it upside down’ with her husband.
Milly, when she answered the phone to Mabel, threatened to report her to the police, refused to call me to the phone. I went to see Patrick in the book shop: ‘Patrick, you have to take Mabel to a doctor.’ ‘She won’t go,’ he said, and was close to tears.
On some of those days before I got my next job I went for long walks, whatever the weather, discovering scenes and aspects of London which office-workers never see. I recall a day when there must have been fine weather, for in a street at Regent’s Park a film was being made for which artificial rain was made to fall in great quantities.
‘What between Mabel and her phone calls and those anonymous letters and calls for Wanda, the house is a nightmare,’ Milly said. ‘Pack a bag, Mrs Hawkins. I’m taking you home for a fortnight.’
‘Home’ to Milly was Cork. I willingly accepted and enjoyed a summer holiday in the fine rain and sunshine of Ireland, remote from mad and untrustworthy London among people who acknowledged respectfully the cultural life but were not remotely mixed up with it. Milly’s eldest daughter lived with her husband in a new house on the outskirts of Cork from which every day we set out for some new stretch of Southern Irish greenery. At night I would lie awake as long as possible with the sound in my mind’s ear of soft voices and amusing stories and in my mind’s eye an ambience of leafiness. Sometimes I thought of London and wondered where fate would take me in the future, and sometimes in those precious, silent, waking hours I thought of Wanda. And I thought then more clearly than before. I felt she was now holding something back, that she was not still unaware as she said she was as to the possible identity of her enemy. Since that night of the anonymous phone call she claimed there had arrived another letter, but she didn’t show it around. According to Wanda, the writer had changed the motive of his threats. It was no longer the income tax, it was something else. About the phone call she was imprecise. This led me to reflect that in any case the man now knew that her little tax affair had been put right. But Wanda was still upset, very distressed. She had wept when I went to say good-bye before I left for Ireland, and I thought she was going to tell me something; but she hesitated and decided not. I didn’t press. Indeed, in a sense I didn’t want to know, for I felt the weight of so many of other people’s difficulties. I was still young, in my twenties, and everyone treated me like a matronly goddess of wisdom. I fell asleep one night, thinking of my own future and its possibilities and with the strange, involuntary image of the moonlit garden at Church End Villas, that night of the anonymous phone call to Wanda, after my dinner at the Savoy; and I thought of William Todd whirling me round and round.
When Milly and I got back home only one thing had changed and it didn’t affect us very much: a reshuffle of personnel in the house next door. Marky’s wife and baby had left and another girl, still ‘my wife’ to Marky, with two children and a young sister had taken their place; the first sister-in-law remained: an interesting mixture; Milly speculated much on the outcome.
Ian Tooley, director of the vast publishing firm of Mackintosh & Tooley, looked at his pocket diary and said, ‘I suggest you start next Monday, the 11th, Mrs Hawkins. If that is convenient?’ I said that would suit me very well. It was a week ahead. ‘You will find us at the peak of our activity,’ he said, his eye still on the page of his diary. ‘October 12th will be the next day, Tuesday, a full moon: there will be a movement of authors.’
‘Do you find the moon affects the authors, Mr Tooley?’ I said.
‘Oh, a great deal, believe me,’ he said deeply. ‘There is always a considerable movement from those quarters at the full moon.’
This saying, combined with the décor of the office, made me extraordinarily happy: I knew already that the new job was going to be something of an adventure.
I hadn’t expected to get the job. In fact I suspected that a number of highly experienced men and women editors must have applied for it, people with recommendations, qualifications, honours degrees, specializations, and after I had been at the job for some time I found out that this was true. Many well-known reviewers and literary editors and BBC personnel had applied for this job at Mackintosh & Tooley, and had been interviewed for it. It was later that I realized why I was employed in preference to these impressive applications.
I got the job at Mackintosh & Tooley in October through Kate, who had been nursing an elderly relation-by-marriage of Sir Alec Tooley throughout September. Martin York had already been arrested for fraud and was now remanded on bail and in a nursing home tended by psychiatrists.
The scandal in the publishing world was rife, and the bankruptcy of the Ullswater Press and his other ventures, imminent and inevitable. A considerable list of people stood to lose weighty sums of money in the crash.
To entertain her patient, whom Kate greatly liked, she read bits of The Times to her every day, I imagine with those appropriate observations of a moral order, so typical of Kate. And, according to Kate, the news of Martin York’s arrest with the list of his alleged (as the papers put it at this stage) frauds and forgeries, so much fascinated Kate’s patient that Kate was led to say she knew someone who had, up to only recently, been an editor at the Ullswater Press, and was alas out of work.
This news was passed on rapidly to Sir Alec Tooley. I believe his sick relation must have been a fairly poor relation, otherwise she would have had a private nurse, not Kate. I suspect that this near-acquaintance with an actual inside observer of the goings-on at Martin York’s establishment was a kind of poor relation’s offering to the rich Sir Alec, and that he in turn was induced by curiosity to arrange an interview for me. This is my construction of how I got the interview, for certainly there was a vacancy for an editor just then, and the candidates were many and the qualifications required were far higher than any I could claim. Some series of reasons and half-reasons like this procured me the interview. Why I actually got the job was, I am sure, due to something else. Kate had warned me fairly: ‘These are different people than you meet every day, Mrs Hawkins. They can command university degrees and titled young lads as their office boys.’
But allowing for the rhetoric of Kate’s sincere beliefs, it was still a mystery to me that I got the job. I came to realize the answer later.
I had been interviewed by two directors in turn. Ian Tooley, of Mackintosh & Tooley, son of Sir Alec Tooley (there was no surviving Mackintosh), an esoteric crank, was the second. First, I had been ushered in to the vast carpeted office of Sir Alec. I was fairly keyed up, so I didn’t notice many details at first. An elderly man. A voice that I placed at the back of my mind as surprising, a whimper. I was too occupied with the interview and whether I could possibly hope to get a job in this important firm of publishers to take in much as Sir Alec talked.
‘Mrs Hawkins, I believe you in fact worked for the Ullswater Press? That must have been an interesting experience,’ he prompted me.
I said that it was.
‘And what was your feeling about Mr York’s conduct?’
I said I thought Martin York was off his head if it were proved he forged documents without taking the slightest precaution to conceal his own handwriting. ‘But’, I said, ‘my work at Ullswater Press was with actual books.’
‘Ah yes, in fact, books,’ said the venerable publisher. ‘Yes, many of our staff here are in fact fairly interested in books. One of our senior colleagues in fact was saying at a meeting only the other day that he thought he might perhaps have a shot at getting back to his first love — books. Now, tell me, in fact, Mrs Hawkins …’
I had begun to wonder if I had wandered into the wrong premises. Was it tomato soup, ladies’ dresses, washing machines that they trafficked in here? But Sir Alec pressed on ‘… was there not in fact — I am sure you must know — some difficulty or fracas at the shareholders’ meetings?’
I told him I was never at the shareholders’ meetings, but according to the newspapers there was a lot of money
involved.
‘Indeed there is, Mrs Hawkins. Distilleries, building schemes. I quite understand you, in fact, wanting to keep out of it, although let me assure you that anything you say between these four walls will go no further. Given that York is a loony and I’m not, in fact, excluding it, tell me about Ted Ullswater. I suppose he’s taken the affair rather hard?’
I was now noticing rather more. On his desk was a silver frame with the photograph of a woman of the ‘twenties in Court dress holding an ostrich-feather fan.
Sir Alec was thin and grey and his voice matched his looks. It sounded like a wisp of smoke wafting from some burning of leaves hidden by a clump of lavender. The effort that appeared to go into his voice seemed not to correspond with any commensurable weariness or boredom; indeed, he was eager to pump me, and, genuinely looking for a job as I was, I felt highly impatient both with the affectation built in to his manner and with the fact that I had come primed for a serious interview and was being frivolously quizzed. Moreover, I had come in a taxi. I always took a taxi to an interview.