‘I have my chinchilla,’ she said. ‘Tims has got her eyes on my chinchilla but I’ve left it to the Cochin Mission to be sold for the poor. That will give Tims something to think about when I die. If she survives me. Ha! But you never know.’
Only six out of the ten members called to the meeting could come.
It was a busy afternoon. I sat at my typewriter in a corner of the study while in straggled the six.
I had probably expected too much of them. For years I had been working up to my novel Warrender Chase and had become accustomed to first fixing a fictional presence in my mind’s eye, then adding a history to it. In the case of Sir Quentin’s guests the histories had been presented before the physical characters had appeared. As they trooped in, I could immediately sense an abject depression about them. Not only had I read Sir Quentin’s fabulous lists of Who was Who among them, but I had also read the first chapters of their pathetic memoirs, and through typing them out and emphatically touching them up I think I had begun to consider them inventions of my own, based on the original inventions of Sir Quentin. Now these people whose qualities he had built up to be distinguished, even to the last rarity, came into the study that calm and sunny October afternoon with evident trepidation.
Sir Quentin dashed and flitted around the room arranging them in chairs and clucking, and occasionally introducing me to them. ‘Sir Eric—my new and I might say very reliable secretary Miss Talbot, no relation it appears to the distinguished branch of that family to which your dear wife belongs.’
Sir Eric was a small, timid man. He shook hands all round in a furtive way. I supposed rightly that he was the Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., a sugar-refining merchant whose memoirs, like the others, had not yet got farther than Chapter One: Nursery Days. The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents’ absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver.
Sir Quentin’s method at this early stage was to send round advance copies of the complete set of typed and improved chapters to each of the ten members so that each of the six members present, and the four absent, had already seen their own and the others’ typescripts. Sir Quentin had at first considered my additions to be rather extravagant, don’t you think, my dear Miss Talbot, a bit too-too? After a good night’s sleep he had evidently seen some merit in my arrangement, having worked out some of the possibilities to his own advantage for the future; he had said next morning, ‘Well, Miss Talbot, let’s try your versions out on them. After all, we are living in modern times.’ I had gathered, even then, that he had plans for inducing me to write more compromising stuff into these memoirs, but I had no intention of writing anything beyond what cheered up the boring parts of the job for the time being and what could feed my imagination for my novel Warrender Chase. So that his purposes were quite different from mine, yet at the same time they coincided so far as he had his futile plans as to how he could use me, and I was working at top pace for him: photocopy machines were not current in those days.
At the meeting I gave close attention to the six members without ever actually studying them with my eyes.
I always preferred what I saw out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak. Besides little Sir Eric Findlay, the people present were Lady Bernice Gilbert, nicknamed Bucks, the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, a Mrs Wilks, a Miss Maisie Young, and an unfrocked priest called Father Egbert Delaney whose memoirs obsessively made the point that he had lost his frock through a loss of faith, not morals.
Now Lady Bernice Gilbert swam in and at first dominated the party. ‘Bucks!’ said Sir Quentin, embracing her. ‘Quentin,’ she declared hoarsely. She was about forty, much dressed up in new clothes which people who could afford it were buying a lot of, since clothes had come off the ration only a few months ago. Bucks was got up in an outfit called the New Look, a pill-box hat with an eye-veil, a leg-of-mutton-sleeved coat and long swinging skirt, all in black. She took a chair close to me, her physical presence very scented. She was the last person I would have attached tot her first chapter. Her story, unlike some of the others, was by no means illiterate in so far as she knew how to string sentences together. The story opened with herself, alone in a church, at the age of twenty.
However, I was called, at that moment, to shake hands with Miss Maisie Young, a tall, attractive girl of about thirty who walked with a stick, one of her legs being encased in a contraption which looked as if it was part of her life, and not a passing affair of an accident. I took considerably to Maisie Young; indeed I wondered what she was doing in this already babbling chorus; and still more I was amazed that she belonged to the opening of the memoirs attached to her name, this being an unintelligible treatise on the Cosmos and how Being is Becoming.
‘Maisie, my dear Maisie, can I put you here? Are you comfortable? My dear Clotilde! My. very dear Father Egbert, are you all comfortable? Let me take your wrap, Clotilde. Mrs Tims — where is Mrs Tims?—Miss Talbot, perhaps you would be so kind, so very kind as to take la Baronne Clotilde’s…’
The Baronne Clotilde, whose ermine cape I took to the door and passed over to the bubbling Mrs Tims outside, had set her memoirs in a charming French château near Dijon where, however, everything conspired to do down the eighteen-year-old Baronne. While I had the time to think at all, I was momentarily puzzled by the fact that in the autobiography Clotilde had been eighteen in 1936 whereas now in 1949 she was well into her fifties. But on to Father Egbert, who wore a Prince of Wales check jacket and grey flannel trousers; his face resembled a snowman’s with small black pebbles for eyes, nose and mouth; his autobiography had begun, ‘It is with some trepidation that I take up my pen.’ Now he was shaking hands with Mrs Wilks, a stout, merry-faced lady in her mid-fifties, clad in pale purple with numerous veil-like scarves, and painted up considerably. Since she had been brought up at the court of the Czar of Russia her memoirs should have been interesting, but so far she had written only a very dull account about the extreme nastiness of her three sisters and the discomforts of the royal palace, where all four girls had to share a bedroom.
All of these people’s writings, with the exception of Bernice Gilbert’s, were more or less illiterate. I now waited, as they first chattered and exclaimed, to hear what they thought of my improvements.
Mrs Tims came into the study on some busy mission and told me in passing that Lady Edwina was sleeping peacefully.
It was to me a glorious meeting. The first twenty minutes were taken up with introductions and exclamations of all sorts; Father Egbert and Sir Eric, who apparently knew the four missing members, spent some time discussing them. Then Sir Quentin said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention please,’ and everybody stopped talking except Maisie Young who decided to finish what she was saying to me about the universe. She sat with her crippled leg in its irons stuck out in front of her, which did indeed give her a sort of right to hold forth longer than anybody else. Her handbag had a soft strap handle; I noticed that she held this handle threaded through her fingers like a horse-rein; I wasn’t surprised to learn, later on, that Maisie’s paralysed leg was the result of a riding accident.
The rest of the room was hushed and Maisie’s voice went on, qualmless and strong, to assert, ‘There are some universal phenomena about which it is not for us mortals to enquire.’ I took very little notice of this silly proposition as such, although the actual words sound on in my mind. She had been talking quite a lot of nonsense, largely to the effect that autobiographies ought to start with the ultimates of the Great Beyond and not fritter away their time on the actual particulars of life. I was thoroughly against her ideas; however, I had taken a liking to Maisie herself, and I particularly liked the way in which she went on, in the room which had been called to silence, insisting that there were things in life not to be enquired into, at the same time as she had opened her own autobiography with precisely these enquiries. Contradictions in human character are one of its most c
onsistent notes and so I felt Maisie had a substantial character. Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory, somewhere a paradox. And I’d already seen that where the self-portraits of Sir Quentin’s ten testifiers were going all wrong, where they sounded stiff and false, occurred at points where they strained themselves into a constancy and steadiness that they evidently wished to possess but didn’t. And I had thrown in my own bits of invented patchwork to cheer things up rather than make each character coherent in itself.
Sir Quentin, who was always polite to his customers, sat smiling while Maisie finished her emphatic say:
‘There are some universal phenomena about which it is not for us mortals to enquire.’
Beryl Tims then charged in on some practical but unnecessary mission. It seemed that as she was being overlooked as a woman she was determined to behave as a man. Naturally she succeeded in drawing everyone’s attention to herself, with her clatter and thumping, I forget what about.
When she had gone Sir Quentin made to resume his introductory speech but he had to lay it aside. Sir Eric Findlay spoke. He had obviously summoned up courage to do so.
‘I say, Quentin,’ he said, ‘my memoirs have been tampered with.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘I hope they’re none the worse for it. I can arrange to delete any offensive item.’
‘I didn’t say offensive,’ said Sir Eric, looking nervously round the room. ‘Indeed, you have made some very interesting changes. Indeed, I wondered how you guessed that the butler locked me in the pantry to clean the silver, which he did indeed. Indeed he did. But Nanny on the rocking-horse, well, Nanny was a very religious woman. On my rocking-horse with our butler, indeed, you know. It isn’t the sort of thing Nanny would have done.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Sir Quentin, pointing a coy finger at him. ‘How can you be sure if you were locked in the pantry at the time? In your revised memoir you found out about their prank from a footman. But if in reality…’
‘My rocking-horse was not at all a sizeable one,’ said Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., ‘and Nanny, though not plump, would hardly fit on it with the butler who was, though thin, quite strong.’
‘If I might voice an opinion,’ said Mrs Wilks, ‘I thought Sir Eric’s piece very readable. It would be a pity to sacrifice the evil nanny and the dastardly butler having their rock on the small Sir Eric’s horse, and I like particularly the stark realism of the smell of brilliantine on the footman’s hair as he bends to tell the small Sir Eric-that-was of his discovery. It explains so much the Sir Eric-that-is. Psychology is a wonderful thing. It is in fact all.’
‘My nanny was not actually evil,’ murmured Sir Eric. ‘In fact—’
‘Oh, she was utterly evil,’ Mrs Wilks said.
‘I quite agree,’ said Sir Quentin. ‘She was plainly a sinister person.’
Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert said in her bronchial voice, ‘I suggest you leave your memoir as Quentin has prepared it, Eric. One has to be objective about such things. I think it vastly superior to the opening chapter of my memoirs.
‘I will sleep on it,’ said Eric mildly.
‘And your memoir, Bucks?’ Sir Quentin said anxiously. ‘Don’t you care for it to date?’
‘I do and I don’t, Quentin. There’s something missing.’
‘That can be remedied, my dear Bucks. What is missing?’
‘A je ne sais quoi, Quentin.’
‘But,’ said the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret, ‘you know, Bucks, I thought your piece was very much you. My dear, the atmosphere as the curtain rises as it were. As the curtain rises on you in the empty church. In the empty church with the fragrance of incense and you praying to the Madonna in your hour of need. I was carried away, Bucks. I mean it. Then comes Father Delaney and lays his hand on your shoulder—’
‘I wasn’t there. It wasn’t I.’ This was Father Egbert Delaney speaking up. ‘There is a mistake here that needs rectifying.’ He looked at Sir Quentin and then at me with his round pebbly eyes and his pudgy hands clasped together. He looked from me back to Sir Quentin. ‘I must say in all verity that I am not the Father Delaney described in Lady Bernice’s opening scene. Indeed I was a seminarian at the Beda in Rome at the time she refers to.’
‘My dear Father,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘we need not be too literal. There is such a thing as the economy of art. However, if you object to being named—’
‘It was with some trepidation that I took up my pen,’ Father Delaney declared, and then he looked with horror at the women, including myself, and with terror at the men.
‘I didn’t actually name the priest,’ said Bucks. ‘I never said that all this exchange took place in the church, I only—’
‘Oh but it has an effect of great tendresse,’ said Mrs Wilks. ‘My memoir is nothing like as touching, would that it were. My memoir—’
But Lady Edwina just then came tottering into the room. ‘Mummy!’ said Sir Quentin.
I jumped up and pulled forward a chair for her. Everyone was jumping up to do something for her. Sir Quentin fluttered his hands, begged her to go and rest and demanded, ‘Where is Mrs Tims?’ He obviously expected his mother to make a scene, and so did I. However, Lady Edwina didn’t make it. She took over the meeting as if it were a drawing-room tea party, holding up the proceedings with the blackmail of her very great age and of her newly revealed charm. I was greatly impressed by the performance. She knew some of them by name, enquired of their families so solicitously that it hardly mattered that most of them were long since dead, and when Mrs Tims entered with the tea and soda buns on a tray, exclaimed, ‘Ah, Tims! What delightful things have you brought us?’ Beryl Tims was amazed to see her sitting there, wide awake, with her powdered face and her black satin tea dress freshly spoiled at the neck and shoulders with a slight face-powder overflow. Mrs Tims was furious but she put on her English Rose simper and placed the tray with solicitude on the table beside old Edwina, who was at that moment enquiring of the unfrocked Father, ‘Are you the Rector of Wandsworth in civilian clothing?’
‘Lady Edwina, your rest-hour,’ wheedled Mrs Tims. ‘Come along, now. Come with me.’
‘Dear no, oh dear no,’ said Father Egbert, sitting up and puffing to rights his Prince of Wales jacket. ‘I don’t belong to a religious hierarchy of any persuasion!’
‘Funny, I smell a clergyman off you,’ said Edwina.
‘Mummy!’ said Sir Quentin.
‘Come now,’ said Mrs Tims, ‘this is a serious meeting, a business meeting that Sir Quentin—’
‘How do you take your tea?’ said Lady Edwina to Maisie Young. ‘Weak? Strong?’
‘Middling please,’ said Miss Young, and looked at me sideways from under her soft felt hat as if to gain courage.
‘Mummy!’ said Quentin.
‘Whatever have you done to your leg?’ said Lady Edwina to Maisie Young.
‘An accident,’ replied Miss Young, softly.
‘Lady Edwina! What a thing to ask…’ said Mrs Tims.
‘Take your hand off my arm, Tims,’ said Edwina. After she had poured tea, and asked the Baronne Clotilde how she had managed to preserve her ermine cape without the smell of camphor, and I had helped Sir Quentin to pass the teacups, Edwina said, ‘Well, I must take my nap.’ She gave Beryl Tims’ hand a shove-away and allowed Sir Eric to help her to her feet. When she had gone, followed by Mrs Tims, everyone exclaimed, How charming, How wonderful for her age, What a grand old lady. They were going on like this in between bites of their soda buns and accompanied by a little orchestra of teaspoons on china, when Lady Edwina opened the door again and put her head round it. ‘I enjoyed the service very much, I always hate hymn-singing,’ she said, and retreated.
Beryl Tims minced in and collected the tea things, muttering to me as she passed, ‘She’s gone back to bed. Calling me Tims like that, what
a cheek.’
I sat at my typist’s desk in the corner and made notes while they talked about their memoirs till six o’clock, half an hour past my time to go home.
‘When I come to my war experiences,’ said Sir Eric, ‘that will be the time, the climax.’
‘It was during the war that I lost my faith,’ declared Father Egbert. ‘For me, too, it was a moment of climax. I wrested with my God, the whole of one entire night.’
Mrs Wilks remarked that it was not every woman who had witnessed the gross indelicacies of the Russian revolution and survived, as she had. ‘It gives one a quite different sense of humour,’ she explained, without explaining anything.
I had been taking notes, there at my corner table. I recall that the Baronne Clotilde turned to me before she left and said, ‘Have you got everything that is germane?’
Maisie Young, leaning on her stick and with a hand still twined round her bag-strap as if it were a horse-rein, said to me, ‘Where can I find the book Father Egbert Delaney has been telling me about? It’s an autobiography.’
She had been conversing privately with the priest, apart from the hubbub. I turned to Father Delaney, my pencil poised on my notebook, for enlightenment. ‘The Apologia pro Vita Sua,’ he said, ‘by John Henry Newman.’
‘Where can I get it?’ said Miss Young.
I promised to get her a copy from the public library.
‘If one is writing an autobiography one should model oneself on the best, shouldn’t one?’ she said.
I assured her that the Apologia was among the best.
Father Egbert murmured to himself, but for us two to hear, ‘Alas.’
It was a quarter past six before they had left. I went to fetch Lady Edwina to take her home to have supper with me.
‘She’s fast asleep,’ Beryl Tims said. ‘And in any case she broke her promise to us, why should you be bothered with her?’ Sir Quentin stood listening. Beryl Tims appealed to him. ‘Why should we pay for a taxi and all the bother? She interrupted the meeting, after all.’