CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I often wondered what would have happened if I’d stayed with the Polish Count instead of moving in with Arthur. Maybe I would be fat and content, sitting in his apartment during the day, wearing a flowered negligee, doing a little embroidering, a little mending, reading trashy books and eating chocolates; in the evenings we would dine out at the Polish Officer’s Club and I would be treated with respect, more or less; I would have an acknowledged position, I would be “Paul’s mistress.” But it wouldn’t have worked, he was too methodical. His first name was Tadeo but he preferred to be called Paul, his third name, after Saint Paul, who was a systematic man, no loose ends. His idea of the good life was that it should be tidy.
Even his escape over the Polish border had been tidy. (“But it was chance that saved your life!” I exclaimed. “No,” he said, “I would have been dead anyway if I had not used my head.”) He calculated his course precisely and emerged from the forest at the exact point he intended. To keep himself awake and to dispel the hallucinations he was having, he recited the multiplication tables as he plodded through the snow and the darkness (plodded, for he had given his skis to a member of the doomed party). He didn’t panic, as I would have done; he paid no attention to the vivid geometrical shapes and, later, the menacing faces that appeared before him in the air. I too had seen the shapes and the faces, during my attack of blood poisoning, and I knew that my response, especially in the depths of that Polish forest, dense as hair, cold as despair, would have been to sit down in the snow and let disaster overtake me. Details would distract me, the candle stubs and bones of those who had gone before; in any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice. In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight. My mind was not disciplined, as Arthur sometimes pointed out.
So did Paul. He was compulsive about time, he had to leave the house at precisely eight-fifteen, and before that he spent ten minutes by the clock polishing his shoes and brushing his suit. He found my lack of order charming, but not for long; soon he was making speeches about how much easier it was to hang up one’s clothes at the time, rather than leaving them in a heap on the floor till the next morning. He didn’t expect much of me – after all, I was only a mistress – but those few things he expected absolutely. I think he considered training me to live with him a minor and tedious challenge, sort of like training a dog: a limited number of tricks, learned thoroughly.
With the exception of that first surprising night he confined sex to weekends. He believed in separate rooms, so I slept on a foldout bed in the room he called the library. He was not stingy or repressive by nature, but he was a man with a mission, and because I slept in the library I soon discovered what it was.
The first day, after he left for the bank, I slept in till eleven. Then I got up and browsed around the flat, opening the kitchen cupboards, looking for something to eat but also exploring the personality of this man who the night before had, as they say, violated my honor. I was curious, and you can tell a lot about a person from their kitchen cupboards. Paul’s were very well-organized; tinned goods prevailed, with some utilitarian dried soups and a package of water biscuits. The foods were of two kinds, bare necessities and exotica: squid, I recall, and some seal meat (which we had later; it was rank and oily). Next I did the refrigerator, which was spotless and almost empty. I ate several water biscuits with some tinned sardines, then made myself a cup of tea and went into Paul’s room to go through his closet and bureau drawers. I was careful not to disturb anything. There were some tinted photos on the bureau, the lips purplish, the hair yellowish-gray. Boxer shorts; all his pajamas were striped except for a pair of silk ones. Under the boxer shorts there was a revolver, which I didn’t touch.
I went back to the library, intending to get dressed, but I thought I’d go through the bookshelves first. The books were mostly old, cloth- and leather-bound with marbled endpapers, the kind you find on secondhand book tables. A number of them were in Polish, though there were English ones too: Sir Walter Scott, quite a lot of that, and Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth and Wilkie Collins; I remember the names because I subsequently read most of them. But there was one shelf that puzzled me. It consisted of nurse novels, the mushy kind that have a nurse on the cover and a doctor in the background gazing at her with interest and admiration, though never pop-eyed with desire. They had titles such as Janet Holmes, Student Nurse; Helen Curtis, Senior Nurse; and Anne Armstrong, Junior Nurse. Some had more daring titles, such as Romance in Paradise and Lucy Gallant, Army Nurse. They were all by a woman with the improbable name of Mavis Quilp. I skimmed through a couple, remembering them well. I’d read dozens, back in my fat days. They were standard fare, each ending with nurse and doctor wrapped in each other’s arms as firmly and antiseptically as elastic bandages. There was something odd about the language, the clichés were a little off, distorted just slightly. For instance, someone said, “They’re selling like pancakes” instead of “hotcakes,” someone else said, “Keep a stiff upper jaw,” and Anne Armstrong “trombled” rather than trembled when the doctor brushed past her, though that could have been a typo. Other than this, however, they weren’t remarkable; but they were so out of place in Paul’s library that I asked him about them that evening.
“Paul,” I said, when we were seated opposite each other at the kitchen table, eating the tinned seal meat and drinking the half-bottle of champagne he had brought back as a propitiation offering, “why do you read those trashy books by Mavis Quilp?”
He gave me a peculiar, twisted smile. “I never read those trashy books by Mavis Quilp.”
“Then why do you have fourteen of them in your library?” Perhaps Paul was a secret agent – which would explain the revolver – and the Quilp books were messages in code.
He was still smiling. “I write those trashy books by Mavis Quilp.”
I dropped my fork. “You mean, you’re Mavis Quilp?” I started to laugh, but was stopped by the offended look on his face.
“I have a mother and a daughter on the inside,” he replied stiffly.
The story he told me was this. On first arriving in England, he had still fancied himself a writer. He had written a three-volume epic dealing with the fortunes of a petit-aristocratic family (his) before, during and after the war, laboring away at it with the help of a dictionary in the intervals between his ten-hour stints as a dishwasher. He would rather have written in Polish, but felt it was no use. His novel had thirteen major characters, all of them related, and each with an entourage of wives, mistresses, friends, children and uncles. When he’d finished his book at last and had typed it, painfully, himself, he took it to a publisher. He knew nothing of publishers; inadvertently, he had chosen one that did nothing but Westerns, nurse novels and historical romances.
They rejected his novel, of course, but they were impressed by the quality and especially the quantity of his work. “You can turn it out, all right, mate,” the man had told him. “Here’s a story line for you, write it up and keep it simple, a hundred quid. Fair enough?” He had needed the money.
While his three-volume epic went the rounds of other, more respectable publishers – it never did get accepted – he churned out junky novels, using at first the story lines provided for him, later supplying his own. He was now receiving between two and three hundred pounds a book, no royalties. With his new job at the bank he earned exactly enough to support himself, so the nurse-novel money was extra, and he sent it to his mother and daughter in Poland. He had a wife there too, but she had divorced him.
The publisher had offered him Westerns and historical romances, but he stuck to his specialty. For Westerns you had to use words like “pard,” which he didn’t feel comfortable with; and historical romances would depress him, they would remind him of his old, privileged life. (Escape literature, he told me, should be an escape for the writer as well as the reader.) With nurse novels he didn’t need to learn anything extra or use any strange words except a few medical terms easily found in a first-aid handbook. He had chosen his pseudonym because he found the name Mavis to be archetypically English. As for Quilp.…
“Ah, Quilp,” he sighed. “This is a character from Dickens, it is a deformed, malicious dwarf. This is what I see myself to be, in this country; I have been deprived of my stature, and I am filled with bitter thoughts.”
Status, I thought; but I did not say it. I was learning not to correct him.
“What about something more like you,” I suggested. “Spy stories, you know, with intrigue and international villains.…”
“That would be too much like life,” he sighed.
“For nurses, nurse novels may be too much like life,” I said.
“Nurses do not read the nurse novels. They are read by women who wish mistakenly to be a nurse. In any case, if the nurses wish to avoid the problems of their life, they must write spy stories, that is all. What is gravy for the goose will be misplaced on the gander, such is fate.” Paul believed in fate.
It was to Paul, then, that I owed my choice of career. Aunt Lou’s money was running out, much faster than I’d anticipated, though I was trying to be economical, and I didn’t like the thought of getting a job. Nobody likes that thought, really, they only do it because they have to. I could touch-type, but it seemed to me I could make money faster by typing at something of my own, and other people’s business letters are very boring. Also, there was nothing much for me to do on weekday evenings while Paul sat bashing away at his current book, Judith Morris, Arctic Expedition Nurse, chain-smoking Gauloises stuck in a short gold cigarette holder he kept clenched between his teeth, and drinking one glass of tawny port per evening. At such times, contempt for his readers and for himself hovered in the room like a cloud of smoke, and his temper after one of these sessions was foul but cold, like smog.
I asked Paul to get me some samples of historical romances from Columbine Books, his publisher, and I set to work. I joined the local library and took out a book on costume design through the ages. I made lists of words like “fichu” and “paletot” and “pelisse”; I spent whole afternoons in the costume room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, breathing in the smell of age and polished wood and the dry, sardonic odor of custodians, studying the glass cases and the collections of drawings. I thought if I could only get the clothes right, everything else would fall into line. And it did: the hero, a handsome, well-bred, slightly balding man, dressed in an immaculately tailored tweed cloak, like Sherlock Holmes’s, pursued the heroine, crushing his lips to hers in a hansom cab and rumpling her pelisse. The villain, equally well-bred and similarly clad, did just about the same thing, except that in addition he thrust his hand inside her fichu. The rival female had a lithe body like that of a jungle animal beneath her exquisitely stitched corset, and like all such women, she came to a bad end. I wasn’t as good at bad ends as I later became: I think she merely tripped on her paletot, going downstairs. But she deserved this, as she’d attempted to reduce the heroine to a life of shame by tying her up and leaving her in a brothel, under the supervision of a madam to whom I gave the features of Miss Flegg.
But I had aimed too high. My first effort came back with instructions to the effect that I could not use words like “fichu” and “paletot” and “pelisse” without explaining what they meant. I made the necessary revisions and received my first hundred pounds, with a request for more material. Material, they called it, as if it came by the yard.
I was quite thrilled when two copies of The Lord of Chesney Chase arrived in a brown-paper parcel, with a dark-haired woman in a plum-colored traveling cloak on the cover and my pen name in white lettering: Louise K. Delacourt. For of course I used Aunt Lou’s name; it was a kind of memorial to her. Several years later, when I’d switched to a North American publisher, I was asked for a photograph. It was for the files, they said, to be used for publicity; so I sent them the shot of Aunt Lou at the Ex, with me standing beside her. This picture was never used. The women who wrote my kind of book were supposed to look trim and healthy, with tastefully grayed hair. Unlike the readers, they had brisk shoulders and were successful. They weren’t supposed to squint into the sun, displaying both rows of teeth and holding a cone of spun sugar. The readers preferred not to think of their fairy godmothers, the producers of their delicate nightly masquerades, as overblown and slightly frowsy, with slip straps that showed and necklines that gaped, like Aunt Lou’s. Or my own.
Initially Paul encouraged me, partly because of the money. He liked the idea of having a mistress, but he couldn’t really afford to keep one. After the first five or six months, when I started earning more per book than he did, he even began to charge me rent, though having me sleeping in his library didn’t cost him any extra. I was grateful for his belief, not in my talent exactly, for he didn’t feel that writing this kind of book required any, but in my perseverance: I could think up plots almost as fast as he could, and I was a better typist, so I could equal him page for page on a good night. At first he was paternal and indulgent.
In some ways he reminded me of the man with the bouquet of daffodils who had exposed himself in that chivalrous and touching way on the wooden bridge when I was a young Brownie. Paul too had that air of well-meaning but misplaced gallantry; they were both, I thought, gentle and harmless beneath their eccentricities, asking only simple gratifications that didn’t impose too much on the partner or watcher. And both of them had rescued me, perhaps, though the identity of the daffodil man was still not clear to me.
I couldn’t tell about Paul’s identity either, for as time went on he began to change. Or possibly I merely learned more about him. For instance, he viewed the loss of my virginity as both totally his fault – thus making him responsible for me – and a fall from grace which disqualified me from ever being a wife, or his wife at any rate. He thought my lack of guilt was a sign of barbarism. Anyone from across the Atlantic Ocean was a kind of savage to him, and even the English were questionable, they were too far west. So he ended by being angry with me for my failure to cry, though I told him over and over that this wasn’t the sort of thing I cried about.
Then there were his views on the war. He seemed to think that the Jews were in some obscure metaphysical way responsible for it, and thus for the loss of his family chateau.
“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, outraged; he couldn’t mean it. “That’s like saying a rape victim is responsible for being raped, or a murder victim.…”
He drew imperturbably on his Gauloise. “This also is true,” he said. “They have brought it upon themselves.”
I thought about the revolver. I couldn’t ask him about it without revealing that I’d snooped in his room, and I knew by now he would find this unforgivable. I began to feel a little like Eva Braun in the bunker: what was I doing with this madman, how did I get into this thoroughly sealed place, and how could I get out? For Paul had an end-of-the-world fatalism: civilization for him had either already collapsed or was about to. He thought there would be another war, in fact he hoped there would; not that he thought it would solve or improve anything, but so that he himself might fight in it and distinguish himself by acts of bravery. He hadn’t resisted enough in the last one, he felt; he’d been too young to know that he should’ve stayed and perished in the forest with the rest of the slaughtered army. To have lived, to have survived, to have escaped was a kind of disgrace. But he didn’t picture war as tanks, missiles and bombs, he pictured it as himself on horseback, with a sabre, charging against impossible odds. “Women do not understand these things,” he’d say, clenching his teeth down on the end of his cigarette holder. “They believe that life is babies and sewing.”
“I can’t sew,” I said, but he would merely say, “Later you will sew. You are so young,” and go on to prophesy more doom.
I recited slogans of hope, in vain; he would only smile his twisted little smile and say, “You Americans are so naive, you have no history.” I’d given up trying to tell him I was not an American. “It is all the same thing, isn’t it?” he would say. “The lack of one kind of history is the same as the lack of another.”
Ultimately our differences were: I believed in true love, he believed in wives and mistresses; I believed in happy endings, he in cataclysmic ones; I thought I was in love with him, he was old and cynical enough to know I wasn’t. I had merely been deluded into this belief by my other belief, the one in true love. How could I be sleeping with this peculiar man, who was no Bell Telephone Mercury, without being in love with him? Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Because Paul knew I was not in love with him, because he thought of me as a mistress and of mistresses as unfaithful by nature, he began to have fits of jealousy. It was all right as long as I did nothing but loll around the flat, reading and typing out my Costume Gothics and going nowhere except with him. He didn’t even mind my trips to the Victoria and Albert; he didn’t notice them much, because I was always home before he was and I didn’t go there on the weekends. It was over the Portobello Road that we came to the parting of the ways. He himself introduced me to it, and it quickly became an obsession with me. I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen’s feet or midget hands, clocks that didn’t work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. I had never seen things like this before; here there was age, waves of it, and I pawed through it, swam in it, memorized it – a jade snuffbox, an enameled perfume bottle, piece after piece, exact and elaborate – to fix and make plausible the nebulous emotions of my costumed heroines, like diamonds on a sea of dough.
What amazed me was the sheer volume of objects, remnants of lives, and the way they circulated. The people died but their possessions did not, they went round and round as in a slow eddy. All of the things I saw and coveted had been seen and coveted previously, they had passed through several lives and were destined to pass through several more, becoming more worn but also more valuable, harder and more brilliant, as if they had absorbed their owners’ sufferings and fed on them. How difficult these objects are to dispose of, I thought; they lurk passively, like vampire sheep, waiting for someone to buy them. I myself could afford almost nothing.
After these excursions I would return to the flat exhausted, my energy drained, while back in their stalls the coral rose brooches, the cairngorm pins, the cameos with their ivory profiles would be glowing in the dusk, sated as fleas. No wonder Paul began to suspect I had a lover and was sneaking off to visit him. Once he followed me; he thought I didn’t see him, dodging in and out of the racks of used evening gowns and feather boas, like a comic private eye. It was beneath his dignity, of course, to actually accuse me of anything. Instead he threw tantrums because I wanted to go to the Portobello Road on Saturday, the good day, and he felt this day should be reserved for him. He began to attack my novels too, calling them cheap and frivolous, and it infuriated him when I agreed with him pleasantly. Of course they were cheap and frivolous, I said, but I had never claimed I was a serious writer. He took this as a dig at his own previous ambitions. Probably he would rather have found out I had a lover than discovered I didn’t. A lover would have been less humiliating.
Paul was beginning to frighten me. He would wait for me at the top of the stairs after my orgies in the Portobello Road, standing there like a newel post, not saying anything, and as I came up the steps he would fix me with a reproachful, vindictive stare. “I saw a wonderful Victorian jack-in-the-box today,” I would begin, but my voice would sound false, even to myself. I’d always found other people’s versions of reality very influential and I was beginning to think that maybe he was right, maybe I did have a secret lover. I certainly began to want one, for making love with Paul had begun to resemble a shark fight, he was no longer gentle, he was pinching and biting and coming into the library on weekdays. It would have been all right except for the baleful glances and the oppressive silences, and the revolver, which was making me anxious.
Also, he’d just announced that the Polish government had agreed to let his mother out of Poland. He had saved up for it and at last it would happen, it was easier to get the old ones out than the young ones, he said. But I didn’t want a Polish Countess living with us – where would she sleep? – discussing me in Polish and siding with Paul against me and ironing his boxer shorts, which I refused to do. He was devoted to his mother, which was tolerable only at a distance. But when I mentioned moving out, to give them more space, I said, he wouldn’t hear of it.