Loitering With Intent Read Free

honour, not that one would wish to were she in fact a lady, and as for stating the actual truth about one’s life which naturally involves living people, well, it is quite impossible. Do you know what we have done, we who have lived extraordinary—and I mean extra-ordinary—lives? Do you know what we have done about placing the facts on record for posterity?’
    I said no.
    ‘We have formed an Autobiographical Association. We have all started to write our memoirs, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we are lodging them for seventy years in a safe place until all the living people mentioned therein shall be living no longer.’
    He pointed to the handsome cabinet faintly lit by the sun filtering through the gathered muslin curtains. I longed to be outside walking in the park and chewing over Sir Quentin’s character in my mind before even finding out any more about him.
    ‘Documents of that sort should go into a bank vault,’ I said.
    ‘Good,’ said Sir Quentin in a bored way. ‘You are quite right. That is possibly the ultimate destination of our biographical reminiscences. But that is looking ahead. Now I have to tell you that my friends are largely unaccustomed to literary composition; I, who have a natural bent in that field, have taken on the direction of the endeavour. They are, of course, men and women of great distinction living full, very full, lives. One way and another these days of change and post-war. One can’t expect. Well, the thing is I’m helping them to write their memoirs which they haven’t time to do. We have friendly meetings, gatherings, get-togethers and so on. When we are better organized we shall meet at my property in Northumberland.’
    Those were his words and I enjoyed them. I thought them over as I walked home through the park. They had already become part of my memoirs.

    At first I supposed Sir Quentin was making a fortune out of the memoir business. The Association, as he called it, then comprised ten people. He gave me a bulky list of the members’ names with supporting biographical information so selective as to tell me, in fact, more about Sir Quentin than the people he described. I remember quite clearly my wonder and my joy at:

Major-General Sir George C. Beverley, Bt., C.B.E., D.S.O., formerly in that ‘crack’ regiment of the Blues and now a successful, a very successful businessman in the City and on the Continent. General Sir George is a cousin of that fascinating, that infinitely fascinating hostess, Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert, widow of the former chargé d’affaires in San Salvador, Sir Alfred Gilbert, K.C.M.G., C.B.E. (1919) whose portrait, executed by that famous, that illustrious, portrait painter Sir Ames Baldwin, K.B.E., hangs in the magnificent North Dining Room of Landers Place, Bedfordshire, one of the family properties of Sir Alfred’s mother, the late incomparable Comtesse Marie-Louise Torri-Gil, friend of H.M. King Zog of Albania and of Mrs Wilks who as a debutante in St Petersburg was a friend of Sir Q., the present writer, and daughter of a Captain of the Horse at the Court of the late Czar before her marriage to a British Officer, Lieutenant Wilks.

    I thought it a kind of poem, and all in a moment I saw Sir Quentin, a good thirty-five years my senior as he was, in the light of a solemn infant intently constructing his wooden toy castle with its moats and turrets; and again, I thought of this piece of art, the presentation of Major-General Sir George C. Beverley and all his etceteras, under the aspect of an infinitesimal particle of crystal, say sulphur, enlarged sixty times and photographed in colour so that it looked like an elaborate butterfly or an exotic sea flower. From this first entry alone on Sir Quentin’s list, I thought of numerous artistic analogies to his operations and I realized, all in that moment, how much religious energy he had put into it.
    ‘You should study that list,’ Sir Quentin said.
    The