Loitering With Intent Read Free Page A

telephone rang and the door of the study was thrown open, both at the same time. Sir Quentin lifted the receiver and said ‘Hallo’ while his eyes turned to the door in alarm. In tottered a tall, thin and extremely aged woman with a glittering appearance, largely conveyed by her many strings of pearls on a black dress and her bright silver hair; her eyes were deeply sunk in their sockets and rather wild. Sir Quentin was meantime agitating into the phone: ‘Oh, Clotilde, my dear, what a pleasure—just one moment, Clotilde, I have a disturbance…’ The old woman advanced, her face cracked with make-up, with a scarlet gash of a smile. ‘Who’s this girl?’ she said, meaning me.
    Quentin had placed his hand over the receiver. ‘Please,’ he said in an anguished hush, fluttering his other hand, ‘I am talking on the telephone to the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret.’
    The old woman shrieked. I supposed she was laughing but it was difficult to tell. ‘I know who she is. You think I’m ga-ga, don’t you?’ She turned to me. ‘He think I’m ga-ga,’ she said. I noticed her fingernails, overgrown, so that they curled over the tips like talons; they were painted dark red. ‘I’m not ga-ga,’ she said.
    ‘Mummy!’ said old Sir Quentin.
    ‘What a snob he is,’ screamed the mother.
    Beryl Tims turned up just then and grimly promoted the old lady’s withdrawal; Beryl glared at me as she left. Sir Quentin resumed his conversation on the phone with many apologies.

    His snobbery was immense. But there was a sense in which he was far too democratic for the likes of me. He sincerely believed that talent, although not equally distributed by nature, could be later conferred by a title or acquired by inherited rank. As for the memoirs they could be written, invented, by any number of ghost writers. I suspect he really believed that the Wedgwood cup from which he daintily sipped his tea derived its value from the fact that the social system had recognized the Wedgwood family, not from the china that they had exerted themselves to make.
    By the end of the first week I tad been let into the secrets of the locked cabinet in Sir Quentin’s study. It held ten unfinished manuscripts, the products of the members of the Autobiographical Association.
    ‘These works when completed,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘will be both valuable to the historian of the future and will set the Thames on fire. You should easily be able to rectify any lack or lapse in form, syntax, style, characterization, invention, local colour, description, dialogue, construction and other trivialities. You are to typewrite these documents under conditions of extreme secrecy, and if you succeed in giving satisfaction you may later sit in at some of our sessions and take notes.’

    His aged Mummy came and went from his study whenever she could slip away from Beryl Tims. I looked forward to her interruptions as she came waving her red talons and croaking that Sir Quentin was a snob.
    At first I suspected strongly that Sir Quentin himself was a social fake. But as it turned out he was all he claimed to be by way of having been to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; he was a member of three clubs of which I only recall White’s and the Bath, he was moreover a baronet and his refreshing Mummy was the daughter of an earl. I was right but only in part, when I accounted to myself for his snobbery, that he had decided to make a profitable profession out of these facts themselves. And indeed it crossed my mind during that first week how easily he could turn his locked-up secrets to blackmail. It was much later that I found that this was precisely what he was doing; only it wasn’t money he was interested in.
    Going home at six o’clock in the golden dusk of that lovely autumn, I would walk to Oxford Street, take a bus to speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park, then cross the park to Queen’s Gate. I was fascinated by the strangeness of the job. I made no notes at all, but most