Loitering With Intent Read Online Free PDF Page A

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