Loitering With Intent Read Online Free PDF

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 consistent 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.