The Muse Read online

  One of my jobs was to transcribe research notes for academic men I never saw, except for their nearly indecipherable handwriting, scribbling about bronze sculptures or sets of linocuts. I enjoyed this, but my principal duty revolved around a tray on my desk that would be filled with letters I was to type up and leave with Pamela downstairs. Most of the time they were fairly mundane, but every now and then I’d pick up a gem, a begging letter to some old millionaire or decrepit Lady Whatnot who was on their last legs. ‘My dear Sir Peter, it was such a pleasure to identify the Rembrandt you had in your attic back in ’57. Would you consider using the Skelton to help catalogue the rest of your wonderful collection?’ and so on. Letters to financiers and film moguls, informing them that a Matisse was floating around, or would they fancy a new room of the Skelton being named after them, as long as we could fill it with their artworks?

  They were mainly written by the director of the Skelton, a man called Edmund Reede. Pamela told me Reede was in his sixties and had a short fuse. In the war, he had something to do with recovering art confiscated by the Nazis, but she didn’t know any more. The name ‘Edmund Reede’ for me conjured up a quintessential, intimidating Englishness, Savile Rowers in Whitehall clubs; eat the steak, hunt the fox. Three-­piece suit, pomaded hair, great-­uncle Henry’s golden watch. I would see him round the corridor, and he would look surprised every time. It was as if I had walked in naked off the street. We studied men like him at school – protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.

  The Skelton was a bit like that world, the world I’d been taught that I wanted to be in – and just by typing the letters, I felt closer to it all, as if my help in the matter was invaluable, as if I’d been picked for a reason. And the best thing was; I was fast. So once I had finished their letters, I used a spare hour here or there to type my own work – starting over and over again, scrunching up pieces of paper and making sure to put them in my handbag rather than leaving them like evidence in the waste-­paper bin. Sometimes, I’d go home with my handbag brimming with balls of paper.

  I told Cynth how I’d forgotten the smell of the Dolcis stock cupboard. ‘It’s as if one week can kill five years,’ I said, determined and rhapsodic about my transformation. I told her about Pamela, and joked about the rigidity of her beehive. Cynth paused, frowning, for she was frying me an egg in our tiny flat, and the hob was unreliable. ‘I pleased for you, Delly,’ she said. ‘I pleased it going so well.’

  ON THE FRIDAY OF THE first week, Reede’s letters completed, I was struggling with a poem in a quiet half-­hour. Cynth had told me that the only thing she wanted as a wedding gift was ‘something written – seeing as you’re the only one who ever could.’ Touched but agonized, I stared at the Skelton’s typewriter, thinking how happy Sam and Cynth clearly made each other. It made me think about my own lack; the foot, but no glass slipper. It also made me realize how I had been struggling with my writing for months. I hated every word that came from me. I couldn’t let any of it breathe.

  A woman walked in as just as I lit upon a possible phrase. ‘Hallo, Miss Bastien,’ she said, and the idea melted away. ‘Getting on? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Marjorie Quick.’

  I stood, knocking the typewriter in my haste, and she laughed. ‘This isn’t the army, you know. Take a seat.’ My eye darted to the poem on the reel, and I felt sick to my stomach that she might walk round and see it.

  Marjorie Quick came towards me, hand outstretched, her gaze flicking to the typewriter. I took her hand, willing her to stay on the other side of the desk. She did, and I noticed the cigarette scent that clung to her, mingled with a musky, masculine perfume that I recognized from the letter she’d posted, and I would later learn was called Eau Sauvage.

  Marjorie Quick was petite, upright, dressed in a way that eclipsed Pamela’s efforts. Wide black slacks that billowed like a sailor’s as she walked. A pale-­pink silk blouse with a grey satin necktie loosely slung inside it. She looked like something out of Hollywood, with her short, silvering curls, her cheeks seemed carved from a fine honeyed wood. She could have been in her early fifties, I supposed, but looked unlike any fifty-­year-­old I’d ever met. Her jawline was sharp and her glamour hovered.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. I couldn’t stop staring at her.

  ‘Any bother?’ Quick seemed to feel the same, fixing her dark liquid irises on me, waiting for my answer. I noticed she looked rather flushed, a bead of perspiration on her forehead.

  ‘Bother?’ I repeated.

  ‘Good. What time is it?’ The clock was behind her, but she didn’t turn.

  ‘Nearly twelve-­thirty.’

  ‘So let us lunch.’

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  III

  She had her name engraved on a brass plate upon her door. I wondered how many women in London, in this year of our Lord 1967, had their own office. Working-­class women had menial jobs, or nursed in the NHS, or were factory or shop girls or typists like me, and it had been like that for decades. But there was a world of difference, an almost unnavigable journey, between that and having your name engraved on the door. Perhaps Marjorie Quick was a scion of the Skelton family, here in some honorary position.

  With a look of grim satisfaction, she opened the door, the nameplate glinting in the rays of sun through the window beyond. She ushered me inside. Her room was white and airy, with huge windows looking onto the square. The walls were bare of paintings, which I thought odd, being where we were. Three were covered in bookshelves and I spied mainly nineteenth-­ and early-­twentieth century novels, the surprise combination of Hopkins perching next to Pound, and a smattering of Roman history. They were all hardbacks, so I couldn’t see if the spines were bent.

  From her large desk, Quick grabbed a packet of cigarettes. I watched as she extracted one, hesitated, and then placed it delicately on her lips. I would become accustomed to her habit of speeding up her actions, only to slow them again, as if checking herself. Her name lived up to her, but whether it was her languorous or hasty side that was more natural was always hard to tell.

  ‘Would you like one?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Then I’ll go on alone.’

  Her lighter was one of those heavy, refillable silver varieties, to be left on a table rather than slipped in a pocket. It was the kind of thing you might see in a country house, a cross between a hand grenade and something up for auction at Christie’s. The Skelton had a lot of money, I reckoned, and Quick reflected it. Unspoken, but present, it was in the cut of her pink silk blouse, her brave trousers, her smoking paraphernalia. In her. I wondered again what exactly her role here was.

  ‘Gin?’ she said.

  I hesitated. I never drank much, and I certainly did not like the taste of spirits. The smell reminded me too much of the men in the Port of Spain clubhouses – the bubble of rum through the blood, working to a roar of squalid pain or euphoria heard upon the dust roads into town. But Quick unscrewed the cap of the gin from a table in the corner and poured some into two tumblers. She delved in an icebox with a pair of tongs and dropped two cubes in my glass, splashed it with tonic to the top, added a slice of lemon, and handed it to me.

  Sinking down into her chair as if she’d been standing for twenty days, Quick slugged back her own gin, picked up the telephone receiver and dialled a number. She sparked the lighter and a fat orange flame appeared. The end of her cigarette sizzled, tobacco leaf crisping into tendrils of blue smoke.

  ‘Hello, Harris? Yes, whatever it is today. But twice over. And a bottle
of the Sancerre. Two glasses. How long? Fine.’ I listened to the cadences of her voice; clipped and husky, it didn’t sound entirely English, even though it had hints enough inside it of a draughty boarding school.

  She placed the receiver back down, and flicked her cigarette into a giant marble ashtray. ‘The restaurant next door,’ she said. ‘I find it impossible to sit inside it.’

  I sat down opposite her, cradling my glass, thinking of the sandwich Cynth had made for me. Its edges would be curling in the heat of my desk drawer.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘A new job.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  Quick placed her glass on the desk. ‘First things, Miss Bastien. Never call me “madam”. Nor am I “miss”. I like to be known as Quick.’ She smiled, looking rueful. ‘Your name is French?’

  ‘Yes, I believe so.’

  ‘You speak French?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘To have and to be confuse me greatly. I thought ­people spoke French in Trinidad?’

  I hesitated. ‘Only a few of our forebears were indoors, speaking with the French,’ I said.

  Her eyes widened – with amusement, offence? It was impossible to tell. I dreaded that my history lesson was too much, too arch, and I was going to fail my trial period. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How interesting.’ She took another slug of gin. ‘There’s not much to do here at the moment,’ she went on, ‘but I expect Mr Reede is keeping you busy with his endless flow of correspondence. I’m worried you’ll be bored.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure I won’t be.’ I thought of Dolcis, of how they overworked me and Cynth; the way the husbands watched our buttocks whilst their wives slipped on their heels. ‘I’m just so pleased to be here.’

  ‘There’s probably more life to be seen in one day at Dolcis Shoes than a week at the Skelton. Did you enjoy it?’ she asked. ‘Touching all those women’s feet?’

  The question was vaguely shocking, rimed with a sexual sharpness that stung me, virginal as I was. But I would not be cowed. ‘In all honesty,’ I replied, ‘with thirty pairs a day, it was appalling.’

  She threw back her head and laughed. ‘All the cheeses of France!’

  Her laughter was infectious and I giggled too. It was a ludicrous thing to say, but it melted the tension inside me. ‘Some ­people don’t mind it,’ I said, thinking of Cynth, how I was abasing her for this exchange, this strange game whose rules I didn’t know. ‘It takes a skill.’

  ‘I dare say. But so many anonymous toes.’ She shuddered. ‘We have all these beautiful portraits at the Skelton, but we’re really just gangling arms, gurgling intestines. The heat inside the liver.’ She looked at me hard, and took another drag. ‘I’ve had a lot longer than you to come to that conclusion, Miss Bastien. Toes, the crooks of elbows. Enjoy dignity in them while you can.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said, unsettled once again. There was a restlessness to her; it felt as if she was putting on a performance for me, and I didn’t know why.

  There was a knock on the door. Quick told them to enter and our lunch arrived on a trolley, pushed by a very small, elderly porter who only had one arm. A basket of rolls, two flat fishes, a buoyant-­looking salad, a bottle of wine in a cooler, and something else hidden under a steel dome. The porter glanced at me, startled like a rabbit. His rheumy eyes slid back to Quick.

  ‘That’ll be all, Harris. Thank you,’ Quick said.

  ‘We haven’t seen you all week, miss,’ he replied.

  ‘Ah – annual leave.’

  ‘Somewhere nice?’

  ‘No.’ Quick looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘Just a home stay.’

  The porter changed his attention to me. ‘Bit different to the last one,’ he said, cocking his head. ‘Does Mr Reede know you’ve got a wog in?’

  ‘That will be everything, Harris,’ said Quick, in a tight voice. He cast her a disgruntled look and left the trolley, staring at me as he backed out of the door.

  ‘Harris,’ Quick said when he’d gone, as if to say his name was explanation enough. ‘The arm got lost in Passchendaele. He refuses to retire and no one has the heart to do it.’ The porter’s word clung to the air. Quick stood up and handed me a plate off the trolley.

  ‘Just use the desk to rest it, if you don’t mind.’ She carried her own plate round to her side of the desk. She had a slim little back, her shoulder blades slightly poking through the blouse like a pair of fins. The wine had been uncorked and she poured us both a glass.

  ‘It’s very good. Not like the stuff we use for the public.’ The glug of it was loud and lush and transgressive, like she was pouring me elixir in full daylight. ‘Cheers,’ Quick said briskly, raising her glass. ‘I hope you like lemon sole.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. I’d never eaten it before.

  ‘So. What did your parents say when you told them you were working here?’

  ‘My parents?’

  ‘Were they proud?’

  I wiggled my toes in the confines of their shoes. ‘My father’s dead.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘My mother is still in Port of Spain. I’m an only child. She might not even have got my letter yet.’

  ‘Ah. That must be hard for you both.’

  I thought of my mother – her belief in England, a place she would never see; and I thought of my father, recruited into the RAF, gone down over Germany in a ball of flame. When I was fifteen, the Prime Minister of Tobago had declared that the future of the islands’ children lay in their schoolbags. My mother, desperate for me not to live a life like hers and Dad’s, pushed me to better myself – but for what, when all the land post-­independence was being sold to foreign companies who invested the profits back into their own countries? What were we youngsters supposed to do, when we reached the bottom of those schoolbags and found nothing there – just a seam, split from the weight of our books? We had to leave.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Bastien?’ said Quick.

  ‘I came here with my friend, Cynth,’ I said, not wishing to dwell on Port of Spain, the death board with Dad’s name on it, his empty plot in Lapeyrouse Cemetery that Mama still kept vacant, the Catholic nuns who’d taught me as I grew up in my grief. ‘Cynthia’s engaged,’ I said. ‘She’s getting married.’

  ‘Ah.’ Quick picked up her knife and began to lift a small segment of the sole, and I had the strange feeling of saying too much without having said anything at all. ‘When?’

  ‘In two weeks. I’m maid of honour.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, you’ll be alone, won’t you? She’ll be living with her husband.’

  Quick always insisted on skirting her own truths whilst getting to the core of yours. She told me nothing about the Skelton, focusing only on finding out about me, and had soon skewered my darkest fear. The fact was, Cynth’s imminent departure from our little flat had hung between me and my oldest friend like a silent question, heavy with foreboding. We both knew she would leave to live with Samuel, but I couldn’t imagine rooming with anybody else, so I didn’t talk about it, and neither did she. I boasted about my new job and she fretted over wedding invitations and made me sandwiches I overlooked. The salary from the Skelton would cover the second room she was going to vacate, and this was my only comfort.

  ‘I enjoy my own company,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘It’ll be nice to have some space.’

  Quick reached for another cigarette, but then seemed to change her mind. If you were alone, I thought, you’d have already smoked three more. Her eyes rested briefly on my face as she lifted the steel dome to reveal a lemon meringue. ‘Do eat something, Miss Bastien,’ she said. ‘All this food.’

  Whilst I ate my slice of meringue, Quick didn’t touch a thing. She seemed born to all this, to the smoking and the telephone orders, the tangential observations. I imagined her in her twenties, raffing r
ound London with a glamorous, careless set, a cat amongst the Blitz. I was piecing her together from Mitford and Waugh, dousing her with a coat of my newly discovered Muriel Spark. It was perhaps a vanity, instilled in me from the education I’d received, which was little different from the model used in English public schools, with its Latin and Greek and boys playing cricket – but I had yearned for eccentric, confident ­people to enhance my life; I thought I deserved them, the sort of ­people you found only in novels. Quick hardly had to do anything, I was so sprung for it, so willing. Starved of my past life, I began to concoct a present fantasy.

  ‘Your application interested me greatly,’ she said. ‘You write very well. Very well. At your university, you seem to have been one of the brightest students. I take it you think you’re too good to be a secretary.’

  The fear ran through me. Did this mean she was letting me go, that I hadn’t passed the trial? ‘I’m very grateful to be here,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place to work.’

  She made a face at these blandishments and I wondered what it was she wanted. I reached for a bread roll and rested it in my palm. It was the weight and size of a small marsupial and I had an instinct to stroke it. Feeling her eyes upon me, I plunged my thumb into the crust instead.

  ‘And what sort of things do you like to write?’

  I thought of the piece of paper on the typewriter in the other room. ‘Poems, mainly. I’d like to write a novel one day. I’m still waiting for a good story.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t wait too long.’ I was quite relieved she gave me this instruction, because usually whenever I told ­people I wanted to write, they would tell me how their own lives would make the perfect subject. ‘I mean it,’ said Quick. ‘You mustn’t hang around. You never know what’s going to pounce on you.’