Free Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

and paper or before a typewriter. I enjoyed myself with Warrender’s mother, Prudence, and her sepulchral sayings: and I made her hand over the documents to the American scholar, Proudie, whom she thought so comical. I did it scene by scene: Marjorie’s obvious release from some terrible anxiety after Warrender’s death and the consequent disapproval of her husband, Roland, with his little round face and his adoration of his dead uncle; then came the discovery of those letters and those notes left by Warrender Chase, pieced together throughout the book, which finally show with certainty what I had prepared the reader slowly to suspect. Warrender Chase was privately a sado-puritan who for a kind of hobby had gathered together a group of people specially selected for their weakness and folly, and in whom he carefully planted and nourished a sense of terrible and unreal guilt. As I wrote in the book, ‘Warrender’s private prayer-meetings were of course known about, but only to the extent that they were considered too delicate a matter to be publicly discussed. Warrender had cultivated such a lofty myth of himself that nobody could pry into his life for fear of appearing vulgar.’ Well, he was supposed to be a mystic, known to be a pillar of the High Church of England; he made speeches at the universities, wrote letters to The Times. God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.
    I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper. I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day. I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table. One of them said, ‘There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.’
    It was all I needed. That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter. All the rest sprang from that phrase.
    But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma. It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender’s war record so convincing and full when I had said so little—one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it —but since then I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.
    I never described, in my book, what Warrender’s motives were. I simply showed the effect of his words, his hints. The real dichotomy in his character was in his public, formal High Churchism, and his private sectarian style. In the prayer-meetings he was a Biblical fundamentalist, to the effect, for instance, that he induced one of his sect to give up his good job in the War Office (as the Ministry of Defence was then called), to sell all his goods to feed the poor, and finally to die on a park bench one smoggy November night. This was greatly to Warrender’s satisfaction. But he himself, I made quite clear, understood Christianity in a far more evolved and practical light. ‘Induced’ is perhaps not the word. He goaded with the Word of God and terrorized. I showed how four women among his prayer-set were his greatest victims, for he was a deep woman-hater. One woman committed suicide, unable to stand the impressions of her own guilt that he made upon her and convinced that she had no friends; two others went mad, and this included his housekeeper Charlotte, that English Rose who was enthralled by him. His nephew’s wife, Marjorie, was on the point of mental crash when the car crash killed Warrender. All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew. How do I know? Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds