Free Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark Page A

of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page. If I had conceived Warrender Chases’s motives as a psychological study I would have said so. But I didn’t go in for motives, I never have.
    I covered the pages, propping them on the underside of a tray, to finish Warrender Chase on my sick-bed that winter, even when my ‘flu had turned bronchial and touched on pleurisy. I was too hoarse to read it to Dottie when she came to see me. But when she spoke of Sir Quentin and said, ‘Beryl Tims is in love with him,’ I sat up in my fever and said, ‘My God!’ The idea that anyone could be in love with Quentin Oliver was beyond me.

Chapter Five

    I noticed the deterioration in the members of the Autobiographical Association precisely at the end of January 1950, a week after I had finished the book. I felt low from my ‘flu but cheerful that my work was finished and behind me. I had no great hopes of success with Warrender Chase but already I had plans for a better book. Solly had found me another publisher to replace the one whose contract he had so despised. This publisher, an elderly man, was called Revisson Doe. He had a round, bald head of the shiny type I always wanted to stroke if I sat behind it in church or at the theatre. He said he thought Warrender Chase ‘quite evil, especially in its moments of levity’, and that ‘the young these days are spiritually sick’, but he supposed his firm could carry it at a loss in the hope of better books to come. He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn’t such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm, Park and Revisson Doe, had a printing press on which they produced ‘the usual form of contract’ to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author. But Revisson Doe commended himself to me by his entertaining reminiscences of his youth, when he was an office-boy on a literary weekly and had been sent out to Holborn Underground to meet W. B. Yeats: ‘A figure in a dark cape. I said, “Are you the poet Mr Yeats?” He stopped, raised his hand high and said, “I yam.”‘
    But these matters were of the past and I had said a temporary good-bye to Revisson Doe on signature of the contract. Warrender Chase was to be published some time in June, and I only had to wait for the proofs. At the end of January when I went back to my work at Sir Quentin’s I had almost obliterated the book from my thoughts.
    The proofs came in March, and when I came face to face with my Warrender Chase again I was so far estranged from it that I couldn’t bring myself to look through the proofs for typographical errors. Instead I went with Solly one afternoon to St John’s Wood to see our friends Theo and Audrey, a married couple who had both published their first novels and who consequently enjoyed a little more respect, in that very hierarchical literary world, than did my unpublished friends whom I used to meet at poetry readings at the Ethical Church Hall. Theo and Audrey had agreed to read my proofs for me. I exhorted them to make no changes but only to look for spelling errors.
    I handed over my proofs.
    These were kind people. ‘You look haunted,’ said Theo. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
    ‘She is haunted,’ said Solly.
    ‘I am haunted,’ I said, but I wouldn’t explain any further. Solly said, ‘Her job’s getting her down’, and left it at that.
    Audrey made me up a package of buns and sandwiches left over from tea, to take home.

    Since the end of January and for the past two months I had come to feel that the members of Sir Quentin’s group resembled more and more the bombed-out buildings that still messed up the London street-scene. These ruins were getting worse, month by month, and so were the Autobiographical people.
    Dottie couldn’t see it.
    Sir Eric Findlay said to me, ‘Do you really think Mrs Wilks is in her right