Free Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark Page B

mind?’
    I thought it safest to say, ‘What is a right mind? ‘He looked frightened. We were alone having coffee after lunch in the ladies’ sitting-room of the Bath Club which, because of a fire in its original premises, was housed within another club, I think the Conservative.
    ‘What is a right mind? Well, you have a right mind, Fleur, and everyone knows it. The point is that the Hallam Street set are saying … Don’t you think it’s time we all had it out with each other? One big row would be better than the way we’re going on.’
    I said that I didn’t care for the idea of one big row.
    Sir Eric waved his hand in mild greeting to a middle-aged couple who had just come in and who sat down on a sofa at the other end of the room. Other people presently joined them. Sir Eric waved and nodded across the room in his timid way as if making a side-gesture tot some sweet discourse with me about the London Philharmonic, the Cheltenham Gold Cup or even my own charms, instead of this depressing conversation about what was wrong with the Autobiographical Association. I longed for the power of the Evil Eye so that I could cast it on Eric Findlay in revenge for his taking me out to lunch and then assaulting me with his kinky complaints.
    ‘One big row,’ he said, his timid little eyes glinting. ‘Mrs Wilks is not in her right mind but you, Fleur, are in your right mind,’ he said, as if there was some question that I wasn’t.
    I felt some panic which, however, I knew I could control. I felt I should sit on quietly as one would in the sudden presence of a dangerous beast. The atmosphere of my Warrender Chase came back to me, but grotesquely, without its even-tempered tone. When I first started writing people used to say my novels were exaggerated. They never were exaggerated, merely aspects of realism. Sir Eric Findlay was real, sitting there on the sofa by my side complaining how Mrs Wilks had failed tot appreciate the latest part of his autobiography, his war record, and thus was out of her mind. All Mrs Wilks could think of, he said, was the foolish incident in his schooldays with another boy while thinking of an actress. ‘Mrs Wilks harps on it,’ said Eric.
    ‘You shouldn’t have revealed it. Those autobiographies are dangerous,’ I said.
    ‘Well, a lot of them were your doing, Fleur,’ he said.
    ‘Not the dangerous passages. Only the funny parts.’
    ‘Sir Quentin insists,’ he said, ‘on complete frankness. Are you leaving that sugar?’ He pointed to a tiny lump of sugar on the saucer of my coffee-cup. I said I didn’t want it. He put it in his pocket in a small envelope he kept for the purpose. ‘They say it will be off the ration in three months,’ he said in an excited whisper.

    Dottie said to me that evening, ‘I quite see Eric’s point of view. Mrs Wilks has an obsession about sex. I don’t believe she was raped by a Russian soldier before she escaped. It’s wishful thinking.’
    ‘It makes no difference to me what any of you did,’ I said. ‘I just can’t stand all the gossip, the canvassing, the lobbying, amongst the awful members.’
    ‘Sir Quentin insists on complete frankness and I think we should all be frank with each other,’ Dottie said.
    I looked at her, I know, as if she were a complete stranger.

    Maisie Young had found out where I lived. She had come to my room, one Saturday afternoon, only some days before I met Sir Eric Findlay at his club for lunch. She had come complaining too, as it turned out, although she at first protested she didn’t want to come in, she only wanted to leave me a book and she had kept the taxi waiting. We sent the taxi away.
    ‘Oh,’ said Maisie, ‘what a delightful little wee room, so compact.’ She herself came out of the best half of a house in Portman Square and enjoyed the rent of the other half. I think Maisie was rather stunned at the spacelessness of this room where I lived all of my present life, she was amazed that anyone could