Chapter 3

Gwendolen Chawcer's home in St. Blaise Avenue had been built in 1860 by her grandfather, her father's father. Notting Hill was countrified then, with lots of open spaces and new buildings, and was supposed to be a healthy place to live. The Westway was not to be thought of for another hundred years, the first section of the London Underground, the Metropolitan Railway from Baker Street to Hammersmith, would be built in three years' time, but the site of the street later called Rillington Place was open land. Gwendolen's father, the professor, was born in St. Blaise House in the nineties of that century and she herself in the twenties of the next one.

The neighborhood went down and down. Because it was cheap, immigrants moved in in the fifties and lived in rundown North Kensington and Kensal Town, in Powis Square and Golborne Road, and it was a man from the Caribbean who found the first body in the Christie case when taking down a wall in the flat he had moved into. Hippies and flower people lived up there in the next two decades. Ladbroke Grove was so familiar a part of their lives that they called it affectionately " the Grove. " In their rented rooms and flats they grew cannabis in cupboards with ultraviolet light inside. They dressed in cheesecloth and the concept of the Global Village was born.

Miss Chawcer knew nothing of this. It flowed over her. She was born in St. Blaise House, had no brothers or sisters and was educated at home by Professor Chawcer, who had a chair of philology at London University. When she was a little over thirty her mother died. From the first the professor had been against her taking any sort of job, and what the professor was against invariably didn't happen, just as what he was in favor of did. Someone had to look after him. The maid had left to get married and Gwendolen was a natural to take her place.

It was a strange life she led but a safe one, as any life must be that is without fear or hope or passion or love or change or anxiety about money. The house was very large, on three floors, innumerable rooms opening out of square hallways or long passages, with a great grand staircase consisting of four flights. When it seemed certain Gwendolen would never marry, her father had three rooms on the top floor converted into a selfcontained flat for her, with its own hallway, two rooms, and akitchen. The lack of a bathroom had nothing to do with her disinclination to move in. " What was the point of being up there when her father was always down in the drawing room and always, it seemed, hungry for his meals or thirsty for a cup of tea? Her unwillingness to go up to the top floor started at that point. She only went up there if she had lost something and had exhausted all other places where it might be.

Nothing had been painted in the rest of the house and no other rooms had been modernized. Electricity had been installed, but not everywhere, and the place had been rewired in the eighties because the existing wiring was dangerous. But where the old cables had been taken out and the new ones inserted, the walls had been plastered up over the holes but no redecoration had been done. Gwendolen said herself she wasn't much of a cleaner. Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to. When she shopped for food, she kept to the old shops as long as she could, and on the departure of the grocer and the butcher and the fishmonger, she went to the new supermarkets without registering that the change had affected her. She liked her food well enough and had made few changes to her diet since she was a young girl, except that with no one to cook for her she barely ate hot meals.

Every afternoon, after lunch, she lay down and rested, reading herself to sleep. She had a radio but no television. The house was full of books, learned works and ancient novels, old bound copies of the National Geographic and Punch, encyclopediaslong obsolete, dictionaries published in 1906, such collections as The Bedside Esquire and The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries. She had read most of them and some she had reread. She had acquaintances she had met through the St. Blaise and Latimer Residents' Association, and they called themselves her friends. Such relationships are difficult for an only child who has never been to school. She had been away on holidays with the professor, even to foreign countries, and thanks to him she spoke good French and Italian, though with no chance of using either except for reading Montaigne and D'Annunzio, but she had never had a boyfriend. While she had visited the theater and the cinema, she had never been to a smart restaurant or a club or a dance or a party. She sometimes said to herself that, like Wordsworth's Lucy, " she dwelt among the untrodden ways, " but it was said rather with relief than unhappiness.

The professor lived on into extreme old age, finally dying at the age of ninety‑ four. For the past few years of his life he had been incontinent and unable to walk, but his brain remained powerful and his demands undiminished. With the occasional assistance of a district nurse, even more occasionally that of a paid carer, Gwendolen looked after him. She never complained. She never showed signs of weariness. She changed his incontinence pads and stripped his bed, thinking only while she did so of getting through it as fast as possible so that she could get back to her book. His meals were brought and the tray later removed in the same spirit. He had brought her up apparently with no other purpose than that she should housekeepf or him while he was middle‑ aged, care for him when he was old, and read to keep herself out of mischief.

There had been moments in his life when he had looked at her with a cool unbiased eye and had acknowledged to himself that she was good‑ looking. He had never seen any other reason for a man to fall in love and marry, or at least wish to marry, than that the woman he chose was beautiful. Intellect, wit, charm, kindliness, a particular talent or warmth of heart, none of these played any part in his choice nor, as far as he knew, in the choice made by other intelligent men. He had married a woman for her looks alone and when he saw those looks in his daughter he became apprehensive. A man might see them too and take her away from him. None did. How could such a man have met her when he invited no one to the house except the doctor, and she went nowhere without her father's being aware of it and watching her with an eagle eye?

But at last he died. He left her comfortably off and he left her the house, now in the eighties a dilapidated mansion half buried among new mewses and closes, small factories, local authority housing, corner shops, debased terraces, and streetwidening schemes. She was at that time a tall thin woman of sixty‑ six, whose belle epoque profile was growing nutcracker like, her fine Grecian nose pointing markedly toward a jutting chin. Her skin, which had been very fine and white with a delicate flush on the high cheekbones, was a mass of wrinkles. Such skin is sometimes compared to the peel of an apple that has been left lying too long in a warm room. Her blue eyes hadfaded to pastel gray and her once‑ fair hair, though still copious, was quite white.

The two elderly women who called themselves her friends, who had red fingernails and tinted hair and dressed in an approximation of current fashion, sometimes said that Miss Chawcer was Victorian in her clothes. This showed only how much they had forgotten of their own youth, for some of Gwendolen's wardrobe could have been placed in 1936 and some in 1953. Many of her coats and dresses were of these vintages and would have fetched a fortune in the shops of Notting Hill Gate where such things were much prized, like the 1953 clothes she had bought for Dr. Reeves. But he went away and married someone else. They had been good in their day and were so carefully looked after that they never wore out. Gwendolen Chawcer was a living anachronism.

She had cared for the house less well. To do her justice, she had determined a year or two after the professor died that it should be thoroughly redecorated and even in places refitted. But she was always rather slow in making decisions and by thet ime she reached the point of looking for a builder, she found she was unable to afford it. Because she had never paid National Insurance and no one had ever made contributions for her, the pension she received was very small. The money her father had left paid annually a diminishing return.

One of her friends, Olive Fordyce, suggested she take a tenant for part of the top floor. At first Gwendolen was appalled but after a time she gradually came around to the idea, but she would never have taken any action herself. It was Mrs. Fordyce who found Michael Cellini's advertisement in the Evening Standard, who arranged an interview and who sent him round to St. Blaise House.

Gwendolen, the Italian speaker, always addressed him as Mr. Chellini but he, the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war, had always pronounced it Sellini. She refused to change: she knew what was correct and what was not if he didn't. He would have preferred that they should be Mix and Gwen, as he lived in a world in which everyone was on first‑ name terms, and he had suggested it.

" I think not, Mr. Cellini, " was all she had said.

It would probably have killed her to be called by her given name, and as for Gwen, only Olive Fordyce, much to Gwendolen's distaste, used that diminutive. She called him, not her tenant, or even " the man who rents the flat, " but her lodger. " When he mentioned her, which was seldom, he called her " the old bat who owns the place" but on the whole they got on well, largely because the house was so big and they rarely met. Of course, it was early days. He had been there only a fortnight.

At one of their very occasional meetings he had told her he, was an engineer. To Miss Chawcer an engineer was a man who built dams and bridges in distant lands, but Mr. Cellini explained that his job was servicing workout equipment. She had to ask him what that meant and, not being very articulate, he was obliged to tell her she could view similar machines in the sports department of any large London store. The only London store she ever went to was Harrods and when next there she made her way to view the exercise equipment. She entered a world she didn't understand. She could see no motive for setting foot on any of these devices and scarcely believed what Cellini had told her. Could he have been, to use a rare exampleof the professor's inverted‑ commas‑ surrounded slang, " pulling her leg"?

Every so often, but not very often, Gwendolen went around the house with a feather duster and a carpet sweeper. She pushed this implement halfheartedly and never emptied its dust container. The vacuum cleaner, bought in 1951, had broken down twenty years before and never been repaired. It sat in the basement among old rolls of carpet, the leaf from a dining table, flattened cardboard boxes, a gramophone from the thirties, a stringless violin of unknown provenance, and a basket off the bicycle the professor had once used to ride to Bloomsbury and back. The carpet sweeper deposited dirt as regularly as it picked it up. By the time she reached her own bedroom, dragging the sweeper up the stairs behind her, Gwendolen had grown bored with the whole thing and wanted to get back to whatever she happened to be reading, Balzac all over again or Trollope. She couldn't be bothered to take the carpet sweeper back downstairs so she left it in a corner of her bedroom with the dirty duster draped over its handle; sometimes it would remain there for weeks.

Later that day, at about four, she was expecting Olive Fordyce and her niece for tea. The niece she had never met, but Olive said it would be cruel never to let her see where Gwendolen lived, she was " absolutely mad about" old houses. Just to spend an hour in St. Blaise House would make her ecstatic. Gwendolen wasn't doing anything special, apart from rereading LePere Goriot. She'd go out in a minute and buy a swiss roll from the Indian shop on the corner and maybe a packet of custard creams.

The days when that wouldn't have been good enough were long gone. Years had passed since she had baked or cooked anything more than, say, a scrambled egg, but once every cake eaten in this house, every pie and flapjack and eclair, had been made by her. She particularly remembered a certain swiss roll, the pale creamy‑ yellow sponge, the raspberry jam, the subtle dusting of powdered sugar. The professor wouldn't tolerate bought cakes. And tea was the favorite meal of all three of them. Tea was what you asked people to partake of if you asked them at all. When Mrs. Chawcer was so ill, was slowly and painfully dying, her doctor on his regular visits was always asked to stay to tea. Her mother upstairs in bed and the professor giving a lecture somewhere, Gwendolen found herself alone with Dr. Reeves.

Falling in love with him and he with her, she convinced herself, were the most important events of her life. He was younger than she was but not much, not enough, Gwendolen thought, for her mother to put him beyond the pale on grounds of age. Mrs. Chawcer disapproved of marriages in which the man was more than two years younger than the woman. In appearance Dr. Reeves was boyish with dark curly hair, dark but fiery eyes and an enthusiastic expression. Though thin, he ate enormously of Gwendolen's scones with Cornish cream and homemade strawberry jam, Dundee cake and flapjacks, while she picked delicately at a Marie biscuit. Men didn't like seeing a girl guzzle, Mrs. Chawcer said‑ had almost stopped saying now her daughter was over thirty. Before tea, between mouthfuls and afterward, Dr. Reeves talked. About his profession and his ambitions, about the place in which they lived, the Korean War, the Iron Curtain, and the changing times. Gwendolen talked about these things too, as she had never talked to anyone before, and sometimes about hoping to see more of life, making friends, traveling, seeing the world. And always they talked about her mother dying, how it wouldn't be long, and what would happen afterward.

Doctors' handwriting is notoriously unreadable. Gwendolen scrutinized the prescriptions he wrote for Mrs. Chawcer, trying to decipher his first name. At first she thought it was Jonathan, then Barnabas. The nearest she got was Swithun. Cunningly, she turned the conversation on to names and how important or unimportant they were to their possessors. She liked hers, so long as no one called her Gwen. No one? Who were these people who might inadvertently create for her a diminutive? Her parents were the only ones who didn't call her Miss Chawcer. She said none of this to Dr. Reeves but listenedavidly for his contribution.

Out it came. " Stephen's the sort of name that's always allright to have. Fashionable at the moment. For the first time, actually. So, one day, maybe, folks will guess I'm thirty years younger than I am. "

He always called people " folks. " And he said " guess" the American way, meaning " think. " Gwendolen loved these idiosyncrasies. She was delighted to find out his name. Sometimes, in the solitude of her bedroom, she mouthed to herself interesting combinations: Gwendolen Reeves, Mrs. Stephen Reeves, G. M. Reeves. If she were American she could call herself Gwendolen Chawcer Reeves; if from parts of Europe, Mrs. Doctor Stephen Reeves. To use the servants' word, he was courting her. She was sure of that. What would be the next step? An invitation out somewhere, her mother would probably say. " Wil lyou come with me to the theater, Miss Chawcer? Do you ever go to the pictures, Miss Chawcer? May I call you Gwendolen?

Her mother no longer said anything. She was comatose with morphine. Stephen Reeves came regularly and every time he had tea with Gwendolen. One afternoon, across the cakestand, he called her Gwendolen and asked her to call him Stephen. The professor usually came home to keep an eye on his daughter as they were finishing their portions of Victoria sponge, and Gwendolen noticed that Dr. Reeves reverted to Miss Chawcer when her father was present.

She sighed a little. That was half a century ago and now it wasn't Dr. Reeves but Olive and her niece who were expected for tea. Gwendolen hadn't invited them for this day, shewouldn't have dreamt of it. They had asked themselves. If she hadn't been tired at the time and even more tired of Olive's company she would have said no. Wishing she had, she went up to the bedroom that had once been her mother's, where in fact her mother had died, but not the one where she had tried out those name combinations, and put on a blue velvet dress with a lace insert at the neckline, once but no longer called a modesty vest. She added pearls and a brooch in the shape of a phoenix rising from the ashes and put her mother's engagement ring on her right hand. She wore it every day and at night put it in the jewel box of silver and chased mirror glass, which had also been her mother's.

The niece didn't come. Olive brought her dog instead, a small white poodle with ballet dancer's feet. Gwendolen was annoyed but not much surprised. She had done this before. The dog had a toy with it like a child, only this plaything was avery life like white plastic bone. Olive ate two slices of the swiss roll and a great many biscuits and talked about her niece's daughter while Gwendolen thought what a good thing it was the niece hadn't come or there would have been two of them talking about this paragon, her achievements, her wealth, her lovely home, and her devotion to her parents. As it was, her day was spoiled. She should have been alone, to think about Stephen, to remember‑ and perhaps to plan?

Olive was wearing a trouser suit in bright emerald green and a lot of mock‑ gold jewelry. Kitsch, Gwendolen called it to herself. Olive was too fat and too old to wear trousers or anything in that color. She was proud of her long fingernails and had lacquered them the same scarlet as her lipstick. Gwendolen stared at lips and nails with the critical and mocking eye of a young girl. She often wondered why she had friends when she rather disliked them and didn't want their company.

" When my great‑ niece was fourteen she was already five feet ten inches tall, " said Olive. " My husband was alive then. 'If you grow any more, ' he said to her, 'you'll never find a boyfriend. The boys won't go out with a girl taller than them. ' And what do you think happened? When she was seventeen and over six feet she met this stockbroker. He'd wanted to be an actor but they wouldn't have him because he was six feet six, far too tall for the theater, so he went into stockbroking and made a packet. The two of them were quite an item. He wanted to marry her but she had her career to think of. "

" How interesting, " said Gwendolen, thinking of Dr. Reeves who had once said she was a nice girl and he was awfully fond of her.

" Girls don't have to get married these days like we did. " She seemed to have forgotten Gwendolen's single status and went on blithely, " They don't feel they're left on the shelf. There's no status to marriage anymore. I know it's a bold thing to say but if I was young again, I wouldn't get married. Would you? "

" I never did, " said Gwendolen austerely.

" No, that's true, " Olive said as if Gwendolen might have been in some doubt about it. " Maybe you did the right thing all along. "

But I would have married Stephen Reeves if he'd asked me, Gwendolen thought after Olive had gone and she was clearing up the tea things. We would have been happy, I would have made him happy, and I'd have got away from Papa. But he had never asked her. Once he had said he was fond of her, Papa seemed to have made a point of being there, though he could not have overheard. When her mother was dead Stephen signed the death certificate and said that if they wanted Mrs. Chawcer cremated they would need a second doctor's signature, so he'd ask his partner to come round.

He didn't say he'd enjoyed all those teas they'd had together or that he'd miss them or her. Therefore she knew he'd comeback. Probably there was some rule in medical etiquette that forbade a general practitioner asking the relatives of a patient to go out with him. He was planning on coming back, waiting till after the funeral. Or perhaps he meant to come to the funeral. Gwendolen went through several series of agony because she had omitted to ask him to the funeral. That too might be in the medical etiquette rule book. She couldn't ask her father. They were both supposed to be grieving too much to ask each other anything like that.

Dr. Reeves didn't come to the funeral. It was at St. Mark's, and apart from Gwendolen and her father, only three other people were there: an old cousin of Mrs. Chawcer's, their current maid, who came because she was religious, and the old man next door in St. Blaise Avenue. Since he hadn't been at thefuneral, Gwendolen was sure Stephen Reeves would just turn up at the house one day. He was leaving it for a little while outof respect for the dead and the mourners. During that week she spent more time, trouble, and money on her appearance than she had ever done before or since. She had her hair cut and set, she bought two new dresses, one gray and one dark blue, she experimented with makeup. Everyone else piled it on, especially about the lips and eyelids. For the first time in her life she wore lipstick, bright red, until her father asked her if she'd been kissing a fire engine.

Dr. Reeves never came back.