Picnic, Lightning

(apologies to Nabokov)

Can I make you think, now, of Mrs Carshalton.
Absurd as it would seem, every morning she commutes from the centre of London to the centre of Paris in a series of neat navy two-pieces, to attend to business at the embassy and then to déjeuner in the same brâsserie every day at 12.50, an establishment that frowns on sparrow-feeding. Still, surreptitiously, she tends to let crumbs gather in her napkin and then fall discreetly when she finishes around 1.30, stands up knees together like a lady – she is no great animal lover, I think, but she is full of that misplaced English verve for charity.

Mrs Begum’s Son and the Private Tutor

So Mrs Begum said to me, “Young man, young man… I can see you are getting some ideas. Don’t get ideas. No ideas round here, yaar? My son does not need a companion, or a friend-type-thing, or any of your English moral guidance – Magid needs this one thing: A private tutor. Question a) – are you willing or not, will it do or won’t it? Question b) – have you the ability? Can you or can’t you?”

Hanwell Senior

Hanwell Snr was Hanwell’s father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his person—he was a “big personality,” in that odious phrase—but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A feckless and slapdash man—worse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all.

Hanwell in Hell

I am looking to enter into correspondence with anyone who remembers my father, Mr. —— Hanwell, who was living in the central Bristol area between 1970 and 1973. Any details at all will be gratefully received by daughter trying to piece together the jigsaw. Please write back to P.O. Box 187.

The Trials of Finch

SAY HELLO TO FINCH

Finch had three friends: Claire, Karen, and Jemima. These were tall, lucky, professional Englishwomen in their early forties who had been ever so kind to Finch, and who felt, with some reason, that they had saved her. Ten years ago, when Finch first entered their circle, these three women were married, they had families and intricate lives, and Finch had n one and nothing. It was a friendship so unlikely it had the color of charity. By befriending her, they plucked poor Finch from the very edge of something. Stopped her from slippin down a notch to join the lonely mad, who were visible everywhere in Hampstead, with their sticks and props and wigs, spitting, effortful, bent. Because of her friends, Finch was no one of these people. She had a job and did not fear the London Underground or any of its African employees with their blue caps and bloodshot eyes. She had been persuaded (afte a battle!) to give up long, bright socks and men’s suspenders. She no longer kept food loose in her pockets. It turned out that Finch wasn’t mad at all—she was only an eccentric.