I hadn’t known any either by that name till I came here, she looked completely blank.
But despite the clunky dance with Pamela, I was ecstatic to be there. The Skelton was Eden, it was Mecca and Pemberley; the best of my dreams come to life. A room, a desk, a typewriter, Pall Mall in the morning as I walked from Charing Cross, a boulevard of golden light.
One of my jobs was to transcribe research notes for academic men I never saw, except for their nearly indecipherable handwriting, scribbling about bronze sculptures or sets of linocuts. I enjoyed this, but my principal duty revolved around a tray on my desk that would be filled with letters I was to type up and leave with Pamela downstairs. Most of the time they were fairly mundane, but every now and then I’d pick up a gem, a begging letter to some old millionaire or decrepit Lady Whatnot on their last legs. ‘My dear Sir Peter, it was such a pleasure to identify the Rembrandt you had in your attic back in ’57. Would you consider using the Skelton to help catalogue the rest of your wonderful collection?’ and so on. Letters to financiers and film moguls, informing them that a Matisse was floating around, or would they fancy a new room of the Skelton being named after them, as long as we could fill it with their artworks?
They were mainly written by the director of the Skelton, a man called Edmund Reede. Pamela told me Reede was in his sixties and had a short fuse. In the war, he had something to do with recovering art confiscated by the Nazis, but she didn’t know any more. The name ‘Edmund Reede’ for me conjured up a quintessential, intimidating Englishness, Savile Rowers in Whitehall clubs; eat the steak, hunt the fox. Three-piece suit, pomaded hair, great-uncle Henry’s golden watch. I would see him round the corridors, and he would look surprised every time. It was as if I had walked in naked off the street. We studied men like him at school – protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.
The Skelton was a bit like that world, the world I’d been taught that I wanted to be in – and just by typing the letters, I felt closer to it all, as if my help in the matter was invaluable, as if I’d been picked for a reason. And the best thing was; I was fast. So once I had finished their letters, I used a spare hour here or there to type my own work – starting over and over again, scrunching up pieces of paper and making sure to put them in my handbag rather than leaving them like evidence in the waste-paper bin. Sometimes, I’d go home with my handbag brimming with balls of paper.
I told Cynth how I’d forgotten the smell of the Dolcis stock cupboard. ‘It’s as if one week can kill five years,’ I said, determined and rhapsodic about my transformation. I told her about Pamela, and joked about the rigidity of her beehive. Cynth paused, frowning, for she was frying me an egg in our tiny flat, and the hob was unreliable. ‘I pleased for yuh, Delly,’ she said. ‘I pleased it going so well.’
On the Friday of the first week, Reede’s letters completed, I was struggling with a poem in a quiet half-hour. Cynth had told me that the only thing she wanted as a wedding gift was ‘something written – seeing as you’re the only one who ever could.’ Touched but agonized, I stared at the Skelton’s typewriter, thinking how happy Sam and Cynth clearly made each other. It made me think about my own lack; the foot, but no glass slipper. It also made me realize how I had been struggling with my writing for months. I hated every word that came from me, couldn’t let any of it breathe.
A woman walked in just as I lit upon a possible phrase. ‘Hallo, Miss Bastien,’ she said, and the idea melted away. ‘Getting on? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Marjorie Quick.’
I stood, knocking the typewriter in my haste, and she laughed. ‘This isn’t the army, you know. Take a seat.’ My eye darted to the poem on the reel, and I felt sick to my stomach that she might walk round and see it.
Marjorie Quick came towards me, hand outstretched, her