Read Loitering With Intent for Free Online Page A

promised to get her a copy from the public library.
    ‘If one is writing an autobiography one should model oneself on the best, shouldn’t one?’ she said.
    I assured her that the Apologia was among the best.
    Father Egbert murmured to himself, but for us two to hear, ‘Alas.’
    It was a quarter past six before they had left. I went to fetch Lady Edwina to take her home to have supper with me.
    ‘She’s fast asleep,’ Beryl Tims said. ‘And in any case she broke her promise to us, why should you be bothered with her?’ Sir Quentin stood listening. Beryl Tims appealed to him. ‘Why should we pay for a taxi and all the bother? She interrupted the meeting, after all.’
    ‘Oh, but everybody was delighted,’ I said.
    Sir Quentin said, ‘But speaking personally I had a mauvais quart d’heure; one never knows with my poor mother what she may say or do. I decline responsibility. A mauvais quart d’heure—’
    ‘Let her sleep on,’ said Beryl Tims.
    As I left Sir Quentin said to me, ‘We have a gentleman’s agreement, you and I, that none of the Association’s proceedings will ever be discussed or revealed, don’t we? They are highly confidential.’
    Not being a gentleman by any stretch of the sense, I cheerfully agreed; I have always been impressed by Jesuitical casuistry. But at the time I was thinking only of the meeting itself; it filled me with joy.
    It was after seven when I got home. My landlord, Mr Alexander, lumbered downstairs to meet me as I let myself into the hall. ‘An elderly party’s waiting for you. I let her into your room as she needed to sit down. I let her use the bathroom as she needed to go. She wet the bathroom floor.’
    There, in my room, I found Lady Edwina, wrapped in her long chinchilla cape; she sat in my wicker armchair between the orange box which contained my food supply and a bookcase. She was beaming with pride.
    ‘I got away,’ she said. ‘I foiled them completely. There wasn’t a taxi anywhere but I got a lift from an American. Your books—what a lot there are. Have you read them all?’

    I wanted to telephone to Sir Quentin to tell him where his mother was. There was a phone in my room connected to a switchboard in the basement. I got not reply, which was not unusual, and I rattled to gain attention. The red-faced house-boy, underpaid and bad-tempered, who lived with his wife and children down in those regions, burst into the room shouting at me to stop rattling the phone. Apparently the switchboard was in process of repair and a man was working overtime on it. ‘The board’s asunder,’ bellowed the boy. I liked the phrase and picked it out for myself from the wreckage of the moment, as was my wont.
    ‘Lady Edwina,’ I said, ‘will they know where you are? I can’t get through on the phone.’
    ‘They will never know I’m out,’ she said. ‘As far as they’re concerned I’ve gone to bed with a sleeping pill, but I dropped the pill down the lavatory pan. Call me Edwina, which I don’t permit, mind you, of Beryl Tims.’
    I got out cups and saucers and plates and set about making an evening of it. I propped the old lady’s feet on three volumes of the complete Oxford English Dictionary. She looked regal, she looked comfortable; she had no difficulty with her bladder and only asked to be taken to the lavatory once; she cackled with delight over her herring roes comparing them to caviar ‘which is the same thing only a different species of fish’.
    ‘Your studio is so like Paris,’ she said. ‘Artists I have known…’ she mused. ‘Artists and writers, they have become successful, of course. And you, too …’
    Now I hastened to assure her that this wasn’t likely.
    It rather frightened me to think of myself in a successful light, it detracted in my mind from the quality of my already voluminous writings from amongst which eight poems only had been published in little reviews.
    I looked out an unpublished poem by which I set great store even