Bailey - A Stranger to Herself

HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of 60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.

Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey
After the Cabaret
All the Days of My Life
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
Cassandra
Connections
Elizabeth and Lily
Fifty-First State
Hannie Richards
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
Mrs Rochester
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs Mulvaney
The Cry from Street to Street
Miles and Flora
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes

Hilary Bailey

For Fanny Blake,
my editor,
and Mabel Longford,
September 13th 1887-September 3rd 1979

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1989 by Macmillan London Ltd
Copyright 1989 Hilary Bailey
All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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The moral right of the author is asserted.
ISBN: 9781448209460
eISBN: 9781448209477
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Kate Higgins, March 14th, 1991

Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, March 29th, 1991

The Levines, April, 1991

Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, April 9th, 1991

Violet Crutchley, 1913
Kate Higgins, April 18th, 1991

Kate Higgins, May 5th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1914

Violet Levine, 1917

The Levines, May, 1991

Kate Higgins, May 28th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1917

Violet Levine, 1933
Kate Higgins, June 16th, 1991

The Levines, June, 1991

Kate Higgins, June 17th, 1991
Violet Levine, 1936

Violet Mackinnon, 1951
Kate Higgins, June 19th, 1991

Violet Levine, 1976
Kate Higgins, June 20th, 1991

The Levines, 1990

Kate Higgins, June 22nd, 1991

I got the job of writing Violet Levines biography in the early spring of 1991, just over a year after she died at the age of ninety-three. I was commissioned by Askew and Askew, an old-established firm of London publishers, who had employed Henry James as a reader and also William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Love Peacock and, for all I knew, Chaucers uncle. They commissioned me because I was the first person to suggest the biography to them, because no one else seemed to be doing it, because I had no track record so I would work for little money and because I knew Roger Littlebrown, who was senior person there, due to the fact that I was sleeping with his cousin Andy. Seeing or having a relationship with his cousin Andy might be a more conventional way of putting it but I have my standards and even then I wouldnt have liked to claim I was having a relationship with Andy. Most of the time I didnt and when I did I had no idea what it was. After what happened I now have even less idea, of course. Still, I knew Roger, via Andy, so Id contacted him to discuss the idea of a biography about Violet.

We had lunch at a place called La Somnambule, just off the Haymarket, where there were Raffles Hotel-style fans in the ceiling and on the walls old stills of French thirties and forties films showing Jean Gabin in a pulled-down fedora and Simone Signoret in a slinky evening gown. We ate tiny portions of food nicely arranged on plates and in the ladies the notice telling you not to put sanitary towels down the lavatory was in French. What about women who didnt understand French, I wondered? Still, it was bright at La Somnambule, and pretty clean, though I noticed Roger Littlebrown, a big, fair man, built on Danish invader lines, was giving his curly lettuce and teeny bit of duck an old-fashioned look. He would probably have been happier in one of those grubby restaurants where old men in old waiters costumes plonk down heavy portions of British food and insult you. He was an Ill have the steak and kidney man, an Oh good treacle tart chap.

The food was neither here nor there to me I had no appetite and was probably better off eating at La Somnambule, where there was hardly any food, than trying to get down a steak somewhere else. I was worried about meeting. I wanted to write the biography, all right, but I wasnt sure I could. Andy had told me I couldnt, for starters, pointing out that Id never done anything like it before and hadnt the right gifts for it anyway. In the meanwhile, the atmosphere at the restaurant was not kind to the shabby and unsuccessful and unconfident, and I was all three.

I might sound, now, as if I was pretty smart in those days. Knowing, office-wise, hard to shake, rattle or generally disconcert. In fact, Im not that, even now. Then, I was a mere babe in the wood. This story is, among other things, about how they separate the girls from the women these days; and, I think, about how I started, at thirty-five years old, as one and ended up not long after as the other.

I looked at Roger, frowning at the menu in search of carbohydrates. Id met him several times, the first time about eighteen months earlier, just after I found Andy at a press do for a book about the Gulf War, which had been written by a friend of his. Id gone along at the instigation of Dave Gottlieb, who was the deputy editor of The Mag, a weekly I sometimes did a little, badly paid work for, and was glad to get it. So, about a week after Andy and I began our affair, and I thought I must be the luckiest, if the most nervous, woman in the world, Andy said, Do you mind coming along to a pub to meet my cousin Roger? Hes a dull publisher. Im going to be the best man at his wedding. Got to discuss the arrangements in as little detail as possible. I think his fiances coming too. Youll probably have to hear about the dress and the mortgage and so forth. Im sorry about this. Ive been dodging it for ages, but there you are

The evening passed much as expected. Roger and Sarah, his future wife, were formidable in their size, blondness and good humour. There was a point where they were laughing about having exchanged contracts on their new house, at a price they couldnt really afford, just as the sitting-room ceiling collapsed on their heads, when I felt a pang of envy at their unity go through me. Like a knife-stab. I reminded myself that I loved Andy. He was better looking, more intelligent, more interesting than Roger. We were both, perhaps, more complicated than Roger and Sarah. And, I told myself, the last thing I wanted was marriage, a house in rising Dalston, with rising damp, original features and two years work in it, a plump baby. I wanted magic, even if it meant sleepless nights, anxieties, jealousies and jumping for the phone when it rang.