Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye

Author:M. M. Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 21

It was Limerston Street that changed the whole direction of my life from art to writing. I could cope with the days, because I was kept busy working alongside the rest of the Chelsea Illustrators. But the evenings were long and very lonely, and in order not to sit and think of Tacklow and all that I had lost with his death, I joined a ‘Tuppenny Library’ at the end of the street.

Those libraries were wonderful institutions for the lonely and for those who did not wish to think, or remember. You paid a small deposit to register, and after that you paid tuppence,1 which entitled you to take out as many books as you wanted, provided you returned them all within a week – or was it ten days? If you were late returning them there was a small fine.

The books that were stocked by the Tuppenny Libraries included love stories by the score, scads of whodunnits, of which those by Agatha Christie and E. M. Eberhardt were by far the best, and an almost weekly ‘thriller’ by a writer who turned them out like a sausage machine and called himself Edgar Wallace. That was about the level, and I would generally manage to get through one of them in a day. Nevertheless, it took a long time for my tuppence to drop, and I can remember the evening in which it happened as though it was literally yesterday.

I had just sold (for another fiver) a design for the cover of a sales catalogue in three colour-blocks, which included a good many figures and had given me a lot of trouble, and I had stopped at the little library on my way back to my bed-sit, handed over two pennies and (there was a weekend coming up) asked the girl behind the counter for six books, any books. I left the choice to her and, having collected them, plodded back up Limerston Street towards my gas fire and a cup of tea. It was raining, and I have seldom been more depressed, because I owed that five pounds, and didn’t like being behind with the rent. My art was not proving good enough to keep me afloat, and I was beginning to lose faith in it.

I made myself a cup of tea, changed into pyjamas and a dressing-gown and settled down in front of that hissing gas-fire to read one of the six books. I ought to be able to remember its title and who wrote it, but I don’t. I only remember getting as far as about Chapter Three, when at long last the latest of my tuppences dropped with a resounding clang.

It could not be possible, I told myself, to write worse than the author of this bit of drivel. No one could! And yet I was willing to bet that the author had been paid a good deal more money for perpetrating this slush than I had been for that catalogue cover! So, why not

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