“You’ve not been writing poetry in Morocco?”

“No, no.”

“Sooner or later almost all my novelists come to me and say they have written poetry. I can’t think why. It does them infinite harm. Only last week Roger Simmonds was here with a kind of a play. You never saw such a thing. All the characters were parts of a motor-car—not in the least funny.”

“Oh, it won’t be anything like that,” I said. “Just some new technical experiments. I don’t suppose the average reader will notice them at all.”

“I hope not,” said Mr. Benwell. “I mean, now you’ve found your public… well, look at Simmonds—magneto and sparking plugs and camshaft all talking in verse about communism. I don’t know what to do about it at all….. But I can count on your new novel for the autumn?”

“Yes.”

“And we can list it as ‘crime’?”

“Certainly.”

Mr. Benwell saw me to the top of the stairs. “Interesting place, Morocco,” he said. “The French are doing it very well.”

I knew what he was thinking: “The trouble about Plant is, he’s come in for money.”

In a way he was right. The money my father had left me and the proceeds which I expected from the sale of the house, relieved me of the need to work for two or three years; once the necessity was removed there was little motive for writing. It was a matter of pure athletics to go on doing something merely because one did it well. This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it. The heap of foolscap began to disgust me. Twice I hid it under my shirts, twice the club valet unearthed it and laid it in the open. I had nowhere to keep things, except in this little hired room above the traffic.

As I returned from seeing Mr. Benwell, the club secretary waylaid me. Under Rule XLV, he reminded me, members might not occupy bedrooms for more than five consecutive nights. He did not mind stretching a point, he said, but if a member from out of town applied for a room and found them all engaged and wrote to the committee about it, where would he, the secretary, be? I promised to move out as soon as I could; I had a lot to attend to at the moment; perhaps he had seen that my father had just died. We both knew that it was unfair to bring this up, but it won me my point. For the time being I had lodging—a bed, a washbasin, a window in St. James’s, a telephone, space enough for a fortnight’s wardrobe. But I must start looking about for something more secure.

This sense of homelessness was new to me. Before I had moved constantly from one place to another; every few weeks I would descend upon St. John’s Wood with a trunk, leave some books, collect others, put away summer clothes for the winter; seldom as I slept there, the house in St. John’s Wood had been my headquarters and my home; that earth had now been stopped and I thought, not far away, I could hear the hounds.

My worries at this period became symbolized in a single problem; what to do with my hats. I owned what now seemed a multitude of them, of one sort and another; two of them of silk—the tall hat I took to weddings and a second I had bought some years earlier when I thought for a time that I was going to take to fox-hunting; there were a bowler, a panama, a black, a brown and a grey soft hat, a green hat from Salzburg, a sombrero, some tweed caps for use on board ship and in trains—all these had accumulated from time to time and all, with the possible exception of the sombrero, were more or less indispensable. Was I doomed for the rest of my life to travel everywhere with this preposterous collection? At the moment they were, most of them, in St. John’s Wood, but, any day now, the negotiations for the sale might be finished and the furniture removed, sold or sent to store.

Somewhere to hang up my hat, that was what I needed.

I consulted Roger Simmonds who was lunching with me. I felt as though I had known Roger all my life; actually I had first met him in our second year at Oxford; we edited an undergraduate weekly together and had been close associates ever since. He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away; we met constantly when I was in London. Sometimes I even stayed with him, for he and half a dozen others constituted a kind of set. We had all known each other intimately over a number of years, had from time to time passed on girls from one to the other, borrowed and lent freely. When we were together we drank more and talked more boastfully than we normally did. We had grown rather to dislike one another; certainly when any two or three of us were alone, we blackguarded the rest, and if asked about them on neutral ground I denied their friendship. “Blades?” I would say. “Yes, I used to see a lot of him, but we never seem to meet now he’s in Parliament” or “Jimmie Rendall? Yes, I knew him well. Then he got taken up by Lord Monomark and that is the end of all friendship.” About Roger I used to say, “I don’t think he’s interested in anything except politics now.”

This was more or less true. In the late twenties he set up as a writer and published some genuinely funny novels on the strength of which he filled a succession of rather dazzling jobs with newspapers and film companies, but lately he had married an unknown heiress, joined the Communist Party and become generally respectable.

“I never wear a hat now I am married,” said Roger virtuously. “Lucy says they’re kulak. Besides I was beginning to lose my hair.”

“My dear Roger, you’ve been bald as a coot for ten years. But it isn’t only a question of hats. There are overcoats.”

“Only in front. It’s as thick as anything at the back. How many overcoats have you got?”

“Four, I think.”

“Too many.”

We discussed it at length and decided it was possible to manage with three.

“Workers pawn their overcoats in June and take them out again in October,” Roger said. He wanted to talk about his play, Internal Combustion. “The usual trouble with ideological drama,” he said, “is that they’re too mechanical. I mean the characters are economic types, not individuals, and as long as they look and speak like individuals it’s bad art. D’you see what I mean?”

“I do, indeed.”

“Human beings without human interest.”

“Very true. I…”

“Well, I’ve cut human beings out altogether.”

“Sounds rather like an old-fashioned ballet.”

“Exactly,” Roger said with great pleasure. “It is an old-fashioned ballet. I knew you’d understand. Poor old Benwell couldn’t. The Finsbury International Theatre are sitting on it now, and if it’s orthodox—and I think it is—they may put it on this summer if Lucy finds the money.”

“Is she keen too?”

“Well, not very, as a matter of fact. You see, she’s having a baby and that seems to keep her interested at the moment.”

“But to return to the question of my hats…”

“I tell you what. Why don’t you buy a nice quiet house in the country. I shall want somewhere to stay while this baby is born.”

There was the rub. It was precisely this fear that had been working in my mind for days, the fear of making myself a sitting shot to the world. It lay at the root of the problem of privacy; the choice which torments to the verge of mania, between perpetual flight and perpetual siege; and the unresolved universal paradox of losing things in order to find them.

“Surely that is odd advice from a communist?”

Roger became suddenly wary; he had been caught and challenged in loose talk. “Ideally, of course, it would be,” he said. “But I daresay that in practice, for the first generation, we shall allow a certain amount of private property where its value is purely sentimental. Anyway, any investment you make now is bound to be temporary. That’s why I feel no repugnance about living on Lucy’s money…” Marxist ethics kept him talking until we had finished luncheon. Over the coffee he referred to Ingres as a “bourgeois” painter. When he left me I sat for some time in the leather armchair finishing my cigar. The club was emptying as the younger members went back to their work and their elders padded off to the library for the afternoon nap. I belonged to neither world. I had nothing whatever to do. At three in the afternoon my friends would all be busy and, in any case, I did not want to see them. I was ready for a new deal. I climbed to my room, began re-reading the early chapters of Murder at Mountrichard Castle, put it from me and faced the boredom of an afternoon in London. Then the telephone rang and the porter said, “Mr. Thurston is downstairs to see you.”