Anon

By STRIX

'Tout' sort of chap he must be, don't you think?' j said the actress. 'Or do you suppose it's a roman?'

The anonymous telegram was quite short. Its purpose was to wound. One couldn't help specu-

lating on the sort of pleasure which its originator

11;1(1 purchased for a shilling. How keen was it? How long did it last? Do the people who send such things ration themselves, like drug-addicts? On what principles do they select their targets? Do they share their slimy joys with a carefully chosen confederate? They alone know the answers.

I have received in my time a fair number of anonymous or pseudonymous letters, but by some

freak of fortune they have almost all been of an agreeable kind. The first was written in an un- educated hand on Buckingham Palace notepaper. The Times (this was long ago) had just published some articles by me about an expedition in a dis

tant region, and for these my correspondent, who claimed to be employed as a housemaid at the Palace, expressed a warm admiration. Would it,

she wondered, be possible for us to meet one day? The letter was signed only with a Christian name; and the question of a reply, which would have had to be addressed to 'Doreen,' Buckingham Palace, London, hardly arose. But I was touched.

by this tribute from so august a servants' hall, and it was not until more fan-mail began to arrive from

unexpected quarters that my suspicions were vaguely aroused. Most of it came on expensive writing-paper from obviously good addresses and sometimes from the seats of noblemen; but almost all my correspondents asked me to reply to them at some place other than that at which the letter purported to have been penned. There was, too, a certain sameness about the fulsome terms in which they addressed me. It looked rather as if I was being bombarded by a syndicate who had

got hold of some samples of notepaper from a fashionable stationer's. It was impossible to divine the purpose of their scheme, but easy to render it abortive by not replying to the letters. This course

I adopted.

Then came a letter of a different sort, from a lady in Yorkshire. She was, she said, unhappily married; her husband did not understand her at all.

Ever since reading my articles she had had the conviction that I, and only I, could solve her problems; and on the previous night this convic- tion had been reinforced by a dream of a most compelling kind. She would shortly be in London. Could we, please, meet?

For some reason this letter did not arouse my suspicions, but the result was much the same as if it had. At twenty-five I maintained. towards strange members of the opposite sex what I hope was a courteous reserve, tending to sidle un- obtrusively but swiftly away from them whenever our paths crossed; an assignation with an unknown married woman—and unhappily married at that— held for me about as much attraction as a visit to the dentist. I wrote back saying that I was very sorry that her husband did not Understand her but failed to see how I could help.

By return of post came an urgent plea that I should meet her at 6.30 on the following Tuesday in the bar of the Berkeley. She said she was dark and described the clothes she would be wearing. I stayed away.

Years and years later a rather handsome lady came up to me in the bar of a theatre and recalled the episode, not without difficulty, to my mind.

I asked her how she knew about it.

'I wrote the letters from Yorkshire,' she said, 'and some of the other ones too. I went to the Berkeley. We thought it was awfully wet of you not to turn up.'

'But who were "we"?' I asked. 'What was it all in aid of?'

'Get me a drink,' she replied; 'and I will tell you.'

The bar was crowded. The bell was ringing for the second time when I came back with her drink. She had gone.

But at least I set eyes on her, which is more than have knowingly done on the person who, sign- ing herself 'Jane Sinclair,' wrote me a series, of long, intelligent and charming letters in the sum- mer of 1951. The letters were typed, the address was 'Surrey,' the style Miniverian.

These missives, she announced, would arrive once a fortnight, adding : 'I realise it will be an oddly unsatisfactory procedure, rather like talk- ing to oneself, because I shall never know :

(a) if my letters ever reach you

(b) if they arc thrown into the waste-paper basket unread

or (c) whether they are glanced at and then ripped across in a careless manner with an Old Etonian sneer.'

Here, I think, she summ d up ably the occupa- tional hazards of anonymous letter-writing. It.; practitioners are better-hidden, safer, mor. Olympian than the most addpt sniper; but they cannot, like the sniper, observe the effects of their fire. At first, though she foresaw the frustrations of a unilateral correspondence, 'Jane Sinclair' (she always put quotation marks round her nom de plume) looked forward to it. 'I think I shall get quite warmed up to this Jekyll and Hyde method of correspondence; never in all my years have I

done such a thing before, and never—I hope— shall I again, it's entirely alien to my nature and I shudder to think what my unsuspecting husband would say. He's rather a solemn young man and would be quite scandalised.. .

There was, as she had observed, a certain pointlessness about the whole thing. Her letters Were agreeable and perceptive, but our relationship (if you can call it that) was inevitably clouded by an atmosphere of non-consummation. I was not surprised when traces of gall began to qualify the honey. 'At a small gathering the other day, an elderly companion of mine pointed out a certain lady, I don't remember her name and had never heard of her anyway, and also remarked that the person talking to the said lady was Strix. It was a sad disappointment. . . . I didn't ever think of anyone not much bigger than me, looking exces- sively bad-tempered and not showing any more animation than one would expect from a broody hen. . . You should try to look a little less glum.'

It would have been difficult to convey in a few words a more documentary impression of my demeanour at a small, or indeed at a large, social gathering. But during the fortnight covered by her letter I had been to neither, and I found my interest in 'Jane Sinclair' quickening. She had invented, or at best transposed in time, her glimpse of me; and once you find a person deviating from the truth you cannot help wondering where the process began.

Did she, in 1951, have 'rather a solemn young man' for a husband? When the German marshal-

ling yards at Hamm were being attacked in 1940, did the-operations of Bomber Command cost her fiancé (on the night of her birthday) his life? And at what stage had this highly literate lady forgotten that the scene of her bereavement was spelt with two m's? Did she during 'a noisy but not very serious, air-raid,' read one of my foolish books to eight or ten blinded RAF personnel while 'sitting on the end of someone's bed, wearing a petticoat. a British warm round my shoulders, and a tin hat'? Had she, before getting married, 'the extreme

pleasure of being a secretary to one of our more illustrious Members of Parliament, the right sort, not of the scum'?

Pseudonym ought not to eat pseudonym. I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of 'Jane Sin- clair's self-portrait. But she had, as far as I could see, no reason for not signing the canvas with her own name. Some instinct restrained her from doing so; and a counterpart of the same instinct, I suppose, restrained me from accepting her pic- ture as a picture of the whole truth.