I was not bothered by this fiscal slump. Material prosperity has never meant much to me. I have always seen wealth and fame for the alluring shams they are.
In early June, for want of anything better to do, I went up to Edinburgh. The truth was that I was lonely in London, and, in that mood, sentimental notions about family and roots easily take hold. I sublet the flat for the summer and headed north.
I managed to last two days with my father before his unrelenting ironic inquiries drove me out. He had finally moved from his old apartment to an elegant Georgian house in India Street in the New Town. From there I booked in to the Scotia Private Hotel, a modest clean establishment in Bruntsfield. I took breakfast in my room, lunched in a public house and dined at 7:00 P.M. sharp with my fellow residents. They were all upstanding professional men, mainly engineers and surveyors working away from home, where they returned at weekends. During many weekends I was quite alone at the Scotia and was regarded by Mrs. Darling, the widowed proprietrix, as a faintly louche and eccentric character, whom she blantantly patronized, introducing me to new guests as “Mr. Todd, our cinema producer.”
Now that I look back on it, I think I must have been suffering a mild but protracted nervous breakdown all that first half of 1934. I was listless and morose. I felt betrayed and let down by Doon. I saw myself as a hapless victim of technology. I idled my way through the long summer weeks, going for long walks in the city or out in the country or the Pentland Hills. Steadily, I found myself revisiting the haunts of my childhood: Anstruther, North Berwick, Cramond. I even revisited Minto Academy, to find it had been converted to a youth hostel. It is an indicator of my mood and melancholy that my most frequent reverie was taken up with trying to imagine myself as an old man. I am sure this is an infallible sign of the end of youth. I had several popular versions. There was the sprightly old lecher with a gray goatee, a pink gin in one hand and a chorus girl’s bottom in the other; or the dear bumbling eccentric whom everybody adored; or the spruce ascetic octogenarian steeped in calm sagacity. I never saw myself remotely like my father. I was thirty-five years old and I could not rid myself of the conviction that my life was over. My great work was as complete as it ever would be; my great love had abandoned me. I was halfway towards my threescore years and ten and the remaining portion stretched ahead featureless as a salt flat.
My God, I should have been so lucky.…
I was routed from my torpid self-pity and introspection in August. Sonia wrote, announcing that she intended to divorce me. Mr. Devize had everything under control. Sometime in the near future I would be contacted by a man named Orr. He would explain exactly what I had to do.
Orr arrived a week after Sonia’s letter. Mrs. Darling brought me my breakfast on a tray and said in tones of sorrowful disdain, “There’s a … man. By the name of Orr? To see you, Mr. Todd. We’ve put him in the smoking room. Out of harm’s way.”
Orr was a small block of a man in a thick cheap suit. He sat to attention, smoking a cigarette as if he were testing it, examining the burning end after each draw. I noticed that the nail and first two joints of his forefinger were as brown as unmilked tea. He had shaved badly that morning; his jawbone was nicked and raw looking. There was a small bright jewel of a scab on the volute of a nostril. He smelled powerfully of brilliantine.
“Ian Orr,” he said, standing up. He was about five foot two. I felt sure he had been a bantam. He put his cigarette in his mouth to free his right hand. We shook hands. He had a strong grip. He then checked each pocket to his suit before discovering a used business card. “Ian Orr,” it said, “Orr’s Private Detection Agency, Divorce and Debt Collection Our Specialties.” After Eugen, Orr. I had a sudden doleful premonition that my life was going to be bedeviled by these sorts of men.
“Shall we get down to business?” I saw no reason to be civil. However, Orr explained what we had to do with an enthusiasm that was almost infectious. We might have been organizing a whist drive or scavenger hunt, rather than orchestrating my culpability in a divorce case. Put simply, Sonia’s divorce from me would be most swiftly and easily effected if I were caught in flagrante delicto committing adultery. Smart Londoners spent an afternoon with a Mayfair tart in the Metropole Hotel in Brighton. Orr had booked two nights for me (for authenticity’s sake, he explained) in the Harry Lauder Temperance Hotel in Joppa, the western extension of Portobello, scene of my first excursions to the seaside. At a preordained point during the stay, Orr would then “surprise” me and the woman I was with and testify to that effect in court as chief witness for the plaintiff.
“Fine,” I said. “All right. But do I really need to spend two nights?”
“I always find it’s far more convincing, sir. You know, for real solid adultery. Not just a one-night fling.”
“Whatever you say.”
Orr had a strong stop-start Scottish accent, very nasal. He pronounced “adultery,” addle-tree.
He smiled at me. He had small dark-cream teeth.
“We can get a whoor in town or at Joppa.”
“Let’s get one here.”
That night Orr and I went down to Leith docks to a pub called the Linlithgow. The bar was full of mirrors, extravagantly etched and carved with prototypical Scottish scenes. The public room was well lit, to such a degree that I felt like shading my eyes. It was busy with men and sailors who seemed to be pointedly ignoring the “girls”—only three of them — who sat behind a long table with their backs to the wall.
Orr paid for two pints of special (I was paying, in fact; his fee was two guineas a day plus “sundries”). We stood at the bar, drinking, pondering who was going to be my companion.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t propose to do anything with her.”
“Might as well have some fun, Mr. Todd. You’re paying for it.”
He went over and spoke to the women and came back with one whom he introduced as Senga. She was young, rather heavy-set, with a slight squint. She wore a threadbare velvet coat over a grubby print dress. We made the arrangements swiftly. I would meet her under the clock at Portobello Station the next day at four-thirty in the afternoon. She would be paid five pounds when the “discovery” was complete.
Senga was waiting for me at the appointed time, wearing the same clothes and with no luggage. I asked her where she got her curious name.
“It’s Agnes backwards,” she said.
The Harry Lauder Temperance Hotel was not far from the station. It was a solid simple building of white-painted stone with brown mullions across the main road from the sea front. I had been told to use an assumed name, so I signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Backwards. The proprietor, a small fat man with a dense sandy moustache, showed us to our room. There was something familiar about him. Once we were inside, he introduced himself.
“Alexander Orr,” he said with a broad smile. “Call me Eck. Ian’s made all the arrangements. Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Todd. I get all his clients.” He ignored Senga completely, as if she did not exist.
“Can I offer you a wee drink? I can send up a bottle. Rum or whiskey?”
“What would you like, Senga?”
“I’ll take a rum.”
“Rum it shall be, Mr. Todd.”
“I thought this was a temperance hotel,” I said.
“Oh, aye, it is. That way we get nae trouble fae the polis.”