‘Not when I started. I thought I was writing the greatest stories ever written and that people just
didn’t have sense enough to know it.”
“Were you really that conceited?”
“Worse probably. Only I didn’t think I was conceited. I was just confident.”
“If those were your first stories, the ones I read, you had a right to be confident.”
“They weren’t,” he said. “All those first confident stories were lost.
The ones you read were
when I wasn’t confident at all.”
“How were they lost, Roger?”
“It’s an awful story. I’ll tell it to you sometime
“Wouldn’t you tell it to me now?”
“I hate to because it’s happened to other people and to better writers than I am and that makes it
sound as though it were made up. There’s no reason for it ever happening and yet it’s happened many
times and it still hurts like a bastard. No it doesn’t really. It has a scar over it now. A
good thick
scar.”
“Please tell me about it. If it’s a scar and not a scab it won’t hurt to will it?”
“No, daughter. Well I was very methodical in those days and I kept original manuscripts in one
cardboard folder and typed originals in another and carbons in another. I guess it wasn’t so cockeyed
methodical. I don’t know how else you’d do it. Oh the hell with this story.”
“No tell me.”
“Well I was working at the Lausanne Conference and it was
the holidays coming up and
Andrew’s mother who was a lovely girl and very beautiful and kind—”
“I was never jealous of her,” the girl said. “I was jealous of David’s and Tom’s mother.”
“You shouldn’t be jealous of either of them. They were both wonderful.”
“I was jealous of Dave’s and Tom’s mother,” Helena said. “I’m not now.”
“That’s awfully white of you,” Roger said. “Maybe we ought to send her a cable.”
“Go on with the story, please, and don’t be bad.”
“All right. The aforesaid Andy’s mother thought she would bring down my stuff so I could have
it with me and be able to do some work while we had the holiday together. She was going to bring it
to me as a surprise. She hadn’t written anything about it and when I met her at Lausanne I didn’t know
anything about it. She was a day late and had wired about it. The only thing I knew was that she was
crying when I met her and she cried and cried and when I would ask her what was the matter she told
me it was too awful to tell me and then she would cry again. She cried
as though her heart was
broken. Do I have to tell this story?”
“Please tell me.”
“All that morning she would not tell me and I thought of all the worst possible things that could
have happened and asked her if they had happened. But she just shook her head.
The worst thing I
could think of was that she had
tromper
-ed me or fallen in love with someone else and when I asked
her that she said, ‘Oh how can you say that?’ and cried some more.
I felt relieved then and then,
finally, she told me.
“She had packed all the manuscript folders in a suitcase and left the suitcase with her other bags
in her first class compartment in the Paris-Lausanne-Milan Express in
the Gare de Lyon while she
went out on the quai to buy a London paper and a bottle of Evian water. You remember the Gare de
Lyon and how they would have sort of push tables with papers and magazines and mineral water and
small flasks of cognac and sandwiches with ham between sliced long pointed-end bread wrapped in
paper and other push carts with pillows and blankets that you rented? Well when she got back into the
compartment with her paper and her Evian water the suitcase was gone.
“She did everything there was to be done. You know the French police. The first thing she had to
do was show her
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