Beautiful Shadow (76 page)

     The final story in the collection, ‘Please Don’t Shoot the Trees’, which foreshadows her last short-story collection,
Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes
, is set in the America of the future, in 2049, at a time when once-great cities had become ‘unsupervised prisons of the poor and the black, and New York and San Francisco were dirty words’.
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Repeated underground nuclear testing has resulted in the growth of strange protuberances on the state’s trees – cancerous growths which shoot out a nasty acid-like substance – which the authorities then try to destroy by further underground bombing. The result proves apocalyptic: the trees send out jets of deadly poison and the nuclear bombing sets off a massive earthquake. As Elsie, the heroine of the story, tends her dead husband – a man, she realises, more faithful to the authorities than to her and ultimately a victim of the tree acid – she acknowledges she has to take a moral stand. Although she could escape in her helicopter, as she hears the tremendous roar of the Golden Gate bridge slamming into the Pacific Ocean, she chooses to make one last heroic gesture. The story ends with the logical conclusion to the story of America – its death. ‘It was right, Elsie felt, right to go like this, conquered by the trees and by nature . . . A land mass, big as a continent, it seemed, big as she could see, was dropping – slowly for land but fast for her – into the dark blue waters.’
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Highsmith’s social conscience – her environmentalism, distrust of big business and loathing of war – sits oddly with her support of Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative party from 1975, and following the 1979 general election, Britain’s first female Prime Minister. What appealed was Thatcher’s rampant economic individualism – in August Pat wrote a letter to Barbara Ker-Seymer voicing her support for the new Prime Minister’s tax-cutting policies – and, no doubt, the fact that she was a strong woman who had risen through the political system due to her own efforts, with no help from the feminist movement. ‘Pat and I had commented from time to time on how curious it was that Asian and Mideast countries could elevate women to positions of statesmanship, while the opposite was true in Western nations . . .’ says Kingsley. ‘Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative party was a great boost for women in the West and the possibility of her becoming prime minister would have counted for more, with Pat, at the time than any political differences thereafter.’
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‘I could never work out Pat’s politics,’ says the actor and director Jonathan Kent, ‘but I suppose they were libertarian right wing.’
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‘Pat’s political sense was quirky, almost as if she didn’t want her views to be pigeon-holed,’ says Bettina Berch. ‘Although she was, later, very anti-Bush, she could just as well come out thinking some right-wing ideologue was cool too because he happened to say something that struck her fancy.’
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     In September 1979, Highsmith thought about the possibility of buying a property in Switzerland so she could avoid paying French income tax; she could take advantage of this financial loophole if she could guarantee that she lived outside France for 181 days of the year. Another option she had considered was to buy a condominium in New York so she could reduce what she considered was the preposterously high sum of money she paid to the American government – $32,827, in addition to the $14,000 she had given the French authorities. She was, as she confessed to Barbara Ker-Seymer, in the 96 per cent tax bracket for the year, ‘as French have access to what I tell USA Income Tax people (48 per cent), and will want the same,’ she wrote. ‘This has made it imperative I do not earn more money, as I’d then be dipping into USA savings just to exist.’
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     Carl Laszlo, the writer and art collector, recalls Highsmith’s obsession with money. ‘Her favourite topic of conversation was to talk about how expensive things were,’ he says. ‘For instance, I remember once she drove sixty miles to a place where she knew spaghetti was cheaper. I liked her a great deal, she could be very sweet and warm, but at the same time she never let herself be really free. She had a very closed nature; she was a strange mind in a strange body.’
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Hedli MacNeice, the singer and second wife of Louis MacNeice, who lived in one of the houses around the common courtyard of the Rue de la Boissiere, Moncourt, told Barbara Skelton that Highsmith was, ‘a lonely, unhappy woman who would have been less so if she had been more generous with her money . . . She [Pat] told me that practically every object in her house had come from a dump on the outskirts of Grez.’
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Hedli also told Skelton – who met Highsmith in 1982 – that Pat had once tried to proposition her, but ‘Hedli had no lesbian tendencies, so it had not worked out,’ commented Skelton. ‘Pat was no beauty. She had a rather louche overhanging underlip. Her dark hair was her best feature, worn in a pageboy. She dressed in stylish trouser suits that came from a fashionable men’s shop in downtown Manhattan . . . She was very skilful with her hands. She painted her own watercolours, and constructed several of the tables and chairs in her house. She enjoyed gardening and had created a lovely apple orchard sloping down toward the river. I rarely found her very easy to talk to.’
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Anne Morneweg was fond of Highsmith despite her occasional miserly behaviour. ‘Although she had a reputation of being a bit stingy, that did not bother me,’ says Anne. ‘She was generous with her mind, that was all that mattered to me. She had a lot of unpleasant racist views, and all her friends, although shocked, chose not to say anything. We were cowards in a way, but I’m sure those views came with old age. She was, what you would say in French,
sauvage
– wild and yet afraid of people. But I felt very honoured that she did not feel like that with me.’
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     Highsmith’s near-obsessive interest in managing her financial affairs was also behind her decision to split from her American and London agents, McIntosh & Otis and A.M. Heath. The problem, as she saw it, was the fact that ‘the latter two agents take 5% each on German, Italian, Scandinavian, Italian, etc. sales, causing me to lose 20% instead of 10%,’ she told Alain Oulman in August 1979. ‘With double taxation arriving or creeping, I cannot afford this.’
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She wrote to Patricia Schartle Myrer informing her of her refusal to sign any contracts with A.M. Heath which involved money passing through New York and London, adding that Heinemann would handle her affairs in Britain, leaving McIntosh & Otis to concentrate only on her American sales. Schartle Myrer promptly responded with a letter in which she expressed her surprise and anger. ‘As you know, I have faithfully represented your work as your primary agent for nearly 20 years . . .’ she wrote. ‘Heath, as has been pointed out before, is the hub of a wheel that controls the Continent on your behalf. Through Heath and other sub-agents, the entire McIntosh & Otis list is offered around the world . . . Since you clearly feel that you have been cheated in commissions by two of the world’s most reputable agents, I am not willing to continue to represent your work . . . It has, of course, come to my attention from many sources that you have reported the downright libel that McIntosh & Otis and Heath charge you an unfair commission. This does sadden me very much indeed.’
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The row left her with no American agent and no one to handle her film and television sales. Highsmith had been thinking about appointing a single world agent for some time: in July 1979, she had written to Rainer Heumann in Zurich asking him about the possibility of representing her, a request he turned down; in August she contacted Diogenes Verlag with the same proposal. The negotiations surrounding the author-agent percentage split and exactly which territories Diogenes should control – Highsmith was particularly keen to carry on dealing with Calmann-Lévy directly – continued during late 1979 and early 1980 before both parties were happy with the deal, which was finalised in March. ‘As you may imagine, it was pretty tough with Diogenes,’ Highsmith wrote to Alain Oulman.
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At the very end of 1979, Highsmith heard that the French authorities had started to investigate her tax affairs, combing through her records for any irregularities. On 15 January 1980 the writer was sitting at her typewriter, tapping out a sheet of figures detailing her 1979 American income, when a drop of blood fell from her nostrils. A few minutes later the drops had turned into an arterial gush. Highsmith ran to ask one of her neighbours, an elderly woman, if she would come inside her house to phone the doctor as blood was streaming from her nose at such a rate that she could not read the telephone number. When the woman said she couldn’t venture outside as she had fallen only the day before, Highsmith ran back into her house, grabbed a tea towel from the kitchen and rushed outside again, where she stopped a passer-by who agreed to telephone for her. After a doctor refused to help, the fire brigade was called, who promptly sped her towards Nemours, where she was admitted to hospital. As she lay in her hospital bed she thought about the sheet of paper left in her typewriter, the rows of figures documenting her income tax. ‘How appropriate,’ she observed, ‘to be bleeding in two places.’
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     Unfortunately the haemorrhaging did not stop and every two hours for the next five days she had to endure the sudden gushes of blood which poured from her nose. The nurses told her to lie back and relax, but if she did alter her position the blood ran down the back of her throat like lukewarm tea. ‘Raising myself, at least I can spit, and at the same time the stuffing eases out of my blacked nostrils into the bandage that is taped to my face,’ she wrote. ‘Bandage is sopping & hangs over upper lip. Down my throat they have poked – with aid of stiffish plastic tube down nose – a thread that bears a tampon of cotton that hangs. Thread is taped to right cheek. This is nauseating, blocks air to some extent and I have to breathe entirely by mouth for five days.’
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     For six weeks previously Highsmith had been taking drugs to expand the blood vessels in her right leg, and as a result the bleeding was taking longer to control. On her third and fourth days in hospital, Highsmith realised that there was a very real possibility that she might die as she was losing more blood than she was being given. Worried, she asked that the door to her room be left open, but her request was refused as the nursing staff were concerned that the children in the ward might be frightened by the sight of so much blood. ‘This made me angry, also ashamed of my fear of dying alone, since I’ve always known death is an individual act anyway,’ she wrote. ‘I swear to myself next time I’ll be better prepared.’
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     After being discharged from hospital, she wrote a poem about the banality of death and the fleeting images which pass through one’s mind in the final moments of life. The experience had left her with a feeling of joy that she was alive, together with a determination to build up her strength, but also a lingering depression. The illness had forced her to confront an uncomfortable reality. ‘I feel happy and secure of myself only when I am daydreaming and creating a story or a book,’ she wrote.
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     In early March, after a brief trip to London, she was admitted to hospital once again, in Paris, for tests to determine the efficiency of her blood circulation. For this, Highsmith had to undergo a general anaesthetic, after which she felt like the doctors had ‘rammed an ironing board into one’s torso’.
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The examination revealed that she had a blocked right femoral artery, a condition which would necessitate an operation in the summer. Although she felt in pain and weak after the tests, she travelled to Switzerland in mid-March, where she decided to buy an old house, which needed renovation, in Aurigeno, twelve kilometres outside Locarno, near Ellen Hill’s house in Cavigliano. She planned to move into the house, which cost $90,000 including refurbishment, later in the year after it had been finished, splitting her time between France and Switzerland so as to resolve her tax problems. Then, on 26 March, two officers of the
douane
, French tax officials, plus a policeman, staged an impromptu raid on her house in Moncourt, seizing all her papers and documents and informing her, as a French resident, she was forbidden to have a foreign bank account. The three-hour search resulted in the removal of all her cheque books, business papers and accounts. It was, as she said to Christa Maerker, done in a ‘real old Nazi style . . . You may imagine my mental state, as I potter about, trying to convince myself I’m still leading a constructive life.’
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Highsmith was so enraged by what she saw as this insulting invasion of her privacy that she set about removing her entry from the French edition of
Who’s Who
and she blamed the raid for her subsequent lack of concentration. ‘My work is down to about 20% of normal,’ she wrote to her accountant and lawyer.
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In October 1980, the matter was finally settled with the payment of a 10,000 franc fine. Her relationship with France, already rather tentative, was now over. And although she would keep her Moncourt house for another three years, Highsmith had had just about enough of a ‘country which assumes everyone is a slight crook’.
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