Country Girl: A Memoir (29 page)

Some months after I returned from Paris, the author Patrick Seale approached me about writing an article for a magazine about the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Blithely I said yes. He pointed out that I would have to renounce my Catholic faith and become a Muslim in order to be allowed to take part, and
again I said yes. Yet a dream told a different story. The heavens opened and I saw the bearded face of God, in all His wrath and all His omniscience. He had come to call mankind to account. A battle for the end of the world was being waged. The opposing armies comprised Jewish and Muslim opponents, battalion after battalion wiped out before my very eyes. Eventually they had run out of weaponry, and the improvised weapons became flaps of human flesh, cut up as pastry might be and filled with human blood that mysteriously acquired lethal powers. I was in the Jewish camp, but truth to tell, both sides were equally crazed and equally bloodthirsty. In death they were thrown upon one another in heaps, the very fraternity that appalled them in life thrust upon them in extinction. Just as I entered the front line of battle, I heard a voice, my own or another’s, cry out, “It is not for earthly considerations we fight, we suffer so, it is to catch sight of God.”

I telephoned Laing for an appointment.

“What could it be?” I asked him, as I recounted the various terrors and scourges, birth and death and the desert sands of Arabia, where I had never been. He said the trip itself and the subsequent “flashes” were a replay of experiences I had lived long ago and would have to live again. That was how it had to be.

I came away from that appointment more shaken than ever.

When his bill came, I suddenly saw things in more livid light. It was a large bill, covering the hours he had spent with me, and though somewhat nettled, I wrote the check and posted it at once. Then a strange thing happened. A call came after some weeks from his assistant to say that the bill was overdue. I said I had sent it, and fearing that she disbelieved me, I made an appointment for when he would return from his holiday. It must have been August.

It was a warm day when I sat in his flat, his wife and child
out in the garden. With windows open all around I could hear sounds, and distinctly heard someone shouting his name and challenging him. He made no reference to it. I mentioned the check that he thought was not paid, whereupon, and with that strange half-smile, he produced an envelope from a drawer in his desk. The odd thing was that though I had the correct address and it was written legibly, the envelope went to all the other places he had lived in, in London, and was neatly readdressed. It was as though he was being followed by occult forces.

On the way out I asked him why it was that Freud had given Virginia Woolf a narcissus the day she visited him, also in rooms in Hampstead. He laughed his inscrutable, frozen laugh, and I never saw him again.

A long time afterward I was being driven from Edinburgh over to Glasgow when Laing’s death was announced on the taxi radio. He had died of a heart attack, on a tennis court in the South of France. I owed him a debt; he had sent me packing with an opened scream, and that scream would become the pith of the novel I would write. It was called
Night,
the story of Mary Hooligan, in nocturnal lather, her mind raveled and excoriating, with all semblance of niceness gone. It was the dividing line in my life, between one kind of writing and another.

It was time to leave the house in Putney. In my fraught state, I began to imagine coffins in various rooms, the small white coffins of children, and soon it came to be that each room was filled with them and therefore uninhabitable.

Somehow, in all the turmoil, I managed to do some work and had written a screenplay called
Zee & Co.,
a sort of sexual flamenco featuring a spitfire wife, her husband, and the other woman. It was bought for a film in which Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, and Susannah York would eventually star, but the result was a tame offering, with all the meatiness squeezed out of it. I received thirty-nine thousand pounds and so, with my housekeeper Elizabeth Lobey, I went house hunting. She could drive, whereas I could not. In the evenings we would drive away from Putney and on into Chelsea, to look for
FOR SALE
signs on hoardings nailed to gateways and piers. We would get out and walk around to see if this was the right street or the right house, and I would stand with the intensity of a water diviner to try to guess if there were any white coffins in there.

On Lower King’s Road we passed the chandelier shop owned by two Russians, Dawna and Petrov. On my walks I used to be drawn to their window, which was bathed in light, as the chandeliers were left on all day. Scores of them, crammed together on low gilt chains, the pendants cheek to cheek, giving a shimmer to a bit of street that ran under a railway bridge, with a few small factories, a smelting works, and a garage that did repairs. Looking in, I could not help thinking of Anna Karenina at a
ball in St. Petersburg, with fresh pansies in her hair, dancing the mazurka, turning round and round, about to leave the low earth of duty and routine for the higher and more terrifying peaks of love.

Then we came on my future mansion, No. 10 Carlyle Square. In the double drawing room, a young boy was playing the piano, and already I pictured my sons there. The fact that the asking price exactly tallied with the amount that I would get for the film was further proof that this house was meant for me. After some slight haggling with the estate agent, the price was reduced by fifteen hundred pounds, and in due course Petrov came and hung matching chandeliers in the downstairs drawing room.

My first night in that house was one of my happiest ever. I stood on the doorstep and saw a chain of fairy lights on a restaurant across the way, and next to it an art gallery and then a wine shop, where a young enthusiastic man called Ali would become my chevalier.

Before long, I met different people in the nearby cafés: a man in a black beret who claimed to be Marc Chagall’s nephew, and another man, always tipsy, who came from Brittany and sold onions in the neighborhood. He would stagger into the café for a coffee and then bicycle off with garlands of pink-skinned onions around his neck and on the handlebars of his bicycle. There were two markets nearby that specialized in clothes and jewelry from the twenties, and in one of them, on a throne of cushions, was the Highlander seer Isabella Campbell, who became my friend and indeed foresaw love affairs that were looming. People were friendly. I would linger there and tell myself that I need never be lonely again. Adjoining one of the markets was a café where a very young shy girl made crepes, which she filled with either stewed apple or cream cheese and sugar. It was the bohemian life that I had longed for.

At the window of Carlyle Square, 1974.

Ali wore a kilt and was something of a jester, teasing his customers, calling everybody John. “Yes, John. No, John. Your wish is my command, John.” There was a basement in Carlyle Square, and I asked him if perhaps he would like to live in it.
He was jubilant. “Yes, John.” He moved in within twenty-four hours, and soon after his mother sent two rosebushes as a gift to me and for good luck. He stayed with me all those years with, it has to be said, some rowdy visitors at weekends. Frequently, on a Monday morning, a naval van, its blue light flashing, would be parked outside my house as an irate registrar came in search of laggard sailors who had not shown up for duty. Ali’s paramours. I cautioned him about this, at which he would hang his head in remorse and say it wouldn’t happen again, John. Then he would say he loved me, the way he loved his mother and Ella Fitzgerald, and that’s the truth, John.

The actor Patrick Magee came to lunch and brought a bunch of red roses. A powerful man, his voice was a heavenly blend of ecclesiastical Armagh and the heightened rhapsodies of Anew McMaster in his great Shakespearean roles. Magee had toured Ireland with McMaster, and one of the troupe was a young Harold Pinter, who used to joke that Magee and he had shared minor parts, digs, and jockstraps. The evening I first met Pinter in the bar of the Aldwych Theatre, at a preview of
The Birthday Party
in the early sixties, contrasted so lamentably with the last day, a week before he died, in December 2008, when we had lunch. There were seven years of illness, which he heroically fought, almost disdained, except that it was there, and never so tellingly as in the lines of the poem “But I remember how to die, though all my witnesses were dead.” He was a frail shadow of that other man, that earlier man, with the jutting jawline, eyes licorice-black that literally smote one, as he was having, as it happened, an altercation with the barman about the ice in his whiskey. At that very first introduction he spoke of his years of touring in Ireland, as he would on the very last day, Ireland, poor and bedraggled, and yet to him it was a golden time,
which he enshrined in a little book called
Mac
that is a tribute to McMaster. In it he captured Mac the Thespian, Mac the Canny Manager, and Mac the Irate, who would brook no interruptions either from ignoramuses in the front row or actresses swooning during his soaring soliloquies.

But it was not he who introduced me to Magee, it was Samuel Beckett, in the bar next to the Royal Court Theatre. Magee was warm and expansive, yet one felt that he was in the grip of such turbulence that if any whelp were to try to muscle in, Magee would explode. He loved Beckett, it was plain to see, but so did all those who met him. It was not the fame, it was the sheer bareness, not a grain of untruth either in the person or in the work; it had all been whittled away.

Magee invited himself to lunch in Carlyle Square, and on the appointed day he arrived punctually, dressed like a toff. The roses he brought had sprays of white gypsophila, and when I said that hospitals at home never liked mixing the red and the white flowers, he bowed to tradition and the gypsophila was put in a separate vase. He was polite, almost genteel, and moved as big strong men sometimes do, with a daintiness. He drank vodka, and at first he drank slowly, but that was not to last. He talked of Ireland, mud and muck, trees dripping, fierce fathers and women’s soft hearts, he bound from the youngest age for the boat, an émigré, with his svelte elocutions. Hating England at first, the provinces, dingy digs, playing to small houses with, however, some lonely and amenable landladies. He drank more and brightened, and grew melancholy again and raged, and was more theatrical by the hour.

It was now five o’clock, then six o’clock, and Magee was in no mood to leave. He was reciting Hamm’s speeches from
Endgame,
putting a cold but furious madness into them. Nervously I said I had to be somewhere.

“Capital, capital.” He would come with me. To augment the
lie, I invented the name of a family in a large house on Wimbledon Hill, one that I had noticed in the fallow times when I took the number 14 bus to Wimbledon to collect the children. I went to the bedroom, changed, and put makeup on, realizing the absurdity of all this. We left the house together, my trying to appease him, telling him they were quite uninteresting people and the dinner party would be formal. He tut-tutted that. He would lend some color. At the corner of King’s Road I could see a taxi coming from the far end, and I ran, hailing it wildly, leaving Magee like a dethroned king uttering his harangues as to how disgracefully he had been treated, he who had dined with the nobles in the great houses of Ireland, England, and beyond.