Going Up (12 page)

Our undergraduate
arbiter elegantiae
was Joe Bain, a modern linguist whose fine red hair, pinkish complexion and normative diction bestowed an air of decisive refinement. A Marlburian who had done his National Service in the RAF, Joe was an unassuming dandy who carried a posy of recondite literary references. He favoured a green corduroy jacket over a bone-buttoned yellow waistcoat. He despised my literary patron Donald Rudd, for reasons that seemed more sinister for being undisclosed. It was a small promotion to be beckoned to Joe’s table in the Whim Café on a Saturday morning and to share his genial scorn for the passing trade. Although he did sport bow-ties, he abstained from Dunhill lighters, overlong, filtered cigarette holders, and the pipes of various calibres with which apes of the acting fraternity embellished themselves.

Since most people smoked in those days, an old woman found it profitable to stand all day at the top of Senate House Passage, with a tray of matches suspended from her neck. It was charitable to buy one’s red-tipped Swan Vestas (deemed smarter than Bryant and May’s ‘safety matches’) from ‘Mother Matches’. Bints who smoked were taken to be more accessible than others. A girl who asked for a light was supposedly as good as yours. Hence the quip: ‘Do you smoke after sex?’ ‘I don’t know, I’ve never looked.’

Joe Bain advertised no sexual activity; but he was not above repeating his line about asking a girl round for a ‘whisky and sofa’ or offering her a ‘suggestive biscuit’. An admirer of A. H. Clough’s
Amours de Voyage
, he was much given to the lines ‘Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female? … Somehow, Eustace, alas, I have not felt the vocation.’
Double
entendres
, such as ‘a silent titter ran through the room’ were very much his style. It was, however, a surprise when, eating curry at the Taj Mahal one evening after we had had a few beers at the Blue Boar, Joe’s whimsy became gross. Regarded with what he took to be disapproval by a single diner, he came out with ‘That old fool in the corner,
fart
!’ He soon returned to decorousness, but he did indulge an abiding
faible
for disconcerting what no one yet called ‘square’ members of the college, by some mordant thrust, whereupon he would say, ‘Sent ’er up!’

I was never sure of Joe’s precise provenance, but he seemed to have some affinity with Wales. He relished the line, delivered in a Welsh accent, ‘You fuck off, he said, quick as a flash, and witty too.’ Joe made a whimsical class distinction between Johnians who wore bicycle clips (many did) and those who did not. Although a member of the ADC, he had no time for Peter Hall’s quasi-professional company. He preferred to direct a modest Lady Margaret Players production of Alfred de Musset’s
On Ne Badine Pas Avec
l’Amour
. It featured a line that might have been composed in his honour: ‘I should sooner be the first man in the village than the second in Rome.’

Joe liked to entertain and to be the centre of attention, but he resembled Oscar Wilde in never withholding his laughter when he found others amusing or – not quite the same thing – comic. He told me that he relished my uniquely scathing way of saying things.

‘Really, Joe? What sort of things are those?’

Joe said, ‘Oh … things like … hullo … and goodbye.’

He had come up a year before me and had a prefectorial air. I liked to play to his gallery. When someone said that something had ‘crossed his
mind’, I remarked, ‘Scarcely an overnight trip.’ Among Joe’s coterie I was slightly dismayed to find a Welsh medical student who, when we were both in Lockites, admired G. B. Shaw. He also told our dormitory the story of the man who fell asleep on the synagogue steps and woke up covered by a heavy djew. Jim, who later became my sergeant-major, remembered his Carthusian life with mortification, if only because he had been ‘de-monitored’ after he and a friend had decorated the pinnacle of the marquee erected for OC day with an upturned chamber pot. No doubt, he had been ‘shown up’ by someone eager to replace him in the house seniority. I had no memory of the events that so distressed him, nor did he ever make allusion to my tearful schoolboy request that he explain the reasons (as if there had to be any) why, all of a sudden, he and his friends had singled me out as the target of what one of them, a direct descendant of William Ewart Gladstone, called a ‘Jew-bait’.

One Sunday morning, in the summer term of 1951, when I was sleeping off several rounds of mild-and-bitter philosophising with Renford Bambrough and others, there was a knock on my ‘oak’. My ‘sorry to bother you’ visitor was Simon Raven, whom I had never seen before, yet seemed to recognise. Having been expelled from Charterhouse without being disgraced, he was now the secretary of the Cambridge OC society and had come to solicit my membership. I told him that I wanted nothing further to do with Charterhouse or Carthusians, quite as if he were the embodiment of all the proprieties that he had flouted. He said, ‘I expect you’re quite right’ and went on his way.

I was told that the headmaster, ‘Bags’ Birley, who was also his housemaster, almost wept when he realised that he had no choice but to ‘sack’ the most delightful and comely member of Saunderites. Birley himself departed not long afterwards. Before becoming Provost of Eton, he was deputed to go to Germany in order to put the future education of that country in good hands. Since he spoke little or no German, he relied on the good offices of
teachers and professors who spoke English. With their help, Birley is said to have confirmed any number of plausible ex-Nazis in their posts.

By the summer of 1951, I was all but a third of the way through my expectation of Cambridge life without having made any impression. I played too much bridge and, even there, I lacked the single-mindedness to study the higher skills of the game, even though Swinnerton-Dyer (later the Master of Trinity) circulated terse post mortems on our matches, identifying missed opportunities for squeeze play or ‘master bids’. I seemed all the time to be adjacent to my contemporaries. I used the Union as a library, but rarely went to debates, where politically ambitious undergraduates, such as Hugh Thomas, delivered deutero-Churchillian orations. When in the Sixth at Charterhouse, I flinched even from reading the lesson in chapel, less because of pious reluctance than on account of the stage fright that had struck me, at my prep school, when I had had to read a passage from the Bible after running up from the beach. I seemed to be drowning in the air, like a gasping fish. The long consequence was that, while I had no reluctance to impersonate someone else on stage, or even in life, I shied from having to stand up in public and be myself.

B
EETLE AND I made plans to go to France during the summer. John Sullivan, who was staying up for the ‘long vac term’, agreed to be my beard: I was welcome to tell my parents that he and I were heading for the Continent together. My dread was that they might find out that Beetle and I meant to spend several weeks on the Riviera and, even though our trip was to be funded almost entirely from her earnings as a secretary, forbid me to go. Did they have any idea that we were lovers? I suspect that they preferred not to think about it. Even when clear of Balliol House, with my suitcase, I feared that our liaison might be reported before I had time to grow the beard that would certify Lawrencian emancipation from suburban morality.

Beetle was there, smiling, on the platform at Victoria. I looked around anxiously before embracing her. A blonde classicist called Veronica Crisp happened to be getting into the boat-train with us. I was less proud of my beautiful companion than nervous of gossip. Only when the train started was I purged of apprehension. To leave England was like escaping from one more forbidding school.

In 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre had remarked that everything that Britain had lived in pride, France had lived in shame. For a while, Frenchmen left and
right deferred to ‘
les Anglo-Saxons
’ with something like reverence. They soon got over it. By the time we landed at Dieppe, six years after the end of the war, France again stood above all for art and existentialism,
croissants
,
café au lait
and sexual liberty not easily available between British landladies’ sheets. Laurence Sterne had promised, in
A Sentimental Journey
, that they ‘order these things differently in France’. I was relying on it. We took the brown train from Dieppe to the Gare St Lazare close together on the slatted wooden seats in third class. It was mid-June and we were free as long as the money lasted.

The first Parisian hotel we tried refused us; so did the second; and the third. I took it personally; Beetle, who had been abroad before, did not. Toting our heavy bags, we found a room, more expensive than we could well afford, near the Madeleine. We made love there as we never had before, and many more times. I loved and I was loved, just as the Latin grammar promised; and I was happy, as I had never been before, and so, she promised me, was Beetle. Cambridge ceased to matter, but I did have my portable typewriter with me.

The next morning, we removed to the narrow Hôtel des Deux Continents in the rue Jacob in the sixth arrondissement. Across the street, a dive called L’Echelle de Jacob advertised that Léo Ferré was performing. Having no idea who he was, we failed to pay a few francs to hear a legend who ranked with Georges Brassens. We went for coffee to the Café des Deux Magots, which, the bill promised, was the ‘
rendezvous des intellectuels
’ (many of them tourists, even in 1951). I hoped that we might fall into conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre and discover whether existentialism was a humanism and why it mattered one way or the other. The best cheap restaurant in the Latin Quarter was Raffi on the other side of the Boulevard St Germain, where thick, rare
Chateaubriands
cost us three shillings. It was worth ordering them just to hear the waitress call down the hatch, ‘
Deux chateaux, je commande!
’

Eliot Paul’s
A Narrow Street
, about his pre-war Left Bank life, had taught me more about pre-war bohemian life in Paris than anything by Sartre, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. The street in question was the rue St André des Arts. We discovered that it threaded through the Latin Quarter to the Boul’ Mich, via the market where we bought the cardboard box of
choucroute garnie
that we took back to our ten shillings-a-night bedroom in the Deux Continents. We had £35 between us and we hoped to spend at least six weeks in France. Before we went to catch our charabanc to the south, I bought paints, brushes and canvases in the rue Bonaparte, where Picasso was said to have a studio.

In
Hay Fever,
Noël Coward’s Jane Sefton ‘in her scarlet Hispano swept out of the Place de la Concorde into the rue Boissy d’Anglas’. We left Paris, in a Phocéen Car,
en route
via Lyon to the Riviera, where Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham had done their boldest work; so too Matisse, Cézanne, Dufy, Bonnard and Picasso. Our charabanc lumbered out of the Place St Sulpice at 7 a.m. It would take two days to reach Nice, first along the Route Nationale Six and then over the foothills of the Alps along the Route Napoléon. We scarcely noticed our fellow passengers as we literally shook off Paris. The bus bounced and bumped along the
pavé
, which lasted all the way to Melun. In open country, the road grew smoother but it was never more than a single lane in each direction. The plane trees that once shaded Napoleon’s army on the march now served as hard buffers for French drivers whose impatience regularly hurtled them in the ditch.

Every now and again, the driver pulled up at a
relais
and called out ‘
Dix minutes, m’sieudames
’ to offer relief to those with weak bladders. The lunchtime stop was at Saulieu, where the104 Hotel du Lion d’Or had a restaurant with three stars in the Michelin. Some of our fellow passengers may have eaten there; we did not. ‘
Un de ces jours
,’ someone said; we doubted it. The bus arrived at Lyon at nightfall. We were deposited at a tall, gaunt hotel not
far from the station. Our room might have served as a set for Jean Anouilh’s
Point of Departure
(which we had seen, with Mai Zetterling wearing nothing but a silk slip), but the bed was a bed. The
cabinet
was a hole in the ribbed enamel floor in a cupboard on the half-landing. Squares of old newsprint were spiked on a nail, the only recourse after a necessary squat.

The ride over the knees of the Alps was accompanied by the long blare of our driver’s klaxon. We never wondered about the state of the bus’s brakes or what would happen if an equally large vehicle was coming down the hill we were climbing or up the narrow mountain road as we hurtled down, a low wall between us and the ravine below. Nothing bad could happen to us. France was spread out for our pleasure.
‘LIBÉREZ HENRI MARTIN
’ was whitewashed on several bridges that crossed our route, but what did his incarceration have to do with us? The vanity of victory excused us from concern with the fate of a Communist jailed for campaigning against attempts to keep Indochina French.

We arrived at the bus terminal in Nice late in the evening. Touts offered us their hotels. A grey-haired woman was offering a room and breakfast for five hundred (old) francs; less than ten shillings. She led us to a horse-drawn
calèche
and we rode, in nervous style – how much was the journey going to cost us? – to her house in the suburbs. The fare was fair enough. The room proved airy and clean. It was easy, and cheap, to be happy.

We took an early-morning bus from near the flower market in Nice to St Tropez. In mid-June, it was still an uncrowded fishing village. We found a room in a little
pension
called Au Bout du Monde. It had a redtiled floor and two single beds, of which we used one. We bought a picnic (bread, ham, one banana, a packet of
Petit beurre
biscuits) and went to the beach. I told Beetle that I had the kind of skin that never burned. She claimed that she did too. So we lay under the Mediterranean sun for several bright hours. By evening we were cooked raw. Somehow we still made love.

One of Beetle’s friends in the London University history faculty, a German refugee who later committed suicide, had recommended a nearby hill village called Ramatuelle. After a couple of days, we set off, in the
midi
sun, toting our luggage, to walk eleven hot kilometres to Ramatuelle. We were not far out of St Trop, where the cork forest began, before our unbending sandals had blistering consequences. We marched on until our blisters seemed to have blisters. A French army jeep passed, stopped and backed up. Two camouflaged soldiers gestured to us to put our things in the back and drove us past the olive trees and the vineyards to Ramatuelle. ‘
Merci, merci!’ ‘De rien! Bonnes vacances!
’

Ramatuelle carried a turban of white ramparts on the top of a small hill. The one café had a vine trellised over its wide, deep terrace. Across the polygonal
place
was the Alimentation Générale. Women were taking water in tall metal jugs from two spigots in a round fountain under the shadowed lee of the church. Behind it, the walls of the town were pierced by a dark arch. We asked in the café where we might find a room. ‘
Allez chez la mère Isnard; sait-on jamais
.’ We walked through the arch and along the narrow, cool, curve of the alley to where Madame Isnard had her several houses. All she could offer was an attic bedroom and the kitchen below it at five thousand francs a week, just over four of our precious pounds. The bed was big and low. The toilet was in the next house, not far away. The kitchen had no running water. Madame Isnard’s daughter Marcelle lent us two tall tin jugs in which to bring water from the fountain. We never discovered what had happened to Monsieur Isnard.

At the Alimentation Générale, the one-toothed lady smiled on us and mounted four fresh eggs in a cone of newspaper. Tomatoes, olives, tinned sardines, potatoes, bread, milk, tea,
Vache Qui Rit
cheese furnished our larder. Our extravagances were
Ambre Solaire
and mineral water. Everyone knew what Continental water did to people. The
consigne
on the glass bottles was worth a few
sous
when we took them back. We kept the butter
fresh by floating it in a foil dinghy on the zinc water tank in the cupboard over the kitchen basin. I topped it up daily from the fountain.

In the mornings I sat at the kitchen table and typed what was intended to be my first novel on my Olivetti portable. The hero’s name, like that in
Of
Human Bondage
, was Philip. I cannot remember what his last name was; it must have been vaguely Jewish, but not foreign. I wrote without flourish. Maugham and Fleet Street led me to keep things simple. Philip was and was not me. He went to a public school that I think I called Greyfriars and he was, like Maugham’s club-footed alter ego, lonely and misunderstood. My Philip’s lameness was that he was a Jew. I cannot recall precisely what happened to him or whether I got sufficiently far for him to be liberated from his solitude by love.

What did Beetle do while I clicked at my flimsy pages? A writer relies on the tact and patience of the woman he lives with. She promised me, when I handed her the morning’s work, that it was going well. At lunchtime, we had fried eggs, beans and sauté potatoes, and then we went to bed. We made love and we slept and then we walked to one of the two nearby beaches. The more convenient was Escalet, where there were rocks and other people. A blond Swede sunned himself naked on a tall rock under the burned-out villa that we dreamed of being rich enough to buy. We were too timid to take off our swimsuits at Escalet, but one day the Swede called down to us, quite as if we were naked, ‘Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve!’

We had to walk an extra three or four kilometres to reach the long, empty, sun-blanched beach at Pampelonne, where – seven years before – the Americans had landed in strength on their way to Berlin. There we could swim naked in an empty sea and lie on the deserted sand, under a gleam of
Ambre
Solaire
, and read our Penguin
Anna Karenina
and
The Charterhouse of
Parma
. Oh, to be a modern Fabrizio del Dongo! One afternoon, a party of French people came onto the beach several hundred metres from us. I was British enough immediately to pull on my swimming trunks. ‘
Bougez
pas!
’ one of them called. ‘
Nous sommes aussi des naturistes!
’ A decade later, Pampelonne became the first nudist beach on the Côte d’Azur. Sex-starved Anglo-Saxons came to get their first
plein air
sight of brazen breasts.

On the road back to Ramatuelle, we knew we were halfway when we passed the shuttered pink house that I called ‘Eyeless in Gaza’, thinking more of Aldous Huxley than of John Milton. My thickening beard was partly in homage to Mr Gumbril in
Antic Hay
. The days passed, and the nights. We could not afford to go out to a meal, although the village artist recommended the Auberge de l’Ancre, a kilometre along the road through the olive orchards. It was worth a visit if we wanted something ‘
un tout petit
peu différent
’. The implication seemed to be that the company was louche, perhaps orgiastic. We did walk out to have a look at the place one evening. I stopped and pissed by the roadside, like a Frenchman. Beetle had never seen anyone do that before.

I even bought a beret. I had no idea that such headgear had been a distinguishing mark of the Vichy
Milice
. Our conviviality was limited to an occasional coffee under the wide vine of the café in the square. One evening, a party of English smarties, who had parked their open Ford Consul by the communal fountain, asked us where we were staying. I said, ‘Here.’ One of them said, ‘What do you find to do?’

We hardly spoke to anyone else during our weeks in Ramatuelle. The exception was a
soignée
Swiss woman, in her later twenties, who was also staying
chez
Madame Isnard. Isabelle had unblemished red fingernails and dressed to go nowhere as if it were a very chic destination. She was pleased to tell us that she was a
speakerine
on
Télévision Suisse Romande
. She had come to Ramatuelle to get away from publicity. She was in retreat in order to decide whether or not to marry a rich older man. Nothing seemed more grotesque than making a decision about, as we presumed, whether you loved someone or not.

Jean-Baptiste, the village Cézanne, who invited us to see his nice paintings
of fruit and flowers, called our Swiss neighbour ‘Isabeau’. Knowing little French history, I took this to be his own sarcastic invention.
La Suissesse
left after a few days without disclosing her decision. Two years later, I wrote a short story entitled ‘The Lacquer Set’ featuring Isabeau and her immaculate fingernails. It was accepted for publication by Peter Green, who had been appointed editor of a compendium which was to be called
The Book of the
Year
. The publisher went broke before my story could appear. Peter and I have remained close, if often literally distant, friends ever since.