Going Up (25 page)

I was relieved to be done with the company of Dick Knights. I neither liked nor disliked him. I asked him no questions and he asked me none. What was strange, and has happened many times since, is that I was unable to break a casual relationship that I found unappetising. It has been the same with agents, producers, collaborators and neighbours. I fear those whom I cannot disarm with genialities; I take polite pleasure in deceiving them with smiles. Dread of unpopularity keeps me amiable to people I should prefer to lose. More times than I can count, I have accepted commissions for things I do not want to do, for fear that I might never be asked again by people whom I have small wish to know and whose patronage diverted me from more worthwhile work.

It was a comfort to be on the train to Rome. Hill towns clustered on the razor edges of sharp hills, pinks underlined with green and umber, whites clouded by weathering water, buildings blended with landscape. Where was that woman walking, basket under her arm, along a mud-caked lane, head high, as if with the discipline of a vessel upon it? Black cattle shifted over the thick green, turned their heads to the train like stately buffoons. Acre on acre, mile on mile, the common world of the Mediterranean peasant; gates, fences, herds and flocks and their solitary guardians, soon to be their killers. I had seen them in the cracked mud of the Moroccan desert,
among the dunes where the sea works the shore; in creaking carts on the bald stoniness of Spain, real people in dungarees,
djellabas
, denim. It was easier to be ignorant of the city than to leave it. Horace, even in those artful verses, meant what he said about his Sabine farm; Virgil, in
Eclogues
and
Georgics
, contrived genuine sentiments into urbane hypocrisy (he gloried in his town house on the Palatine). Then I remembered a number that Gordon Pask had written back in Jordan’s Yard: ‘The country’s the place for vice / The country is not quite nice’.

In Rome, I found a third-floor
pensione
on the Via Cola de Rienzo in Prati. You had to put ten lire in the
ascensore
before it would take you up. As soon as I had dumped my luggage, I boarded a bus to the Piazza di Spagna. In those days, the blue-faced American Express offices were next to the little house where Keats died. Yes, there were letters from Beetle. I sat in the sun on the Spanish Steps, between the flower sellers, and discovered that she had never received the long, urgent letter I wrote to her in Barcelona, although I had referred to it, and repeated my desire to be married to her, in a later one. Of course she wanted to marry me. She would come to Paris on Boxing Day. I should be able to recognise her because she would be wearing her new dark-green coat; it had a little fur collar and she loved it. I blinked and looked up. Men were unloading Christmas trees from trucks parked against the boat-shaped fountain in the square. A boy darted through the traffic, drank hard cold water from one of the spouts, shook his head, ran off.

I went into Babington’s tea rooms, on the other side of the Spanish Steps, and ordered a waffle. The green cups with white interiors had linen napkins folded into them. There were copies of
Tatler
, the
Illustrated London News
and the
New Yorker
. Foil-wrapped Christmas puddings stood in a row on the chimneypiece. Silent, elderly waitresses wore caps and aprons, like my grandmother’s Winifred Stanley, with a bow at the back. Two women were talking about bridge; there was a club near the English cinema, on the Via Venti Settembre. I wished I could go there and play without cease until it
was time to go to Paris and meet Beetle. The women told me that in London they played at the Ladies’ Carlton Club. They were impressed by my membership of Crockford’s. I was back in the world of one-upmanship.

The women were staying at the Grand Hotel, where Marlon Brando stayed, they told me. Meals cost 3,000 lire. They claimed not to be rich, but they roughed it only in the best places, confident that anywhere lower down the scale they would encounter bedbugs, larceny and indecent assault. One of them (small, black-suited, dark-haired) had to ask me where I went to school. When I told her, she said that she had thought I was a Carthusian; Carthusians had a singular way of enunciating. I was marked, I thought but did not say, by a kind of vocal circumcision. When I mentioned how beautiful Fez was, the other, tallish, blonde, woman said that thirty years earlier her brother had been dying in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Of course, he didn’t
know
he was dying, poor lamb, but an hour before he did, on New Year’s Day 1924, he said, ‘When I’m better I’m going to take you to Fez.’ She had still never been. Perhaps they would fly there next week.

I walked up the Spanish Steps, looking again at Beetle’s long letters. Boys were throwing ivy berries at each other on the half-landing. One child, fat in tweed shorts, blue jerkin, thick-rimmed glasses, pretended that the game was over in order to approach close enough to be sure of hitting his unguarded target. He then threw his pellet with vindictive force. A smaller boy, whose energy made me suspect that he was a disguised adult dwarf, threw his berries with the same savage intensity as the fat one. I could have been at school with either of them.

I stayed in Rome for two weeks. I cannot remember that I had any conversations any deeper than with the two ladies at Babington’s. I did not go to the bridge club. I went to the Forum and the Colosseum and walked in the rain to the Pantheon. I took silly pleasure in noticing that Raphael’s tomb was permanently illuminated, unlike the adjacent tombs of the kings of Italy. There was a puddle of water under the round hole in the coffered
roof, pimpled by the steady rain. I was dutiful enough to visit any number of Roman baths, galleries, circuses, tombs and museums. Perhaps in homage to D. H. Lawrence’s celebration of the Etruscans and their enigmatic virility, I particularly liked (and still like) the Etruscan relics at the Villa Giulia.

I trekked to the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel, though I missed the less advertised adjacent chamber where Vasari’s murals honoured a papal commission to gloat piously over the massacre of the Huguenots. I walked back to the Piazza San Pietro and paid a call on Michelangelo’s then unscreened Pietà and noted the worn big toe, which I had no inclination to kiss. St Peter’s was the Grand Central Station of Catholicism. Young men and boys were playing soccer in the dry moat of the Castel San Angelo. Unlike English schoolboys, they all played very showily, juggling the ball from foot to foot, flipping it over their heads when it seemed to have escaped them. The wall of the fortress gave them opportunities for fancy footwork: if nimble, you could pick up a ricochet pass to yourself. None of the players chose to be a defender.

For all my diligence in conning the ancient sights and sites, I took more pleasure in the
commedia continua
of modern Rome. In those days, there was always a policeman on a podium in the Piazza Venezia. He did not direct the traffic; he
conducted
it, lean flexible fingers in white muslin gloves, each finger with independent jurisdiction. Under his dark-blue topee, his eyes flashed approval or disappointment, pain when motorists failed to respond with the alacrity and elegance he bent upon them. He faced down the Via del Corso and never looked in any other direction. He
sensed
the traffic as it amassed behind him; just as you were sure that he had forgotten it, his arms were raised and, with a gesture at once restrained and compelling, he let it go. As the cars passed him, he fluttered white fingers, promising the significance to him personally of even the smallest ingredient of their concert. It would not have been surprising to see him reviewed in the arts pages of the
Corriere della Sera.

Obbligato

O
N 23 DECEMBER, I took the night train to Paris, where I took a room with a big bed at the Hôtel des Deux Continents. Jackie Weiss, who had been our godmother when we staged
With This Ring
, was staying in the same hotel. Her family had come from Strasbourg. On Christmas Day, I took her to dinner – turkey and chestnut stuffing – at the
Pré St Germain
. She was about to move into rooms in a flat in Crimée which belonged to relatives of the owners of our hotel.

On Boxing Day, I went to the terminal at Les Invalides to wait for Beetle’s bus from Orly. She came towards me, head slightly on one side, same smile, same eyes, in the new green coat with the little fur collar. I cannot remember how we got back to the hotel. Probably we walked. When we got there, she took off her coat and lay back on the wide bed in her little black dress and we were happy again.

Enough remained of the Reverend Harper Wood’s bursary to keep us in Paris for at least two months, while I finished
Obbligato
. In mid-January, we flew back to London for the few days we needed to get married. To please Beetle’s parents, we paid a call on the orthodox rabbi Shapira, who was to officiate. He lived not far from 84 Mount Pleasant Road. I feared that he
would quiz me on my Judaic knowledge and perhaps disqualify me, but his only technical question was what my Hebrew name was. Frederic would not serve, but Michael did. He asked what I meant to do in life. When I told him that I was going to be a writer, he turned to Beetle. ‘A scholar! You’ll have to go out to work to support him.’ Many copper coins were distributed on the carpet next to the rabbi’s desk.

I stood under the
huppe
in the synagogue and waited for Beetle to come to my side, quite as if I had never seen her before. I had to wear a dark suit and a homburg hat, bought specially for the occasion and never worn again. She wore a pretty light-brown lace dress and a little hat. She whispered, ‘Hullo, it’s me’ and then the antique, incomprehensible ceremony began. It ended with the ritual of my stamping on a wine glass, under a white napkin. There was no going back, except to Paris, which we did that same evening, after a wedding feast at the Berkeley Hotel. Apart from members of our families, the only guests included Guy and Celia Ramsey and Leslie Bricusse and his girlfriend Julie Hamilton, Jack and Margaret Piesse and my father’s prep school friend from before the Great War, the anaesthetist David Aserman and his wife, Estelle. I cannot remember who served as my best man. I think it was Beetle’s sister’s husband, Arthur Stone, the dentist. Nor do I know how Leslie Bricusse came to be there. His wedding present was a paperknife, of the kind I had seen on sale in glinting numbers in the
souks
of Morocco. It was, he said, a small token of something bigger to come. Beetle deterred him from ever sending anything more lavish.

I had to make a speech in reply to someone. I recall only that I could not resist saying that the difference between a wedding and a funeral was that in the latter case it was less likely that a mistake was being made. It was as if someone else was standing in for the writer who had done the little grand tour and had met the woman he loved, wearing that green coat with the little fur collar, and taken her back to that big, low bed in the Hôtel des Deux Continents.

When we told Jackie Weiss that we meant to live for however long we could in a hotel bedroom, she had the instant generosity to propose that we take over the rooms she had booked in the Crimée apartment of M. and Mme Lambel in the
onzième arrondissement
. We had two secluded rooms at the end of a corridor. M. Lambel was blind. From time to time he would shuffle, in tartan slippers, past our door to the store room, where there was a brown-paper sack of coal nuggets. We had a small stove, our only heating, in the sitting room, which had a slightly domed parquet floor.

I rented a hefty Royal Sovereign typewriter with an English keyboard and we settled into a routine that has rarely been broken: I worked all morning; Beetle shopped and cooked lunch on a pair of gas-rings in a pantry down the hall; in the afternoon, we explored Paris, especially the Left Bank; in the evening we went to the opera, or to the
Opéra Comique
, where upper circle seats cost only a few old francs; more often to the cinema, often one just off the rue St André des Arts that screened classic movies.

Afterwards, we shared a pot of
chocolat chaud
at the Café Flore. When it was very cold I imitated Inspector Maigret and ordered
grog
, which came in a glass inside a metal cage with a handle. I loitered in La Hune, the adjacent bookshop, where you were free to stand and read Camus and Sartre and who all else, so long as the pages had been cut. On one of these sorties, we fell into casual conversation with an American photographer, Jack Nisberg, who said he was a friend of Ken Tynan’s. He asked whom we knew in Paris.

I said, ‘Tell you the truth, we don’t know anybody.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Six, seven weeks. We don’t especially need to know people.’

‘You don’t even have a fun group? You have to have a fun group.’

Obbligato
fattened day by day. I was often surprised into laughing at my own jokes (‘Our bankers are Coutts, sir.’ ‘That’s not my problem, is it?’). I never doubted that the book would be published exactly as I wrote it. It might be a small work, but I was an artist and I lived in Paris with a beautiful woman.

Crimée was a working-class district. Our rooms were in a three-sided tenement block set around an interior courtyard, often snowy that winter. The cinder paths were lined with upended bottles. A tall metal tree had acute-angled branches on which the tenants spiked their empties. There was no television; we never listened to the radio. I knew that the French were losing Vietnam, from which Pierre Mendès-France was promising to extract them with honour and I was, of course, on his side. His many enemies called him ‘
Ce monsieur curieusement surnommé France
’; like me, he accepted the denomination but was indifferent to religion. Socialism, seconded by linguistic philosophy, would put an end to those obsolete distinctions.

I regularly bought
L’Exprèss
, the Mendèsistes’ house magazine, edited by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and his lover Françoise Giroud. Mendès was a frequent contributor; so were François Mauriac (his very grown up
Bloc-Notes
reminded me of Harold Nicolson’s column in
The Spectator
, which I had hurried to read in the Charterhouse library) and Jean-Paul Sartre, when he took time out from his own house magazine,
Les Temps Modernes
, named after Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie. There was something enviably assured about French intellectuals and their pedestalled
prises de position
.

When we did not go out in the evening, we sat close to the black iron stove in our little living room. If I crossed the creaking parquet floor, even in stockinged feet, to stoke the fire with nuggets from the bag at the end of the corridor, the petty noise provoked the fury of our downstairs neighbour. He was a
poids lourds
driver whose articulated lorry was often parked, half on the pavement, tilted close to the wall of our building, ready for an early start. Any movement from us after we had eaten our evening eggs and bacon provoked a shout of ‘
Il faut dormir!
’ I was all for workers’ rights, but I was not persuaded that they included sending us to bed at eight-thirty. One night, when I had fed the stove like T. E. Hulme’s creeping Turk, my stockinged tread was still enough to evoke the usual yell. I knelt down and, with my face a few inches from the shining floor, I barked, at length. I stopped and
then I did it again, a last menacing growl, like the MGM lion’s. Our neighbour never uttered another complaint.

By early March, Pierre Mendès-France had been ousted from power, I had finished
Obbligato
, and the Reverend Harper Wood’s money was running out. Our blind landlord had never seen the grease marks on the pantry wall. His wife had never ventured in our direction. Now, however, she took sudden loud exception to the spattered grease on the back wall of the pantry where we did our regular frying. We were to pay for the damage and leave at once. Beetle and I both had flu and still had temperatures.

I went through the curtained sliding glass doors of the Lambels’ sitting room and saw that Madame had summoned her large downstairs neighbour to lend muscle to her demands. I denounced him with feverish fluency (and a zest of British disdain for the duplicitous French) as ‘
Monsieur l’agent du Gestapo
’. The large blue man made no response. We never paid for the damage but we did have to pack our bags and walk out into the snow. Since the Lambels and the owners of the Hôtel des Deux Continents were kin, we went to the Hôtel de la Sorbonne.

On our return to England, we took a furnished room in Vicarage Gate, off Kensington Church Street. I felt as if the years Beetle and I had been lovers had been amputated from our lives. To be married and in London was to be reduced to the commonplace. My parents were in no hurry to read my first novel, but my father suggested that I show it to his friend George Greenfield, a literary agent. Beetle had made several neat carbon copies, one of which I delivered to Greenfield’s office in Red Lion Square. He was not there, because his five-year-old son, Georgie, was ill.

Our first visitor in Vicarage Gate was Leslie Bricusse, who was still appearing in
An Evening with Beatrice Lillie
. He had survived the bad notices without noticeable bruises. Despite the hostility of Bea’s large and jealous manager, John Phillips, Leslie had been able to enter many new smart names and telephone numbers in his plump address book. He was glad I
was back because he had work for me to do on a film for Jock Jacobsen’s top client, Max Bygraves. Leslie had already made a deal for the script of
Charley Moon
, which was to contain several original songs. I did not have to worry about those. What I was good at was dialogue. Since he had the lyrics and music to do, did I agree that £250 was a fair share? I was never informed what it was a share of. It seemed a lot of money.

I resumed our collaboration with relief and revulsion. Leslie was sorry to say that I would not be able to have a credit, because the contract was already signed and sealed. On my travels, I had become a writer; more myself by being less so. In Paris, I was a working novelist. Beetle and I had answered only to ourselves. In London, Leslie was blithe and benevolent and I was powerless to reject his favours. How else were we to live?

Thanks to Beetle’s parents and to the money she had saved (and the £6.10s a week royalty that came to my bank from
An Evening with
Beatrice Lillie
), we could afford to pay the ‘key money’ for a two-room basement flat at Turner’s Reach House, 9, Chelsea Embankment. It cost £800, but that included the furniture. It was a rich address (George Weidenfeld had the first-floor flat, which had a fountain in the foyer), but we had to have the light on in our flatlet all day. We did, however, enjoy having a telephone with a FLAxman number. Our one tall window was onto a shaded yard at the back where Mrs Richards and Mrs Lewis exchanged loud matutinal opinions.

Dorothy Tutin was living in a barge anchored a few hundred yards upstream of us. After we had had lunch at a nearby pub, Leslie was keen that we should visit her. Dotty seemed pleased to see him, and me. He always had a way of seeming to have favours to dispense. He had told me that, as a matter of fact, people always liked him and seldom liked me. I should stick to doing the work and leave it to him to make the contacts that would advance our fortunes.

Dorothy Tutin was having an affair with Laurence Olivier, but no one was supposed to know. If Vivien Leigh found out, there would be a terrible
scandal. Fear of her vengeful fury left Dotty unable to eat. When Vivien did indeed storm aboard, there were shrill scenes. Olivier took fright. Dorothy made small effort to retain him. There was something predatory, or so it seemed in those days, in the way the great actor had exercised
droit de seigneur
. Dotty went on to have a long and often successful stage career and a durable marriage, but she never recovered her youthful insouciance.

Impatient to hear what someone thought of
Obbligato
, I took a copy to the MCA office and left it for Elaine Greene to read. A few days later, I called George Greenfield’s office and was told that he had yet to read my manuscript. His little boy was dying. I turned my thoughts to writing screenplays. Graham Greene had compared it to slavery. The noticeable difference was that it paid very well. Before starting work on
Charley Moon
, I asked to see a film script. Its scheme seemed less demanding than Greek iambics. Our director, Guy Hamilton, was past thirty and had already done a couple of films. He dismissed several of our bright new ideas as ‘page one in the book’, but the script eventually passed his examination. Max loved Leslie’s songs. The film was made. I was not wholly sorry not to figure on the credits.

George Greenfield did not read
Obbligato
until a week or so after his five-year-old son, Georgie, died. Meanwhile, Elaine Greene did read it, enjoyed it, and wanted to talk to me about it. Then George called to say that he was confident that he could find me a publisher. Elaine Greene did not take my good news well. It was, she told me, a breach of protocol to have sent the manuscript to two people at the same time. Thirty years later, a publisher friend, the late Stanley Baron, wrote to say that he and a companion were planning a trip to south-western France. Might they call in, perhaps for a night, at our house? I replied that it would, of course, be a pleasure. It turned out that his companion was to be Elaine Greene. When he mentioned their putative hosts’ name, she declined to come anywhere near us. She had neither forgotten nor forgiven how unethically I behaved in 1955.

Since Beetle had worked for V. G. and I could claim to have dined with
him, George went first to Gollancz, where V. G.’s nephew, Hilary Rubinstein, was the heir apparent. V. G. had recently had a great success with a first novel by an Oxford friend of Hilary’s, Kingsley Amis. I listened to a Third Programme excerpt on our battery-powered portable radio. It was a section in which Jim Dixon burns the sheets in the guest room of his smart girlfriend’s house and cuts out the scorch marks with a razor. It seemed an unlikely, scarcely side-splitting episode to be broadcast on a station normally so solemn. I was unsurprised to read a dismissive review of
Lucky Jim
by Julian MacLaren-Ross at the end of a column headed by unmitigated praise for Alfred Hayes’s
In Love
, a novella that Guy Ramsey also applauded in the
Daily Telegraph
. Nearly sixty years later, Peter Owen asked me to write an introduction to a reprint of
In Love
. It read as well as ever.