Going Up (27 page)

In the street outside the Westminster Hospital, a barrow-boy was selling second-hand books. One of them was
Henry Sows the Wind
by Brian Glanville, with whom I had once shared the task of writing the football reports in
The Carthusian
. When he proved the
miglior fabbro
in that field, I switched to reviewing films. In that role, I made a point of not joining the chorus that sang the praises of the British documentary style as manifest in the 1936
Night Train
, with its fellow travelling commentary by W. H. Auden. Glanville was now not only already in print, he was published by Secker & Warburg and this was his
second
book. I gave sixpence for it. It was better than I wished.

We rehearsed
Grande Gingold
at the Playhouse all day, in a serious, light-hearted manner. Radio comedy was not arduous for performers; no one had to learn lines; but clarity of diction was paramount. The main technical concern was to avoid pages rustling as they were turned over. Our rehearsal on 15 July 1955 was without the weekly smiles. Ruth Ellis had been hanged
that morning, for murdering her faithless lover, a racing driver called David Blakely. Despite distinguished appeals, from V. G., Arthur Koestler and others, the Home Secretary, Major Gwilym Lloyd-George, refused a reprieve. She was twenty-nine years old.

The public response, of shame and outrage, ensured that Ruth Ellis was the last female to be executed in Great Britain. The horror was in the detail: apologetic jailers obliged her to put on a pair of rubber knickers, for sanitary reasons, before they led her out for Mr Pierrepoint to break her neck. Did our audience laugh as usual that night? And did we want them to? We did; and they did. The judge in the Ruth Ellis trial, Mr Justice Havers, had entered a strong private plea for mercy. He was the grandfather of Nigel Havers who, some twenty years later, appeared (in the part of a character based somewhat on John Hargreaves), in my BBC Two series
The
Glittering Prizes
.

One weekday, at 11.15 in the morning, never a time at which I welcome visitors, our doorbell rang. It was David Gore-Lloyd. ‘Hullo, it’s me.’ He looked quite well until he sat down and relaxed. Then you saw how pink his cheeks were, how grim the flesh. He was brisk, almost gay, as he felt for his cigarettes. He had been out of hospital for several days. He had not been discharged; he had absconded. His parents did not know where he was. He had become engaged, he said, to Pussy, the sister of the Siamese girl who had shared 28 Montagu Road with us, in Cambridge.

When Poony began to sleep with Paddy Dickson, she feared that her sister would write and inform their father. In the event, Pussy preferred to emulate her sister’s liberties, with several men; David, it seemed, was one of them. When he learned, perhaps from Pussy herself, more likely from the kind of friend whom few people lack in such circumstances, that she was sleeping with someone else, David climbed out of his bed in the Westminster hospital and went to her flat in Fulham. She told him that she loved him and belonged to him. That night, she went and slept with another Siamese.
The following day, while David was at Pussy’s place, her Siamese lover came round to see her. He disclaimed any knowledge of David’s existence.

David told us that he intended never to see Pussy again. He was carrying a bottle of heavy pain-killers suspended in pink fluid. Jonathan Miller told us that such concoctions were known, in the medical profession, as ‘terminal cocktails’. David had nothing to do other than to walk the streets. I took him to lunch at Crockford’s. Then we went to the Oxford and Cambridge Club, where we played snooker. He won easily. Towards evening, I settled him into a hotel in Bloomsbury where, he said, he had once stayed with Pussy. Beetle and I presumed that his ‘love affair’ with Pussy was a fantasy and that she did not, in truth, care for him at all. Many years later, we visited her sister and Paddy Dickson in Bangkok. Poony told us that David had been the love of Pussy’s life. She had never got over his death.

As we parted, I shook David’s hand warmly and told him to telephone us any time, but that I was busy for the next two days: I had a bridge marathon planned with a freckled, balding, gingery-haired person called Donald Simmonds, who had also played bridge for Cambridge. Our occasional sessions, in a basement in Earl’s Court, lasted till the small hours of the next day. Don introduced me to Tom Maschler, a young publisher at MacGibbon & Kee with whom he had been at Leighton Park, the Quaker school. Simmonds had no advertised job or ambition. I never sought his company, but I was reluctant to shake him off. He made doing nothing into a form of superiority above the dutiful and the industrious. We lunched now and again at the
Ox on the Roof
in the King’s Road. I attached Donald’s ominous nihilism to an unsmiling bridge-playing character, whom I called Gladstone, in my 1963 novel
Lindmann
. The surnames of minor characters in my fiction, when I dislike them, are almost always those of my English schoolfellows.

By the time Leslie Bricusse’s provincial tour came to an end,
Charley Moon
was being shot. Jock Jacobsen’s watchword, ‘There’s such a thing as timing, fellers’, came to fruition: the Rank Organisation, which had its
panelled home at Pinewood Studios, offered Leslie and me a contract to write two films in the coming year. There was no distinction between our remuneration: we were each to be paid £1,150. Jock began to call me by my first name.

Leslie had found an accountant whose services he recommended. Eric Barnacle was a pockmarked, slab-faced clerk with the usual spectacles, the usual grey flannels and sports jacket, the usual cubbyhole office (on the north side of Oxford Street). He told me that he hated being an accountant. When he woke up in the morning, he was sorry to discover that he was still the same boring person. He bored himself even in his dreams. After the paperwork was done and signed, he proposed that I pay him and the Revenue simultaneously. ‘It’ll save trouble if you just add the two together and make the cheque out to me. I’ll pass the tax on to HMG.’ I had a strong feeling that I was doing the wrong thing, but I did as he asked.

A year later, the Revenue demanded payment for what Barnacle had promised he was going to pay. I found that he had absconded with what was always described in those days as ‘a chorus girl’. The law eventually caught up with him. When he went to jail, I was not sorry; neither was he perhaps: he had succeeded in being somebody else for a little while. He now had some furniture for his dreams. Since he was not a chartered accountant, no professional insurance covered his delinquency. I am still credulous, but not so easily conned.

After Beetle had nursed me through a long, debilitating, very sweaty bout of glandular fever, Leslie invited us to stay in his parents’ house in Shirley, near Manchester, in order, once again, to ‘tickle up’ the book of
Lady at the Wheel
. While ill, I had had a very high temperature and agonising headaches. The janitor’s wife and her friend Joan were in the habit of having loud conversations in the yard outside the bedroom’s dark window. One morning, Beetle’s mother arrived, with a bag of necessities: smoked salmon, cold chicken, a cake from Maison Sagne in Marylebone High Street. We told her
how persistent and percussive the noise was. Ray had a simple solution: she would give the talkative ladies ten shillings and explain that I was unwell.

Socialist principles led me to insist that we not demean the working class by offering them money; the right thing to do was to reason with them. Ray promised to take care of things in a way that would not be offensive. I heard her explain my condition, and winced at the silence in which I knew she was giving them the money. The ladies never disturbed me again. I consoled myself that overtipping was one thing Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre had in common; prolixity was the other.

While we were staying with his parents in cold suburban Shirley, Leslie gave me driving lessons in his new white Ford Consul convertible. Since I was nervous of pressing too heavily on the accelerator, the L-plated car did many kangaroo leaps. Leslie sat, imperturbable, beside me until I achieved some kind of competence. He promised that one day I should be able to change gear and go round a corner at the same time. It seemed unlikely.

On our return to London, Beetle and I took BSM driving lessons. We both passed the test first time. I cannot remember ever again having to perform the tricky exercise of ‘backing around a corner’. We went to Lex Garages in Soho, hoping for a bargain from Trevor Chinn. He took us up the steep ramp to the first floor and pointed to a second-hand green Ford Anglia, PLD 75. ‘This is your car,’ he said. It had no heater and was not in gleaming condition but we had his promise that, for £250, we would never do better. He was probably right: with a transfer depicting all the roadsigns likely to be encountered on the Continent stuck on the inside of the wind-screen, we were to drive many, many miles in it on all kinds of rough roads, even if I did have to turn round and back up a one-in-ten gradient in Andalucia. When, several years later, I came to trade in PLD 75 for something better, Beetle’s cousin Geoffrey had no doubt that it was composed of the welded halves of two cars that had been in shunts.

Herb and Judy Oppenheim came to England in the autumn of 1955. They
had been touring Europe ever since they left me in Granada. At dinner in Chelsea Embankment, they were pleased to tell Beetle that I had talked about her ‘all the time’ when we were travelling together. As she cooked pineapple lamb in the tiny kitchen, the Oppenheims were quick to whisper that they were not surprised that I had married such a bright, beautiful girl. They were proposing to go to Sicily, their last excursion before they returned to the States. What did we say to joining them?

They were still driving the little Simca with an unsprung bench seat at the back. Comfortable enough for three of us and the smaller Linda, it was tight for five. I was different now that I was with Beetle. Our intimacy soon made Herb and Judy uneasy. The warmth that I had turned on them when we were in Spain was now directed almost exclusively at Beetle. We were less tolerant of Linda and her understandable misery than I had been when I was grateful for the lift and the company.

We went south along the Route Napoléon into the foothills of the Alps and then Herb branched off to take the frozen and seasonably ‘
déconseillé
’ Mont St Cenis pass into Lombardy. He negotiated the deserted, alarmingly icy corduroy road with purposeful skill. The high road was the most direct route to the stadium, designed by Luigi Nervi, near Torino, with the largest unsupported roof in Europe. Herb’s three-dimensional camera put it on record.

We still had a long way to go. On the level road from Turin to Pisa, Judy took the wheel, to give him a break. Not used to low-powered, stick-shift European cars, requiring synchronous skill with the clutch, she drove only in top gear. After she had had to slow down to pass through a village with a fair, the Simca regained speed with clunking reluctance. Out on the narrow, tree-lined Lombardy road, Judy decided to overtake a large, fast-moving lorry. Having pulled out into the only other lane, she failed to accelerate with sufficient firmness to get on past the throbbing lorry. It did not diminish its speed. We willed her to change down to third gear and accelerate
on past. The moaning Simca yawed back and forth. We rolled on in the tight space between the high wheels of the truck and the thick, frequent plane trees. Huge hubs and black tree trunks came and receded, came and receded. Had anything come in the opposite direction, we should certainly have been killed or badly injured. Eventually, we were past the lorry and Judy regained control of our course. The silence was sustained and divisive.

In Pisa, Herb pulled up outside a hotel adjacent to the Campo dei Miracoli. We could stay in the car while he went in to make a deal. I advised against bargaining with undue insistence. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s pretty well November, right? Believe me, they’ll be only too glad to cut a deal.’ He came back out to say that the place was ‘strictly minimal’, but they had offered an enticing rate.

After dinner, which ended with a floral bowl of
zuppa inglese
, Beetle and I walked out into the cool darkness to look at the Leaning Tower. Judy was putting Linda to bed. Herb emerged alone and walked on the wide grass. We did veer over and talk to him, but the rupture proved irreparable; not least because he seemed to blame Beetle for it.

Judy never drove us again. We reached Naples in good time to catch the night ferry for Palermo. Before going on board, we dined at one of the row of restaurants on the quay. Each had an orchestra, in full fig, playing in front of it. The grander ones had three-tiered platforms on which instrumentalists in black ties were conducted by some inglorious, tail-coated maestro. We had fish soup with squid and giant prawns in it and split the bill with precision.

A row of open carriages with beribboned, blinkered, nose-bagged horses was waiting on the quay at Palermo. To reach the hotel that Herb had selected, in the centre of the city, we clopped past Baroque villas behind ornate gates. Not long before, an Alfa Romeo had exploded in the driveway of one of the villas, the mafia’s routine way of killing a recalcitrant politico and encouraging the others. The razing of the antique dockside quarter, and its replacement with yellow, gimcrack tower blocks, would not start for
another decade. 1950s Palermo had sinister shadows, even on a fine autumn morning, but it was still grandiose with the mouldering
palazzi
of the decadent nobility who would find their stylish sarcophagus in Giuseppe Tomaso di Lampedusa’s
Il Gattopardo
.

Herb’s guidebook knew just where to go and what to admire. We drove up to Monreale to see the Byzantine mosaics in the cross-bred cathedral (part Catholic, part Greek Orthodox). In Cefalù, we lunched in a waterfront trattoria. Herb invited a solitary diner to join us. He was an ex-GI who had been in Sicily ever since the war. I imagined that he had been seduced by the myth of Aleister Crowley, the pear-shaped Great Beast 666, who had lorded it, during the 1920s, in the adjacent Abbey of Thelema, where he proclaimed that the only law was ‘Do As Thou Wilt’. Somerset Maugham’s skimpy novel
The Magician
paid scathing homage to the intimidating charlatan. In the late 1960s, I played soccer in Brian Glanville’s twice-weekly pick-up game in Hyde Park. Among the casual company was a wilted individual who had been an acolyte in Crowley’s Abbey. D. H. Lawrence too had passed that way; he blessed the unsmiling Sicilian males with primal phallic virility.