Going Up (28 page)

Herb asked whether our temporary friend had a disability pension to sustain him in Sicily. ‘No, I can stay here because, OK, I do occasional jobs for people locally, which keeps me eating at least.’

‘It’s certainly a beautiful spot to be stuck in,’ I said.

‘Think so? Hate it; hate the people too.’

‘Why stay?’

‘How about I’m wanted by Uncle Sam for desertion? Pays to keep my head down, only not a whole lot.’

We drove on to Taormina. The transparent November sea off Giardini Naxos was just warm enough to swim in. In the evening, we played bridge, in a scintillating storm, in on–off–on light in the glassed terrace of a little hotel up on the hill, next to the Roman theatre. Herb’s schedule kept us looking
and leaping with timely vigilance. In the Greek theatre outside Syracuse, where boozy Aeschylus previewed one of his plays, I slowed things down with an abbreviated lecture on the Athenians’ disastrous Sicilian expedition in the grand harbour, which we could see in front of us.

Then it was time for Agrigento. The old town, high above the famous row of sixth- and fifth-century Doric temples, had been damaged in the war; but it retained the tight heat of ancient Akragas, where the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles was born. Today’s eviscerated city is an agglomeration of concrete, on which the mafia has the monopoly. While the Oppenheims had breakfast, Beetle and I walked to the ruins. I heard myself lecture her on the temples’ gods as if we were strangers. The expedition had divided us from my friends and, to a degree, from each other. We lacked the wit or the will to put things right. Nothing unpleasant was said by any of us. Everything I said was very polite, in the British style.

We did the full round of the island, where the ancient sites, from Selinunte to Segesta, were still unfenced. The villages reeked sweetly of straw and donkey dung. In the sudden twilight, peasants rode past in their carts, rakes and scythes silhouetted in a stiff frieze against the last of the low, lurid light. The carved tailboards of their carts bore polychrome hand-carved reliefs of folkloric figures. There were few cars. Just short of a box-bridge, on a wet evening, we were overtaken by an Alfa Romeo with flaring lights and a loud klaxon. As he took the narrow-shouldered bridge, the alpha male driver lost control. The car spun round, once, twice, within the stiff bracket of the girders, halted for a split second, then plunged on as fast as before. Beetle and I, on the bench at the back, looked at each other. Herb glanced at his mirror and saw the look. He smiled a blue smile.

Outside Castelvetrano, where the outlaw Salvatore Giuliano had died five years before, after lording it over the region in a short season of international fame, we bought unglazed terracotta dishes and a bell-shaped jar from a wayside vendor. A year later, Gavin Maxwell would embellish the
Giuliano myth in
God Protect Me From My Friends
. Half in love with a ruthless and virile bandit, Maxwell’s elegy dignified him into a modern Robin Hood. Leslie Bricusse and I visited the movie producer Raymond Stross, a short, fleshy man of small charm, hoping that he might want to make a movie out of Giuliano’s story.

We were served with tea by his luminously beautiful young blonde wife. Clare endeared herself to me by murmuring, in a convent-educated undertone, how wonderful I had been in ‘Joe and the Boys’. Stross was not seduced by our enthusiasm. Eventually the film
Salvatore Giuliano
was directed by Francesco Rosi from a script by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, the senior of Lucchino Visconti’s trusted scenarists, whom we would meet in Rome in 1964. Suso sustained the Giuliano myth by portraying him almost entirely as a distant figure. In brave relief, he could stand for a sullied, gun-toting saviour in a white mackintosh.

Riding north in the Simca, Beetle and I held our Sicilian pots in our laps, like obstinate trophies of the worthwhileness of the trip. After disembarking from the ferry at Naples, Judy decided that Linda was fretful only because the car was so full. The two of them would catch the train and meet us again at Ventimiglia, on the French border. Alone with me and Beetle, Herb was as nice, and informative, as he could be. He even let me drive. There was a level crossing at the top of an embankment somewhere along the Appian Way. I had to stop, on the tilt, at the top. I tried, as Leslie Bricusse had taught me, to hold the car by idling the engine and staying in gear. I must have depressed the clutch too far. The car rolled backwards down the long slope. Luckily, there was nothing behind us. I waited at the bottom, until the barrier was raised, and then drove up the gradient and over the railway line. After a few more tactful miles, Herb resumed the wheel. Judy’s absence sat with us.

Herb determined on one last detour, via Marseille, in order to see Le Corbusier’s suburban
Unité d’Habitation
. It exemplified the modernism that
Siegfried Giedion claimed would make people better, more sociable and well-adjusted by encasing their lives in a common, clean-lined framework. Glass and concrete were expected to furnish a world purged of baroque exaggeration. Architecture was the moral brassiere of the future: its uplift would make mankind positive and outward-looking, preferably through picture windows. The tenants of the
Unité d’Habitation
certainly enjoyed a brighter life than we did in our SW3 basement; but Le Corbusier’s regimental uniformity echoed the brave new classlessness we were supposed to admire in Sovcolor documentaries in which untiring Ukrainians sowed, reaped and sometimes sang their way to the socialism at the end of Comrade Stalin’s rainbow.

Herb seemed unaware of Europe’s demons or how the hydra could always grow new heads. Perhaps because he did not look like a Jew, he appeared not to feel like one. He considered anti-Semitism a social disease. Architecture, he thought, could redesign nature and make life’s rough places smooth and easy to keep clean. Like the photographer who called on everyone to say ‘cheese’ at the same time, the master-builder would fix a regular smile on humanity’s face.

As we returned north along the Route Nationale 6, in discrete silence, Herb spotted in the
Guide Michelin
that there was a three-star restaurant at Saulieu, the
Lion d’Or
. Beetle and I recalled not eating there when on the way to Ramatuelle. Herb reckoned that if he stepped on it, we could make it by half past one. Wouldn’t it be nice to seal, and heal, our trip with a great meal? We did not arrive till nearly a quarter to two. Herb played the rich American, but neither charm nor his pocketbook could recall a chef who had quit his kitchen once the last
plats de résistance
had been scanned on their way to table. All that anyone could offer was some
pâté
and salad and a dessert, from a limited list. What was meant to be a celebration was cold comfort.

In Paris, we parted from the Oppenheims, with a show of gratitude and
a last contribution to the cost of the gas. The rectitude of my goodbye reminded me of my tight-lipped father. I was sad and relieved, Beetle merely relieved. She never saw them again; I did, when I was in New York in 1967, for the première of
Two for the Road
. Herb’s career had peaked with his designs for the Playboy Club in New York City. He was now on the board of a liberal synagogue. Linda was fifteen, a pretty young girl who remembered, with more good humour than I deserved, what a pain she had been on our travels. If they ever saw it, the Oppenheims just may have seen themselves in the characters of the Maxwell Manchesters in Stanley Donen’s movie. Linda was never as obnoxious as the fictional Ruthiebelle.

Beetle and I caught the train to Calais with the terracotta pots and jug and returned to Chelsea Embankment. When we turned on the light in the living room, it revealed a congress of cockroaches, the size and colour of prunes. I stamped my foot and they took cover, without haste. The next morning, I resumed work on
The Earlsdon Way
. Every evening, Beetle scanned the day’s output of pages. If she guessed that my heroine, Karen, was based on Hilary Phillips she did not remark it aloud. As a reader, Beetle was tactful, but not passive. At one point Karen’s valetudinarian mother Lesley complains of her bad shoulder. Later, her husband Edward asks how her shoulder feels. My typescript had her reply ‘What shoulder?’ Beetle suggested that I delete the ‘what’. Less was more accurate: ‘
Shoulder
?’ was exactly what Lesley would have said. A decade later, Beetle became one of Jonathan Cape’s best readers. Even Edna O’Brien was grateful for her always specific attentions.

Tony Becher had become co-editor of the
Cambridge
Review
, a prim 10-point print publication, its long paragraphs aimed at senior members of the university. He asked me to review David Garnett’s
Aspects of Love
. I found it to be of no intimidating brilliance. Reviewing resembled the composition of prosaic Latin verses: you had to be elegant and sparky within a limited space and, if possible, end with a twist. It was a quick means of
getting your name in print and you could keep the book. Garnett’s novella combined Bloombury sophistication with winsome sentimentality. In the 1990s, Andrew Lloyd-Webber asked John Schlesinger and me to turn his and Don Black’s musical version of Garnett’s novella into a film. The operetta version had stuck, tight, to the plot and dialogue, which struck me, once again, as falsely simple. When John and I proposed bold changes, the project was shelved.

Not long after Beetle and I had returned from Sicily, Tony Becher called. He had met a woman whom he wanted to marry; her name was Anne and she had been a pupil of Helen Gardner’s at St Hilda’s. Might he come and introduce her to us? And by the way, did I know David Gore-Lloyd had died while we were away? I wrote to his parents, of course, and we exchanged Christmas cards for many years. After the publication of
The Glittering
Prizes
, which I dedicated to David’s memory, Mrs Gore-Lloyd took offence. I never heard from her again. It may be that she was less upset by my requiem for David than by my depiction of his mother.

The Earlsdon Way

L
IKE THE VICAR of Oliver Goldsmith’s deserted village on his £40 a year, we were passing rich. A monthly cheque came to Chelsea Embankment, via MCA, from the Rank Organisation. Neither Olive Harding nor any Rank producer suggested a movie that Leslie and I should write; nor did they look to us to volunteer any ideas. It was an ideal arrangement. I worked at
The Earlsdon Way
every weekday morning; in the afternoon I went up to town to play bridge; sometimes in the two-shilling room at Crockford’s, more often at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, where I could read
The Spectator
and the
New Statesman
before continuing to work on my manuscript until it was time to go upstairs to the bridge room. The stakes were only sixpence a hundred, but the chances of winning were enhanced by the amateurishness of the players. Tea and a toasted teacake cost one and sixpence. It was a club rule not to tip the staff.

The company was composed mostly of members of the Bar and the county or High Court bench. There was also a brace of magistrates, one called Pereira, who sometimes figured in the
Evening News
feature ‘The Courts Day by Day’. While Pereira carried traces of Sephardic caution, the beak known as ‘Master Humphrey’ was disposed to booming Anglo-Saxon
candour. He announced one evening that he had had a frustrating day; the case before him had concerned two sets of blacks and, ‘of course, it was impossible to tell which were the bigger liars’.

The most distinguished judge was Cyril Salmon, a scion of the Salmon and Gluckstein fraternity. One afternoon, while we waited for a four, he proposed a game of backgammon, at which my mother had been my tutor. At one point, Salmon threw an awkward pair of dice and said, ‘I shall have to open my legs!’ After the race riots of 1958, the first violent response to the influx of Caribbeans during the 1950s, several ‘Teddy boys’ were accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm on black people. Mr Justice Salmon presided over the trial. In due time, he delivered a four-hour summing up, without notes. He told the jury that, in a free society, men were free to think whatever they wish, however repugnant their opinions; if, however, they translated them into violent action they could expect severe punishment. When convicted, Salmon sentenced the guilty men to four years’ imprisonment. No similar outrages took place in England for several years.

I asked Cyril whether he ever feared being attacked by people whom he had sent to prison. ‘
Sans
wig and robes, they rarely know who you are,’ he said. ‘One good reason for keeping the fancy dress.’ If the odd criminal did recognise the man who had sent him down, in the 1950s, home-grown felons adhered to social niceties: none expressed resentment. Perhaps they took their cue from the rarely vicious villains portrayed by Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers in Ealing comedies.

Among those who came up to the O&C bridge room was the same Mr Murdoch who had enrolled me to make up a four at the Washington Irving Hotel in Granada. One day, Judge Sir Shirley Worthington-Evans told us that Murdoch had been charged with assaulting a black man on the train. He was acquitted, but then took to drink with even more application than previously. Not long afterwards, word came that he had been killed in an incident on the promenade at Eastbourne. Norman Richards QC, to whom
I sometimes gave a lift in what he called my ‘barouche’, murmured conventional sentiments.

Humphrey Tyldesley-Jones, a wartime colonel, now a commanding officer in the Territorial Army, offered a merciless obituary comment on ‘Master Murdoch’: ‘I don’t know which I disliked more – the sight or the smell of him.’ Tiddly’s smile was part of his unassuming civilian kit. I have no idea if he knew, or cared, that I was a Jew. He told me one day that, very late in the war, the RAF had bombed two ships that were at anchor in a Baltic bay. They were, in fact, prison ships with ‘Displaced Persons’ on board. After the ships sank, the SS shot any prisoners who managed to swim ashore. Soon afterwards, British commandos captured Schleswig-Holstein, where they found dozens of bodies washed up or left on the shore.

The German Field Marshal Milch had surrendered to Tiddly (then an acting brigadier) in order to avoid capture by the Russians. Arrogant and bombastic, he insisted that the British and the Germans should have united to destroy the ‘Bolshevik savages’.

‘Savages? What about your concentration camps?’

‘For Slavs and such creatures,’ Milch said.

‘I want you to come for a walk with me.’ The Brigadier led the Field Marshal to the shore, where the bodies had been heaped by the tide.

‘Well?’

‘Look closely,’ Tyldesley-Jones said. ‘Each of these men was murdered.’

Milch sniffed and bent to inspect the bodies. Each had a bullet wound in the temple. After he had looked at three or four, he burst into tears and sat on the wet beach.

My awareness of the horror that Tiddly encountered at first hand was entirely by proxy. Simon Raven claimed that his generation felt guilty because it had escaped the test of battle. I felt more indignation than guilt, although I did not yet have any idea of the scale of the indifference with which the Allies had regarded the extermination of Europe’s Jews. I was lucky to have
spent the war on the right side of the Channel, but I was not grateful; I might be an Anglo-American Hebrew hybrid, but I was not a refugee; Chicago Semite maybe, but never Viennese.

I had no conscious model when I was writing
The Earlsdon Way
, but the novel exemplified my cultural doubleness: presuming that suburban Tories were the sole repository of insular prejudices, I used the many-voiced method of Sinclair Lewis and John O’Hara (whose methods are more frequently imitated than acknowledged) to satirise the bourgeoisie, even as I solicited their applause and their pennies.

The war was already subject to sentimental rehearsal in the cinema. When Leslie and I went to Pinewood in his new pink Citroën Metropolitan to have lunch with a producer, the panelled dining room was filled with actors on a lunch break from sinking the
Bismarck
or defending Tobruk. Officers (often Johnny Mills and Jack Hawkins) and men (such as Brian Forbes, Dickie Attenborough and Mickey Medwin) sat at different tables. Few stars played other ranks. Curd Jürgens played the regular, unsmiling German commander; but the name of the ice-eyed actor regularly employed to play a ruthless SS man has slipped memory’s net. Although I never knew it at the time, John Schlesinger was occasionally among his
Jawohl
-ing subordinates. Virginia McKenna was the loyal British wife for whom good soldiers and steady-as-you-go sailors yearned. The war had been a close-run thing; victory determined whose scripts would prevail.

George Greenfield, who had won the MC at El Alamein and, as a literary agent, made a speciality of sporting and war memoirs, asked me whether I cared to ghost the memoirs of a secret agent who had been dropped into occupied Europe during the war. I arranged to meet Jacques Doneux in the front hall of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Arriving early, I made myself as conspicuous as would be polite. No one who came in looked like a spy. Ten minutes after the fixed time, I sighed and glanced again around the crepuscular foyer. A bespectacled person seemed to have materialised,
without ever making a noticeable entrance, next to the grandfather clock. I went over and said, ‘Are you by any chance Mister Doneux?’ He was. He had been there for some time, he said. Punctuality was something he had learned during the war; so too, it seemed, virtual invisibility: like Agatha Christie’s milkman in
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans
, he was as close to negligible as a man could well contrive.

The artless manuscript of
They Arrived by Moonlight
explained why, unlike so many, Jacques survived without capture: he had obeyed the simple rules inculcated in him during training. Once in occupied Europe, he did not take public transport, except when it was unavoidable, never loitered at a rendezvous, did not spend money or time on women and drank nothing more intoxicating than communion wine (in private life, he was a Roman Catholic church-furnisher). At wise, irregular intervals, he moved himself and his wireless set to different addresses and was discreet in its use.

After several quietly dangerous months in Brussels, it was decided in London that Doneux should return to England. He was given the address of a ‘safe house’ in Paris, where he could hole up before joining the escape route to the Pyrenees. He arrived in Paris on a glacial day and went to a flat, near Châtelet, where the concierge let him in. While he waited for money for a rail ticket to the next rendezvous, he stripped off his soiled clothes, washed them and hung them to dry while he took a chilly bath. He was roused from it by a telephone call. A voice told him that he must leave at once. The Gestapo was on its way. Jacques had to put on all his wet clothes and go out into the cold. He walked along the
quai
, past the
Jardin des Plantes
, to the Gare d’Austerlitz where he hoped to catch a train to Lyon. Short of money, he feared that his false name might now have been passed to the Germans. His manuscript continued: ‘I managed to get onto the platform and, when no one was looking, I slipped under the train and inserted myself on top of the metal struts and hung, face down, a foot or so from the permanent way.’ The next chapter began, ‘When I got off the train at Lyon…’

In due time, Jacques and an RAF escapee passing down the same escape route reached the town of Pau, just short of the Pyrenees. The Germans and their dogs were on snarling patrol. The RAF man fell sick but, after a little while, ‘he pronounced himself as fit as a fiddle and as strong as an ox’. Jacques’s shoes were worn out. The only available new footgear was a pair of cotton and rope
espadrilles
. A
passeur
led Jacques and his companion to safety by taking such a steep path up into the mountains that the Germans did not bother to patrol it. When he reached the snow line, Jacques had to kick foot-holds in the ice with his cotton toes. By the time he had crossed into Spain, he had severe frostbite. The nuns in a convent took long care of him.

Once able to travel on to Madrid, Jacques made his way to the British embassy. He hobbled into the presence of the ambassador, Lord Templewood, who looked at his visitor with no marked warmth. ‘I sometimes wonder’, he said, ‘whether you people aren’t more trouble than you’re worth.’ As a Chamberlainite appeaser, the quondam Sir Samuel Hoare had been despatched in eminent disgrace to Franco’s Spain by Winston Churchill. His Lordship did not, it seems, appreciate Iberian rustication.

When my revisions of his text were approved for publication, Beetle and I were invited by Jacques and his wife to visit them in their house near Sevenoaks. All of the furniture had the odour of sanctity. The runner on our bedroom dresser was an altar cloth in reduced circumstances. Jacques had scarcely noticed how I had deleted his clichés and with what terse invention I had stocked his lacunae. One or two of his stories were not suffered to figure in the text, for ‘security reasons’. For instance, somewhat later in the war, a member of his
réseau
came to his colleagues and reported that he had been sitting in a café in Brussels when a man in plain clothes and a black hat sat adjacent to him and called him by his code name, Max. Max informed his friends that he had, of course, claimed not to know what the man in the black hat was talking about. The man then named all the other
members of the network. The latter was, he said, a ranking official in the Gestapo; he could have them all arrested whenever he wanted. However, it was now clear that Germany could not win the war. He had to make his own arrangements to survive. If he was given 100,000 sovereigns, which he knew they had recently had parachuted to them, he would keep quiet. Max was to bring them the next day and had better come alone.

The group decided that it had no choice but to pay up. Max took the money and set off for the rendezvous. He was never seen again. A recent Belgian TV series made use of a very similar plot. On the day of Jacques Doneux’s publication party, Beetle’s mother had a stroke and was taken into St Mary’s hospital. I was sure that he would understand but we had to be at her bedside. He took offence and, as he might have said, disappeared as silently as he had come.

I saw on the Oxford and Cambridge Club noticeboard that a candidate with a Ghanaian name – similar to that of Johnny Quashie-Idun, who had been in the Footlights with us – had been turned down for membership, even though he was an Oxford graduate and a judge in his own country. The chairman of the election committee, Guy Coleridge, was a partner in Knight, Frank and Rutley. He had a lame leg, from a war injury. He had advised me that when I wanted to buy my wife a mink coat, I should tell him; it was much cheaper to get these things at auction, especially if one knew the auctioneer. When I told Guy that the evidence of a colour bar meant that I was going to have to resign from the club, he said, ‘Freddie, you don’t understand. It’s not a question of what colour the chap is, he’s just not the kind of
judge
we want in the club.’

Alan Maclean was eager to have my second novel ‘in the works’ before
Obbligato
was published. When
The Earlsdon Way
was finished, he asked to see it immediately. Reluctant to let go of the literally only copy (taking carbon copies blighted spontaneity), I was flattered by his impatience and handed it over. A few days later, I left Beetle and went to have lunch
with Leslie and some of his many showbiz friends at the Mayfair Club, in Berkeley Square. Fuelled with the sparkling hock that the generous Leslie always ordered (one of his guests described it, quietly, as ‘sparkling
ad
hoc
’), I walked back to Chelsea Embankment to find Beetle looking grim. She had had a telephone call from Alan Maclean. I had better try to keep calm. He had left his briefcase, with my manuscript in it, in his unlocked office when he went out to lunch. On his return, it was gone. He was very sorry. Would Beetle ask me whether perhaps I didn’t have another copy somewhere possibly?