Going Up (31 page)

I said to the chief sidekick, ‘How does he really see himself doing the show?’

He said, ‘I’ll tell you. He sees himself doing it in the ambassador’s room in the American embassy, in front of the crossed flags of Britain and America and wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet.’

One afternoon, when my parents were on holiday in Juan-les-Pins, Dr Cove-Smith telephoned to say, ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost Mrs Raphael.’ For a moment, I supposed that my grandmother had been mislaid and that I was being summoned to assist in the search. In fact, after many an autumn, Amelia Sophia had breathed her last. I went to Dorset House, where Winifred Stanley was dutifully determined to have me ‘see her’. She lay in the same bed under the same covers, much the same in death as in old age except that her jaw was parcelled in a knotted kerchief that was tied in a firm bow on top of her head.

I met my parents with the news at London Airport and drove them to Manor Fields in PLD 75. My father was tight-lipped, ashamed of not having
been with her at the end. The service took place in the chapel at the Willesden cemetery. Amy had not relished Jewish society in life; in death she could not avoid it. My late grandfather’s sister, my great-aunt Polly, was with us in the car as we passed through the cemetery gates. My mother sought to lighten the atmosphere by asking a standard, flattering question: ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you looked like Marie Tempest, Poll?’

‘Everyone did,’ Polly said. ‘She was an ugly old cat. But what a voice! I was going to be in the chorus of
The Geisha
with her. Had me photo taken in the costume.’ My father’s relatives, on each branch of the family tree, were nothing if not performers.

Cedric went in alone before they nailed down the coffin. The rabbi arrived in a baby Austin, a dark, fleshy man with plummy eyes. After an abbreviated service, we followed a slow, long-handled, two-wheeled handcart to the graveside. As the coffin was lifted, the attendant linked his hand, for balance, with one of the labourer’s. Effort fattened them. After a few prayers, Cedric was handed a narrow shovel. ‘Three times, please.’ He dug three times into a pile of cinders heaped beside the heavy clay. I put my hand on his shoulder. He seemed so near the grave that I wanted to keep him this side of it. When we were back in the stiff shelter of the chapel, my father sat down for a while on a varnished bench. The rabbi shook hands with all of us and went.

I took Polly back to her rooms in Oxford and Cambridge Gardens and then we all went to Rutland Street. Cedric lay down on our orange-skirted divan, but he could not sleep. He went down the road to Harrods for a haircut. He told our regular barber, Number Three, about his troubles.

Number Three said, ‘See that bloke over there? His son came back from Cyprus with cancer of the throat. He died after a nine months’ illness. Nineteen years old.’

I
N 1958, HUSBANDS were not encouraged to be present when their wives gave birth. At two in the morning, when Beetle’s contractions increased in frequency, we did the prescribed thing and called an ambulance to 14 Rutland Street. I followed it to the Middlesex Hospital and stayed with her for a while. She said I should go home and get some sleep. She would call me when she had some news. There was no point in coming back to the hospital earlier, because they would not let me see her. I suspect that I might have insisted with some success, but I was squeamish and docile. I went to have lunch with John and Dudy Nimmo in Upper Addison Gardens.

I had scarcely known Dudy when she was the most famous actress in Cambridge. While I was on my travels, she had been cast as a young girl in
The Duchess and the Smugs
by Pamela Frankau, directed by John van Druten, an American dramatist and director best known for his hit play
I Am a Camera
, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories about Sally Bowles. The
New Yorker
review had consisted of two words: ‘No Leica.’

Beetle was driven by John to see the show in Brighton. Dudy was miscast and inept. She might be short, but she was no little girl. She was replaced before the play reached London. It put an end to her, and John’s,
expectations that she was going to be the next Peggy Ashcroft. Somewhat humbled, Dudy asked my advice. I was bold or callous enough to say that she should go to drama school, which she did, at the Webber Douglas, just off Gloucester Road. John had been a bookish
flâneur
since coming down from Cambridge, but now he needed a job. He found one at the Zinc Marketing Board, in Berkeley Square. He and Dudy seemed to be our best, certainly our most regular back-and-forth dining friends.

No longer dreaming of stardom, though still hoping for employment, Dudy was minded to have as many children as her mother, Elfrida Vipont Foulds, a dedicated Quaker and the author of any number of successful children’s books. Dudy had three siblings, ‘sister Anne, sister Bo and sister Co’. The last was the beautiful one. Her beauty, and its quietness, was due, in part, to her happy, passionate marriage. She and her husband lived in Kenya, where he worked for a large company. One day, they left their daughter with a local nanny and went on safari with a Kenyan driver. There was some kind of an accident, or a blow-out; the Jeep flew off the road and into a tree. Co (Carol) was not badly injured; Ricky was killed. The silly driver sat there. Co came back to England and took a flat somewhere in London which she shared with another woman. Such were the things that happened to other people.

Sister Co’s tragedy inspired me to write a play about a woman, Caroline, who comes back with her young daughter Claudia from Africa, after the death of her husband in a similar absurd accident. Since she has to go out to work, she advertises for a mother’s help. Claudia finds it easier to confide in Rachel than in her mother. Caroline is lonely and jealous and, in a way, falls in love with Rachel. The two women, for different reasons, find consolation in each other. Claudia guesses and cannot quite guess what is going on between the two women (I had been reading
What Maisie Knew
). In due time, Claudia claims that Rachel has been abusing her, which was, I hinted, what she wished had been true.

I sent
Come, Claudia, Running
to Dotty Tutin. She never acknowledged receipt. She was, my mother told me, seriously sick, the aftermath of Vivien Leigh’s furious verbal assaults on her. Larry Olivier had taken fright, not least of the publicity that might result if Dotty’s breakdown was linked with him. Thirty-five years later, I again made fictional use of Dudy’s sister’s experience in an episode of
After the War
. Directed on TV by John Madden, Claire Higgins played the part as truly and movingly as any author could ever wish.

Albert Finney and his then wife, Jane Wenham, were at lunch at the Nimmos’ flat, with their baby, on the day Paul was due to be born. The telephone rang when we were finishing our baked apples and custard. John held the receiver out to me. I heard Beetle say, ‘Well, we’ve done it.’ Her use of the dual was characteristically generous. It was a boy; I could come as soon as I wanted. She sounded strong and proud. Dear God, I was a father. When we talked about names, I had suggested Peter-Paul, which had an artistic swagger. I even proposed ‘Ludwig’ at one point. Beetle thought the hyphen pretentious; we settled for Paul.

At first sight, he looked like a small, elderly, Semitic gentleman. He soon turned into a handsome, demanding infant with long dark eyelashes, large brown eyes and an unblinking stare. Beetle had waited patiently to have a child; more patience was needed in ministering to him. Paul suffered from colic and was reluctant to sleep. The sole effective narcotic was to put him in the car in his carry cot and drive around London until he fell asleep. Cyril Connolly had warned that the greatest enemy of promise was the pram in the hall. Beetle made sure that I need not endorse that glib sentiment. Paul was exhausting, but – in the mornings at least – he was not my concern. I worked.

One afternoon, I left Beetle with Paul and went to the cinema in the King’s Road. I sat almost alone to watch a double-bill of
The Killing
and
Paths
of Glory
, both in black and white, both directed by Stanley Kubrick. His
name meant nothing to me. I emerged dazzled by what movies could do, if anyone had the grim wit to break the mould that determined the shape and contents of whatever was produced at Ealing and Pinewood. On Saturday afternoons I went occasionally to Craven Cottage to watch Fulham. Johnny Haynes distributed cleverer passes to his team-mates, ‘Tosh’ Chamberlain and ‘Chinner’ (later, when bearded, ‘the Rabbi’) Jimmy Hill, than they were capable of anticipating.

When
The Observer
announced a play competition, under the potent aegis of Ken Tynan, I had visions of escape from Leslie Bricusse’s commercial clutch. I wrote
The Man on the Bridge
with inventive speed and antiestablishment calculation. It featured an Everyman with the characteristics of the pedlar who regularly came past our window, leading his donkey and cart, calling ‘Och’n’beechy locha’, which, being interpreted, meant ‘Oak and beech logs’. The bridge in the play was between two antagonistic societies that turned out to be mirror-reversed images of each other.

Apart from my Little Man, I remember only an American businessman who came in with a golf bag in which were holstered a collection of hunting rifles. He put it down and said, ‘I shot seventy-six this morning.’ He may have been called Brad. I did what the terms of the competition required, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope (the badge of all my freelance tribe), and waited for the results, in the state of suspenseful apprehension from which few writers, of any age, are ever exempt.

The first round of judging was said to have been concluded and my play was not returned. It seemed that it had passed the initial
triage
. The longlist was due to be published in a few days’ time. Then, like the character in
With This Ring
, I fell at the last hurdle: I heard the thud of a heavy envelope on the mat and saw my own writing on the front. So inescapable was Leslie’s charm that I feared I should waste my life pedalling his silly tandem. One day, as we were crossing the King’s Road, he asked me whether I would ‘stand beside him’. I was not sure what he meant. ‘I’m
getting married to Bonbon, at St James’s, Spanish Place. Will you be my best man?’ Bonbon was the shapely young Yvonne Romaine. I was very sorry, I told him, but I could not take part in anything that took place in a Roman Catholic church.

According to Billy Chappell, the book of
Lady at the Wheel
was still not up to professional standards. Leslie was sure that I would not mind if ‘big Lucienne’ had a go at it. The regular translator of Jean Anouilh, Lucienne Hill was joined at the hip with a postulant impresario called Andrew Broughton, known by Leslie as ‘Broughtipoo’. Leslie’s personal slang included ‘puddy-paws’ for hands; ‘scanties’ for female underclothes; ‘Brig-ton’ for Brighton, where he had a flat; ‘wagon’ for car; when things went badly, he would say ‘suddenly … boom!’; now and again, he used ‘nignog’ for a fool, a term which, in those days, carried no racist undertones. I never heard him utter any four-letter word. Culture was not his bag. However, when the manuscript of
The Earlsdon
Way
was stolen, he had had the clever generosity to give me the Everyman edition of Carlyle’s
The French Revolution
, the sole first draft of which had been used by a maid in Cheyne Walk to light the morning fire.

Leslie introduced me to Dr Jan van Loewen, said to be the most powerful theatrical agent in London: he represented Maugham and Noël and Christopher Fry. Van Loewen wore a pepper and salt suit and the rimless oval glasses I associated with secret police chiefs. His first-floor offices were adjacent to the Prince of Wales Theatre. As we sat below his dais, I could observe two appetising tarts who, in broad daylight, paraded for custom in front of the National Car Park, adjacent to the fire station, on the far side of Shaftesbury Avenue. The more shapely wore a low-cut, flare-skirted white dress with large red dots on it. Dr van Loewen told us that our thirties would be the time to make money. He had an assistant called Betty Judkins, who promised to read any new play I wrote. She was happy to tell me that
The Man on the Bridge
had found favour with Peter Phethean, who
ran the local theatre in Brentwood, Essex. The woman with the red spots on her dress seldom spent more than ten minutes with each of the clients with whom, after a brief conversation, she crossed the street into Soho on the way to some quick bed.

One day, Leslie popped into Rutland Street wearing a businesslike face. He had prepared a contract that he wanted me to sign, renouncing my rights in return for a token fraction of the proceeds of
Lady at the Wheel
. He remembered me saying that I had better things to do and he quite understood. I sat on our new square, red-topped Heal’s stool and looked at him. I said I had no objection to Miss Hill doing what she thought was best, or better, but I was not about to sign away my rights. I recalled how my royalties on the material in
An Evening with Beatrice Lillie
had stopped. Leslie said that was all because of Binkie’s bloody lawyer. ‘So, listen…’ I sat there, until he said, ‘You’re holding a gun to my head.’

‘It’s the one you brought with you.’

‘You know what this means, don’t you?’

‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Because I’ve been very patient until now.’

I felt sick and elated. Beetle would be pleased to have me free. My fear was I should no longer have access to Leslie’s expertise and contacts. Our association ended decisively when our new agent, Leslie Linder, told me that he could not understand why chalk wanted to work with cheese. The truth was, I told him, that I was not sure that I could make a living on my own. ‘You can,’ Linder said, ‘and you must.’

When
The Earlsdon Way
was published, it received a flattering review by Peter Green in the
Daily Telegraph
: suburbia might have been anatomised before, but never, he said, with such precision. After I thanked Peter for his eulogy, he said, ‘It’s the least one can do for one’s friends.’ I have known many who did less. In
The Spectator
, even Simon Raven flew the old school tie, in his fashion: he wondered why I had started so well and
then, in his view, abruptly ‘stopped writing’. I had encircled the minatory fictional life of Edward Keggin and tied it up with the words ‘Soon he was back on the Earlsdon Way’. It was, I thought, a becomingly understated indictment of the British habit of resuming a way of life that was limited, joyless and compromised.

Simon would adopt a more slashing style in
The Feathers of Death,
the first of many novels blending nostalgia with scandal. The tenvolume
Alms for Oblivion
sequence harped on his own proud, disgraceful history and relished the humbug of his contemporaries, above all William Rees-Mogg. Simon always suspected the Mogg of engineering his defenestration from Charterhouse in order to enhance his own prospects of advancement in school seniority. If the Mogg was indeed the agent of Simon’s eviction, he acted in accordance with a very Carthusian notion of Christian morality.

A pale playwright called Michael Voysey, who doubled as a producer and script editor at BBC Television Centre, commissioned me to turn
The Earlsdon Way
into a play. Knowing nothing of the technicalities, I asked to see a TV script that Voysey admired. He showed me one of his own. It did not seem unbeatable. When I rendered my novel into the stipulated form, Voysey said he could not wait to show it to people on the sixth floor. Meanwhile, how did I feel about ‘coming inside’? The BBC had a year-long course, for which he would be happy to recommend me. It involved learning the ins and outs of TV, and carried a modest salary. On graduation, I should be qualified to join ‘the strength’. I was, as always, tempted: security was not a displeasing prospect. The little house in Rutland Street had only a small, paved yard at the back. Beetle wanted Paul to be able to crawl in a garden, with trees and better air.

After longer than good news would have taken, Michael Voysey called to say that, despite the lively qualities that his superiors recognised, several of them, the consensus on the sixth floor held that
The Earlsdon
Way
was too radical, in certain respects (I could guess what those were) for the Corporation’s style. I was chagrined, as usual, but as usual dolefully determined not to make concessions. I stepped free of another nice noose. I am not a great believer in the improvement of creative work by confabulation.

George Greenfield rang to say that Odham’s were keen for me to do a second ghosting job about secret agents. They would pay £600 if I would take over the task of putting together Maurice Buckmaster’s account of the French section of SOE (Special Operations Executive). A heap of papers and memoirs, by various agents who had been dropped into occupied France, had been collected by David Tutaev, but he felt he could not meet the deadline and had resigned.