Going Up (32 page)

Tutaev delivered four shoeboxes of raw material to Rutland Street. Small and dark-eyed, with artistically disposed long grey hair and an expression of haunted profundity, he had translated a number of Russian plays and might have passed for the glum artist I had impersonated in
A Month in the Country
. The assembled archives had excited sleepless suspicions of callousness and double-dealing. At their interviews, Tutaev had been unnerved by Colonel Buckmaster’s blue-eyed insouciance. As he took his leave, Tutaev mentioned that, on the eve of his visit, he had seen a remarkable actress, Dudy Nimmo, in a television version of
The Cherry Orchard
. He had been impressed by her soulful performance. ‘She might have been a Russian.’ I was glad to tell Dudy as much the next time she and John came to dinner. Beetle told her that she was reading Anthony Trollope. ‘Oh good!’ Dudy said. ‘Soon you’ll be ready for Henry James.’ Dudy never asked me what I was writing, nor did she admit to having read either of my novels. On the last occasion I ever saw her, however, at a literary festival in Lancaster in 1989, she said she had read all my books.

In 1958, Dudy was given a small part in Robert Bolt’s first play,
Flowering Cherry
, which starred Ralph Richardson. ‘Ralphie’, as David Lean and others called him, was a mannered classical actor whose want of good looks gave him an air of ageless integrity. He had a scene with young Robin Ray, whose offstage stammer asserted itself if he was hustled. Dudy told me that Richardson, with his back to the audience, would wait for one of Ray’s pauses and then mouth, ‘One, two, three, four,’ and sometimes ‘five, six, seven…’ until the young actor managed to enunciate the next line.

Maurice Buckmaster lived in one of the big houses across the bottom end of Wellington Square SW3. He now worked for the Ford Motor Company in a PR role like my father’s in Shell. Manifesting no symptoms of having been in a tragic bind, he conceded, rather than confessed, that a number of operations had gone wrong. It was not uncommon in military matters. Some things might indeed have been better managed; the fact remained that the casualties in the French section, however sad or – occasionally – avoidable, involved a lower percentage of its personnel in the field than any frontline infantry commander, for instance, was likely to match.

Having studied the dossiers, I came back to Wellington Square to tell him that there were breaches in the narrative that needed to be filled in. As David Tutaev had noted, some agents who had been ‘turned’ by the Germans continued to receive messages from Baker Street, where SOE had its offices, and further arrests were made as a result of what was gleaned from them. Why was that? Buck’s honest blue look carried a glint of ice. It was sometimes necessary to protect another unit in a given region by giving the Germans the impression that the one they had penetrated was the only one operating. War was an ugly business, secret war especially so. I was lucky to have had nothing to do with it. I asked how he would like me to deal with events where key details were missing. He smiled and said, ‘Oh, my dear Freddie, make anything up that looks plausible. It’s likely to be as near the truth as not. I’m sure you’re up to that.’

I met two or three of the surviving SOE operatives. None displayed rancour with regard to Buck. Dark rumours did, however, circulate about his failure to take tender care of female agents. One of Buck’s Baker Street staff, a proto-feminist called Jean Overton Fuller, had a brace of reproachladen books on the subject published by Victor Gollancz (who called her ‘the egg lady’). She was the first person to hatch the idea, recently renewed with loud persistence by Patricia Cornwell, that Walter Sickert was the original Jack the Ripper. Overton Fuller’s repeated theme was Buckmaster’s cynical sadism when it came to sacrificing women in a man’s war.

Maurice’s response was that the women had volunteered to face the same dangers as the men. He never made light of the sufferings of any of his people, although he did hint that some of them, once armed with SOE funds, had become profligate in the wine and women department. Buck’s admiration for his most famous female agent, Odette Sansom, was nuanced by the fact that, so he told me, smiling, she had been arrested in a hotel in bed with Peter Churchill only because ‘they did what they were doing so loudly that they failed to hear the look-out’s warning whistle that the Gestapo was on the way up’. Odette was tortured with sustained brutality, gave nothing away, and was later awarded the George Cross.

Churchill, whom she later married (and divorced), was treated leniently by the Germans on account of the surname, which, it was clear, he had the wit not to conceal from his interrogators. They assumed – and Churchill did not deny – that he was a more or less distant cousin of Winston’s, although it was not true. In the early 1960s, we rented a cottage in Le Rouret, inland from Grasse. There was no hedge between us and a soft-stepping neighbour who found it amusing to surprise me, while I was reading, with some polite, proximate observation. He introduced himself as Peter Churchill. Since he was fly enough to dodge torture, he had had to make do with the DSO.

Few of Buck’s agents displayed Jacques Doneux’s capacity for strict observation of the training manual. If more had done so, fewer would have been captured and less might have been achieved. Men such as Harry Rée, originally from a Danish Jewish family, showed initiative and leadership that outflanked the rule book with positive results. Brave both physically and morally, he sabotaged French factories working for the Germans and dared to question the effectiveness of Allied bombing, which, he had observed, was alienating French civilians from the Allied cause. One of Buck’s best people had been a drag queen and employed his seductive skills on German officers. What he did, for patriotic reasons, in occupied Europe would have landed him in prison in England. Alan Turing might have fared better under Buckmaster’s command.

Buck obtained permission to insert the authentic log of a
réseau
in the south-west at the back of
They Fought Alone
. It mentioned a little place called Siorac-en-Périgord, where the château was cavernous enough to conceal a clandestine armoury. There is now a supermarket on the other side of the road from the château. We shop there twice a week in the summer months. I only once spotted someone reading
They Fought Alone
. It was on a tourist bus, on the way to Chichicastenango, in Guatemala, in 1974. He had left it, face down, on the seat during a comfort stop. When he returned I told him that I had written it. He said, ‘Are you Colonel Buckmaster?’ ‘No, no, but I helped him write the book. My name is Raphael.’ ‘Really? So is mine,’ he said. ‘I’m a doctor in San Diego. I run the Raphael clinic. We do all kinds of operations, head to toe. You ever need one, stop by. Need two, I’ll give you a rate.’

Just before
They Fought Alone
was published, Buck was pleased to tell me that he had sold an option on the film rights to his friend Sidney Box, for £1. No film was ever made. Was David Tutaev right to suspect that there was some dark aspect to Buck that he was expert at camouflaging, a duplicity that gave an Old Etonian smoothness to both sides of his character? He
had done his best to honour Churchill’s command, back in 1941, to ‘set Europe ablaze’, and if that involved making mistakes, or even blunders, he had fought a winning campaign. His good conscience was of a piece with his callousness. Despite Tutaev’s dark intuition, I suspect that I should have been glad to obey Buck’s blue-eyed orders and, if possible, to have been thought well of by him. In the same spirit, for whatever added reasons, I should prefer to be thought good company by Simon Raven than by any of Tom Maschler’s angry young or youngish men. Not long ago,
They Fought
Alone
was cited in the
TLS
as a documentary source. It has just been reissued as a classic of secret warfare.

After Lucienne Hill had used her mature flat iron on my juvenile jokes,
Lady at the Wheel
went into production. Anxious to avoid nastiness, Leslie invited me to attend an audition at the Prince of Wales for a leading lady. One likely candidate was a good-looking young woman called Jean Brampton, who had already played second leads. She came on in a strapless dress with a flared skirt and began to sing, rather well. As she took a deep breath for her final effort, the zip at the back of her dress burst open and her fine breasts tumbled forward. She caught them, one-handed, as she finished the song. ‘Nearly showed the lot,’ she said. Leslie and Billy Chappell thanked her and said they would be in touch. She was not cast. A short while later, disappointed in love, so the papers said, she committed suicide.

Lady at the Wheel
opened at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Beetle and I went to the first night, but did not attend the party. Leslie had meant no harm, nor had he done any; he chose to belong to a world that, for all its glamour, had no appeal for me; but it would be untrue and ungrateful to say that he brought me no worthwhile rewards.
Bachelor of Hearts
was not the kind of movie that I should ever have wanted to write, but it furnished me with that vital commodity, a credit, without which no film career was likely to proceed. For all Miss Hill’s cosmetic expertise,
Lady at the Wheel
closed after a short run.

Leslie and Yvonne’s wedding feast took place in the new, smart, red-carpeted Panton Street offices of John Redway and associates, of which Leslie Linder was a joint managing director. I happened to talk to George Baker, then a fashionable young movie actor. He asked me what the party was all about exactly. Leslie had bumped into him in the street and invited him to come. He had no idea what we were celebrating.

When Paul was a few months old, we drove up to inspect a ground-floor flat in Highgate. Grange Road was wide and unpaved. The flat was in a large, red-brick Victorian house owned by a grey and respectable Miss Pearce. She was keen to have a child around the place. There was little more than a year remaining on the lease, which the outgoing tenants were willing to assign only if we were prepared to buy their furniture. Since we had little of our own, we did not object. It would take most of our money, but we agreed to pay for the rump of the lease, after the nice Miss Pearce promised that she would extend it by several years as soon as it lapsed.

My blond Heal’s desk fitted handsomely in the window overlooking the rose garden and the slope of wide lawn where Paul moved himself around in his idiosyncratic way. He never crawled, he scooted: one leg under him, the other crooked, he propelled himself like a crab with one hand. I arranged our books on a set of planks supported by bricks (something I had first seen in Jonathan Miller’s Gloucester Terrace house). We settled to a proper, modest life.

Cassell’s had had no signal success with
The Earlsdon Way
, but my new best friend, Tom Maschler, who had recently been head-hunted by Allen Lane, made it his business and pleasure to have it accepted as a paperback by Penguin Books. Two years my junior, Tom had a rage to succeed not unlike Leslie Bricusse’s, but he was driven by serious demons. Having fled Berlin with his parents when he was three years old, Tom carried an abiding sense of the horrors he had escaped. His idea of a great writer was Franz Kafka. He was determined to become the most important publisher
of serious books in London. He remarked with scorn that the only contemporary writer dealing with Jews in England was C. P. Snow, whose recent novel,
The Conscience of the Rich
, featured a caricatural eccentric somewhat resembling my great-uncle Jessel. Someone had to do better than that. Inspired, in part, by Tom’s enthusiasm, I bought a wide, spiral-backed notebook and began a novel that would have something in common with the jejune effort I had begun in Ramatuelle, in homage to Maugham’s
Of Human Bondage
.

I associated Jewishness with isolation. Beetle’s large family had both insulated her from any such apprehensions and given her keen reasons to escape any demanding community. She saved me from loneliness and dared me to be happy. Paul was the proof of her belief in life. We never considered not having him circumcised; it was done by the Dr Snowman who performed the same service for the royal family. Although I had no sense of obligation to the rites of Judaism, to raise an untrimmed Jew would be to accede to the shame of being one. Dr Snowman did his tailoring, dipped his finger in wine, comforted Paul with it and we all said
Mazel tov
.

Curiosity led me to go, several times, to Brick Lane and catch what was left of the air of the East End I was glad not to have come from. With wished-for nostalgia, I bought
challah
from Grodzinsky’s bakery. On one occasion, I asked for it on a Tuesday. They looked at me, with justice, as if I was some kind of a freak. If so, I had a remedy: I resolved my contradictions and absurdities, in whatever high or low sense, by writing, alone, in all kinds of voices. The prattle of my contradictions and fears rode rapidly down long pages of manuscript dialogue. Willie Maugham’s theatrical facility may well have had a good deal to do with his stammer. Inside his head, he had no hesitation in giving voice to the contradictions and agonies that gagged him in public.

It is always difficult to continue to work on something with no title. I soon decided to call my new novel
The Limits of Love
, in homage to Wittgenstein.
That love also had its limitations was part of my point. Manor Fields stood for me as a bourgeois
Unité d’habitation
. Suburban morality, of which the bowler-hatted Mr Love had been the local custodian, was a form of communal cowardice. There had to be a more daring and vital way to live. I thought it was socialism.

One afternoon, in search of comradeship, I went to the newly opened Partisan Coffee shop in Soho, and sat with a workmanlike mug of coffee, reading
The Golden Bough
as an advertisement for intellectual company. I left without finding common cause or
causerie
with anyone. When Tony and Anne Becher came to visit us, I greeted her unguarded admission that she was a Tory with ferocious astonishment. I had, I told her, never before met anyone of my own age who was that much of an antique. She burst into tears. I was sorry, but not chastened.