Going Up (40 page)

A Wild Surmise
was published that summer and received even better reviews, in smarter places, than
The Limits of Love
; but it did not figure on the bestseller list. When Tom Maschler came down to Fuengirola to visit us, he promised, with aggressive candour, that I needed a more forceful publisher than Desmond Flower and his son Nicholas, who preferred motorbikes to books.
The S Man
had been bought by Penguins, with a £750 advance. It seemed a lot, but my share was soon gone. Tom was about to move to Jonathan Cape and was able, and willing, to play the part of literary patron. With favours to dispense, he was invited to meals in the houses of all the so-called writers in Fuengirola.

By some means, Tom acquired a packet of hash from Morocco and proposed that we all get together, smoke pot and use the Gordons’ tape recorder to preserve the consequent conversation. It was a kind of chaste orgy in which we were all expected to make raw revelations. We smoked the stuff and sat there, for quite a long time, trying to be daring, or not, and then we stopped. When the tape was played back, it proved only that people under
the influence of marijuana were likely to be very slow on cue and deliver themselves,
peditentim
as the Latinists say, very slowly, of confessions of little or no interest. The only memorable event of the afternoon was that Harry Gordon tripped on our doorstep and broke his big toe.

At the end of his week’s stay, Tom asked the Gordons whether he might borrow their house and their cook, Pepa, for a big dinner with which he might return the hospitality of his various hosts. There were about ten of us at a well-loaded table. At the end of Pepa’s feast, Tom leaned back and said, ‘That’s the first time I’ve had enough to eat since I got here.’ I walked out of the house and into the village and down to the waterfront. Then I walked back again. I doubt whether Tom had remarked my exit.

As August approached, we had to leave the Villa Antoñita. Siobhan was now so prominently pregnant that, while never admitting her condition, she said that she had to go back to Ireland. We did not seek to detain her; but her fare had to be paid. So did the high-season rent for the Villa Sol, one of a tight trio of charmless bungalows at the west end of the village, not far from the tall tower of the Café Somio, where music thumped on till two in the morning. We parted from the sulky Maria and took on a smiling one. Needing money, I had asked the bank to send us money, as usual. The new manager replied that he would be happy to oblige as soon as my account was in funds. Selwyn Lloyd, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, had imposed a rigorous credit squeeze. When Beetle’s father, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease, died of pneumonia, Jonty Smulian, an American whom I hardly knew and who had fought in the Israeli Defence Force in the 1956 war, lent me money for our fares to fly home from Gibraltar.

Jonty was a friend of Aubrey David, an entrepreneurial architect who was filling the
campo
between Fuengirola and Mijas with more or less fancy villas. Aubrey liked clean lines and, at first, dispensed with banisters for the white marble staircases. Every architect, it seems, fails to take some detail into account. Aubrey discounted the quantity of liquor that a well-heeled
rentier
(and his lady) might be expected to swallow before lurching upstairs to bed and the heavy consequences of a missed step. On the sloping plateau between Fuengirola and Mijas, Lew Hoad, the Wimbledon champion of 1956, later opened a tennis farm. Aubrey’s elegantly landscaped courts were divided by pools that might have been cadged from the Alhambra and into which loose shots regularly plopped.

For our few days in London, John Nimmo lent me his Austin A 40. He also offered me some money. He was a very kind man whose generous friendship I never properly honoured. He had a friend called Joe who had been a close friend of Ken Tynan’s until Ken became too grand to acknowledge him. My financial problems were eased somewhat before we returned to Fuengirola. Stella Richman promised that there was no shortage of work for me when I wanted it.
The Best of Everything
had been produced, with Terry Alexander and Gary Raymond, and had been well received. I arranged to meet Stella in Sainte-Maxime in late September, when we should be driving back to England, to work out the timetable for my new ATV contract. Meanwhile, she advanced me enough money to repay Jonty Smulian.

I had written
The Graduate Wife
in a state of nervous unease, fearful that Beetle thought of me less as an artist than as a husband who was failing to provide a home for his family. She denied that what I feared was true; her patient vexation confirmed it. Nothing of my dismay was reflected in my new, cold, very English book. Whatever the confusion of my emotions, my brain stayed clear. I moped, but I also worked: whatever their state of mind, writers have to write. I allayed my own dreads with the precision with which I spelt out the complacency of my Oxonian characters.

Desmond Flower declared the finished novel too good to be one of a pair. He proposed to publish it and
The Trouble with England
separately. What was needed after that was a big book to match
The Limits of Love
. Tom Maschler’s replacement at Penguin had been appointed too late to abort its paperback publication, but Tony whatever-his-name-was let it be
known that he had no appetite for what he chose to call ‘intellectual’ fiction.
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae
, as the new top man would never tolerate anyone to say.

In mid-September, we left the Villa Sol and the insistent nocturnal beat of music from the Somio. For a few thousand pesetas, Harry and Charlotte Gordon had bought a high plot of land that jutted out, precipices on three sides, a burly buttress at the base of the mountains that rose above Mijas. On the narrow neck that connected the property to the road, there was a little church dedicated to San Anton. Otherwise, the site was unapproachable. Harry proposed to build a house with two studios. He needed masons to do the basic structural work, but he would design the place himself and make the doors and windows. I envied his practical competence and his piano-playing. To fund construction, he and Charlotte were going back to work in New York. He had small hope of selling his paintings, but he had been offered a ‘creative’ job in an advertising agency at almost $20,000 a year.

I lacked the means or the appetite to continue living in Spain, but I dreaded our return to England. We would have enough to keep us, but I had small prospect of earning sufficient money to provide anything that would please Beetle as much as the Old Mill House had. She was willing to find a job, but that solution was also, it seemed to me, a criticism. I had to hope, and prove, that it was not really what she wanted. The children kept us together, and apart.

We crossed the border into France late on a Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, Beetle woke with a temperature and a fierce sore throat. I cannot remember in what hotel in what small town we had stopped. I can, however, see myself, as if on a spool of film in my mental cutting room, running down a long, straight street of shuttered houses and shops in search of a
pharmacie
. I found one that was open and pleaded for an antibiotic, as if my marriage depended on it. Whatever they sold me proved effective. By the time we reached Sainte-Maxime, Beetle was well enough to face
Stella and Victor, who were holidaying with their small son, another Paul.

I had sent word to Richard Gregson of where we would be staying, so that he could tell Stella. There was a message at the hôtel Chardon Bleu to call Gareth Wigan at the John Redway agency. I suspected that Stella Richman was not, after all, going to be in Sainte-Maxime; it augured ill for the promised contract. It took some time to get through to London. Beetle took Paul and Sarah to the beach. When at last we were connected, Gareth told me that Richard was out of town on business. He thought I would want to know that a producer called David Deutsch had seen
The Best of Everything
on television and wanted to buy the film rights and commission me to write the movie script. Was I willing to come back to England to talk to him? He assured me that David Deutsch was a very nice man, the son of Oscar Deutsch, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain. He worked for Anglo-Amalgamated, which had agreed to back the project. I could rely on the terms being fair and, more important, the film was likely to be made. Oh, and did I have a pencil? Stella Richman had rented a house in Sainte-Maxime; she had asked him to give us the address and phone number. She had agreed that I should do three more plays for ATV. She could pay me a little more than she had before.

I could imagine Karl Marx’s ironic smile. Had he not said that economic circumstances determine the consciousness? My fears of inadequacy were purged. It was shameful and it was exhilarating to have the prospect of giving Beetle what she wanted and what I wanted to give her. What I have always least liked about myself, the urge to self-abasement, was banished. For whatever less than Lawrencian reason, I was restored to virility and self-assurance. Fiction might be what mattered most; the movies were my salvation. I told Beetle that we would go back to England, see Mr Deutsch, collect his money, get a new station wagon, in which Paul and Sarah would be able to stretch out and sleep, and then drive to Rome and rent somewhere where I could write the script. We spent a couple of easy days with Stella
and Victor Brusa, who was pleased to compile the best picnics ever eaten on the sands of Sainte-Maxime, and then we drove up to Calais.

Lindmann

D
AVID DEUTSCH ASKED us to celebrate our deal (I was to get £3,000 for the screenplay) by having dinner with him and his wife in their flat in Park Royal, a tall new block off Melrose Avenue. When she opened the door, I saw that Mrs Deutsch was the same beautiful Clare who had whispered admiration of my performance in ‘Joe and the Boys’ when she was married to Raymond Stross. She was – she told me quietly – much, much happier now. David’s enthusiasm for our project led me to presume that the initiative was wholly his. It is at least possible that Clare had something to do with the fact that they watched my little play on television. David had no objection to my writing the movie in Rome. I assured him that I wrote better when I was near the Mediterranean. We would come back, if he wanted that, after he had seen the first draft.

Our new car was a Standard Vanguard, more powerful, as well as more commodious, than the Ensign. Before we left England again, we found time to drive down to Colchester and look at a few properties in the area. My mother was glad to take care of Paul and Sarah. It was as if what I said in Fuengirola had never been said; nor did it ever need to be repeated. I was about to be paid more in the next year than my father, who had just retired
from Shell, had ever earned in a similar period. I did not think it important, but there it was. He and I never again had a sour discussion of the kind that had so embarrassed Beetle.

I had no urgent wish to return to East Bergholt, but nice houses with gardens were cheaper on the unfashionable Essex–Suffolk border than in Sussex or Surrey. After one quick visit, we made an offer of £4,000 for a whitewashed brick Georgian farmhouse behind a garage in Marks Tey, on the London side of Colchester. Now that I could flash the simulacrum of a steady income, we should be able to get a mortgage, but it depended on a favourable survey. I had done enough, I hoped, to convince Beetle that, in due time, we should have a permanent roof in England. I was in no hurry to live under it.

The big new car impelled me to drive eastwards across France in order to enjoy the
autobahn
down into Italy. I felt a twitch of triumphant transgression in crossing the frontier from which my grandfather Max had escaped fifty years before. Our one German night was mildly disturbed by rowdy voices in the street: French soldiers who had had too much too drink, but wanted more. We stayed in Heidelberg, where Willie Maugham went to the university, long enough only to allow a radio to be slotted into the car and then we headed south. Memories of the war in which I never had to fight led me to bypass Rome and head for Anzio, the site of an Anglo-American amphibious operation intended to outflank Kesselring’s defensive line in front of Monte Cassino. The landing took the Germans by surprise, but the cautious American general Lucas failed to press on inland. The Germans regrouped, contained the bridgehead and inflicted heavy casualties on the soldiers pinched within it. Post-war Anzio turned out to be a rebuilt town of shuttered and charmless seaside houses and chalets of the kind to be seen in, as the Linguaphone had indelibly put it, ‘
centinaia e centinaia di stazioni balnearie
’.

We drove back to Rome. The most suitable and affordable flat was on the
ground floor of the 6,000 block on the Via Trionfale, at the top of Monte Mario. Its owner, a contessa of indeterminate age, arrived to vet us in a black Fiat
Millecento
, no very grand motor, driven by a chauffeur in brass-buttoned black livery, wearing a peaked cap. Both might have been characters in flight from Alberto Moravia’s novel
Il Conformista
. La Contessa regarded three-year-old Paul and fourteen-month-old Sarah with indulgent smiles and handed us the keys.

What and whose triumph over whom our street celebrated, I never discovered. It led down to the Milvian Bridge where, in 312 AD, the battle between the upstart Constantine and the incumbent emperor Maxentius ended with the victory of Constantine who had, for opportunist motives, united his soldiers under the sign of the Cross. Their success confirmed the Christian God’s official and enduring tenancy in Rome. Constantine’s theology was his own: conversion did not inhibit him from approving the building of a temple to celebrate his own family’s divinity. Evelyn Waugh wrote a poor, pious book about the emperor’s Christian mother, Helena. We regularly crossed the Milvian Bridge to go to the almost deserted 1960 Olympic village, which continued to flaunt a well-stocked, never-crowded
supermercato
.

Although Rome was thronged with tourists and what the rest of Italy regarded as bloodsucking bureaucrats and venal politicians, it was possible, if not always permitted, to park in the
centro cittá
. We were advised, by our Australian doctor neighbour Bob Singer, never to pay the marked price in the shops. The trick was to ask, ‘
C’é un sconto diplomatico?
’ Is there discount for diplomats? ‘But we’re not diplomats,’ I said. Bob said, ‘Who said you were? All you did was ask!’

David Deutsch’s bosses, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, made only one stipulation before backing our movie: they wanted the title to be
Nothing But the Best. The Best of Everything
sounded too cold. It was another small piece of evidence that in the movies anyone can have a good idea. Nat and
Stu left the rest to us: they preferred going to the races. Their greatest ambition, eventually achieved, was to lead in the winner of the Grand National. David encouraged me to be bold in ‘opening up’ the action; I was to make the piece as daring as the usual proprieties would allow. Thanks to the lively garrulity of my characters, I accumulated enough pages in the mornings for us to spend every afternoon going, with Paul and Sarah, to a gallery, a church or an archaeological site. Life and art were old neighbours in Rome.

Federico Fellini’s film
La Dolce Vita
had been a shameless and scabrous hit a year earlier. We followed in the shadow of Anita Ekberg, in her ecclesiastical hat, as we climbed the tight stairs around the dome of St Peter’s and onto the roof with its wide view down to Hadrian’s Tomb and its sugary heaps of marble cannon balls. Jo Janni, whom I met again a few years later, thanks to David Deutsch, told me that the Vatican had been outraged by Fellini’s episode depicting the venal and superstitious exploitation of two slum children’s supposed vision of the Madonna. The appropriate cardinal announced that he was proposing to instruct the faithful to boycott the movie. Fellini was sufficiently alarmed to go, in penitential mode, as it were to Canossa. On his knees, he explained to the cardinal that he was a poor sinner, anxious only to show how degraded Rome had become and how simple people could be manipulated by the freemasonry of the media. Federico could scarcely restrain his tears. The cardinal promised that he now understood the sincerity of the film-maker’s motives. The maestro could rest assured that his visit had not been in vain. With one more realistic sob, the director kissed the cardinal’s ring and went, shaking, from the room. Back on unholy ground, in St Peter’s Square, Federico slammed his left hand against his right biceps in a crude
abbraccio
, the ‘fuck you’ gesture of the Trastevere working man.

To amuse Paul and Sarah, I dusted off the stories about ancient Rome that ruins or place names recalled, from the Horatii on the bridge to the cackling of the Capitoline geese, from the murder of the divine Julius to the
accession of the clumsy C-Claudius and the fiddle-playing Nero. I tried to emulate Guy Ramsey in never talking down, even when talking downwards. At the weekends, we took the
autostrada
to Assisi or Urbino or Civitavecchia, where Stendhal had once been the French consul. D. H. Lawrence had explored the low-domed Etruscan tombs at nearby Cerveteri and made out the Etruscans to be his kind of dark, instinctive people.

In Italy one can suffer from a surfeit of uplifting refinement. The comic and the grotesque come as a relief. We feared that the Garden of Monsters at Bomarzo might give the children nightmares, but they ran cheerfully into the stone ogre’s mouth and gazed without a blink at the lichened muscular Hercules, poised on the point of ripping the inverted giant Cacus in half. Prince Pier Francesco Orsini built his little park of horrors in the 1570s, to vent his rage against fate after the death of his wife, Giulia Farnese. His counter-cultural parade of horrors was commissioned from the same architect, Pirro Ligorio, who finished the remodelling of Saint Peter’s in Rome after Michelangelo died. On whatever
piano nobile
, Renaissance artists were also the hirelings of show business, erotic, pastoral or sanctimonious, uplifting, morbid or brutal, as their paymasters required.

Ligorio also designed the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, some 30 kilometres from St Peter’s. With its surging fountains and tumbling man-made waterfalls, Cardinal d’Este’s summer place was adjacent to a restaurant with a wide terrace where the children could run while our
abacchio
was turning on the spit. Nearby, the Emperor Hadrian’s suburban retirement home embraced a country estate and a miniature town for the mournful emperor’s staff. Hadrian neither liked Rome nor trusted Romans; he preferred Greece, and Greek love. His elderly blues were induced by the death of Antinous, the comely Bithynian ephebe drowned in the Nile in 130 AD. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Rumour promised that Antinous was dismayed by the onset of hairy maturity. Fearful of losing the emperor’s affection, he soaked his cheeks in milk in the hope of staying Hadrian’s baby-faced darling.
Perhaps, like Narcissus (‘that plain boy’, someone called him), he looked at his watery reflection too closely and fell into his soft mirror. By the side of the pool in Hadrian’s Tivoli retreat crouched a marble crocodile of the kind that inhabits the Nile.

Rome was an immovable feast. Tacitus, the most stylish of sourpuss historians, said that his countrymen had made the world into a desert and called it peace; Petronius was no less scathing and scarcely less of a prig, though a more outrageous writer. As a result of its legions’ conquests, Rome became the finest repository of stolen property in the world. The Vatican museum was the most sumptuous in the city. Its double helix of staircases confounded Heraclitus by ensuring that the road up and the road down were never the same road. Our favourite museum was the Villa Giulia. The most memorable sculpture in the Villa Giulia is of a man and his wife lounging, close together, on top of a terracotta-coloured sarcophagus. Known as ‘The Happily Married Couple’, they wear the perpetual, enigmatic smiles of those with the wisdom to keep the lid on their uxorious secrets. ‘Don’t never tell’ is a good conjugal rule.

On our way home, whether from Ostia Antica – the least visited, most businesslike of all wide Roman ruins – or from the Baths of Caracalla (an allegedly monstrous emperor who did the Roman people a monumental favour), we would stop at the Gran Caffe Giulio Cesare for
capuccini
and
coppe Olympia
(tubs of chocolate-chip ice cream) or the savoury rice-balls known as
supplì
. We found no accessible expatriate society of the kind we knew in Fuengirola; nor did I miss it.

Now that we had some money, I encouraged Beetle to buy Ferragamo shoes and gloves and to have stylish outfits made for her by a dressmasker recommended by the smiling Ella Singer. In the evenings, we often left Paul and Sarah asleep, under the supervision of the janitor’s agreeable wife, and drove across Rome to whatever restaurant featured in the Michelin looked appetising. I relished the overacting of the Alfredo renowned for
his
fettuccini
. When they were ready to go to table, the lights were dimmed and the
padrone
came dancing in, purple flames leaping from the oval dish where the pasta writhed in creamy loops.

We saw the new movies (none funnier or more untranslatable than those starring Alberto Sordi) and we shopped on the Via del Corso and up the Via Condotti and on to the Via Veneto. No one questioned our right to a
sconto diplomatico
. I read Moravia, Pavese, Carlo Levi and Italo Svevo. I even began Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi
. Writing
Nothing But the Best
allowed me the closet pleasure of impersonating the kind of heartless, double-dealing bounder whom I have always been, in practice, too squeamish to emulate. My script was, in some measure, a displaced homage to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s film,
The Scoundrel
, which I had seen, between kisses, in company with Mary Jane Lehman in New York City ten years before.

Within a few weeks, I was able to send the first draft of
Nothing But the
Best
to Richard Gregson. He responded, very quickly: it was the best script he had ever read. David Deutsch was eager that I come to England to discuss the second draft with his chosen director, Clive Donner. It seemed no trouble to get in the big blue Vanguard, cushion Paul and Sarah in the back, and drive north with the certainty that we would not be away for long. We went to stay with Joan and Baron Moss. They had moved into a handsome house, with a large garden, in bourgeois Woldingham, Surrey. Baron’s Bentley convertible was in the drive.

Clive Donner had just directed
Some People
, a worthy piece with Kenneth More, sponsored by the Duke of Edinburgh, about a boy band redeemed from delinquency by musical success. Clive’s reputation was based on his having edited the 1953 hit
Genevieve
, starring Kay Kendall. Based on the annual Brighton Rally of vintage cars, it had something in common with
Lady at the Wheel
. Leslie Bricusse had been appearing in
An Evening with Beatrice Lillie
at the time when ‘sexy Rex’ Harrison was having a flagrant affair with Kay Kendall while he and his wife, the delectable Lilli Palmer,
were starring, as they had on Broadway, in John van Druten’s
Bell, Book and Candle
. It had required no great wit to emend the title to
Bell, Book and Kendall
. Kay Kendall was now dead.

Clive Donner came from the same part of north-west London as Beetle. Bernard Levin was his cousin. When
Nothing But the Best
was eventually made, Bernard played the very small part of a drama critic. Since Clive had gone into the movie business as an apprentice, his ascent had something in common with that of my script’s James Brewster, who – like the S Man – was bent on mounting the slippery pole of modern success. Clive was garrulous, friendly and imprecise. He wanted the plot to be expanded, but he had no clear ideas. I listened, I sighed and sometimes I saw, and sharpened, his point. In Stanley Ellin’s plot, which I had had no call to amplify in the tight television version, Jimmy Brewster enrols Charlie Prince, an upper-class remittance man, as his social tutor and then, having graduated as a plausible toff, murders him, puts his body in a trunk in his landlady’s cellar, and takes possession of his income. It then emerges that Charlie was the disgraced brother of the woman on whom James had fastened his purposeful affections. His daughter’s impending wedding leads her father to seek to recall her scapegrace brother from the wilderness. The TV version ended with a trunk, which the viewers knew to contain Charlie’s body, being delivered to the family house. Clive and David thought that the film needed an extra twist or two, which I promised to supply. Once again, arrogance and servility worked easily in tandem, the mark of the classicist.