Joshua Then and Now (32 page)

He didn’t tell him – he couldn’t possibly tell him – that he had written to the Freibergs, a long and convoluted letter of apology, explaining himself as best he could and asking if they were all right. Please be all right. His letter had gone unanswered, which, all things considered, did not surprise him.

With Murdoch, he became a regular at the Mandrake Club. And on wintry Friday afternoons they waited impatiently there for Murdoch’s wife, a secretary in a publishing house, to drift in with her pay envelope, enabling them to settle the week’s account. As soon as Murdoch had become sodden and truculent, and they had taken him back to their flat to tuck him in, Margaret and Joshua used to sit together in the kitchen, drinking. One night he reached out to feel her breasts. “Yoicks,” she said.

At the time, Murdoch and Margaret lived in Kentish Town and Joshua had a small flat in Chelsea.

In the seedy early fifties, long before London had been pronounced swinging, Chelsea’s most celebrated tomcat was Eliot, a resident of Cheyne Walk, and the only boutiques worth seeking out on the King’s Road were dark, smelly little places stacked with secondhand books. Joshua’s modest flat on the then tatty end of the King’s Road lent him the use of place-names that matched his mood perfectly. His bus stop was Lot’s Road; his local, The World’s End. Stepping out in his baggy utility tweeds, he could, if he chose to, stroll toward squalid Fulham, lingering at smog-encrusted windows of row upon row of decrepit junk and second-hand furniture shops, munching fish and chips wrapped in a greasy
News of the World
. Or if he wandered the other way, toward Sloane Square, there was an abundance of foul Anglo-Indian and Chinese restaurants, secondhand bookshops, tobacconists, and barbershops with big flashing
Durex signs in the window, and chemists, their dusty, faded window displays proffering rupture belts and salves that promised relief from itchy hemorrhoids.

Murdoch, whose first novel had been published to hosannas, was already famous as well as feared, though not yet in the money. He was still supplementing his income from royalties by reviewing here, pounding out a telly column there, and reading for a publisher somewhere else. Moved by his condition, even more parlous than his own, Joshua advised him to order all his food, even whatever clothes he required, from Harrod’s. “Open an account. Get your bloody publisher to sign for you, if necessary. And then, so far as gullible tradesmen are concerned, you are no longer a yabbo but a proper gentleman. The Harrod’s accounts are sent out quarterly. When it comes, ignore it. A month will pass before you are sent a polite reminder. Then you run through the itemized account and query a jar of mustard here, a tin of sardines there. This creates unimaginable confusion. Wretched little clerks, who cycle to work from darkest Clapham, scurry from desk to desk in the basement. Files are pried open. Sales slips consulted. Ledgers double-checked. Months will pass before somebody comes up with the actual signed sales slip, including the mustard or sardines. The next step calls for a little guile. You write an indignant letter querying the authenticity of the signature on the sales slip. More confusion. Consternation in the very bowels of the emporium. Further delays. Six months will pass before you have to settle the account and by that time, I hope, you will have the necessary money. If not, keep the correspondence going.”

A publisher Joshua met at a
New Statesman
party invited him to lunch, asked to see some pages from his manuscript about Spain, and ten days later mailed him a contract, with the promise of a much needed £150 advance. That night, in a mood to celebrate, Joshua crashed a party at the home of an Australian actress who lived in a rambling old house in Earl’s Court. Celia was an ardent left-winger. And in those days, before the Khrushchev speech had confirmed
Stalin’s obloquy to even the most obdurate, before the uprising in Hungary, many of her friends were still active in the Party. These friends, Joshua would discover later, after he had become a regular at Celia’s gatherings, included one Colin Fraser and his dazzling, reputedly promiscuous wife, Pauline.

Meanwhile, there were problems.

Murdoch’s second novel was (deservedly, Joshua thought) even more highly praised than his first, but it didn’t even earn enough to clear his overdraft. Margaret already had one child and eighteen months later gave birth to another, obliging her to leave her job. Something, Joshua thought, had to be done.

Yes, yes, but what?

On a letterhead pinched from the office of
Encounter
, Joshua wrote to the curator of the rare manuscript collection at the University of Texas, saying that he had been commissioned to write an essay on the novels of Sidney Murdoch. He would be in Texas in the spring, he added, and would be grateful if he could be allowed access to the Murdoch papers. There were, a librarian replied, no Murdoch papers in Texas. Joshua wrote back immediately to say that he was astounded and, for good measure, he enclosed a batch of Murdoch’s most flattering reviews. The librarian wrote again to say that the curator was then traveling in Italy, but Professor Shapiro’s letter would be brought to his attention on his return. Joshua took the University of Texas letter to a printer on the Old Kent Road and asked him to reproduce twenty copies of the letterhead. He then wrote to all the dealers he could find listed, asking them if they had any Murdoch papers available. Finally, an unsavory American dealer was snared on his hook. He approached Murdoch with a view to purchasing his papers. Murdoch promptly unloaded everything he had on him, earning about five hundred pounds, and when the dealer came back for more, he was not about to admit the cupboard was bare. Instead, he went Joshua one better. He improvised.

Visiting Murdoch’s flat in Kentish Town one night, Joshua came
upon his two-year-old daughter, Jessica, howling on the floor, yanking at a soggy nappy, while Murdoch, determined to shut her up, was rubbing her lips with cognac. Ralph, squatting in another corner of the freezing living room, his nose running, was totally absorbed in a box of Ritz crackers. Joshua’s immediate problem was that he didn’t know where to stand. The floor was covered end to end with typewritten pages.

“Where’s Margaret?” he asked at once.

“Clever. Oh, very clever indeed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Little greaser.”

Rattled, Joshua inadvertently stepped on a manuscript page. He withdrew his foot immediately.

“Oh, no. That’s just the thing. Step on some more of them, please.”

“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

“But I happen to be serious. Tread on the bloody pages before your shoes dry.”

Joshua did as he was asked.

“Margaret finally found out about me and Lucinda and stormed out of here late last night. If she is leaving me for good this time, she had better come back for this lot.” Murdoch poured him a cognac, his smile fierce. “Do you really fancy her that much, Joshua?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Murdoch wasn’t convinced.

“I rather suspected you were into her knickers once she began to insist how you were the most pathetically unattractive of all my friends.”

“Not bloody likely.”

“Too bad. Ah well, somebody will marry her, don’t you think? Now that I’ve had her teeth capped. Scheming little mouse. Her behavior was perfectly proper until I settled the dentist’s bill. No
NHS
for her. It had to be Wimpole Street. Seriously, don’t you think somebody will marry her?”

“With two kids?”

“Aha,” he exclaimed.

“I’m not having an affair with Margaret.”

“Then why has she suddenly taken to bathing before going out shopping in the afternoon?”

“She could be having an affair with somebody else.”

“Then why would your phone be off the hook those same afternoons? Don’t deny it. I checked with the operator.”

“I could be having an affair with somebody else, too.”

“Oh, really,” he asked, interested, “who with?”

Joshua didn’t answer.

“I smell a dirty rat.”

“What about Lucinda?”

“I’m afraid she’s preggers.”

“Is she expecting you to marry her, then?”

“Margaret’s simply aching to find out the answer to that one, isn’t she?”

“How would I know?”

“Judas!”

“Are you in love with Lucinda?”

“Oh, don’t be such a bore, Joshua.”

He helped Murdoch stow the drugged children into a bed that reeked of urine and then drank more cognac with him as he continued about his work. Pages, dripping with beer, were hung out to dry before the faltering fire. He scribbled corrections on other pages, while Joshua crumpled and uncrumpled further sheets for him. More pages were burned here and there with a cigarette, others were stained with tea. The manuscript, he explained, had come to him unsolicited from a young writer in search of advice. Once it had been properly aged, Murdoch planned to sell it to the dealer as an early effort of his that he had, on reflection, decided not to publish. He refilled their glasses and they drank to that, regarding each other warily. “The irony is,” he said, “that I don’t really enjoy the actual
fucking that much. I find women terrifying. And they’re all much the same in bed, aren’t they?”

“Then why must you change partners so often?”

Murdoch contemplated that one. “Well,” he said at last, “it is becoming disconcertingly easier for me to start an affair rather than a new novel. And what I do enjoy are the deceits. The stratagems. The dangers. All the lovely little lies. Mind you, I’d never stoop to cuckolding a good friend. I’m not a total shit. I know, I know, ‘I’m not having an affair with Margaret.’ Balls, you aren’t.”

Murdoch began to strut.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but no matter how flattering she is to you now, the truth is she could never finish your boring little article in
Encounter.”

“Sidney, you are pathetically insecure.”

“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

“What are you going to do about Lucinda?”

“The proper thing, it goes without saying. But the poor child,” he added, unable to repress a grin, “is under age and can’t possibly marry without her parents’ consent.”

“Which just might be forthcoming, given the compromising circs.”

“Shit. Shit. Shit. What a pain in the ass you are. Can you lend me a hundred quid?”

“Wait. Hold it. I think I’ve got a better idea,” Joshua said, beaming at Murdoch with drunken benevolence. “You and I, Sidney, might just be able to earn a tidy sum in the great state of Texas,” and he went on to improvise his scheme.

“Of course, of course.”

“We could backdate the stuff to Cambridge.”

Murdoch splashed more cognac into their glasses. “Ah, Murdoch,” he sang out, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Yes. Good. Excellent. It could bring a small fortune. Of course you realize that I am famous while you are merely well known, and only in Staggers and Naggers
circles at that. So you would have to agree to a sixty-forty split in my favor. What do you say?”

Joshua agreed at once, and in the weeks that followed, they both avoided real work, laboring to outdo each other in their joint project. All unavailingly, alas. For before they could market the stuff, Murdoch ran afoul of the Texans. His instantly aged manuscript, sold to the university, turned up in print, the real and inconsiderate author earning a good deal of attention. The Texans took umbrage, so did the real author, and Murdoch found himself threatened with a lawsuit, until he explained away his swindle as an absent-minded mistake. Letters gone into the wrong envelopes. Happens all the time, don’t you know?

On the other hand, their work could not be written off as a total loss. At least to Murdoch, the custodian. A malevolent stranger (Margaret, Murdoch hinted darkly) stumbled on the stuff, photostatted some of the more outrageous chunks, and mailed them to Lucinda’s parents in South Ken. They absolutely forbade the marriage. Lucinda was dispatched to Switzerland, and Margaret – sweet, ostensibly dependent Margaret – emerging after an understandable period of despair, was astonished to discover how capable she really was. “People used to think I was mute, an idiot,” she told Joshua, “because whenever we went to dinner parties I could never get a word in edgeways, everybody was so intent on Sidney’s bon mots. And you know how he loves to perform. Holding forth at anybody’s table. Polishing his anecdotes. Now when I’m invited out, people actually listen to what I have to say. There are men who find me both attractive and witty.”

Joshua had now become a regular at Celia’s delightful bottle parties, which abounded in left-wing journalists, contributors to the
New Statesman
and
Tribune
, and American refugees from McCarthyism. Hollywood people. There were also impecunious Africans, an engaging, hard-drinking bunch, seemingly indolent, who were to disappear only to return a decade later, Joshua was to discover on a visit to
London, borne to the same parties in chauffeured limousines, unraveling turtleneck sweaters now eschewed for three-piece gray suits, this one the foreign minister of Malawi, that one the freshly appointed Zambian ambassador to the Court of St. James. Each one bearing a willing, flushed Belgravia rose on his arm, the black man’s burden. And then, yet another decade later, settling into the
New York Times
in The Kings Arms, jesting with The Flopper, he would read of these genial men he had known in their prime, one executed by the latest supreme liberator of Kinshasa, the severed head of another found floating in the Upper Volta River.

It was as a result of a chance encounter at one of Celia’s parties that Joshua actually made direct contact with the dreaded Party and, incidentally, Pauline.

The dazzling, baffling Pauline, whom he would sometimes espy being not so surreptitiously fondled by a black man, headed for another part of the room at even a hint of his approach. And if he pursued, doggedly, she would move away yet again, her long legs rustling.

Then one night at Celia’s somebody cornered Joshua, saying “I’ll bet you’d be afraid to speak at the Communist Party Writer’s Group?”

Pauline, for a change, was sufficiently close to overhear, and he could tell by her face that she expected a craven response from him.