Murderers and Other Friends (10 page)

Now he was married to Hjordis, whom he called the ‘beautiful Swede'. She had been a model, married to a rich husband, and he found her, for some reason, on the set of
Bonny Prince Charlie.
She sat by the pool making endless telephone calls. ‘My ear is out to here!' she complained. ‘Making all these telephone calls. What I need is a holiday!' I remember, because I was still at the cooking stage of my life, asking her if I could see the kitchen. With some difficulty Hjordis found the number of the kitchen – a place, it seemed, with which she was not familiar – rang it up and announced that a visit would not be possible. Niven took us out for drives and to small restaurants. Hjordis stayed at home, a martyr to the telephone.

So we listened to his ever-improving and ever more polished stories. We heard the long saga about the way his zip came undone when he was skiing down a Swiss slope and the icy wind froze his genitals: ‘I looked down and saw this little Eton-blue acorn!' We enjoyed once more the way a bone flew out of an actress's corset and up his nose as he was embracing her on the New York stage, and we heard an entirely new one about the commercial for an underarm deodorant.

He had been asked to film this advertisement, but had steadfastly refused and when pressed had said he would do it only on three conditions. The first was that he should be paid a huge sum of money, the second that he could film it anywhere in the world he fancied and the third, and most important, was that the commercial should not be shown anywhere but in Japan. All these terms were agreed to. Niven chose to film outside the palace in Monte Carlo, no doubt because it was near home and perhaps in memory of his long-past but eternally memorable love affair with Princess Grace. He chose to play a sentry, sweating in a scarlet uniform and a busby, who is forced to give his armpit a generous spray of the magic deodorant. He then collected the money, went off to work in America and put the unpleasant incident out of his mind. When he came back to London he was walking into the Connaught Hotel, where he always stayed, with a number of friends and acquaintances when two large coaches drew up outside the hotel. From them emerged a huge party of Japanese who saw Niven and burst into high-pitched laughter, lifted their arms and dabbed at their armpits in hysterical mimicry.

We sailed through the harbour in a dinghy, slowly, with little wind. The rain, a permanent feature of holidays in the South of France, had stopped suddenly. Niven was talking about the great days of Hollywood, when he had emerged from central casting, an unlikely Scotsman to succeed in the tinsel city. He had shared a house on the beach, which they called Cirrhosis by the Sea, with Errol Flynn. He had organized an elaborate practical joke which again involved Rex Harrison. Niven and Nigel Bruce hired a young hooker to pose as Bruce's virginal cousin from London, whom he had promised to look after, and then affected outrage when they caught Rex making love to her. He also described the embarrassing moment during the filming of
The Prisoner of Zenda
when they were riding into the city and his horse, eager as Harrison, reared up and mounted the mare ridden by Douglas Fairbanks Junior. And then, floating along the coast in a moment of silence, we saw a leaking boat, an abandoned wreck. ‘You know what that is?' Niven said. ‘That's Flynn's boat.' The great old days of Hollywood, the scandals and the fabled romances, were rotting at the quayside and about to disintegrate entirely.

My father's repeated question, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?', boomed out across the garden in my childhood, echoed down the years. It became a password. I was sent to stay with George Clune, a distant connection of my father's, who had been converted to Rome and played the organ in a Catholic church in Eastbourne. He used to weave such tunes as ‘Pop Goes the Weasel' and ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van' into the music when the congregation assembled and dispersed. My father had told me to ask if Cawdor had been executed and when I did so George Clune folded me in his arms and welcomed me as though we were members of some secret society. So the words of Shakespeare became passwords or incantations. ‘Who's the silent Irishman in
Hamlet?'
my father would ask me. Long usage had taught me the answer: ‘He's the one the Prince of Denmark's talking to when he says, “Now could I do it, Pat. Now he is praying.” '

So the plays were part of our daily lives, like the evidence in divorce cases and drowning earwigs and ITMA being switched on during dinner when my father was bored. I thought hardly at all about the man who wrote them, whose coloured effigy seemed unreal and doll-like over his tomb in the church at Stratford. But then, towards the end of the seventies, I got a strange invitation from Associated Television, the fiefdom of Lew Grade, whose agile little feet had once been planted in the variety show and the summer season. I was asked to write six television plays about the life of Shakespeare.

The first professor I asked said that everything known about the life of Shakespeare could be written on a postcard and you would still have room for the stamp. It seems he adopted no public personality, in which he was wise. Other great writers have not been so well advised. Dickens took on the role of a warm-hearted, devoted family man and, when it was discovered that he was cruel to his wife, secretive with his mistress and sometimes hard-hearted to his children, the perpetual pleasures of his books may, for some, have been diminished. Philip Larkin took on the part of a racist, male chauvinist bigot, thus disillusioning the many
Guardian
readers who had written dissertations on his excellent poetry. Evelyn Waugh entertained himself by acting a curmudgeonly country squire with an ear trumpet, and then the wind changed and he was stuck with it. John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, having been called, in some distant dawn of the world, angry young men, have opted to become cross old blimps and have performed their roles with considerable success. But Shakespeare, engaged full-time in writing parts for other people, was apparently unable to think up one for himself.

If he had committed a murder, like his friend Ben Jonson, we should have known a great deal more about him. If he had been a double agent, in trouble with the Privy Council, and a noted atheist who died with a dagger in his eye like Marlowe, we might have had a good deal more to go on. As it is, Shakespeare, who transcended all other writers, beat them all in keeping potential biographers guessing. In fact we know a great deal about him, quite enough to cover a whole packet of postcards, but it's mercifully dull. We have details of his law-suits, his property-buying, his will; the unsensational moments of a life spent keeping out of trouble. He was kind enough to give us some blank years, between leaving Stratford and turning up in the London theatre, during which time you can create your own Shakespeare: a lawyer's clerk, a soldier, a traveller to Italy, a tutor in an aristocratic household – what you will. It is clear that he was born the son of a semi-literate glovemaker, went to London to act, wrote plays with considerable success, was admired by Ben Jonson, known and revered by his fellow actors, Hemmings and Condell, and returned to New Place in Stratford to enjoy his money and die, perhaps on his birthday. He was either William Shakespeare or someone else with exactly the same name. What is perfectly obvious is that he wasn't Francis Bacon; he had nothing whatever in common with that cold-hearted, urbane, secretly corrupt judge whose scientific interests led him to die stuffing a goose with snow; and yet the penalty of writing anything at all about Shakespeare is to receive weekly propaganda from the Francis Bacon Society. Somewhere, in some dusty office, some dullard spends his life collecting evidence that there never was a Shakespeare. If a writer keeps out of trouble he can be denied all existence.

The best I could do was to invent six patently fictional stories about Shakespeare's life. This subject allows a wide degree of speculation because of the form of his art. The novelist is for ever present in his work, sometimes addressing us directly like Dickens, Trollope or Thackeray, sometimes causing every scene to vibrate with his peculiar sensitivity like Henry James or, following Flaubert's precept and being like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible. The playwright is only on stage when he is pretending to be someone else, lost in his characters, whose views shouldn't be too readily mistaken for his. So you can prove that Shakespeare was a liberal anarchist – ‘handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief?', or a conservative devoted to law and order and the class structure – ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows', a pre-Christian stoic – ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport', or a man with a touching belief in Christian mercy – ‘Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy'. You can also spell a great variety of plots out of the sonnets, no doubt the nearest he came to autobiography. Did he love an aristocratic patron called Henry Wriothesley or, as Oscar Wilde thought, a boy actor called Willie Hughes? Did his fair, male lover sleep with his dark girl-friend or were there other causes for his bitterness and burning sense of ingratitude? Such historical questions are best approached by way of fiction.

Writing the Shakespeare stories was an enormous pleasure. It was interesting to see the great female roles acted by boys before all male Shakespeare became fashionable. And I worked with Peter Wood, a director of truly Elizabethan flamboyance. He would sit in the control room surrounded by his props: silver jugs of coffee, bay rum after-shave, and an assortment of pills, admiring the beauty of his shot and congratulating himself. One day he looked at the screen and said, ‘Peter, Peter, that's really sensational! You combine the eye of a Rembrandt with a magnificent narrative drive. But silly, silly, Peter, you forgot to cue the actors!' We built the Globe Theatre on the lot at Elstree and filled it with groundlings. One very hot day they were alarmed when the director appeared on the stage wearing little but a pair of Y-fronts and a Mexican hat. ‘You may think I'm a bastard now, but you'll learn what a bastard I really am before the day is out!' he bellowed at them through a bull horn. They took fright and began to trickle away to the town, where numerous customers in doublet and hose were spotted pushing trolleys through Tesco's. I have the greatest admiration for Peter Wood who taught me something of great value: an hour's drama on television, which might be thought of as a one-act play or a long short story, is greatly enriched if it has not one plot but two or, better still, three. I have always found plots hard to come by; all the same I stuck to Peter Wood's rule when I came to tell stories about my own character, not the Swan of Avon, but Rumpole of the Bailey.

I'm writing in a Moroccan hotel. It's February and in England the skies are grey, the ground frozen, the daffodils have poked up before their time but dare not open. Here, all sorts of flowers are out at the same time: roses, carnations, geraniums, hibiscus, arum lilies and bougainvillaea. The sun is shining, the trees are heavy in the orange groves and there are lemons clinging to the wall. The sky is bright blue and far away you can see snow on the Atlas Mountains. There are a number of elderly English people in this hotel; it's very quiet and a good place to work.

Last year Penny and I were here, watching the other guests, trying to work out their relationships, or speculate on their lives, which is the chief pleasure to be got from staying in hotels. There was an Englishman, frail and birdlike, wearing elderly but expensive clothes and a brown trilby hat. He was in the company of a thickset, crop-haired, moustached and tattooed man with a North Country accent, perhaps half his age, who might have been a bouncer or a PE instructor. We thought he was the old man's bodyguard. At dinner, we noticed, they did themselves extraordinarily well, ordering lobsters specially brought from Agadir and pink, French champagne. After a while they invited us to join them for dimer and we found out more. The older man was called Tony. Mike, who had the tattoos, was his cook, housekeeper, gardener, driver, companion and friend.

‘Tony's only got about a month to live,' Mike said, as all four of us sat at dinner. ‘It was just a little while ago I sent him in roast pheasant with all the trimmings: bread sauce, gravy, sprouts and game chips. Though I say it myself, it was done perfect. Not at all dry, nice and moist, really appetizing. And Tony took one mouthful and he couldn't eat it. So I told him then, straight out, “Cancer of the oesophagus. That's you.” He's not got long to go now. Of course, I suppose he could be kept alive a bit longer with all sorts of drugs and that. But we'd both much rather he went as he is now. I want to always think of him as he is. At his best.' And to this, Tony, who had heard the entire speech, nodded a gentle and smiling approval.

Tony told us more about himself. He'd been very rich: ‘born with a silver spoon in my mouth'. Disgusted by the poverty in his part of England he stood, on a couple of occasions and unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate. He'd been in the Army and took part in the retreat from France. He sat with his sergeant on the beach at Dunkirk while the Germans shelled them and the British did their best to leave in every available craft to cross the Channel. Tony and his sergeant ate the ham, drank the four-star brandy and smoked the Havana cigars which his mother had sent him for his twenty-first birthday. When they'd finished their picnic, the sergeant suggested that they'd better try and get back to England. They swam out and found that the small boats had been ordered not to take more than thirteen passengers. When an officer tried to pull rank and climb on board a motor boat which already had its full complement, an NCO shot him. Tony decided that they wouldn't chance their luck. He and his sergeant swam on until they came to a leaky Polish ship on which they eventually escaped. Later in the war, the sergeant died of wounds, leaving his young wife pregnant with Mike. Tony had helped support her and the child, kept in touch with Mike when he was employed as a sports organizer, and they were now inseparable companions. Tony knew that he hadn't long to go which is why they ordered lobster and pink champagne.