The Fry Chronicles (7 page)

‘But that’s when I start at Cambridge.’

‘Michaelmas term at Cambridge doesn’t begin till October. Our term starts a month earlier.’

And so for the next two years I came back to Cundall and taught either side of the short Cambridge terms. In the summer I drove the tractor that pulled the gang-mower around the cricket square and I umpired cricket matches. In the winter months I took the boys for walks and on rainy Sundays I compiled quizzes and competitions to keep them occupied.

There was no question in my mind that teaching would be my career. It was my true calling and one that sounded in my head as loud as any school bell. Whether I would teach in a place like Cundall, at university level or somewhere in between only my time at Cambridge would decide. If I had the intellectual heft to make it as an academic then perhaps I would make scholarship my life. I imagined that Shakespearean studies would be my
métier
and tweed and briar my constant accoutrements.

It was a pleasant enough prospect. I was over that terrible sugar addiction and the madness and disruption it had caused. It had been replaced by a woody, tweedy, old-fashioned masculine dependency which, so long as the supply was there, did not modify mood or behaviour and which also served to remind me that I was now a mature,
sober, rational adult. I made no allowance for love, sex or the body of course. I was fire and air – in other words, smoke: my other elements, like Cleopatra, I gave to baser life …

Ten years later, in 1988, I met one of Britain’s greatest smokers. He was at the time a premier drinker too.

‘I come,’ he told Rik Mayall, John Gordon Sinclair, John Sessions, Sarah Berger, Paul Mooney and me as we gathered for the first rehearsal of his play
The Common Pursuit
, ‘from the booze and fags generation.’ He slumped his shoulders down ruefully to emphasize that this was an ineluctable fact in whose remorseless face he was powerless.

Simon Gray was then, I realize with a slight shudder, exactly the age I am as I write this now. He had, like his favourite actor Alan Bates, a full flop of black hair, but his physique was less solid. Years of drinking had bulged his tummy into a gentle pot while simultaneously wasting his lower half, so that he was spindle-shanked and all but arseless. I almost never saw him without a cigarette in one hand and a drinking receptacle in the other. In the mornings he gulped down champagne, which in his eyes barely counted as alcohol. From lunchtime onwards he sipped at endless coffee mugs or plastic cups of Glenfiddich whisky. It was the first time I had been at close quarters with an authentic alcoholic. Some of my generation drank more than was good for them and would go on to develop into the real thing, but for the moment youth was on their side.

Unusually for the professional theatre, rehearsals for
The Common Pursuit
would begin after lunch. We all decided early on that this was because Simon, who was directing the
production, was not able to function before that time. In fact, as I found out, it was because he spent the mornings at his desk. No matter how much he drank, he always seemed able to put in plenty of daily writing hours as a playwright and diarist. Just occasionally I caught sight of him early in the morning, before his first champagne. It was a ghastly sight. His face sagged, his eyes were dull, rheumy and bleared, his voice creaked huskily, and his whole being looked defeated and incapable of thought, action or purpose. One sip of an alcoholic drink, however, and he revived like a desert flower in the rain. He seemed to grow inches taller in front of you, a light and sparkle appeared in his eyes, his complexion smoothed and brightened, and his voice strengthened and cleared. Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.

Rik Mayall’s nickname for him was Mr Drinky. We adored him and he appeared to adore us. ‘I know nothing of your generation,’ he would say. ‘I don’t watch television so I haven’t seen “The Young Ones” or “Blackadder” or whatever the things you do are called. They told me to audition you, and so I did. You all seem absurdly young and confident, and I am assured that you will bring an audience into the theatre.’

That we seemed young to him I can imagine, but that we gave the impression of confidence seemed extraordinary in any of us except of course Rik Mayall. Rik was a force of nature who appeared charismatically invincible and fearlessly uninhibited from the moment he burst on to the comedy scene with his friend Ade Edmondson in the early eighties. I suppose that I too, as ever, emanated waves of looming self-confidence that I most certainly did not feel.

The title of Simon’s play came from a phrase coined and used as the title of a collection of essays by the critic and academic F. R. Leavis, who founded a whole school of English-literature studies whose high seriousness, attention to detail and earnest moral purpose were legendary. Simon Gray had been taught by Leavis himself at Cambridge and remained hugely influenced by him. For myself, I’d always thought Leavis a sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance (my own brand of undergraduate sanctimoniousness at work there, I now see) and certainly by the time I arrived at Cambridge his influence had waned, he and his kind having been almost entirely eclipsed by the Parisian post-structuralists and their caravanserai of prolix and impenetrable evangels and dogmatically zealous acolytes. Stories of Frank Leavis and his harridan of a wife, Queenie, snubbing, ostracizing, casting out and calumniating anyone who offended them went the rounds, and those English academics at the university who had been in their orbit were callously dismissed by the elite as dead Leavisites.

Leavis’s intense, suspicious propensity to explode in wrath and to anathematize anyone who dared disagree with him I saw again in Harold Pinter, whose close but combustible friendship with Simon Gray and Simon’s wife, Beryl, was an eternal source of delight to me and John Sessions in particular, as ardent connoisseurs of literary eccentricity. I remember once John and I were sitting in the back brasserie of the Groucho Club. Harold, his wife, Lady Antonia, Beryl and Simon had a corner table. Suddenly Harold’s booming voice burst out. ‘If you are capable of saying such a thing as that, Simon Gray,
it is perfectly clear that there is no further basis for our friendship. We are leaving.’

We peeped round to see Harold rise with massive black-polo-necked dignity, stub out a cigarette, toss down the remnants of a whisky and sweep past us, growling all the while. That massive dignity was a little punctured by his realization that the faithful Pakenham hound was not at his heels. He turned and barked across the room, ‘Antonia!’

Lady Magnesia Fridge-Freezer, as Richard Ingrams liked to call her, jerked herself awake (her defence against the madness of Harold’s tantrums was always simply to fall asleep. She could do this in the middle of a meal or sentence, a kind of traumatic symplegia, a condition known only to cats in P. G. Wodehouse, but which I think refers to what we would now call narcolepsy) and softly gathered up her coat. By this time the whole back brasserie was watching the scene unfold and greatly enjoying the embarrassed lacunae, charged glances and menacing exchanges that one associates with the authentically Pinteresque. Antonia smiled seraphically at the Grays and went to join her husband. As she passed our table she stopped and gathered the loose wool at the shoulder of my pullover.

‘Oh, what a lovely jumper,’ she sighed, fingering it for a second.

‘Antonia!’

And she drifted away. I can almost bring myself to believe that the room burst into applause, but I think that would be an instance of the wish being father of the thought.

I raise the issue of Leavis because the moral seriousness he inculcated into the study of letters left its mark on Simon Gray in strange ways. I remember an evening in
the bar of the Watford Palace Theatre. We had performed the play for about a week prior to coming into the West End. That night’s performance was a great success, and afterwards Simon dished out the few director’s notes he had scribbled on tickets and taxi receipts while standing at the back of the theatre sipping Glenfiddich. The mood amongst us was good. He sighed something about how young we all were.

‘Actually,’ said John Gordon Sinclair, ‘you remember when I auditioned and you asked me how old I was?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘What of it?’

‘Well, I said I was twenty-eight, but actually I’m only twenty-five.’

‘What?
What
? Why?’

‘Well, I knew that you’d cast Stephen and Rik and Johnnie; they were like twenty-nine and thirty and thirty-two or whatever, and I didn’t want you to think I was too young …’

‘You
lied
?’ Simon stared at him aghast.

‘Yes, well …’ Gordie had clearly imagined that Simon would be amused. It was all over now: he was safely cast in the play, we could all share in the charm of his anxiety to be cast and the little white lie he told to make it more likely. If anything the story was a compliment to the play and his desire to be a part of it. The smile vanished from Gordie’s face as he realized that Simon was far from amused.

‘You
lied
.’ A characteristic slump and a grimace of pain and despair swept over Simon. ‘You
lied
?’

Poor Gordie was bright red now and wishing he was dead.

‘Well, I thought …’

‘But to
lie
…’

Fond of Simon as I was, I thought this was a strange reaction. To disapprove of lying is one thing, but to disapprove of so benign and amiable a lie and so relentlessly to bear down on its perpetrator struck me as being bullying, priggish, mean and grotesquely out of proportion. We all tried in our own way to defuse the moment, but Gordie felt rotten for the rest of the week, convinced that Simon was going to sack him or at the very least hate him for ever, and I was left wondering whether the malignant influence behind it all was whisky or Leavis.

The play we were there to put on chronicled the life of a group of friends who collaborate as students on the founding of a literary magazine called
The Common Pursuit
. Over the course of the play’s action, hard real life with its loves, infidelities, compromises and betrayals scuffs away the gloss and sheen of the group’s noble ambitions and high Leavisite ideals. John Sessions took the leading part of Stuart, the magazine’s editor, opposite Sarah Berger, who played his girlfriend, Marigold. Paul Mooney was Martin, the best friend endowed with enough private means to keep the magazine going, and John Gordon Sinclair played Peter, a likeable serial philanderer endlessly snared in a tangle of lies and evasions as he tries to run his chaotic seraglio of mistresses. My role was that of a broodingly intelligent, sexually constrained, waspish and socially awkward philosophy don called Humphrey Taylor, who ends up being murdered by a piece of rough trade, à la James Pope-Hennessy and (perhaps) Richard Lancelyn Green. Rik took the part of Nick Finchling, a brilliant, slapdash and entertaining historian who trades his academic promise for an easy career in the media. Nick is a heavy smoker
and towards the end of the play he develops emphysema. At one point my character Humphrey upbraids him as he watches him light up and dissolve, for the umpteenth time, into a terrible coughing fit.

‘You should give up.’

‘Why?’

‘For one thing, you’ll live longer.’

‘Oh, you don’t live longer. It just seems longer.’

That was Mr Drinky’s view of his addictions, and now it was mine too. The previous year I had told everyone that I was going to give up smoking on 24 August, my thirtieth birthday. I managed ten nicotine-free days at my house in Norfolk before a group of heavy-smoking friends arrived to stay, their presence soon bending and then snapping my puny will. I would not try again for almost twenty years. Instead I adopted Simon Gray’s guilt-free acceptance of the addiction. No, it was more than guilt-free acceptance: cigarettes were proud banners to be flown. Objections to smoking in Simon’s eyes were contemptible and bourgeois. He was always getting in terrible rows for lighting up in minicabs and those parts of theatres and public spaces which, even back then, were given over to non-smokers. The diaries he wrote and published throughout the eighties, nineties and into the noughties reveal a baleful champion of tobacco barging belligerently through an increasingly intolerant and hostile world. The titles of his final journals make this explicit –
The Smoking Diaries Vol. 1
,
The Smoking Diaries 2: The Year of the Jouncer
and
The Last Cigarette: Smoking Diaries 3
.

Of course the body can take chronic assault from alcohol and tobacco for just so long. The time came for him to give up first one and then the other.