The Whispering Swarm (19 page)

That January, while the snow still covered Hyde Park, Helena discovered she was pregnant. She had already had one abortion and didn't want another. She tried a few old wives' remedies to stop the pregnancy, but nothing worked. We were now, not four months into our marriage, anticipating our first child. Helena kept going in to work, but she was very depressed. I reassured her. I could earn enough for two—or three. The first thing to do was to find a larger flat. That was when Joyce Carter, Ildiko's friend, took pity on us and offered us temporary use of her place in Kensington Park Gardens, off Queensway. We got out of our snow-burdened flat in Lancaster Gate and moved in. Another month or two and Joyce must have liked us as tenants. She was marrying her boyfriend and going to live with him in Malta. She couldn't sublet her Queensway flat but she could sublet her other flat in Colville Terrace, Notting Hill, the core of slum landlord Peter Rachman's empire of exploitation. I actually liked Rachman as a person. When work was slow I had done a bit of painting and decorating for him a couple of years earlier. He had paid decently and on the nail. I had lived briefly in the area and liked it, for all its association with race riots, crime and prostitution. We had a larger flat up fewer stairs, close to the shops of Portobello Road. It seemed like paradise in comparison. I was sure this would cheer Helena up.

No matter what our situation, I soon learned that, without apparent reason, Helena could resist cheering up better than Queen Victoria at a Prince Albert retrospective. Periodically she fell into the blackest moods, refusing to eat or talk. I think these days we'd call it clinical depression. I did have the sense to wonder what caused her descents and try to ease them by changing my own behaviour. My ego often got into the equation back then. I always thought it was my fault, my failure. I would go out for long walks, to leave her alone. I wasn't used to people not speaking their minds. Helena would never discuss anything, so I never knew whether she blamed me or whether her moods had any link to my actions at all. I needed some pointers. I remember a time when she'd spent all day trying to buy a hat to wear to a Royal Society of Literature function. It cost a fortune but she looked stunning. She spent about half an hour at the party and then wanted to leave. As we walked home she took off the hat and threw it over a hedge. I didn't know why she did it. All I knew, conventional as it sounds, was that I wanted to support her, help her get through whatever it was. The more she withdrew, however, the more tired I became. After a while I despaired.

Typically, I was prone to guilt. I even shared survivor's guilt as further news of Nazi atrocities was detailed through the '60s. Certainly some of the blame for Helena's moods was probably mine. Her mother said my wife had been prone to those moods since her father had died suddenly of a heart attack at a concert. His favourite child, and just fourteen, she had hardly spoken for two years after she heard the news. The first month we were married, Helena told me she knew I was going to leave her. Being sans fathers, hers permanently, we shared our anger at the common experience. I swore I would not leave her.

But generally she couldn't see me as an ally. Men always divorced their wives, she predicted, to take up with someone younger. I was no better than the rest. My mum being who she was, I wasn't used to indirect, despairing, or masochistic women. My mother had stood up to everyone, especially in my defence. I'm sure I caused Helena pain. I'm sure I delivered many of those small insults and diminishing remarks, the kind men still unconsciously delivered to women in the early '60s. But whatever else, she always enjoyed my lovemaking. Maybe that's what kept us together. She had been attracted to me by my generosity, she said. Good-natured and generous by inclination, like so many writers, I was probably monstrously insensitive, utterly self-involved, but genuinely out to give her a good time. I seemed able to sympathise with her but not understand her. I retreated under stress. I sought the few dark spaces of the apartment for my demonstrations of misery, just as she did. At any time you might find one or both of us in some cupboard or under some table or other. Slumped in any available furniture and bemoaning the futility of life. Those bleak '60s playwrights were very influential.

Two such personalities as ours were doomed, I suppose. Maybe Helena never had a chance to tell me anything because I was too caught up in my own ambition, imposing my own vision on reality. Yet I know I learned from her. I was already conscious of two different kinds of author in me. One was practical, able to make money commercially. The other was predominantly analytical, experimental, and not at all commercial! My imagination was forever imposing vision on reality. I constantly saw things which weren't actually there. If I was overtired, an entire scene might present itself to me. I could take pleasure in it, even though I knew only I could see it. I wasn't psychotic, but a cycle of intense work followed by terrible exhaustion could somehow enslave me. With others depending on me, anxiety was also now part of my creative habit. I must have been horrible to live with. Yet I craved equality. I was used to it. Maybe Helena wasn't. As a better and faster typist I edited and typed her stories for her. But there had to be something more.

I always delighted in my friends, for whom I frequently felt an unconditional loyalty. I began seriously to cultivate an interest in others, beyond being generally sympathetic. I wanted, in a dumb sort of way, to alleviate their discomfort or pain but still had only the vaguest sense of why they were hurting. If I had been a dog I would have brought them my best bone.

I was not thin-skinned. Because I had been raised with considerable self-confidence I could take quite a lot of banter, criticism or insults. Helena was really the only one who could hurt me because I had so much emotion invested in her. God knows what it was I did to her! Looking back, I wonder about my own casual verbal cruelties. I rarely lied and must have been horribly frank. I joked about the most profound experience. Having been brought up among strong women I only felt comfortable with women who generally gave good account of themselves. As an autodidact I was in awe of Helena's formal education, her ability to learn and understand things for their own sake. I taught myself to watch and listen more acutely, studying what lay beneath any surface not because I was driven by shame or regret but because I was curious and needed to improve my range. To that end for a while I read only modern writers. T.H. White had told me to read everything I could learn from. Sometimes I'm astonished at how lucky I was to have known such writers as a child. Commercial writers and literary writers, including my aunt's genial neighbour, the thriller writer Edwy Searles Brooks. He began his career combining fantastic subjects, with the traditional Wodehousian school story set in a Sargasso Sea populated by the descendants of pirates. In my school holidays I stayed with Auntie Connie and used to go to tea with Mr and Mrs Brooks. They lived in a leafy southwestern London suburb, which always seemed magical to me. Those suburbs were endless. Brooks had written dozens of Sexton Blake stories which he now turned into his Norman Conquest thriller series published by the prestigious Collins Crime Club. He gave me a lot of practical advice. Mervyn Peake, though, was probably my greatest mentor. The Peakes lived not far from Brooks, in Wallington. Around 1960 the family moved to Kensington. Peake encouraged me to be dissatisfied with the mediocre and to hoe one's own row. In some ways it helped me create several subgenres, but it made me a slave to the conventions I'd put in place.

My worst faults I only saw in retrospect. I was arrogant and blunt but apparently my sense of humour and self-deprecation made up for it. I remained supremely self-confident and somehow had the ability to take others with me. Maybe our mutual curiosity had something to do with it, too. And there was something about our chemistry. We were, after all, in love.

I remember racing to get something sorted before the baby was born. While I hammered out scripts and features and novellas and novels for money I also studied form and narrative method. Hoping to train my eye to see overlooked details of every kind, I probably did develop a greater sympathy and humility. I doubt if any of this showed in my work, most of which was melodrama: SF, fantasy, allegorical stuff, maudlin autobiography. But I was determined, by the time I was thirty, to have faced the devils driving me and take a broader interest in the world in general. I admired writers like George Meredith, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom could do what I couldn't. I wanted to write moral novels of character dealing with important social issues. I needed to understand others better. In particular I wanted to make my love for Helena into something positive and useful to her. I did my honest best to learn how to support Helena emotionally during her terrible brooding silences but I suppose I was at root too selfish myself to be of any fundamental help. And then I betrayed her. The worst thing I could have done to counteract anything positive I had tried to do. Pregnancy, of course, didn't help. I began to feel serious anxieties about my ability to provide properly for a mother and child.

Most of what I learned about Helena's early life came from her mother. Mrs Denham had married a director of Vickers-Armstrong, the arms and aeroplane company. They made the VC10. The best jetliner ever. Helena always said her dad was an arms manufacturer. She had been his firstborn and his favourite. She had adored him. She was fourteen when he died listening to Bach at the Wigmore Hall. Mrs D said her husband had Jewish blood on his mother's side. ‘And they're prone to heart problems, aren't they? As well as brooding.' Helena's ma was at once fascinated by and suspicious of anyone who might be Jewish. Or anyone who wasn't Anglo-Saxon, for that matter. At six foot two, with blond hair and blue eyes, with my professional background, I fit her bill perfectly. No matter what I told her about my heritage, she was profoundly convinced of my racial purity. Before I came along, Helena's succession of small, neurotic men (‘Jews, Scots, even Australians!') before me hadn't suited Mrs Denham. I had never lied to her. She insisted my family history was speculative. We had an authentic family story of how my grandmother's Jewish parents had mourned her as though dead, not because she married a goy but because she married a secular Jew. Mrs Denham insisted the story was myth and that my grandmother had made it all up! I was genuinely puzzled by these mental convolutions. In London, in the middle of the twentieth century, only loonies cared about your racial origins. Shortly before I was fired, Mrs Denham stood for Dulwich as Liberal MP and missed by a narrow margin.

To make life as stable for Helena and the baby as I could, I did my best to earn more money, upping my output of Meg Midnight stories and a new character, time-travelling Jack O' London. I also did ‘The Man From T.I.G.E.R.' for, you guessed it,
Tiger
. I took on ‘Danny and His Time Machine' weekly for
Lion
and started a weekly feature, ‘African Safari'. I wrote scripts for the monthlies,
Buck Jones, Kit Carson, Dick Daring of the Mounties, Dogfight Dixon, RFC
. I wrote features for
Look and Learn
. I did Zip Nolan and Speed Solo stories for the regular weeklies, Karl the Viking and Olac the Gladiator and historical features for the annuals—anything I could write to start saving a bit of money so we might at least make Colville Terrace a little more congenial. I wrote fantasy novellas and science fiction short stories for Carnell. And the rest of the time wasn't too bad. We were a couple. Helena kept her job for as long as she could. She also planned to freelance. We started to see a lot more of the Allard family and others. He and I would sit and talk literature together while Helena and Shirley talked of more serious matters and wondered if they were ever going to be able to afford a holiday.

In those days I loved Notting Hill and Notting Dale for their increasing diversity. Everybody rubbed along. Only occasionally would a few white lads from the predominantly Irish population go wild when they perceived their girls were being lured into the life. The girls weren't being lured but they did prefer the sweet ways of the West Indians. A few bottles thrown with the insults, a few oy oys and a bit of a tussle was usually the worst it got and then there were the manly exchanges of compliments. Shouts in the street at night. Checking it out from darkened windows.

We did all we could to get ready for the baby so that when she came she was very welcome. September 1963. In those days mothers counted off the months just to make sure a child had been conceived in wedlock. I still relied on AP and other periodicals for most of my income but I was writing more for Carnell all the time. I began doing more science fiction novellas for
Science Fiction Adventures
and
New Worlds
. I even began a feature in
Science Fantasy
calling on writers to raise their horizons. My own ambitions were growing all the time.

 

14

CHILDREN

At twenty-three I'd sold my first real SF novel as a serial and Sally was born that same September. The year 1964 brought another two novels, a demo and Kitty. Kitty took so long coming that the hospital sent me home. Sally was being looked after by my mum. To keep awake until the hospital rang I played poker with Barry, Max and a couple of other blokes. At dawn I walked to the hospital next to Wormwood Scrubs and there was Helena and another scowling miniature Capone. I had lost all my cash at cards. I had to ask Helena to find her purse and let me have my bus fare home. Of course, she never forgot that.

Now I was definitely Father, but not my father. Helena was Mother, not my mother. I was determined not to become my father, whom I didn't much like. I loved my mother, Helena, my daughters. I wanted to be with my family forever. I took on that job. I wanted to be all they wanted of me, Father. I loved them; delighted in them. I bought a massive, industrial-strength, battleship-grey pushchair so the children could sit one behind the other, as if they were in the cockpit of a DH-4 biplane. I dreamed of fixing a Lewis gun on the front as I rushed them through the streets at great speed, through the crowds of Saturday tourists in Portobello Road, up to Holland Park and Hyde Park where we'd settle. As they became toddlers, they could run about on grass while I read or wrote and gave their mother a rest. I got ideas for stories in the parks and up on top of Derry and Toms department store, which had a huge roof garden, unknown by most Londoners. Many a character description came from the people I saw there, many a background scene was from something I'd observed. I loved being with my girls and they were always an inspiration. Twice, what I swore was the same raven I had last seen in the snow turned up, perching on top of the fake wishing well and on the wall of the Tudor Garden. It turned its head and seemed to wink at me. I suppose I should have thought it sinister, even when he hopped along the wall staring at the girls, but to me he was only comical. He seemed a happy soul for a carrion bird. I had always felt an affinity for crows, who are among the smartest creatures on the planet.