Time to Be in Earnest (25 page)

Everywhere there was a sense of impending change. The roads were lined with the tinny-looking cars of East Germans who had come over the border. The dominoes were tumbling and although I saw on every wall, particularly in the schools where I spoke, a large framed photograph of the President, Gustáv Husák, I felt I was not the only person present who was wondering how long it would hang there.

The school visits were disappointing. The young people sat in attentive silence and all, as far as I could judge, seemed interested in what I told them about the craft of the detective story and what was happening in English literature. But at question time they were absolutely silent. This was in such marked contrast from my experience of lively, questioning young audiences in Germany, Italy or Spain, let alone English-speaking countries, that I asked the reason. The staff said pupils were not encouraged ever to question what they had been told and a period of questions and discussion would be alien to their culture.

I spent one evening speaking to an officially recognized organization of writers. They told me that the state was generous to writers and that there was a beautiful residential centre in which they could stay without payment when writing their books. I asked whether a Czech whose books were critical of the government would also be able to enjoy this privilege. There was a silence and then one of the writers replied no. The
evening was curious, the air heavy with questions unasked and the knowledge that life was about to change fundamentally and perhaps in directions no one could foresee.

I was driven to Slovakia by a British Council driver through a landscape of fir trees which reminded me of the novels of John le Carré, and of an early scene from the BBC production of
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
where the British agent is betrayed and shot. I almost expected to hear the crackle of gunfire and see the solitary figure dodging among the trees.

We stopped on the way for coffee and the driver spoke about communism and the acknowledgement of and apology for past mistakes recently made in Russia. Looking across the table I saw that he was close to tears. He broke out vehemently: “Thousands were killed, thousands have no jobs, no hope, thousands are in prison. And now they say, ‘Was a mistake’!”

When I lived in Cambridge in the early days of the war I met a Czechoslovak airman and we would go dancing together on Saturday nights at the pretentiously named McGrath Ballroom, one of the regular Cambridge haunts of air crews based on airfields near the city. He was tall and exceptionally good-looking, but the relationship, which never really grew beyond a romantic friendship, was hampered because we could only communicate in rather poor French. He gave me a very beautiful cameo ring which, to my lasting regret, I lost sometime during the war. He had a passionate hatred of Germans. When I enquired whether he was a bomber or a fighter pilot, he growled,
“Je suis chasseur!,”
as if it were a battle cry. This vehemence was in contrast to the British fighter pilots I knew who took a matter-of-fact attitude to the task in hand, showing little hatred of the enemy with whom they shared the same dangerous skies. We were due to meet at the ballroom in January 1941 but my Czech didn’t arrive, and I knew none of his fellow Czech pilots from whom I could enquire.

When I was in Prague my publishers told me that the Czechs who had fought for the allies and survived were subsequently ostracized. Professional men lost their jobs and most were denied civil liberties. But he said that the climate was now changing and that his firm had produced a book with pictures and records of those who had flown in the Free Czech Air Force. He gave me a copy, and I recognized my Czechoslovak pilot. There was a cross and a date in January 1941 beside his name, confirming what I already knew.

This is the time of year when all the main literary editors of the broadsheets telephone and ask what books I have most enjoyed during the year. It is a curious exercise affording some readers the chance to give a plug to their friends while others choose extraordinarily erudite volumes which it is hard to believe they have actually read for pleasure.

It has been a particularly good year for biographies, which I now read and enjoy far more than fiction. I still have much reading pleasure in store, but, of those I have finished, I greatly enjoyed and have named Claire Tomalin’s sensitive and elegantly written
Jane Austen: A Life
, and Jenny Uglow’s
Hogarth: A Life and a World
, an absorbing study of a great artist and his age. Iain Pears’s unmemorably named
An Instance of the Fingerpost
is a fictional tour de force set in Oxford in the 1660s which combines erudition with mystery. But the novel I most admired this year is
Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan; the brilliant first chapter alone should have assured it a place on the Booker shortlist. It doesn’t altogether fulfil this promise and it isn’t a comfortable novel, but it would be interesting to know why the judges rejected it.

I am writing this in my room at the Waldorf Astoria at the end of the
QE2
cruise which began on Friday, 7th November. This was my third trip as a guest lecturer and by far the most enjoyable. The
QE2
is a ship which needs getting used to; at first too much like a floating hotel to provide what I love, a sense of being at sea. But now I know my way around and have begun to understand the affection which regular travellers obviously feel. Some of them cross the Atlantic by no other way, taking the same cabin, meeting the same people, and speaking knowledgeably about their favourite captains.

This time I persuaded Rosemary to come with me, the perfect travelling
companion since she is invariably good-humoured, relishes the variety, challenge and drollery of new experience and can be relied upon to be stalwart in an emergency. Her broken wrist is still in plaster, and the official photograph taken of us coming aboard has caught her, arm in sling, with a momentary look of submissive depression, with me at her side, twice as large, ruddy-faced and beaming. The only appropriate caption would be “Murderess and her victim come aboard!”

The trip was memorable for the storm which began on Saturday. We were warned that the weather would worsen, and it did so spectacularly. Rosemary and I took our sea-sickness pills, which were effective, but a row of cabins had their “Do not disturb” signs on the doors all day, and the Queen’s Grill, where we had our table, had more empty places than passengers. One of the waiters told me that a member of the crew in their quarters had become extremely unpopular by showing
The Poseidon Adventure
on video. It was difficult at times to keep upright and the captain broadcast to us that the open deck was prohibited. Before this announcement Rosemary and I, desperate for sea air, had tried to force open one of the doors on the boat deck, but immediately had to clutch each other to avoid being hurled across the deck.

But it was worth putting up with inconvenience to see the Atlantic in a storm. As far as we could see the ocean had solidified and become a heaving mountain range of granite and rock, violently restless and yet intimidatingly dense and impervious. As far as the horizon the great grey ridges reared themselves up, valleys widened and became chasms, and volcano after volcano rose with majestic slowness to erupt, not with bursts of fire, but with explosions of spume. Outside our cabin window we watched the ocean rising in shining curves of grey mottled with white which disintegrated with a sound like gunfire and flung spray against the glass. On Saturday night a particularly large wave must have shaken the ship, the sound something between a crack and an explosion. Our clothes were wrenched from the hangers and flung across the floor while bottles and glasses skidded and broke, and the chairs spun and crashed against the cabin wall. It was extraordinary to think that a ship the size of the QE2, 70,000 tons in weight, thirteen storeys high and a half-mile walk round the decks, could be so shaken.

But by Sunday night the storm had eased and on Monday midday a fitful sun was shining on a calm purple-blue ocean and we were able to sit and read on deck. When the
QE2
finally goes out of service, I wonder
how many regular sea crossings of the Atlantic there will be and how many passengers will be able to experience the tumultuous power of the Atlantic in a gale.

We found we were to share our table, always at first a depressing prospect. But the two passengers—Donald and Renée Bain—were delightful, entertaining and companionable Americans. Donald, among his varied literary achievements—he is the author of the
Murder, She Wrote
series—writes books for celebrities who want to be published authors without the actual bother of having to write themselves. He was extremely discreet about his clients, but I can see the attraction. The book sells on the celebrity’s name and the writer collects 50 percent of the royalties. But it is not without its disadvantages, particularly when the celebrity draws a languid hand across his or her brow and complains that the emotional stress of creative writing, not to mention the publicity, is becoming too much. Under Don’s guidance I threw craps in the casino, the first time I have ever gambled. I limited myself to $100 and left the table with $198. Rosemary played the one-armed bandits until I confiscated all her quarters.

The arrival in New York down the Hudson was as spectacular as ever. One should always arrive in great cities by sea or river. As we managed our own luggage we were able to disembark early and, despite pouring rain, set off to check in at the Waldorf Astoria and then to the Frick and the Metropolitan Museum. Rosemary will have a day in New York before flying back to London tomorrow, while I go on to a Canadian tour.

It is 9:30 p.m. and I am seated on Air Canada flight 96 for London Heathrow after a successful, if tiring, Canadian tour.

On Friday 14th I arrived very late in Toronto and was met by Pat Cairns, one of the publicity directors, and taken to the Four Seasons Hotel. Next day, Saturday, my Canadian publisher, Louise Dennys, gave a celebration party at her Toronto apartment. Louise is a remarkable woman, beautiful, intelligent and kind, and I value her both as my Canadian publisher and as a friend. The party was due to last for two hours, but went on considerably longer and I was introduced in swift
succession to one Toronto celebrity after another. Although I was comfortably seated while this went on, the noise level and the effort of responding to each new personality were inevitably tiring.

At the dinner afterwards, one of the guests, an eminent woman lawyer, inveighed passionately against the dominance of the legal profession in England by male barristers and the prejudice and hostility shown to women at the Bar. She instanced Helena Kennedy and the unfairness with which, she alleged, this particular lawyer had had to contend. I was tempted to point out that the brilliant Helena Kennedy had, in the end, done rather well for herself. I am always irritated by criticism of England when I am abroad and I tried to point out that women were entering the law in greater numbers and that, although I obviously had no personal knowledge, I believed that things were improving. However, as the diatribe continued, I found myself saying tartly that I was becoming tired of women presenting themselves as victims.