Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (7 page)

After lunch Watford checked out the Ming Tombs. We paced down a lavatorial stone staircase into the arched tunnels and vaults. A Tourist drew a learned comparison between the featureless rust-coloured casements and the creosote used on truck undercoats. Interest was in danger of flagging entirely until an interpreter weighed in with some salacious accounts of the premature burial of imperial concubines. 'When's the next train to Cockfosters?' cracked a Director, not inappositely. If there had been a train to Cockfosters passing through, the suggestion was that he would have been on it.

'Fpall?' said the elderly lift-operator, and kicked a leg in the air like a chorus-girl:
'PSAIOW!'
The scene now briefly shifts to Shanghai, though Watford's points of comparison remain wistfully homebound. The harbourfront Bund 'is like Liverpool'. The near-slums which the Bund conceals 'are like Glasgow'. The dock itself 'is like Tyneside'. The yellow and shoreless Yangtze 'is like the Mersey'. The players settle on the deck of Special Class for the three-hour cruise up the Huang Pu. 'Row, row, row your boat,' says one. 'Slow boat to China,' says another. 'Don't rock the boat . .. Banana boat ... I am sailing . . . Sailing along . . . Riding along in my automobile . ..'

From Peking's Yan Jing I check into Shanghai's Jing Jiang, and for the first time I am on the same menu as the players. Bacon and eggs, chicken and chips, steak and chips. At lunch the four internationals fly in from their stopover in Hong Kong. England's two black strikers, Blissett and Barnes, glisten with youth, power, muscle-tone. They look like racehorses - in shocking contrast to the Gang of Four, toiling through the paste and smog of their daily penance.

That night we went to see the Chinese Acrobats, and witnessed their otherworldly feats of strength, balance and artistic contortion. Not for the first time since my arrival in China, I felt assailed by the evidence of Earthling variety: the players, the Gang, the Chinese, with their abstract humour, their ritual courtesy disguising unknown restlessness — and all this so fully expressed by the controlled tension of the acrobats ... Back at the hotel an American party had just arrived. An exhausted 2O-stoner awaited service from the flogged lifts. Shot to pieces gastrically, he looked as though his own weight was about to drive him into the ground like a tent-peg. 'Come on, Duane,' said his friend, 'it's only one floor up. Let's walk it.' But Duane had few options. 'I, uh, believe not,' he said firmly.

Of the three coaches, Players', Directors' and Tourists', the Players' is by far the most restfully taciturn. The Tourists' coach booms with rugby songs, business talk and hangover boasts. The real nerve-frayer, though, is the Directors' coach, a rumpus-room of almost psychotic good cheer. It was in this charabanc of Laughing Policemen and Jimmy Tarbuck soundalikes that I made the journey to the Shanghai ground, past lean-tos and go-downs, bamboo department stores and buses packed with waving arms and beaming, steel-flecked dentition, through streets latticed by plane-tree fronds, tram cables and wet washing.

The stadium was an elegant ruin, a shallow bowl of bleached and flaking stonework. The ballboys sat slumped beneath their sleepy coolie hats. 'Shanghai audiences are good audiences and this is a Shanghai audience,' cackled the loudspeaker. This was a Shanghai audience all right, but it wasn't such a good one. When the home team went one up, there were fire-crackers and cherry bombs — practically a counter-revolution. When Watford equalised and then took the lead (both goals created out of nothing by the Shanghai goalkeeper), there was an experimental riot in one bank of the stadium - fomented, it turned out, by the Gang of Four, who were feeding Watford souvenirs through the steel netting. Like the crowd, however, the game soon fizzled out in the impossible humidity. At half-time Taylor marched into the dressing-room. He drew in his breath to denounce his team, then burst out laughing. Several players sat with icepacks on their heads and jets of steam billowing from their ears.

* China now toils through her sixth Five Year Plan, and is rolling up her sleeves for the seventh. There are smiles, handshakes, spurned gratuities; there are the new incentives of the Responsibility System, the crusades of Social Public Morality; there are colour TVs. You also sense a hidden life of impatience and frustration, a resented exclusion from the world of freedom and reward. (Recent attempts at Western marketing show the full gulf of naivety: a lipstick called 'Fang Fang', a type of battery called 'White Elephant', a range of men's underwear called 'Pansy'.) Football is part of this interchange, and China seeks inclusion here as feelingly as she seeks it elsewhere.

China only just missed out on qualification for the 1982 World Cup. They now have a four-year plan on the go, looking to Mexico in 1986. The national side performed well in its first match against Watford, and hopes were high for the second game in Peking. Yet China played a spoiling game, and were thrashed 5-1. Towards the end, the climbing anger of the crowd took a surprising form: Watford's black stars were booed whenever they touched the ball. One tried hard to resist this conclusion, since it attacked everything one wanted to believe about China. 'No, no,' said our suavest interpreter. 'They're just trying to put them off because the black players are so good.' But the aggression was selective and unmistakable, an incensed submission to the worst instincts.

Out on the concourse I searched anxiously for the Tourists' coach, which had taken the precaution of killing its lights as the hoards swirled sullenly round the ground. Cursed, barracked and gestured at, the humble motorcade of the China squad crept abjectly through the gates.

'I wanna go home,' sang the Gang. 'I wanna go home. This is the worst trip, I've ever been on . . .'

The tour now petered out in pleasant anti-climax, with celebrations, sightseeing and some predatory shopping. Elton John spent forty times the local per-caput income in a single spree. His purchases included replicas of the stone lions beneath Mao's portrait, which gaze across the square at the Great Hall of the People. That night, with eyes like two lumps of sweet-and-sour pork, Elton mastered his exhaustion and took to the piano to crown the farewell shindig. When Elton sang (not for a multitude but for his team) you felt the force, and proximity, of his talent; you didn't want it to end. The high point of his tour, he said, had come at the Children's Festival in Zhongshan Park, when a ten-year-old girl prodigy presented him with a painting of a flock of gambolling kittens. Elton was moved — 'well chuffed'. This would give him more pleasure than anything else he intended to bring back from China. Money isn't everything, he pointed out. And China, however reluctantly, would be forced to agree. On the flight home the 747 made its first stop in Hong Kong, arrowing in through the genie-clouds above the bay, past the golden cigarette-lighters of the skyscrapers and sparkling hotels - a Manhattan, a Mammon, a vast duty-free store, perched on the very tip of the East, and destined to be dismantled and flattened out into the Chinese fold. One couldn't escape the impression that most foreign visitors make the trip to China chiefly for the shopping. In hotel lobbies, in airport lounges, one was always hearing elderly and prosperous Americans talking lecherously about the latest Friendship Store they had plundered, or planned to plunder. It was said of one press photographer in our party, on the day before our return, that 'his
room
looked like a Friendship Store' . . . While the Directors sprawled in First and Business, the players dozed with their manager in Economy, their faces set in scowls of discomfort. But the team roused itself for the transit lounge (where they have cameras and gadgets, as well as silk and jade), and we all trudged out for one more crack at the loot.

Observer, 1983

Postscript:
In terms of cultural responsibility the Watford footballers behaved even better than this account admits -especially when you compared them to certain elements in the press corps. I remember encountering Wilf Rostron, the young defender, in the hotel lobby in Shanghai. He was on his way from the ballet to the opera. Accompanied by the
Sun's
Voice of Sport, John Sadler, I was on my way from the bowling alley to the snooker room . . . The esprit of the players was a tribute to Graham Taylor. Late at night, ensconced in an armchair, with the pressmen gathered piously at his feet, Taylor would talk of the deeper mysteries of the sport, and would air his dream of a management job somewhere in his native North-East - Sunderland? Newcastle? As far as I remember he never mentioned the possibility of managing England. I write these words on the eve of England's World Cup qualifier against Holland at Wembley: Taylor's watershed, or his Waterloo. But it doesn't surprise me that he seems physically undiminished by the job. Bobby Robson, if you recall, was a shot-faced spectre after about six months. Taylor is made of stubborner stuff. As for the 'enigmatic' — i.e. bafflingly ineffective — John Barnes: there probably isn't any upper limit for bodily splendour in a footballer (look at Ruud Gullit), but Barnes struck me as someone close to being overwhelmed by his own attributes. He appeared to spend much of his free time examining various portions of his person (his forearms, his calves), not from any concern about injury but in simple admiration. Often his hand would rest proprietorially on the prow of his skimpy white shorts. When he arrived he made quite a speech about the need to respect Chinese culture. The next day he turned down his only chance to visit the Great Wall (the much more ebullient, Anglicised and squeaky-voiced Luther Blissett went off alone in a taxi). Taylor said: 'How can you pass up the Great Wall, talking like you were talking yesterday?' Barnes didn't answer, but fell to the contemplation of some neglected highpoint of his physique — his collarbone, his elbow.

JOHN UPDIKE

I met up with Updike at Mass. General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Center of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9:30 that morning. It was 10:30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. 'You know what I look like,' he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, 'storklike', distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.

'How
are
you?' I said with some urgency.

'They didn't take it out. It's still here!' He raised his hand to the light. It seemed a gratifying intimacy, after ten seconds' acquaintance. John Updike, warts and all. Most writers need a wound, either physical or spiritual. Updike's is called
psoriasis,
'skin disease marked by red scaly patches', as my COD unfeelingly puts it. He has written about the condition himself, rather more feelingly, in the
New Yorker.
Actually the growth seemed quite inoffensive, like a sizeable and resolute freckle.

'How frustrating. You must be...'

'Yes, I'm very sad,' he said, and looked - as he would continue to look for the next two hours - like a man barely able to contain some vast and mysterious hilarity. This generalised twinkliness has been much remarked. It is almost the demure expression a child has when gratified to the point of outright embarrassment — but with an extra positive charge, flowing from hyperactive senses. 'No, apparently it's more complicated than I thought. They're going to do it later in the year. The incision will go from there to there. I'll have to wear a support for a while. I won't be able to play golf. I won't be able to type! But listen. How are
your
This, too, was said with unusual concern. Updike ducked and briefly grappled with the
Boston Globe.
He pointed to a piece that I had read, with quivering fingers, half an hour earlier. The previous evening I had flown in from Provincetown: fifteen minutes in a Wright-Brothers seven-seater. That same day, according to the
Globe,
one of these little aeroplanes had lost height and come skimming in over Boston Bay. Sunbath-ers had dived into the sea from their rafts. The article ended with a reassuring review of the airline's safety record: it was grounded, quite recently, after a series of accidents, all of them rich in fatalities.

'You flew! I warned you not to.' 'Yes, and I'm flying back. After I've done you.' And he said to me what I had been planning to say to him: 'You're very brave.'

The hospital cafeteria was bright, airy, oceanic; there was foliage, a sun-trapping terrace, a smoking section: it seemed positively fashionable. The atmosphere differed from its British equivalent in many ways - most crucially in that its patrons were, of necessity, on some kind of spree, pushing the boat out, spending big. We joined the queue with our tray. I had coffee, while Updike bemusedly dithered over the half-dozen kinds of tea on offer.

'The ordeal of choice,' I said, suavely enough - though one should stress that these occasions are not suave at all.

However genial, they are always anxious and exhausting, with the interviewer fielding about 80 per cent of the nerves. 'Have you read Saul Bellow's new novel?' I went on. (The novel was
More Die of Heartbreak.)
'He says that in the East the ordeal is one of privation, in the West one of choice.'

'Yes, I keep meaning to get it. There's just something about forking out the twenty bucks. Why don't / carry that?' he said, and smoothly commandeered the trembling tray. The gesture was protective, courteous, very
able,
above all. 'So the
Observer
is paying for my tea. How nice.'

The tea cost fifty cents. Nor was this the extent of the moneys I would disburse on Updike's account. Later, when we drove to Harvard, I gave the novelist a quarter for the parking meter. He fanned a handful of change at me, but I told him that Tiny Rowland would pick up the tab. Throughout he showed, not a sensitivity, but an
awareness
about money. 'I was raised in the Depression,' he has said, 'when there was a great sense of dog eat dog and people fighting over scraps.' This feeling has partly survived two decades of book-a-year bestsellerdom and the fact that 'Reagan has turned
America
into a tax haven'. Nowadays Updike could probably hold his own with the other Midases of the age: the arbitrageur, the greenmail raider, the arms dealer, the video vicar.