A Gull on the Roof (5 page)

‘My dear, what are you going to
do
all day?’

‘If
only
I had the same courage!’

‘Are you
sure
you’re not going to miss all the fun?’

‘I’ll take a bet you’re back in six months!’

Those in the tight little world of parties, American Bars and gossipy sensations, disliked the idea of one of their number deserting – the justice of their lives was being questioned, an end had come into sight when they felt only safe in prolonged beginnings. Hence they interpreted her decision by complicated explanations, and gained satisfaction in their certainty she would soon be back.

Those who had never tasted the flavour of mixing with celebrities found her decision incomprehensible. She led the life of a modern fairy princess yet she was giving it up. She must be out of her mind, and they looked at her as if she were an oddity in a zoo.

There were others who envied her. These, captured by their own success, could only reason that she was showing the courage they believed they lacked themselves. Courage, in their view, was required if you are going to break the routine of butterfly pleasures – whereas Jeannie only saw in her choice a way of escape. We were both, in fact, taking the easy way out towards reaching our personal horizon of living time slowly.

We first met one evening at the Savoy in an air raid. I had written a travel book called
Time Was Mine
and my first words to her were abrupt: ‘You’re just the person I have been wanting to meet. Can you manage to get my book on the bookstall?’

I had written in this book of a man called Jeffries, a weird mountain of a man, whom I had met on a Japanese boat sailing from Sydney to the Far East, and who, as it proved, was a link between me and Jeannie. I used to sit on deck till late at night listening to the stories of his nefarious life, leaning over the ship’s rail, the soft breeze in our faces, watching the passing shadows of the islands along the Barrier Reef. It was the spring of 1939 and he was on his way to a job in the shipyards of Hong Kong.

‘I once studied with Cheiro the astrologist and palmist,’ he said on one occasion. ‘He told me I would never be any good, but then I was never able to tell him his judgement was wrong . . . you see, I worked out on my own that he would die when he was sixty-eight. And he died on his sixty-eighth birthday.’

As it turned out, many of the prophecies Jeffries made to me during the voyage were proved false by events. There would be no war. Chamberlain would be Prime Minister for a further five years and so on. But one evening he asked whether I would be prepared to have my own hand read. I was not very keen because I had always remembered the distress of my mother who, when she was thirty, was told by a palmist that my father would die when she was forty-one. She said it was the most agonising year of her life for she never could get the prophecy out of her mind. However, I agreed and we sat down in a corner of the deck lounge, glasses of saki on the table beside us, and I watched Jeffries study my palm in his ape-like hands. Later I wrote in my diary what he said – among other things that I would marry in 1943, that my wife would be smaller than myself and dark, and that her initials would be J.E. . . .

Jeannie arranged for my book to be on the bookstall and in celebration I asked her out to dinner. The River Room, with its windows bricked up against bomb blast, was the Savoy restaurant in those days and we sat in a corner while the band of Carroll Gibbons played to a crowded dance floor in the background.

I happened to ask her whether she had any other Christian names beside Jean. And she said: ‘The awful name of Everald.’ I looked at her across the table. ‘Do you mind saying that again?’ She appeared puzzled. ‘My full name is Jean Everald Nicol.’ Two years later in 1943, we were married.

The American
Look
Magazine called Jeannie ‘the prettiest publicity girl in the world’; and when it was announced she was leaving the Savoy, the newspapers wrote about her as if they were saying goodbye to a star. A columnist in the
Daily Mail
described her as slim, colleen-like, with green eyes and dark hair,

. . . who seems so young, innocent and delicately pretty that you couldn’t imagine her saying ‘Boo’ to the smallest and silliest goose. But Jean has said ‘Boo’ to all sorts of important people including tough American correspondents.

For ten years she has been a key woman at that international rendezvous of film stars, politicians, maharajahs, financiers, business men and what have you – the Savoy Hotel.

She is about to quit the post of publicity boss or public relations officer for the Savoy, Berkeley and Claridge’s. Her job consisted not only of keeping those hotels before the public but in stopping indiscreet stories from appearing in the newspapers and sometimes in protecting timid guests from the glare of publicity. Now that is a job requiring tact, intelligence and charm, and Jean has all three qualities.

Who stopped the story about the colonel (with D.S.O.) who was working in the kitchens of the Savoy from getting into the papers?Jean Nicol. Who arranged Dior’s first interview in this country? The same girl. When Ernie Pyle the famous American war correspondent (they made a film about him) was going off to his death in the Pacific he had his last lunch in London with Jean. He told her sadly: ‘I’ll never see you again. There’s been too much luck in my life, and it’s exhausted.’

Close friend of Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power, Gertrude Lawrence, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby . . . there isn’t a famous name in the past decade that doesn’t know Jean.

Well, she is going to retire for she thinks that ten years is enough to spend in the glare of London’s West End. And she is right.

We left Mortlake on a sunny April morning when the tide was pushing its way up the river, creeping into the inlets of the riverside like an octopus feeling with its tentacles. On the steps of the Ship, beer mugs in hand, a group stood ready to wave us goodbye. On their right loomed the Brewery, and on their left an empty space, an elm tree, and the house with the roof like a dunce’s cap which we were leaving. The act of departure spares only the light-hearted, and as I carried out our belongings, sticking them in the Land Rover, I found myself thinking of that ardour seven years before with which we came to this house; for it was with this ardour, dressed up in new clothes, that we were going away. I looked up at the windows and thought of our happiness, which would always live within the rooms; the unfinished sentences of gay conversations, raised glasses, sweet moments when endeavour had met its reward, affection like suffused sunlight warming the company of friends. I saw poised in my mind the fragments of other people’s lives, lost perhaps by them, for ever attached to me . . .

Bob Capa, the wayward brilliant photographer, who was killed in Indo China, was there, leaning against the door, his sombre face brightened by a stick of bombs falling across Duke’s Meadows, cigarette drooping from his lips, quietly, with broken accent calling: ‘Coming nearer, coming nearer’ . . . a startled A. P. Herbert on a November night, whisky glass in hand, hearing the S.O.S. on the
Water Gypsy’s
hooter; the tide had gone out and the crew had awoken when she tilted on her side . . . George Slocombe on a winter’s afternoon standing with his back to the fire, red-bearded like an apostle, praising the virtues of France . . . Baron hitching a camera under his withered arm before photographing Monty; ‘Come on Monty, give us a smile’ . . . Gertrude Lawrence, a cockney again, boisterously shouting the Cambridge crew to victory . . . Carroll Gibbons drawling the song
People will say we’re in love
as he played at our small piano . . . Alec Waugh standing on the steps looking at the empty river: ‘Your last Boat Race party . . . it was the best.’ We had come to this house believing it would be our home for always, yet here we were setting off again, packing away past hopes and ambitions, disappointments and victories, buoyantly confident that we now knew better. ‘A chapter of my life was closed,’ wrote Somerset Maugham when he left Tahiti, ‘and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.’

We were aware, too, that departure meant a crack in the lives of those who cared for us. Jeannie would no longer be calling in to see her parents nor would I be able to have the almost daily, hour-long conversations with my mother. I was never unsettled by age difference with either of my parents. My father kept a perpetual eye on his own youth, and so never grew old in his approach to me and my two brothers. My mother’s philosophy had been to hold up a mirror to the happiness of the three of us, and gain her own in the reflection. When I was a schoolboy I said proudly to a small friend:
‘My
mother would walk five miles with a heavy suitcase if it would help me or my brothers.’ The childish boast always remained true.

The canvas hood of the Land Rover bulged like a kitbag . . . an armchair, suitcases, books, pots and pans, blankets, a camp bed, an ironing board. They piled high behind us as we sat ready to start . . . my mother whom we were taking to my aunt’s house on the way, Jeannie with Monty on her lap, and myself at the wheel. And as I let out the clutch and slowly moved away, we could only laugh with those who were waving us goodbye.

‘I hope you’ll get there!’ was the last I heard as I turned the corner.

I was on the road to the West again, a road which from my childhood had been part of my life. I used to drive to Glendorgal, our family home, as casually as I drove from Victoria to Kensington. My father saying: ‘When in 1903 I drove a car to Cornwall for the first time, a donkey and cart actually passed me on this hill.’ My mother: ‘Three weeks after my first driving lesson I set off for Glendorgal. We had a puncture at Honiton but there was no garage anywhere near and we had to send to Exeter to find someone to repair it.’ And myself: ‘Here at Amesbury we had a smash with a Baby Austin . . . on my twenty-first birthday weekend we drove through the night and had breakfast at that café . . . I bought an evening paper at this corner shop and learnt the
Royal Oak
had been sunk . . . the car broke down here and I spent the night in that gateway . . . I was gonged on this stretch . . .’ Scores of incidents so vivid in my mind that it seemed to me, as I travelled this road again, that I had ‘time regained’.

The full moon was waiting to greet us at Minack, a soft breeze came from the sea and the Lizard light winked every few seconds across Mount’s Bay. An owl hooted in the wood and afar off I heard the wheezing bark, like a hyena, of a vixen. A fishing boat chugged by, a mile off shore, its starboard light bright on the mast. It was very still. The boulders, so massive in the day, had become gossamer in the moonlight, and the cottage, so squat and solid, seemed to be floating in the centuries of its past.

I said to Jeannie: ‘Let’s see if Monty will come for a walk.’

He came very slowly down the lane, peering suddenly at dangers in the shadows, sitting down and watching us, then softly stepping forward. His white shirt-front gleamed like a lamp. He sniffed the air, his little nose puzzling the source of the scents of water weeds, bluebells and the sea. He found a log and clawed it, arching his back. He heard the rustle of a mouse and he became tense, alert to pounce. I felt as I watched him that he was an adventurer prying his private unknown, relishing the prospect of surprise and of the dangers which would be of his own making. We paused by the little stream, waiting for him to join us; and when he did, he rubbed his head affectionately against my leg, until suddenly he saw the pebbles of moonlight on the water. He put out a paw as if to touch them.

‘I’ll pick him up and carry him over.’

But when I bent down to do so he struggled free of my grasp – and with the spring of a panther he leapt across, and dashed into the shadows beyond.

‘Well done!’ we cried, ‘well done!’

This little stream where it crosses the lane as if it were the moat of Minack, halting the arrival of strangers, greeting us on our returns, acting as the watch of our adventures, was given a name that night.

Monty’s Leap.

We awoke the following morning to the sun streaming through the curtainless windows, to the distant murmur of the sea, to a robin’s song hailing another day, and the delicious sensation that there was no frontier to our future. If our watches stopped what did it matter? An hour, a day, a week could pass . . . there was no barrier to which we were advancing, no date on a calendar which glared at us from a distance. No telephone to shiver us into expectation. No early morning noises, a far-off factory hooter, the first rumble of traffic, the relentless roar of a Tube . . . no man made alarms to jerk us into the beginning of another day. No newspaper shoved under the door. No clatter of milk bottles. Time to think, time to read. Go down to the rocks and stare vacantly at the sea. Perform insignificant, slowly achieved tasks – weeding the garden, mending a bolt on the door, sticking photographs in an album – /without conscience nagging us with guilt. Take idle walks, observe the flight of a raven, the shifting currents of the sea, the delicate shades of moss. Travel the hours on horseback. Timelessness, isolation and simplicity creating the space which would protect us from the past. The hazy happiness of the present guiding our future.

I got up, collected a jug and went down to the stream. I had invited Monty to come with me but he would not budge. I picked him up and put him down in the garden, but within a second he had rushed indoors again. He behaved in this manner for several days, hating the daylight and only venturing out in the dark, and then if we accompanied him. It was difficult to understand his behaviour for on his previous brief visits, though he had never wandered far, he had always kept his nerve. A week later, however, he gained his self-confidence after meeting a baby rabbit face to face outside the front door. He seized it by the neck, brought it into the cottage while I was having breakfast, and deposited it at my feet – alive. Henceforth every tuft of grass was a potential rabbit and every capture brought to us for our admiration; and instead of having to lure him outside, we used to spend much of our time searching for his whereabouts.