Going Up (24 page)

There was, Jacques Croiset told me, ‘no such thing as justice; divine justice perhaps, human never’. She seemed to think that because the Germans were beasts they could not be blamed for the concentration camps. She told me about a Russian woman, a writer, not Jewish, who was in one of the camps. A girl of fifteen was included in a list of those who were to die. When she began to cry, the woman said, ‘Don’t take it so hard. Death is not such a terrible thing. If it will help you, I will come with you.’ The woman took the girl’s hand and they went into the gas chamber together. I had not heard any such stories before.

Jacques Croiset secured me an invitation to dinner at the house of a Moroccan prince, Moulay Ta’ib, to whom she had rendered some service
chez les Français
. A friend of his, a slim Arab in European dress, with an inch-long beard along and under his jaw, met us at the gate of the medina. The low cedarwood door to the house was in an unlit street. The hall was angled sharply to the left, like the city gate. Pairs of open-mouthed, shucked shoes lined the tiled wall inside the door.

The central room was bare of furniture. There was a basin of washing by the wide fireplace. An open doorway led to the kitchen and the women’s quarters. The high beamed ceiling was continuous with that in the small, oblong room into which we were shown. A pale blue cotton curtain hung in the square archway. There was a radio on an inlaid table; a cheap alarm clock (bell on the top), mirror on the wall above it. We sat on the lowest of
three couches. Backed by a row of plump pink cushions, it was covered with floral, blue-green linen.

When Moulay Ta’ib joined us, Jacques Croiset exchanged courtesies and then withdrew. Both the prince and his friend had sworn not to cut their beards until Mohammed V was reinstated. They were suffering financially for their loyalty. Moulay Ta’ib was short and dapper; he had a dark leathery face, the colour of roast turkey, fine-featured, with black, amused eyes, neat brown hands. He curled his small feet, in grey socks, under him as he sat between us on the highest couch. His nephew, a thin boy of twelve or thirteen, in a grey suit and dark tie, brought a silver basin and a kettle from which warm water was poured over our hands, then towelled away.

My guide cut flat loaves into six. Pieces of lamb came on long spits on which they had been grilled over a wood fire. You tore out the centre of your bread, gloved the meat and drew it off the spit. Only the right hand was to be used; the left never. As soon as one spit was empty, another came. I assumed that this was all we would get, but the kebabs were followed by a huge bowl with lumps of meat and spiced cabbage leaves, swimming in gravy. You heaped a mixture on your bread and put it in your mouth in one quick movement. It was bad manners to have your fingers touch your lips. I dropped a piece onto my lap and retrieved it hurriedly, too hurriedly, with my left hand.

Moulay Ta’ib and his friend ate with clean dexterity. We talked easily, unfazed by the clash of plates and cutlery. After the big dish was removed, the boy brought a heaped bowl of grapes. Then came the basin and warm water, now with a piece of soap, to purge the grease. We reclined on the pink cushions and smoked Gauloises while tea was prepared. Only the master of the house and his closest friends had the right and the art to make it. Various kinds of mint came in gilt coffers. There was a gilt teapot of chased metal, sugar crystals like nuggets of salt. The mint was put in the pot, with lumps of sugar, and boiling water poured in from a tall, thin-necked kettle.
Then it was passed to the visitors. We drank many glasses. The pot was refreshed with more mint, before being replenished.

Moulay Ta’ib had read Spinoza, Descartes and Plato. He was both intelligent and, it seemed to me, naïve: he wanted the French to stay as the administrative servants of the restored Sultan, who would have supreme jurisdiction. Having thus advocated a civilised compromise, he said that he hoped that the French would kill them all. Salvation lay in dying as a martyr. I do not remember that the Jews were ever mentioned. At that time there were still several hundred thousand in the country. Moulay Ta’ib’s friend went home quite early, but I stayed talking with him till one-fifteen in the morning.

When I went out into the mazy streets of the medina it was very dark. I had only a vague notion of where the European quarter was. There was a curfew and no one about. I was stopped by a suspicious and (at first) hostile Foreign Legion patrol. I was not at all disposed to make a joke about their képis. My passport excited no immediate solidarity. I was at once alarmed and aloof: what did Morocco and its animosities have to do with me? My French was improved by apprehension. When I asked the sergeant to indicate the way to the hotel, he and his men escorted me to the door. I marched along with them, invisible swagger stick under my arm.

It was now late November. I had written several letters to Beetle, but I had not, of course, received any of hers; they had had to be addressed care of American Express, Rome. It was time to go back to Gibraltar and catch the USS
Constitution
, on which I had had the foresight to book passage to Italy. I had bought Beetle presents in the souks and loaded them, with some of my stuff, in a new blue sack before going to the station to catch the afternoon train to Tangier. I waited on a stone bench, reading Henry de Montherlant’s
Carnets
, which I had bought at the Comédie Humaine, as a thank you to Jacques Croiset. When the train steamed in, I got up and hurried, with my backpack, to get a corner seat. We had been
on our way for half an hour when I realised that I had left the blue sack on the station bench.

A woman in the compartment said, ‘
Ah oui! Je l’ai vu, un sac bleu, n’estce pas? Sur le banc, et je me suis dit
…’ I smiled and shrugged. I could have killed her. At the next stop, the ticket collector called Meknès station and asked for a taxi to bring the sack to Petitjean, the oil refinery town where we had a forty-five minute halt. ‘
Ne vous inquiétez pas, monsieur. Tout va s’arranger
.’ When we reached Petitjean, the conductor was told that my sack was still at the station in Meknès. The taxi,
numéro trente-neuf
, was leaving right away. It would take an hour to get to Petitjean. With no one to blame but myself, I decided to let the train go and wait. The conductor said that the taxi could take me to the border with Spanish Morocco, but no further.

The station yard was rough, bare and muddy. The refinery was across from me as I waited and told myself to be observant: tubes and canisters, dials and gauges, towers scaled by ladders, topped with curling pipes, metal platforms with heron-necked lamps. Flags of flame flew from the vents where waste gas scorched the sky. Sentries stood with rifles in boxes along the road; guards at the gate. The service road was flat and deserted. A sentry forbade me to walk along it.

There was a Berber camp beyond the refinery, surrounded by a plaited grass fence about five feet high. The shanties, of corrugated iron, tins hammered flat, broken packing cases, sticks and dried mud, were pitched on a slope for the sake of drainage. Some were thatched with bamboo fronds, others roofed with tin sheets or sacking. Children rolled in the dust. Mortified by my own ineptitude, I sat facing the vacant station yard and the refinery. The banners of flame flew in a darkening sky, black at the edges. By 5.45 it was evident that I could never catch up with the train. Even alone, I could not take a joke. I walked to the crossroads where taxi 39 had to come, if it ever did. The sign on the Shell station was turned on. In the darkness, Arabs and Europeans cycled out of the refinery gates, laughing together. An
old Morris came round the
rond-point
and I thought it was just my luck if it turned out to be my taxi. My luck was not that good: it contained a large contingent of Arabs and plodded past like a metal donkey. I flung myself on a concrete pier by the refinery gate and cursed and cursed. I wanted to cry. An Arab woman with a baby watched me curiously as she passed.

At 6.30, taxi 39 arrived, a big Ford. The driver showed me my sack in the
coffre
. Nothing had been taken. There was a bus from Arbaona, at the frontier, at
vingt heures
. The driver wanted 8,000 francs to get me there. I sat by him, the sack on my knee, knapsack on the seat behind me. He asked me what was in the sack that made it worth all this trouble. It occurred to me, rather late in the day, that he might dump me in the desert and make off with the treasure. ‘
Que des cadeaux. Pour mes parents et ma fiancée
.’ I had never called Beetle that before.

We drove along the highway for a while and then he turned off down a dirt track. We came to a small, dark village. He stopped the car and got out.
‘J’ai de quoi faire
.’ He whistled and a light came on in a doorway. If they were going to rob me, then they were. It was the Reverend Harper Wood’s money. I should put it down to experience; unless they killed me. The driver and two men came out and went to the back of the Ford. They took some boxes out of the boot. The driver came back to my window. ‘
Excusez-moi, monsieur, ce sont mes cousins. J’ai de quoi leur livrer. Ne vous inquiétez pas
.’

Inquiet? Moi?
We drove on after I had refused tea. The headlights hit on plodding native carts with red lanterns as we neared Arbaona. There was no bus that could take me on to Tangier. We arrived at the
Douanes
; strip lights and policemen. My driver went over to a long black limousine, a chauffeur in the front, an old gentleman in the back. I sat and fumed. The driver came back and said, ‘
Vous avez de la chance, monsieur
.’ The dignified old Arab was willing to give me a lift into Tangier.

The radio played as the great car’s headlights split the purple of the night. The old man hummed and burbled, shrivelled away in his cushioned
corner. He wore a turban with a little yellow soft hat settled in its folds. On his orders, the chauffeur stopped to pick up a couple of women with their bundles. They called him ‘
effendi
’. On reaching the Tangier frontier, he had the chauffeur take care of all the passport formalities. When he left me outside the Hotel Bristol, I thanked him becomingly. He waved me away.

O
N THE FERRY to Gibraltar I fell into conversation with Mr True, a furniture salesman from Hamptons of Knightsbridge. He was broad, round-shouldered, of medium height; small light eyes. He wore an unbelted mackintosh and a floppy brown hat, brim down all round. There were several initials on his briefcase. He had been on a six-week tour of north Africa: Addis, Aden, Oran, Tunis, Cairo. ‘I’d like to have gone to the Varsity,’ he said, ‘not to study, to play games and all that. I’m a rugger man. My school switched in ’26, just as I arrived. Know why? You have to have ball sense to play soccer. And ball sense, either you have it or you don’t. But rugger! You can take a boy without an ounce of ball sense, bung him in the scrum, all he has to do is stick with the ball basically. Chances are, a keen boy’ll be quite useful at rugger where he’d be hopeless at soccer. That’s why they switched.’

I told him I had played soccer but preferred cricket. ‘Surrey man myself,’ he said. ‘But that’s not why I’d like to see Lock in Australia. Wardle, he’s a defensive bowler, but Tony Lock! There’s a match-winner for you. I know Bill Edrich. Met him in business. Reckon he lost £10,000 by turning amateur. Only did it because he thought he’d get to captain England. I reckon he’d’ve got as good a benefit as Compton if he hadn’t jumped the gun. My
guess he doesn’t make above ten thousand a year in his job. I would’ve coughed up for his benefit; can’t help liking old Edrich.’

‘Drinks, doesn’t he?’

‘Not only drinks, old boy. That’s why they daren’t take him on tours. Every time they did, his wife divorced him afterwards. Some people have all the luck. Only joking. I like to combine business with pleasure myself. These Arabs, you know, they’re incredible. Reckon they’re impotent if they can’t function sexually about five times a day. In Addis I saw this local doctor giving these natives a shot in the behind. Smack!’ He crashed his fist into his palm. ‘“Drop your pants,” this doctor’d say, and then, smack! In went the needle and off they went.’

‘What did he give them?’

‘Oh, it’s quite harmless. Vitamin B, something like that.’

‘What was wrong with them, then?’

‘Wrong? Nothing. They can only come twice a day so they think they’re impotent. One of our chaps was out in Saudi Arabia for three months, without the wife, you know, planning the furniture for one of the big nobs’ palaces. They think nothing of spending £400,000 on a single palace. They kept putting things off but he stayed and stayed. The Arabs were amazed at him.’

‘His persistence?’

‘No, no, no. They couldn’t understand how anyone could go more than three days without his wife. I think they kept him hanging about to see how long he
could
go. You know, if I had my life over again, I’d like to go up to the Varsity and then become a journalist. I often think of things I’d like to write up. Never do. I suppose you have to get born with the gift.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Only sub-editors have to be born with the gift.’

‘Anyway, that’s what I’d like to be if I had my life again. Sports journalist. What a life! I’m keen on sports, you know, and I think I could make a sporting journalist, get on with people and so on.’

When we docked at Gibraltar, he gave me his card. If my ship was delayed,
I should come and look him up at the Rock. He could lend me some cash if I needed it. I had time before boarding the ferry to Algeciras to walk up the main street. Player’s cigarettes were one and fivepence for twenty. I bought the
Sunday Times
and
The Observer
in a dark brown teashop full of army wives and squalling children. It was good to have an English cup of tea again. I saw that Ken Tynan had called Leslie Bricusse ‘a flaccid comedian from Cambridge … Ruthlessly cut, he might escape obloquy.’ The great iconoclast of the 1960s wrote, in 1954, in the tones of a sententious sixth-form master.

I had been on holiday from myself, in a state of weightlessness that rendered me all eyes and ears, free of sentiment, alert only to the present. Now, reading the London press, I was heavy again, not wholly dismayed by what Tynan said, yet conscious of England as a place of sly and eager knives. I was reminded of Leslie’s adhesive wish to be my partner in writing all the kinds of things that I had no wish to write. I hated the songs his Sirens sang, but feared that I lacked the will to escape their allure. It gave me good reason to stay away from England.

Once aboard the USS
Constitution
, I had to share a cabin with an American of about thirty called Dick Knights. He slept in his vest and pants and had a rancid odour. I avoided him during the day. The crossing to Naples, via Genoa, took two days. Most of the passengers had embarked in New York. On the last night out, they were given a farewell dinner: paper hats, garlands, rattles and bells. ‘Americans’, I noted, ‘think they are giving you a treat if they let you behave like children. Such occasions license their latent infantilism.’ I was neither American nor British, it seemed, and neither Jew nor Gentile.

After dinner, an accordionist played Neapolitan tunes and sang them with an accompaniment of the children’s rattles and squeakers. The Purser, tall, Germanic, with a balding egg-shaped head and a nose like an ant-eater, played double bass. The ship’s photographer, short and thick, with wavy brown hair and a handsome, apish face, was Master of Ceremonies. He crooned and got the words wrong and did a tap routine. His hair flopped
about; he waved his arms and flopped on the floor an unhinged gollywog, oh, and he smiled, he smiled and smiled. He came back to the microphone, panting. It squeaked – naughty! – as he adjusted it in order to gasp: ‘After doing that, anyone else would be out of breath!’

When the band had packed up, the children pulled the balloons from the walls and collected the empty hats. The purser reappeared with a fat German. They had lighted cigars behind their backs. They would go up to a child with an armful of captured balloons and, as one talked nicely, the other popped the balloons. The room was soon full of crying children. I wanted to go and hit the bullies. I walked over and looked at them. They seemed to realise that they had gone too far. The purser unstuck more balloons from the walls and tried to force them on the children. They redoubled their cries. He became tough and mature: they must shut up or go to bed. They stood, open-mouthed, still tears on their cheeks, holding balloons they did not want. The purser walked around the saloon responsibly, tearing down the decorations and peeling sellotape from the walls. He whistled as he did so and upped children, tenderly, from his path.

I was on deck, reading Nietzsche’s
Le Gai Savoir
(a present from Jacques Croiset), as the
Constitution
steamed into Genoa. A woman in a red suit came by and started to talk to me in Italian. She was shiny-faced with hairy legs, a pointed nose, wide contorted lips. She must suddenly have caught sight of the person waiting for her on the dock. She shrieked and ran about in arrested spurts, as if snagged on a leash. She cried in gasping convulsions and plunged her head in her arms as if the sight of her friend was too exciting to bear. She resurrected her head and resumed the panting sobs. Her fur fell to one side and she dropped her umbrella.

The man on the quay raised his arms above his head (it had a soft hat on it) and waved, more friendly than passionate. The woman panted and groaned as if delirious. When the gangway was lowered, she ran down it, scampering, half-falling, towards the dumpy man. An American woman told me that
the woman had tried earlier to talk to a young Lebanese. When he said he spoke no Italian, she dealt him a sharp kick on the shin, which inflicted ‘a terrible wound’. Might it be that the man in the soft hat was not the lover she imagined but some relative delegated to escort her to an institution?

As I walked down the gangway at Naples, I felt a clap on my shoulder. It was Dick Knights. ‘Where are you going to stay?’ He stuck with me. ‘We could maybe share a room.’ I found it impossible to deny him. We went to a big hotel on the Via San Felice. A single room would cost me more than sharing a double. I had three more rancid nights ahead of me. In the morning, I escaped Dick’s company and went to Pompeii on the narrow-gauge railway. I had no camera and did not at all wish I had one. My notebook was enough.

I ate pizza for the first time in Naples. I was reminded that Aeneas was told by an oracle that he should land his men when he came to a place where the natives ‘ate their tables’ when they dined. Antiquity was suddenly all around me. I walked up to the Naples museum and paid a few more lire to go through a gated arch into a room with more obscene paintings, lifted from Pompeii. I took keener note of a round canvas by Brueghel the Elder. A venerable figure in a blue-black cloak, face almost hidden by its fall, was walking with the aid of a stick; behind him, hunched in villainy, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, fat and deformed by a goitre or some glandular deficiency, expression brutish and sly. With a wide-bladed butcher’s knife, the boy was cutting the old man’s red purse-strings, which hung from the lower folds of the old man’s gown. The purse dangled like a heart; you had the feeling that the cutting of the string would also cut the old man’s lifeline. The monstrous child was encased in a pair of hoops that intersected at right angles. The circular motif of the canvas was repeated in the bizarre cage in which the malign boy was framed. It had a cross on the top. Behind, there was a windmill, grazing sheep, an untroubled shepherd.

My last night in Naples, 8 December 1954, coincided with the end of the ‘Marian year’. I took notes as I watched from the iron balcony outside our hotel window: