Going Up (36 page)

Further down the street lived Paul Hecht, the poet son of a New York hack-driver. He had saved for his trip to Spain by working for three years on building sites in the Bronx. Now he was learning to play flamenco guitar and living with a good-looking black American called Joan. I asked Larry Potter what she did.

‘Joan? She sleeps a lot.’

When I told Larry that I had finished a new play, he suggested that I should read it to the ‘community’. I said I had only one copy, so I should have to read all the parts myself. ‘Who better?’ I was afraid that
The Roper
House
would be too British for a mostly American audience, but it held their attention pretty well. Larry surprised and flattered me by being able to quote or paraphrase several of Stephen Taylor’s speeches after a single hearing. I told him that until I met him I had not believed the story, retailed among classicists, that ancient Athenian audiences could actually recite large sections of a tragedy after it had been staged only once. ‘The work’s good enough, why not?’ Soon after my one-man play-reading, Hans came to the door with news that some German TV station was offering a prize of 800 Deutschmarks for a television play. ‘I sink we do it,’ he said. But I sought differently: Larry’s enthusiasm made me keen to get my new play to my fan Betty Judkins in Dr van Loewen’s office.

A Wild Surmise

H
ARRY AND CHARLOTTE Gordon rented a big house in the Avenida José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The street does not carry the same name in today’s democratic Fuengirola, which has a summer population of a quarter of a million. José Antonio was the Falange leader, killed by the Republicans in 1926. The Gordons had made enough money on Madison Avenue to take a year off to paint and sculpt in Spain. We were soon told that Charlotte had been the youngest art editor ever of
Seventeen
; she had been ‘let go’ because of temperamental differences with the magazine’s managing editor.

Harry’s cool first-floor studio was big enough for the large canvases on which he did his hard-edged stuff. Top New York galleries were keen to give him a show when he got back, but there were very few he was willing to go with. Not yet thirty, he had the aspect and bow-legged trudge and furrowed frown of a man braving undisclosed sorrows. He did like to tell jokes, though. The one I remember was about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They’re riding down a canyon when they see 5,000 Indians at the far end; they wheel round and there are another 5,000; the Lone Ranger looks up and sees … 5,000 more on the skyline. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto
and says, ‘Well, old timer, looks like we’ve finally had it this time.’ Tonto says, ‘Where’d you get the “we” shit?’

The Gordons had been art students together in Philadelphia, where his father, now dead, was a policeman. Harry told us that one day, when his father was on point duty, a man who had had a few drinks came over to him and said, ‘Officer, is my fly undone?’ Harry’s father said, ‘No, it’s not.’ ‘Then how come I’m pissing?’ Charlotte’s father Leopold was an Austrian refugee and an inventor of genius, somewhat like Gordon Pask. He was employed by RCA. Some eighty patents for his many inventions belonged wholly to the company.

Harry’s face would change when he told funny stories, of which he had a good number. The creases changed from vertical to lateral when he smiled. His laugh promised that he might easily be happier than he was. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic. When Christmas approached, we invited him to a communal roast turkey, baked in the village oven. Harry claimed not even to know which day it was.

Hans and Juliana owned an elegantly boxed mahjong set. Once the children were settled, they came to our house, carrying a suitable table, and taught us how to play. The game proved to be a picturesque form of rummy, with oriental tiles instead of cards. Hans’s commentary added a little spice. ‘Now I sink I finish it quickly,’ he would say. His English was as fluent as it was foreign. His parents, Max and Else, lived in Málaga. Max was an enlarged, much louder form of Hans, who was already larger than the kind of life I was used to. Max wore a black cape and a black beret and pretended to amorous rights over his ‘daughter-incest’. Juliana suffered more than she welcomed his embraces.

Every Tuesday, Beetle and I wheeled Paul up to the next village, Los Boliches, to catch one of the few copies of the
Sunday Times
on sale along the coast. On the other side of the
carretera
was a big villa with a high wall around it, facing onto an empty lot. Pink and black pigs rootled among
the garbage. The villa’s stone-arched wooden gates were always shut; the shutters too. The property was said to belong to ‘
El Alemán
’, the German.

Soon after we settled in Fuengirola, we saw in someone else’s newspaper that Harold Macmillan’s Conservatives had won the general election. We never listened to the radio. There was no television. Macmillan’s winning slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’ seemed to promise that England’s best hope was to remain in a state of faltering complacency. ‘Supermac’ was its woebegone miracle-worker. I had no wish to go back.

I wrote at least five pages of my novel every morning, often more. The unceasing clatter of my typewriter keys dismayed Paul Hecht and amused Larry Potter. I stopped briefly, in mid-morning, when the
cartero
opened the little gate on the beach side of the patio, and unloaded the mail onto the tiled table. I gave him the usual peseta for his trouble. If the letter was one I craved (from George Greenfield, for instance), I made it two pesetas.

One day, as Christmas approached, Hans came to our house. After asking, as always, ‘Did you get letters?’ he wanted to know if we meant to have a Christmas tree. It would be nice for the children. Where might we find a Christmas tree in Fuengirola? ‘On ze way to Marbella, on ze right, there’s a whole forest of them. We go one night wiz an axe and … why not?’ I was too prim to relish the prospect of rustling conifers, however many there might be of them. Imagine if the Guardia Civil happened to come by. I announced a fortunate cold. Hans was displeased at my lack of nerve, but he did not go and cut a tree for himself.

After doing my Trollopian quota of work on
The Trouble with England
, which had been sparked by the paralysed man who came into the
pension
Florida and left his mouth-paintings on each table, I gave an hour or two to playing the honest hack. In John Prebble’s style, and – in the chapter on the Tay Bridge disaster – with the help of his book, I compiled breadwinning chapters of tragedies and horrors. I wrote the segment on the murder of six million of Europe’s Jews using as a crib Lord Russell of Liverpool’s
catchpenny paperback, the sales of which had been enhanced by the photographs of naked women being paraded before grinning SS men. In the course of my commissioned drudgery, I was philosophical enough to say that the so-called ‘Jewish question’ was not a genuine question at all; hence there was no call to answer it. Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations
stood in its light-blue jacket on the chimney-piece.

In the afternoon, I craved exercise. Harry Gordon and I got in the way of kicking a soccer ball around on the patch of land adjacent to the
carretera
, beside
El Alemán’
s shuttered villa. Now and again, a large American car would drive past with off-duty GIs in it. Its licence plate announced: USAAF MORON. One day, the judas door in one of the big brown wooden gates of the villa opened and a trio of Spanish boys ran out and joined us. Pretty soon, we had enough regular players to make up two sides.

Gene Masson, a professor of painting from Miami, Florida, joined us occasionally. He had never played soccer before so I suggested that he go in goal. One day, Esteban, one of the Spanish boys from the German villa, hit a shot so hard that Gene, making a casual swipe at it, broke the little finger on his left hand. He held it up and laughed and said, ‘Guy just broke my fucking finger. He broke my fucking finger, see that? Lucky it’s not the one I paint with.’ Gene had been a war artist in the Pacific with the US Marine Corps. He did not think that Harry was really a painter; ‘hard-edge’ was a style that was convenient for designers: they didn’t have to know how to draw. Harry’s pictures were all different and all the same. Harry’s view of Gene was that he was a typical sun-belt, old-style artist who couldn’t ever interest a progressive New York gallery.

Another black American painter called Clifford joined us on the football field, usually when we were just about done. He had connections in Morocco and was well supplied with hash. It made him sleepy, even when awake. With a cry of ‘Time to get the lead out!’ he would watch the ball roll past him with the frowning attention a zoologist might give to a rare, spherical
beast. Clifford lived with a small, fair, English girl called Valerie. She told me he was the best lover a girl could dream of having. He beat her from time to time, but the bruises were a price worth paying to have a real man.

When I went to the Massons’ house, down on the harbour beyond the Casino Bar in the middle of town, to see how his finger was, he was working on a big painting of goats spilling down a hillside. The floor was littered with charcoal studies he had made with, it looked, infallible spontaneity. A canvas on the wall was of three naked girls rolling on a set of cushions. ‘Braniff air hostesses, they volunteered to pose for me, so I thought why not? They took their clothes off like they did it all the time. Why? Probably because they did it all the time.’ Gene’s wife Helen was dark, talkative and devoted. Although outspokenly Jewish, they had children called Robin and Leslie.

After our football games and a Pepsi or two at the casino bar, Harry Gordon and I went and talked in his studio, smoking big cheap cigars imported from Fidel’s Cuba. I was British enough to be surprised at how Harry seemed to be on first-name terms with pretty well everybody: Andy (Warhol), Jack (Kerouac), Dick (Avedon), Jack (Kennedy, this time), and of course Marilyn. I never greatly enjoyed cigars, but I felt at one with Ernest as I puffed my Fidel y Julieta. We had been in Fuengirola for a few months when I felt a small lump at the back of my throat. The local doctor was called Verdugo, the Spanish for executioner. I did not feel the urge to consult him. I thought the lump would go away, but it did not.

Every few weeks, we would drive along the coast, past flat-faced Estepona and heaped San Roque, to Gibraltar where we could stock up on provisions unobtainable at Cayetano’s in Fuengirola: Lipton’s tea, crisp Peek-Frean biscuits and unrancid butter. The lump in my throat was bothering me enough for Beetle to insist I find a doctor while we were in Gib. I was directed to a throat specialist called Hamish Macpherson. A brass plate at the door, opposite Lipton’s said that he was ‘late of Guy’s Hospital, London’.

His surgery was a large, bleak room on the first floor. He looked down my throat and then at me. ‘You think you’ve got cancer, don’t you?’

I said, ‘It had occurred to me.’

‘Well, you haven’t. I know what’s wrong with you and I can cure it.’

‘Well, that’s … that’s … encouraging.’

‘Where did you have your tonsils removed?’

I said, ‘New York, when I was … five years old.’

‘I might’ve guessed. American medicine! What you have is a post-lingual tonsil, composed of scar tissue. Result of inept surgery.’

‘What … what does one … do about it?’

‘It’s a simple operation.’

‘Operation! We’re … we’re only in Gibraltar for the day…’

‘That’s all right. We can do it right away. Do you have ten minutes?’

He had already opened a cupboard and taken out a large battery to which he now attached two leads from an instrument with two metal arms that tapered to a point. It would not have looked out of place in a Spanish inquisitor’s tool kit. As I watched the point began to redden.

‘It’s quite a simple operation,’ Mr Macpherson said. ‘But it does require three hands. And, as you may have observed, I have only the two; so one of them will have to be yours.’

‘What exactly…?’

‘When my … instrument is red-hot, the tip, I shall insert it, carefully, so that it reaches down into the back of your throat and cauterises your supposed tumour. As the lump is composed entirely of scar tissue, it has no nerves; as long as you keep perfectly still, you will feel nothing whatsover. You may hear a slight … seething noise, but that’s all.’

‘What about, um, an anaesthetic?’

‘Not necessary. I told you…’

‘I know, but…’

‘If you insist, I can always give you a swab of cocaine.’

‘Please. This third hand…’

‘I want you to take these two pieces of gauze and hold your tongue, maybe not your favourite activity. Stick the tongue well out, keep still, open wide, and ready when you are.’ I swallowed. The lump was still there. I opened very wide and held my tongue. Mr Macpherson directed the red-hot iron to the back of my throat. There was a therapeutic sizzle and out came the iron. ‘There y’are, you’re cured. Let go your tongue, man, and have a swallow.’ I did. I felt nothing.

I said, ‘Well, thank you very much. What do I … owe you?’

‘Normally, that would be three guineas. But since you assisted with the operation, we’ll make it three pounds. What’re you proposing to do now?’

I said, ‘Go and find my wife and have a cup of coffee.’

‘Typical! You’ll drink it when it’s too hot and you won’t notice because of that completely unnecessary swab of cocaine and you’ll give yourself cancer of the stomach.’ I never smoked a cigar or a cigarette from that day onwards.

We arrived back in Fuengirola to find a letter from my mother (always a lively and fluent correspondent). Guy Ramsey had died. In an article in
Bridge Magazine
, Ewart Kempson, one of the ‘Aces’ in his classic handful of master players, reported that he had invited Guy to play in a weekend match in Norwich. After a ‘black tie’ dinner, he charmed the team, and their ladies, and won the pairs competition, partnering Kempson’s wife. On the Sunday night, Guy again played ‘with considerable skill’ and then sat discussing the hands they had played until 2.30 in the morning. Kempson ends his piece: ‘He died a few hours later. The doctor who was summoned found him writing to his adored wife. I shall always think of him as Guy Ramsey Sahib Bahardur. He was a gentle, kind, generous and extremely brave person. His end-play was a very happy one.’ As I transcribe Kempson’s dated words, my eyes fill with tears, as they did when I wrote to Celia fifty-five years ago.

Guy left no blazing mark on the world, but he is among those minor
figures of whom friends and colleagues (Peter Green among them) continue to speak with affection and admiration. Perhaps too vivid a performer to be a novelist, he devoted all his energy to impersonating the urbane
flâneur
that indeed he was. As a journalist, he had flair and style, but he was too genial, perhaps too lazy, to be a careerist. He had small interest in politics and rejoiced in the England where the chivalry he had applauded in Ewart Kempson was commonplace. He loved to make a fine impression and tell a good story. The bridge world was salted with jealousy and backbiting. Guy had no time for cliquish rivalries; he took everyone on their merits, as English gentlemen always did, or were supposed to do.

Celia asked whether she might come and visit us in Fuengirola. I never wondered why she hoped to find us more of a consolation than her close friends E. Arnot Robertson and Marghanita Laski. She brought her young son Simon and stayed for a week. In her late forties, she seemed at once brave and somehow desirous of something that we could not, or would not, give her. She told me, meaningly, that if I was going to write many novels, I needed to have more experience of life than monogamous domesticity could supply. Perhaps she imagined herself as Colette’s Léa to my Chéri. As we waited in the rain for the bus that would take them to catch the plane in Gibraltar, she said, ‘I can feel the drops trickling between my tits.’