Going Up (37 page)

Harry and Charlotte Gordon went to Madrid to look at the pictures in the Prado and elsewhere. When they came back, Harry told us that the Academia Real had just made the last sets of eighty-four prints from Goya’s original etchings of the
Desastres
. The quality was still good, but they would never make any more. He had a spare set, if we wanted them. The price was just over £100. It was a lot of money, but a chance that we chose not to miss. I have two of the prints on my wall, but not in my eyeline. Goya’s unblinking eye furnishes images too demanding to be kept in constant view.

Franco’s cruel Spain suited us. We were indeed passing rich on £10 a week. I finished
The Trouble with England
on a Friday and started
A Wild
Surmise
on the following Monday. On Saturday mornings, we left Paul with Salvadora and went to the big covered market in Málaga where they sold
chirimollas
(custard apples) and fresh strawberries in March. After doing the rounds, we went to Antonio’s bar on the waterfront, where we refilled wicker-covered flagons with
fundador, vino tinto
and
agua aguardiente
.

Antonio tethered his donkey among the casks in the shadowy depths of his sawdust-floored
bodega
. He was a lame widower. His ambition was to emigrate to Australia. To get a visa, he had to go to Madrid with his small son. He could not afford to stay in a hotel. They arrived at the Australian embassy in the morning, in the clothes they had been in for thirty-six hours. The boy had soiled his pants. The Aussie official sniffed as they came in and that was that.

Fuengirola’s American population was not all artistic. Two of them were veterans on disability pensions. One was an ex-Marine with whom I played poker a few times. His pet phrase was ‘Up yours with a hay-rake, Jack!’ The other was called Chuck; he had only one lung and seemed resigned to lonely decline. Then he surprised everyone with the announcement that he was getting married. His bride was a young whore from Málaga. He had no illusions about why she agreed to the wedding: she would get a good percentage of his pension after he died. Chuck had already been married and divorced in the US. When his son sent him a Christmas present of two pairs of socks, he refused to pay the few pesetas duty on the package. ‘Spain, I don’t need socks.’ He married his
puta
in the new white village church (the ‘loyalists’ had burned down the old one) and lived for a while as happily as he knew how.

I read Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez. To improve my everyday Spanish I relied on paperback translations of Agatha Christie (‘
Desde luego, señor Poirot
…’). I rarely looked at a Spanish newspaper. One day, on my way to play football, I saw that the rooting pigs, and the garbage, had been cleared from beside the
carretera
. The whole village was being spruced up
with whitewash and happy flags. ‘
Porqué?’ ‘Porqué? Porqué mañana por la tarde viene el Jefe del Estado!’
Francisco Franco was coming to Fuengirola.

On the day itself, traffic was banned on the
carretera
. FRANCO was inscribed, again and again, in large whitewashed letters on the tarmac. The villagers lined the street, the children in their tight best clothes. The rein-forced Guardia Civil scowled. Just before Franco was due, a tall, slim old man in a straw hat, wearing an open, floral waistcoat, pointed white leather shoes and carrying a long polished cane, sauntered into view from the gypsy encampment to the west of the village.

In front of the
alcaldía
, the town hall, he came to the first FRANCO in the roadway. He tilted his head and put a careful toe in the O of FRANCO and did a little pivot. The Guardia scowled more than ever, but the king of the gypsies paid them no heed. He walked on, to the next whitewashed FRANCO and now he put that pointed toe into the eye of the A, never touching the whiteness, and did the same pivot. The tilt of his head seemed to ask what FRANCO was doing in the middle of his road.

The king of the gypsies sauntered to the side of the road only as the first motor cyclists came blaring into sight. They drove fast through the village and on towards Los Boliches (‘Lo Boliche’, Salvadora called it). Then came the first black limousine, then the second, then the third and the fourth and the fifth. In each of them sat a stiff, plump figure with a nasty moustache; uniformed acolytes beside him. Without slowing down, they came and they went, Franco and his four facsimiles. ‘
Con mis ojos le he visto!
’ Salvadora said, with my own eyes I saw him; but which was the real one, neither she nor we will ever knew.

A few days later, I went to collect Harry Gordon to play football and he said he didn’t feel like it. So what was the matter?

‘You haven’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘Hard-edge is dead. It was in
Time
magazine.’

‘I never even knew it was sick. So what?’

‘So what? So every single one of the fifty-something paintings I’ve done since we got here is hard-edge. I had promises of interest from all kinds of galleries, including Sidney Janis. Now no one’s even going to look at my stuff. Looks like I wasted a whole year.’

Could a genuine artist choose to do what he did only, or even principally, because there was a market for it? I was not, of course, indifferent to cash, but I never wrote a novel for a mercenary motive and I have never changed a word in order to please or appease some putative reader. I made it a habit to rely on the movies and television to subsidise what really mattered to me. While we were on the Costa del Sol, I had the luck, engineered by Richard Gregson, to be hired by Fritz Gotfurt to improve an Associated British Pictures script that was about to go into production. Dickie Todd was not happy with his lines. There is a rule as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians that the closer a movie is to production, the higher the fee for remedial script surgery. I made three times as much as my advance on
The Limits of Love
in as many weeks.

Gotfurt was one of the earliest of many refugees from the German cinema. The best, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder among them, headed for Hollywood. Emeric Pressburger was one of the few who stopped in England, where he teamed up with Mickey Powell, whose career was fatally blighted in 1960, when he made
Peeping Tom
, a more truthful erotic myth than prudish British critics (voyeurs by trade) cared to countenance. Too cynical to advertise his cynicism, Fritz Gotfurt had been shrewd enough to quit Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. He had no pious hopes, as Wesker and others did, that man was redeemable. He had technical acumen, but no illusions about cinema as an art. Many small cigars had kippered and creased his complexion. He admired Dickie Todd more for his amorous adventures than for his heroic war record.

When Dickie announced his delight in the new lines I had given him,
Fritz promised that I should never be short of work as long as he was around. The next job he offered me was to adapt his wife’s play,
Little Ladyship
, for the screen. I elected to stay poor and go on with
A Wild Surmise
. Not long afterwards, the
cartero
brought me a neat letter in which George Greenfield said that he had read
The Trouble with England
and thought it too slim to be published on its own. Would I consider writing another novella to furnish a doublet that he could propose to Cassell’s? They would want to follow
The Limits of Love
with a ‘booky book’ rather than a squib. Fortunately
A Wild Surmise
would be ready to supply it.

Its plot was based on a recent scandal in Spain. A large number of people had been poisoned, and a few had died, allegedly by the use of industrial oil, from Morocco, for making canned tomato sauce. In the end, which took some time to come, it was proved that the oil was innocent; Spanish tomatoes had been overdosed with toxic spray before they were cooked. I embellished the story and transferred it to San Roque, a fictitious South American country whose capital closely resembled Málaga.

The novel’s anti-hero was Robert Carn, based on my Charterhouse friend Robin Jordan, who had indeed emigrated to South America. The name Carn was dredged from my memory of my prep school in north Devon. I can hardly recall its bearer but even his pre-teen personality had the singular aura that distinguishes the maverick. Having said my piece about anti-Semitism and Jews, at length, I was determined not to be cornered into being a Jewish writer. At least half my books and stories contain no Jewish characters. I like to live, and write, in what my friend Joseph Epstein calls ‘the middle of my tether’.

Tranquil Fuengirola suited me very well. My stacks of pages proved it. We made trips to the pottery in Coín and to Ronda, high in the sierras, where we sat in front of a coal fire at the Hotel Reina Victoria and were served with a full British tea by a red-haired waiter. Ronda had the oldest wooden bullring in Spain. A deep ravine cuts the town in two. It is said
to have been the real-life location of a scene in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, in which republican loyalists threw captive Fascists off the high scarp into the rocky abyss, unless it was the Fascists who did the throwing.

When my parents came to stay for a few days, we drove them to Granada to see the Alhambra. Larry Potter and the other Americans called my mother ‘Irene’ without hesitation. Larry gave her a little etching, of a reclining woman. He had nothing and he was very generous. Later he gave me a sketchbook thick with gouache cartoons in the style of Juan Gris. I have it in my desk drawer. Larry went to Paris soon after we left Fuengirola in 1960. I recognised him, under another name, in Jimmy Baldwin’s novel
Another
Country
, when I reviewed it in 1963. His asthma made him vulnerable and he was, he later wrote to Harry Gordon, ‘flat on his black ass’. Larry died in 1966; he has since gained a measure of deserved fame as an artist.

The S Man

E
ARLY IN 1960, Beetle was again pregnant. She was not disposed to have the baby in Spain. I now had hopes of making enough money to afford the rent of somewhere in England, even if it meant doing things I did not want to do. Our prospects changed with a telegram from George Greenfield.
The Limits of Love
had won the Lippincott Prize, which guaranteed an advance of $2,500; the same sum would be devoted to publicising the book. Confident that he would share my pleasure, I wrote to tell Bob Gutwillig about the Lippincott Prize. He responded that if I was going to be a success, there was no point in continuing to know me. I took it that he was congratulating me. Perhaps he was. I never heard from him again.

Life in Fuengirola had been a liberation. I worked harder and better than I ever had before. I did not have to be anything I did not want to be; nor was I aware of what my contemporaries and supposed rivals were doing. My idea of being a writer has never had anything to do with social or careerist ambition; revenge is the sharpest spur. I wanted only to write the books I wanted to write and have them published. I might be a prig (no ignoble condition), but I was never calculating; I had no wish to please, although I am always pleased to do so. I took my chances, perhaps too many, but
I never schemed to obtain them; nor did I belong to any artistic or political group. Larry Potter’s favourite character was Steppenwolf and I understood why, even though I have never much admired Hermann Hesse. Kipling’s lonely cat is more my style.

In early May, we loaded the Ford Anglia with all our belongings and set off for Gibraltar, slowly; PLD 75 had developed a tendency to boil if I drove at more than 25 miles an hour. We decided that Beetle should fly home from Gibraltar with Paul. I would drive our lame and rusting motor back to England, where we could now afford to change it for something better. Beetle hoped that my parents would allow her to have her summer baby at 12 Balliol House. My mother suggested a good nursing home in Wimbledon.

I cannot remember having any thought or emotion as I trundled northwards. Is there really such a thing as the stream of consciousness? Alone, I neither dreaded England nor looked forward to it. My slow, loaded progress attracted no hitch-hikers. As I drove the long, straight road between the pine forests of Les Landes, the fumes from the car contributed to a blinding headache. I had to pull in and lie down in a dry ditch, where I slept almost literally like the dead for nearly three hours. That evening, at a restaurant in Vendôme where the
Michelin Guide
promised a generous meal for less than a pound, a large gentleman sat at an adjacent table, a white poodle on a chair next to him, a napkin as its supplementary collar.

I stayed a night or two in Paris and loitered, as usual, at the stacked tables at the Librairie La Hune. Scanning the Impressionists at the Jeu de Paume, I bumped into Julian Jebb and a party of friends, including Gillian Tindall. Julian had performed a number of mine in Brian Marber’s Footlights show: ‘Willie, Willie Somerset Maugham / You’re at the top of the literary form / You’ll be going on fine / Till you’re ninety-nine / Willie, Willie, Somerset Maugham’. Julian was good casting for the Old Party; he was prematurely aged, small, clever and homosexual.

I expected it to be a relief to have congenial company in Paris. I resumed,
with reluctant readiness, a more English persona than I had inhabited in Andalucia. I am not sure whether Julian was, as they used to say, a ‘Roman’, but la Tindall (an expert in French matters) certainly was. She was good-looking, fair and not amused by my patter. Years later, a novel of Ms Tindall’s came to me for review. I did not much admire it, for spelt-out, objective reasons. She wrote me a letter accusing me of personal animus because she had not fancied me when we met in Paris. I had not been aware that I was a candidate for her favours. I have never met her again, though I have admired some of her non-fiction, and have said so in print.

Back in England, luck took the ladylike form of Dudy Nimmo’s Newnham friend Anne Moore, who owned a furnished cottage in East Bergholt, Suffolk, and was looking for a tenant. Her tall, cadaverous husband Richard had been a lank-haired Liberal committeeman in the Cambridge Union. He now worked at the
News Chronicle
. When, to check some detail about our tenancy, I called the paper and asked to be put through to him, he picked up the phone and said, ‘Leaders’. Beetle, Paul and I moved into the Old Mill House, East Bergholt, soon after my return to London, where my first move had been to trade in PLD 75, for whatever Beetle’s cousin Geoffrey was genial enough to give us. We acquired a new, spacious, grey Standard Ensign with red upholstery.

I sent a freshly typed copy of
The Roper House
to Betty Judkins at Jan van Loewen’s office. When I went to see her, she told me that, in the unlikely event that the play even got into rehearsal, it would be only a day or two before it was found to be unperformable. I took one more look at the polka-dotted tart still on patrol on the far side of Shaftesbury Avenue and left the office for good. I never showed
The Roper House
to anyone else. Fifteen years later, Stephen Taylor and his long-suffering, overweight wife became characters in the third of my television series
The Glittering Prizes
. Eric Porter, not the least critical of actors, did not have any problem saying my lines.

The Limits of Love
was due to be published in mid-June. Richard
Gregson’s confidence and range as an agent had grown in our absence. He arranged for me to meet Wolf Mankowitz, who was looking for a writer to adapt a novel entitled
Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man
into a vehicle for Peter Sellers, whose life and appearance had been transformed by being cast opposite Sophia Loren in
The Millionairess
. Pudgy, pasty-faced, bespectacled Peter, for whom Roy Speer had said the radio might have been made because no audience would ever choose to look at him, fell so thumpingly in love with Sophia that he had willed and dieted himself into being handsome. Vocal versatility was transmuted into facial refinement and tailored elegance. He wore slick glasses and went to Dougie Hayward for his suits (‘clobber’ as Leslie Bricusse would say).

Mankowitz too had been an East End boy. Clever enough to get into Cambridge, he was quick to become a follower of Frank Leavis. In his single precocious contribution to
Scrutiny
, he followed the Downing party line in lambasting the incoherent vatic verbosity of Dylan Thomas (had Richard Burton known of this disparagement of Welsh genius, his diaries might have been less admiring of Wolf’s ‘poetic’ strain). If the graduate Mankowitz ever considered an academic career, he lacked patience for its small increments. Like the scholarly George Engel, Wolf had the intelligence to make himself the master of a somewhat abstruse subject, Wedgwood china, on which he wrote what remains the standard monograph.

In 1953, he had published
A Kid for Two Farthings
, a brief, pseudo-folkloric novella in which he revisited Spitalfields and turned the Jewish East End into London’s version of Sholem Aleichem’s Pale of Settlement. By the time I went to his office, above his Wedgwood store in Piccadilly arcade, Wolf had revised his accent backwards. It chimed with that of a rough, tough, street-wise businessman. Who would guess that the other side of his coin carried the image of a Downing man of letters? Wolf had the mimic’s contempt for one-track minds and singular ambitions. My unmitigated accent led him to say that he wasn’t buying any bloody Cambridge
crap. Desert-booted feet on the desk, he played with an oversized matchbox which he slid open to reveal rubber-banded rolls of £5 notes. He was seeing a lot of people who were likely to be better qualified to do this script for Peter than I was, but he would let me know. I had the feeling that I had been summoned in order to witness how a clever Cantab East Ender, with a few bob, could work both sides of the street and still have time to write a showbiz A-Z for the
Evening Standard
. What we had in common emphasised the difference between us. Boasting of his photographer son’s rampant sexuality, he spoke of him being ‘stalky’, a locution I have never heard elsewhere.

The Old Mill House had been built by John Constable’s father. It was a grey stuccoed cottage down a hedged lane, a few hundred yards outside East Bergholt, near the Manningtree Road. Our only neighbours, in a cottage further down the lane, were Tom and Molly Cheale. Now a gamekeeper for the local land- and orchard-owning Eely family, Tom had survived being a prisoner of war after the capture of Singapore. He never complained and he never ate rice. I worked in a glassed first-floor conservatory, overlooking the lawn, which I had promised Anne Moore that I would keep mown. The vegetable patch outside the red-tiled kitchen was thick with asparagus and red-buttoned with raspberries.

Beetle was determined to have her new baby at home. Nurse Bray was a seasoned midwife, recommended by Dr MacBride, who would be available if needed. I made my last flannelled appearance on a cricket field, playing for East Bergholt. I made seven not out and bowled a couple of loose overs. I even persuaded Beetle that we should be better integrated if she went to a meeting of the local Women’s Institute. She did so just once. Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Smith came for two hours twice a week and Miss Ireland when asked, to do the ironing. Miss Ireland, who was scarcely five feet tall, drove a large old Morris eight. On its way up the lane, it appeared to be empty. As it got closer, Miss Ireland’s eyes could be seen looking out from under the brim of the big steering wheel, her hands higher than the top of her head.

East Bergholt had two famous living inhabitants: Randolph Churchill, who lorded at Stour House, a large pink Regency building facing out over the rolling pasture down to the river for which it was named, and Paul Jennings, who lived with his wife and six children adjacent to the Franciscan priory. Jennings was the weekly author of the
Oddly Enough
column in
The Observer
. His whimsical wit was collected in a Penguin entitled Jenguin
Pennings
. Another collection had been called
Oddly Bodlikins
. When I went into the village shop-cum-post office, I was glad to see packets of typing paper on one of the shelves. The shopkeeper was sorry but they were reserved for Mr Churchill. He had an undeniable need of instant supplies. When I dared to say that, in a democracy, shops should not withhold goods on display, I prevailed, just.

Randolph had a purple temper and was no respecter of the lower orders. When he called at one of the local garages for petrol, he lowered the window as little as possible and thrust a suitable bank note through it. The garageman, Arnold Handley, who became a friend of ours, was a red-haired ex-Communist ex-schoolteacher. When he brought the change, in coins, he posted them back through the crack in the window so that they fell all over the floor. Churchill said that he need not expect to enjoy his custom again. Arnold said, ‘You got the point then.’

Randolph was not only a regular journalist but also in charge of the many volumes of his father’s biography. He supervised and depended on a series of, so to speak, galley slaves who were quartered in the partitioned dormitory floor of Stour. Daylight reached them through Georgian windows which were rarely centred in the walls of their gimcrack accommodation. Some of the bedrooms had only a share of a window to themselves. Martin Gilbert, who later achieved fame as a historian, especially of the Holocaust, was one of Randolph’s most reliable, and relied upon, assistants. When Randolph died, Gilbert ceased to be a ghost and became the accredited author of the last six volumes.

Martin told me, years later, that we must have been neighbours in East Bergholt at much the same time. He was, in effect, Randolph’s social secretary as well as amanuensis. When overtures were made, by the producer Jack Le Vien, for an American TV series of Winston’s life, Randolph determined to entertain him in style. Having summoned his oriental cook (his English ones had all left within a week), he demanded that, for once in his life, he produce something edible for their distinguished guest. The cook rose to the challenge by packing his bags and walking out. Randolph asked Martin to book dinner at the best local hostelry. There happened to be an excellent restaurant in nearby Stratford St Mary.

Jack Le Vien arrived and was primed with champagne before the three of them repaired to Le Talbooth. The thatched Tudor building pleased the guest. The sedulous attention of the owner, Gerry Milsom, brought out Randolph’s most amiable aspect. After the meal was ordered, the wine list was proffered. Randolph said, ‘What would the sommelier suggest to give delight to Mr Le Vien?’ The wine waiter indicated one of the listed bottles. ‘This one is very popular, sir,’ he said. Randolph said, ‘
Popular
? What leads you to presume that I should ever want to drink anything POPULAR?’

One evening, I shared a third-class compartment with Paul Jennings on the train from London. Since I had heard him to be a piously uxorious Catholic, I remarked on the enlivening uses of adultery in making the marital world go round. Making oneself obnoxious to famous persons is not an unknown form of self-introduction, but I did not have much success. Some time later, I happened to buy the new Penguin pocket dictionary. Whether through sly intention or comic chance, the pairs of words that showed the first and last entry on each page had generated comic hyphenates: ‘corkscrew-cornetto, fruitless-fuck’ and so on. I sent word to our neighbour Mr Jennings, as a sort of apology perhaps, alerting him to the fun that he might have with these and other conjunctions. A few weeks later, his
Observer
column made protracted and witty use of them. He sent me neither a copy
nor a word of thanks. There was no obligation to do so; that is what might have made it stylish if he had.

I finished
The S Man
and delivered it to Tom Maschler. A sustained piece of wilful cynicism, it merited the pseudonym, Mark Caine, that we clapped on it. A typical passage read ‘The success believes in the team. (His team.) The success believes in the loyalty of the team. (To him.) He believes that the team should stick together. (Until he wants to dissolve it.) He believes that the company comes first. (As long as he is first in the company.) He believes that if everyone can come up with just one more good idea, final success is inevitable. (For him.)’ I left the business of selling to Tom. He reported that Ian Hamilton at Hutchinson’s was enthusiastic, although he accused Tom of ‘bargaining like an Armenian’. A profitable deal was closed; the book would be out in time for Christmas.