Going Up (39 page)

W
HEN SARAH WAS a few months old, Beetle and I left the children with my mother and went to Paris for a few days. Being alone together, and out of England, made us lovers again; but not the same lovers who lived in those cold rooms in Crimée. We hurried to retrieve what we did not quite admit to each other that we feared we were losing. In the list of films in the
Semaine de Paris
, I saw one which was synopsised as being about an engaged couple going, with a party of smart people, to an Aeolian island where the woman, Anna, disappears.
L’Avventura
was on, in
version originale
, in a small cinema off the Boul’ Mich’.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s world, in which couples could be more remote in the light of the desire between them, was unnervingly evocative. Caressed by her director’s camera, Monica Vitti was a vulnerable goddess, tipped almost against her will into replacing her friend in the affection of a weak charmer whom she knows she would be, and then is, a fool to love. The uneasy and unhurried rhythm of the movie, Giovanni Fusco’s pulsing music, the story’s lack of resolution, gave the adventure an asymmetrical elegance that I had never before seen in a movie. Antonioni’s art was so different from, and so indifferent to, routine cinema that it was both more acute and
more enigmatic than that of any other director. We both fell in love with the movie, though not in the same way. I recognised and I feared what I saw in common between me and Sandro, the one-time visionary architect who had settled for an easy life; I also feared that I could see something in Beetle’s beauty, not in anything she actually said or necessarily felt, that passed judgement on my facility.

During supper at the Acropole (red linen napkins extra), just off the Boule’ Mich’, another look at the
Semaine de Paris
told me that
L’Avventura
was showing, in a French version, at a cinema near the Opéra; we went to see it again. A single viewing had sealed the piece into my mind. I noticed that a small scene, of no great consequence, had been cut in the French version. As we were leaving, I approached the manager in the foyer with the righteousness of the convert and said, ‘
En coupant une scène clé, monsieur, vous avez mutilé un chef-d’oeuvre
.’ He said, ‘
Ecoutez, monsieur, le dernier métro va partir dans deux minutes. Mes clients préfèrent respecter leurs horaires quotidiens plutôt que de voir quelques moments de plus d’un film qui, pour pas mal d’entre eux, traîne considérablement.’ ‘C’est un crime contre l’art du cinéma.’ ‘Vous avez le droit, peut-être les moyens, de rester sentimental, monsieur. Moi, j’ai mon métier à faire. Bonne nuit
.’

L’Avventura
was a talisman of a kind of creative cinema in which John Paddy Carstairs and his Pinewood peers had no place. Antonioni seemed to be an artist who knew precisely what he was doing, although what it meant was somewhat concealed from the audience; that, I was sure, was part of his magic.
L’Avventura
defeated expectation, turned each moment into some part of a whole that was never disclosed. Why did Anna disappear on that Aeolian island and what became of her? It was a thriller without thrills, a love story with a sorry ending, at once incomplete and completely satisfying.

I should discover, in time, that Antonioni’s project had been blown off its original course by a series of accidents, the worst being that the company was stranded on that bleak island by lack of funds. Lea Massari, who
played the elusive Anna, had caught pneumonia and could not return to do whatever Michelangelo and the screenwriter Tonino Guerra had planned for her to do. What seemed an impeccable and seamless innovation had been, in large part, improvised and patched together; but it was a patchwork contrived by a master.

In the spring of 1961, Cristina Baselga went back to Spain. I envied her. She was replaced by a fair-haired Irish girl called Siobhan O’Malley. Anne Moore had set no term on our time in the Old Mill House, but she now wanted either to sell it or to let it on a long lease. I knew that Beetle was happier than I was, but I chose to think that she did not want forever to live in a Suffolk village with no life outside the house and the garden. Our trip to Paris had reminded me of what we were missing. I had corresponded with Harry Gordon. His regular script reminded me of a world elsewhere. One of his letters told me that there was a house to let for June and July, big enough for the four of us, and our new help, on the
carretera
opposite our football field. The Villa Antoñita (nominally reminiscent of the director whose film had rekindled my interest in cinema) had a large square tower with a secluded room where I could work.

Something prevents me from recalling clearly in what spirit, and after what discussion, we moved out of the Old Mill House. Beetle and I had unshared attitudes to leaving it. I had no regrets; she did. I was sure that, one way or another, I could make enough money, even when out of the country, to keep the family and I thought that that was all that could be expected of me. Beetle had her children; I wanted to be the writer I had been in Fuengirola and not since.

Stella Richman promised that being abroad need not prevent me from writing more plays for her. The last piece of work I did before we left the Old Mill House was an adaptation of a very short story by Stanley Ellin, ‘The Best of Everything’. Set in New York, it featured a social climbing outsider who happens to share a table in a crowded diner with a disgraced
playboy, to whom he offers a bed in return for instruction into how to pass for an Ivy League smart-ass. It took me the usual three days to transpose the plot to London, where Ellin’s Jimmy became a West End estate agent’s clerk and his tutor a remittance man called Charlie Prince.

Siobhan seemed excited at the prospect of going to Spain. She went on a short holiday to Ireland to see her boyfriend, but came back, slightly against our expectations, with his blessing. We put the furniture from the Old Mill House into storage. The removals man, who had seen us into the house a few months before, said, ‘You’ve got itchy feet.’

I should have known that we could not step in the same Fuengirola twice. Even in 1961, the summer months on the Costa del Sol were thick with tourists. Traffic and crowded beaches dispelled the timelessness of Juan Ramón’s ‘
Catedral pobre, al sur, en el trigo de estío / cuando el sol puro es miel de los rosetones
…’ We were richer, for the moment, not happier. I worked up in the tower, the door shut, in a big room, but I lacked the fluency that I had taken for granted in the Calle Tostón. Salvadora was busy and came only a few times to cook us a meal. We had a full-time
muchacha
called Maria, a big, good-looking, unsmiling girl who worked because she had to and who made no pretence of caring who we were. Unlike Salvadora, she was not particularly nice to Paul or to Sarah. At the smallest hint of reproach, she would say ‘
Yo mi marcho a mi casa
.’ We went into Málaga in the new car and, as before but not quite, we bought food and toys in the market before going to Antonio’s bar. He was older and, it seemed, more lame.

I started a new novella,
The Graduate Wife
, to go in a twin-pack with
The Trouble with England
. It was set in a duplicate of the Old Mill House, but the couple whom I depicted as living there were based on the Atkinsons, whose condescending visit excited satirical accuracy. I imagined their doubles in a sardonic, very English tone which kept the author at a distance. I no longer had any inclination to self-portraiture in my work. I might be more sure of myself as a writer, but I was less sure of what I was, or should
be. The less I thought about myself, the more mature, and the more English, my work seemed to be, and the more distant from Beetle and from myself. I did not hurry to show her my daily pages; a symptom, perhaps of Antonioni’s ‘
incommunicabilitá
’, perhaps of a sense of no longer being as important to her as I was before we had children.

It was too hot for football. Harry Gordon and I played tennis on the tiled court within the walls of
El Alemán
’s villa. After a sweaty hour, we could dive into its adjacent pool. Harry had digested the consequences of the death of hard-edge and concluded that he would have to go back to New York City and take a job in advertising. Our talks of the previous year had been full of the romance of the artistic life, remote and dedicated, but now the big city seemed nearer. Beetle had two babies and she wanted somewhere permanent to live.

One afternoon, walking home, with my tennis racket, from the Casino Bar in the centre of Fuengirola, I met a large man in a tracksuit who was carrying a meshed sack full of tennis balls. He seemed to fill the pavement. He said, ‘You play tennis?’ ‘I play a little tennis.’ ‘I play with Jock Krommer on the West Coast. You want, I learn you. My name is Boris.’ ‘I don’t really…’ ‘You play doubles?’ ‘Can happen.’ ‘I play you with my son Sasha.’ Because he was in my way, I agreed that Beetle and I would meet Boris and his son on the German’s court the following afternoon. She had not played recently, but she had a strong forehand. Competition brought out the best in her game and character. It must be admitted that Sasha did not have the best possible footgear for the fast tiled court: he wore heavy rubber-soled boots. Boris produced several aces but was unduly ambitious at the net. When Beetle did not pass him, I produced lobs that left Sasha stranded. We won 6–4, 6–3. No arrangement was made for a return match. When we got back to the Villa Antoñita, Beetle said, ‘We learned them.’

Harry Gordon had a birthday in June. We left the children with Siobhan and drove the Gordons in our new car up to Granada to hear Andrés
Segovia give a solo concert in the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra. We stayed the night at the Alhambra Palace and drank gin fizzes on the long, narrow terrace that stood high above the plain. Somewhere out there in the haze was the village where Garcia Lorca lived and was murdered. The Granada Palace’s many bedrooms opened off long, wide corridors that reminded me of the one along which Monica Vitti ran, with elegant awkwardness, when she realised, early in the morning, that Sandro was not in the room with her. She ran and ran until she came to the deserted public rooms. In the last of them, she saw Sandro with the call girl whom they had seen, and pitied, if not despised, in an earlier scene. Beauty was not enough for him, nor was happiness.

On the day Hemingway died, 2 July, several people, some I did not know, came to the Villa Antoñita as if they needed the comfort of some kind of informal formality. One was a guy who wrote pulp fiction short stories. Harry Gordon said that he had ‘a problem with Jews and blacks’: he didn’t like them. Charlie Reiter drove up in a black VW with his beautiful blonde opera singer wife, Anne. He had written a stream-of-consciousness novella which he gave me to read. Barnie Rosset’s Grove Press was almost certainly going to publish it. The story was about a man, in New York on business, who is treated to a black call girl by whoever he just closed a deal with. She is very good-looking, cool and articulate. They have dinner and he gets to know her, he imagines, a little too well for the occasion to remain a commercial fantasy. She comes back with him to his hotel, but he cannot bring himself to treat her like the sexual treat he has been promised. He tells her that he likes her too much to want to go on. She says, more or less, ‘And how about what I want?’ It was well done, although I could imagine Bob Gutwillig wanting work done on it. Harry Gordon liked Charlie less than I did; he regarded him as some kind of a ‘reproduction Ivy League dude’. Charlie and Anne looked like the perfect handsome couple, but she, it emerged, was more interested in her career than in being a wife. Like many
opera singers, she was disciplined, dedicated and implacably self-involved.

Porter Sneyd also brought some of his work for me to see. He had a wispy beard, like a cashiered mandarin official, and wrote very short, ‘experimental’ stories; part of the experiment appeared to be that they dispensed with grammar, plot and characters. Porter’s wife, whom he called ‘Mitch’, was scrawny in appearance and even in voice. I had no idea what they lived on, perhaps a disability pension. ‘Mitch’ had some unspecified chronic debility. They rented a small house up in the foothills towards Mijas.

Later in the summer, Charlie told Harry Gordon that he went to call on the Sneyds and found that Porter had gone to Málaga to sign some papers. ‘She was lying there on the couch, in some kind of a wrapper, and she told me how Porter never did it any more and she probably never would herself and that’s what she was thinking about, if I really wanted to know. So I thought, why not do her a small favour? What harm could it do? I did it strictly for her sake, but you know what? It felt good.’ Charlie’s book got published, but I never heard that he wrote another. He went to live in California and became a union executive, edited the local magazine and became fat. He told Harry Gordon that he was very happy with the way things turned out.

There was an outbreak of smallpox on the Costa del Sol that summer. We asked Siobhan whether she had been vaccinated. She had not. We urged her to go to Dr Verdugo as soon as possible. She announced that she preferred to ‘battle against it with my own resources’. She certainly looked very well. When my parents came to see us, my mother described her as ‘blooming’. Siobhan told Beetle that she found Spanish food very fattening; she had had to let out her skirts. The obvious question had to be put: ‘Are you by any chance pregnant?’

‘Impossible. Out of the question.’

‘Impossible in what sense?’

‘There’s no way whatsoever I can be pregnant.’

My parents’ visit added tension to the household. Irene was only fifty
years old, but her skin was too delicate for the beach. The days were long and very hot. We went out in the car and we came back. I persuaded Salvadora to come and cook the occasional meal of her remembered specialities, but Irene had small appetite. One evening, when we were at table, Paul leaned across and kissed Beetle on the arm. My mother burst into tears. If my father was embarrassed by our looks of amazed exasperation, he felt obliged to defend his wife. I cannot recall what was said to have made her unhappy, but it was not admitted to be jealousy. Was she distressed by Paul’s show of spontaneous filial affection of a kind that I had never offered? The scene was charged with unsaid things. I had two small children and I was about to be thirty years old. When, in his terse, tight-lipped way, my father made it clear that Beetle and, more particularly, I had not welcomed them as warmly as they had wished, I heard myself say, ‘Why don’t you fuck off out of my life and leave us alone?’