Murderers and Other Friends (23 page)

Some houses furnish clues in the shape of manuscript volumes bound in marble paper and bought in Florence or Siena. These may have been intended for tenants to write usually unrevealing comments: ‘Two weeks of bliss, the Thompsons will come again' or ‘Tracy and Tim Maynard broke the Rioja-drinking record poolside on Sunday morning and finally got Maria-Teresa to smile.
Hasta la vista!
' In one house we thought we had struck gold: the owners kept a bulky volume describing all the dinner parties they had ever given. First came the menus, then the list of guests which included such heavily dropped names as Tennessee Williams, Visconti, and even Maria Callas on one occasion. Then came the comments. Did these record the table talk of the great and famous? Did they throw a flood of light on the lives and loves of hosts and guests? They did not. The notes were strictly confined to such profound observations as ‘cannelloni a little too
al dente
' or ‘saltimbocca on the tough side but soufflé a rare success'. This too was, I suppose, revealing in its way.

On very rare occasions the owners hand out straight information. In one house in France they were clearly not getting on. The wife, obviously a methodical lady, made a list of the attributes on which she would have to rely were she to set out on a new, unmarried existence. The document, left face upwards beside the telephone, was headed
MY ASSETS
and began: 1. Extreme physical beauty 2. A certain ability to type. She had also made a list
WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN MY LIFE
in which the house itself came first, someone called Gaston second and the rest of the family also ran. What was surprising about these lists was not that they should have been made (we all have to sort out our priorities) but that they should have been left so obviously to add interest and excitement to our stay.

It's often necessary, as the holiday sinks into its accident-prone middle period, to call the landlord about some disaster. In the dry Tuscan hills the water will run out, whether as an act of God or as the result of some dubious human conspiracy it is difficult to say. We have had to buy water by the lorry load from Siena which, on one nightmare night when we were reduced to boiling the spaghetti in San Pellegrino, was delivered into the swimming-pool by mistake. Into the same swimming-pool, on another memorable occasion, a horse fell during the hours of darkness and, unable to emerge, was found at dawn, blinking in the shallow end. Once the slenderest member of the party was lowered down the well in search of an obstruction. In another rented house, a rat regularly visited the kitchen. ‘A rat?' said the landlord when we telephoned him. ‘That's most unusual. But you'd better ask the maid to buy some glue.' Glue? He was no doubt sitting comfortably in his London office, a place where the water gushes out of taps and no one has to be lowered down the well; he was enjoying the luxury of not being on holiday. On that occasion we ignored his instructions. Far better to have a rat scuttling across the kitchen floor than one glued to it in squeaking immobility.

Holidays can be brutal occasions. Husbands and wives, usually protected by jobs, office routines, secretaries and bosses, are forced into each other's company for twenty-four hours a day. Teenage daughters are deprived of their friends, parties, nights at the Mud Club, the Café de Paris or assorted discos, and find little to do but change their clothes or collapse on their beds in terminal boredom. Aged grandparents sit in the backs of cars and try to keep up everyone's spirits; their efforts are not always successful. And yet in unaccustomed sunshine, paying unaccustomed visits to churches and cathedrals, pausing, however briefly, in front of great works of art, the visiting family may not only discover unusual and interesting things about their landlords but about each other. For these reasons I think it worth the considerable risk of renting a house and going on holiday.

I wrote much of
Summer s Lease
in an Italian house about fifteen miles to the east of Siena and, as the directions would say, you turn right past the castle and go on down a rough, dusty road, across a hillside that smells of wild fennel and wild thyme, until the road stops at the house and you can go, and would wish to go, no further. It's an old, converted
casa colonnica,
a farm manager's house; its big, cool rooms can accommodate many friends and a large assortment of children. The wine comes from the castle at the end of the road, and can be drunk in large quantities with no ill effects whatsoever. This castle, and a larger one built on the strangely Gothic lines of Balmoral, belongs to the Ricasoli family. I think it was early in the last century that, at a ball in Rome, the then Baron Ricasoli's wife danced twice with a handsome young officer. Her furious husband dragged her out into the winter's night in her thin ball-gown, threw her into his carriage and drove her to his castle in Tuscany. There he kept her prisoner and passed the long, tedious years while he stood guard over her, discovering the proper mixture of red and white grapes which became the classic wine of Chianti.

I suppose, if I didn't consider myself stuck for life in my father's house, that corner of Italy is where I would choose to live. There is nowhere else where you can travel so easily to see paintings, where you can sit in such beautiful squares in so many small towns, where trees are as green as they are in England and the sun is never too hot; where the food is fresh and, unlike food in France, or nowadays in England, tastes of exactly what it's made of, and where, on a warm night among the towers of San Gimignano, you can watch
Rigoletlo
as the moon travels slowly across the sky. Is is also the place, again unlike England, where children are welcome.

The English have always been drawn to Tuscany, so that in the last century the common Italian word for foreigners, no matter from what country they came, was
inglesi.
One hotel porter in Siena was apparently heard to say, ‘We've got six English in tonight: three of them are French, two German and one Russian.' The fountain of all knowledge about the Brits in Chiantishire was Harold Acton. Was he the original Anthony Blanche, the prickly aesthete in
Brideshead Revisited?
Admittedly he used to recite
The Waste Land
through a megaphone while at Oxford. When I visited him he lived in a villa, built by a Medici banker, on the outskirts of Florence. If it always seemed late afternoon indoors, the garden was full of sunshine. It boasted huge statues and a theatre made of lawns and hedges in which the Diaghilev Ballet, marooned in Florence during the 1914 war, once danced for the boy Acton. He was an old man, looked after by servants who may once have been handsome but now seemed grumpy in their old age. We sat together between two giant statues and his mind went back so far, to so many famous and notorious English visitors, that I asked him, in a moment of complete confusion, if he'd ever met Browning.

‘Not
Robert
Browning, of course, but I knew his son Pen. Pen Browning had one great interest in life and that was (here he separated the syllables as delicately as though he were peeling a peach with a sharp silver knife) forn-ic-ation. In fact Pen was so fond of forn-ic-ation that his offspring were to be found in all the villages round Florence.' I thought of the cafés in Fiesole where the barmen and the customers are, perhaps, descendants of the Barretts of Wimpole Street. As the tall, bald man wearing a dark city suit in the Italian sunshine went on talking with immaculate courtesy in his precise accent (‘My mother's family,' he said, ‘comes from Chee – car – go'), great ghosts of the past seemed to steal out from behind the clipped hedges and wander among the white marble gods and heroes. There went a Miss Paget, who knew Browning well, and there Max Beerbohm (‘A bit of an actor with a wife who was humourless although she had been on the stage'). And then D.H. Lawrence (‘A genius as a writer but a disagreeable man with a ferocious German wife'). Also present was Reggie Turner, who was with Oscar Wilde when he died. Then came Ouida, the Victorian Barbara Cartland (‘She died in poverty because she spent all her money on her dog'), and Ronald Firbank, ‘the ornate and nervous novelist' who wrote
Valmouth.
(‘Firbank admired Oscar Wilde so much that he bought armfuls of lilies and threw them at Reggie Turner, who was a very ugly little man with a face which looked as though it had been carved out of India rubber.') So why did these extraordinary English make their way to Chiantishire? ‘Because,' said Sir Harold, ‘the English and the Tuscans are very similar characters. We're both practical, undemonstrative people with a love of proverbs. We both like the same sort of food, nursery cooking.'

Harold Acton said in
Who's Who
that his recreations were jettatura (which I take to mean putting the evil eye on persons) and ‘hunting the Philistine'. When I asked him about this he said, ‘It really comes from the time I was at Oxford. I used to go at them with my umbrella. They usually ran away. All Philistines are cowards at heart.'

Much of
Summer's Lease
goes on in the mind of the central character, a bothered housewife whose life takes on a new dimension during an Italian holiday. This made it a hard book to dramatize but thanks to the director and cameraman and an extraordinary cast I think the television version worked well. The book contains a lecherous old journalist, author of an appalling column called Jottings, which he fills with random and frequently pretentious thoughts. Haverford Downs insists on joining the family holiday and does his best to shock his grandchildren. Grandchildren are now, of course, quite unshockable, so he has to be content with shocking his boring solicitor son-in-law, which is rather too easy, and his daughter Molly, who is not quite so vulnerable. To my surprise and total delight, John Gielgud agreed to play Haverford, a consummation I had never hoped for when, a myopic eleven-year-old boy, I had sat in the stalls and heard the handsome and troubled student prince say, ‘Nymph, in thy orizons be all my sins remembered', the line that always brought tears to my father's eyes.

I had got to know John Gielgud a little since we had met at Tony Richardson's London house. Emily was a baby then and we had brought her with us in her carrycot and left her in a spare bedroom. We were lugging this pink plastic box out of the front door when Gielgud saw us and said, ‘Why on earth didn't you leave your baby at home? Were you afraid of burglars?'

The great tragedian became a great comic actor; this is understandable because of the number of jokes in
Hamlet
and
King Lear
(Macbeth's ambition ruled out a sense of humour). The wartime
The Importance of Being Earnest
has gone down in history because of the way Edith Evans said the word ‘handbag'; it was equally notable for Gielgud's wonderfully serious-comical performance as John Worthing. His understated comedy and immaculate timing became apparent to cinema audiences with Tony Richardson's
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, in which he acted Lord Raglan. He had some, although not much, previous experience of war scenes and horses. He played King Louis of France in the film of
Becket
and played it on horseback. The director told him he would say the line and then the horse would move one pace forward. At the first take he said the line, of course impeccably, but the horse remained immobile. By the seventh take the horse had still not moved on cue, or at all. Then a puzzled Gielgud asked the director, ‘Do you think the animal
knows?
'

The young Gielgud had the talent of all the Terrys (‘poor lachrymal glands, you know') of crying at will. His movements were less certain; his first drama teacher said he walked like a ‘cat with rickets', and a hostile critic said, I'm sure without justification, ‘Mr Gielgud means absolutely nothing from the waist down.' But although he was never an athletic actor like Olivier, he arrived on the set of
Summer's Lease
at the age of eighty-five with a straight back, blue eyes bright with curiosity, chain-smoking and bubbling with reminiscences: ‘You know Marlene Dietrich played me records of her concerts which consisted solely of applause?'; ‘Elisabeth Bergner in
As You Like It
made Olivier film his scenes with Rosalind entirely by himself so she could work out how to upstage him'; ‘Tynan said I only had two gestures: the left hand up, the right hand up. What did he want me to do, bring out my prick?'; ‘Another critic, James Agate, came round to see me during the interval when I was playing Macbeth and said, “I've come to congratulate you now; by the end of the performance I'll probably have changed my mind!” '

During the filming Gielgud was taken ill and had to be flown to England for a small but necessary operation. He was soon back, as straight-backed and elegant, smoking and talking as energetically, as before. He had a scene with Chaliapin's son, who was also over eighty and played an aged Italian count with whom Haverford Downs gets into bed by mistake. ‘Do you think,' Gielgud asked with genuine concern, ‘the old boy will be able to remember his lines?'

We had a party scene to shoot that would require working all night in the garden of the huge rose-pink and floodlit Villa la Vignamaggio near Greve in Chianti. The Italian assistant shouted, ‘
Silenzio
,
giriamo!
' and the English assistant called, in more apologetic tones, ‘Settle down now, we
are
shooting.' Word went out on the walkie-talkies and, on dark and distant roads, the shrill cries of Fiats and the falsetto solos of buses were silenced. Only films provide a writer with a chance of stopping the traffic. When we broke for supper, and the extras made a concerted rush for the catering van, I sat on the terrace with John, who had just been reading a book about Lord Lucan. ‘Could you really get someone to do a murder for £3,000?' he asked with genuine curiosity. ‘I suppose Donald Wolfit might almost have paid that to get rid of me. He did
hate
me so much.'