Owning Up: The Trilogy (43 page)

Quentin, Iron Foot Jack and the Countess Duveen confined themselves to seedy cafés chosen for how long you could stay there without buying more than the odd cup of tea. In the pubs, especially The Fitzroy and The Wheatsheaf, I met a less derelict collection. The occasional
borta fide
lion I recognised but never dared approach: old Augustus John with his baleful swivelling eye, Dylan Thomas oozing drink and talking frenetically in his parsonical, obscenity-larded posh Welsh bray. Others seemed more accessible: Maclaren Ross with his cloak and silver-topped cane, Nina Hamnet, rushing impulsively from one watering-hole to another for fear of missing out on something. My old schoolmaster, John Davenport who, depending on how drunk he was, would either hug me warmly or cut me dead, and a variety of queens, anonymous earbenders, young painters, writers and poets, and the more commercially-minded sectors of the armed forces, mostly sailors or guardsmen.

It was a scruffy, warm, belching, argumentative, groping, spewing-up, cadging, toothbrush-in-pocket, warm-beer-gulping world which I found less taxing if also less stimulating than the Surrealist ambience. I slept occasionally with a man who made masks. He had amazingly tragic blue eyes, stubble under his make-up and smelt of pungent but not unpleasant sweat. He lived in Frith Street in a tatty but inventive flat with bare boards, shawls, incense, and his own artefacts grimacing in gilded candle-lit rictus anguish: a setting which twenty years later would have seemed a. commonplace hippy pad, but at the time was, for me at any rate, unique. Here, after the pubs and coffee shops closed, a tough homosexual world gathered to bitch in the accents of Birmingham or Newcastle. As dawn broke we would all collapse in each other’s arms on stained mattresses under grimy blankets which had been ‘liberated’ from hospitals by a skeletal consumptive boy who worked as a porter at the Middlesex. I should say my cousin Paulie was not part of this scene.

However, it was with Paulie that I first discovered the Caribbean Club in Denman Street. This place, a lobby bar and a low but large room with a bandstand at one end, was primarily West Indian, with a few black GIs and some white members, mostly girls of rather painful refinement whom in retrospect I imagine to have been tarts. The owner, Rudi, was one of those between-the-war blacks whose English was exaggeratedly Oxbridge, whose clothes were excessively formal, and who once a night would sing, in the rich baritone of Paul Robeson, such sophisticated night club ballads as ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’. The rest of the music was more jazz-oriented. A trio led by Dick Katz, smiling like Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, played a selection of tunes ranging from Fats Waller to the newly emergent Bebop. Sometimes I would sing a blues, tolerated by the clientele for my gauche sincerity. The man at the door called me ‘Admiral’; the barmaid, as long as I had money to drink with, allowed me to flirt with her. I was eventually given an honorary membership. ‘Now,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ve really made it. I am a member of a London Club!’

Another bed, or in this case two chairs, I found in Margaretta Street, Chelsea, in the room of the Turkish Surrealist poet, Sadi Cherkeshi. Unlike Simon, who tended to put me off by explaining that ‘his mistress’ was staying the night and it would therefore be ‘inconvenient’, Sadi didn’t mind me lying in the dark, ears agog, listening to him screwing his girl. I felt no end of a liberated, tolerant and, to be frank, stimulated creature in this role. In the end, however, it was the household which was to prove more central to my life. At its head was an elderly man called Bill Meadmore who wrote biographies, ghosted memoirs and worked for Customs and Excise. Long-haired and irascible, married to a kindly, quietly realistic, humorous woman called Dumps, he was the progenitor of three daughters and the owner of two unreliable cats. Bill and I found ourselves on immediate terms. Not that we agreed about anything. Bill, despite Sadi and, before him, Simon as lodgers, hated Surrealism and indeed modern art in general. He liked Sickert and, in lieu of the means to buy his paintings, had acquired the work of his followers, in particular those of Clifford Hall, a gruff, bearded man with whom I had many a furious argument stimulated, when there was any danger of it flagging, by Bill’s mischievous intervention. It seemed inevitable that one morning,- on going to the bathroom, I should come upon Quentin Crisp relaxing in an unpatriotically full tub, Bill Meadmore’s being one of those houses where he prepared himself for a sortie up West. Surrealism, Soho, the Caribbean Club, the Meadmores, Quentin, my second cousin – I felt that I had begun to discover, in the seeming chaos of the ‘Smoke’, a secret village. As spring came however, I was to happen upon a very different world.

7

Robin Westgate, the school friend I had been to see on the evening of the day I had first met Simon Watson Taylor, was responsible for introducing me into a milieu far removed from the austere if original morality of the Surrealists or the boozy promiscuity of Soho.

Robin was of a fragile beauty which I had long associated with Wilde’s Dorian Gray and was soon to identify with Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte. His manner was correct, diffident and charming, but his opinions, even on so simple a matter as the weather, while seemingly delivered with clipped precision, were so qualified as to leave the listener unable to decide whether it was fine or not. His parents lived mainly in a manor house in Essex. His mother was what is called well-connected. His father, a retired Major with a moustache, while almost completely silent, somehow managed to project a deeply-grained and melancholic pessimism. I can only remember him addressing one remark to me directly. I had come to see Robin in the Westgate’s
pied-à-terre
in South Kensington and found his father sitting alone in a deck chair in the under-furnished drawing room. I was wearing a cardboard bird’s mask which I had bought in King’s Road and which I believed, in conjunction with my bellbottoms, transformed me fairly convincingly into one of those ‘personages’ from an Ernst collage. Major Westgate looked at me without showing much reaction but eventually asked me, without any real conviction, if I didn’t think that my metamorphosis might be construed as ‘an insult to His Majesty’s uniform’. Before I could answer Robin came in and Major Westgate relapsed into his customary shell.

Mrs Westgate, on the other hand, was the opposite of inhibited. A great beauty with an unfair amount of charm, she would ask my advice about everything, no matter how intimate; a trait which, directed at someone as young and inexperienced as I was, could not but fail to seduce me utterly. Most of the time, however, Major and Mrs Westgate were in Essex but, as Robin was stationed at Chelsea barracks, he stayed in South Kensington when not on duty and I, from time to time, stayed with him.

At school we had never in fact had an affair, but as everybody thought we had, I had gone to no trouble to put the record straight. To be exact I had cast Robin as Bosie to my Oscar, taking it for granted that this role-playing would be to his liking. Now I would be less sanguine. Robin’s ability to fall in with everything or, to phrase it more negatively, his inability to assert himself, makes it difficult to be sure. Yet he had no hesitation in behaving unconven tionally providing someone else made the running, even though the consequences might have proved awkward or even disastrous. For example, commissioned officers were not allowed to associate with enlisted men, yet Robin never put up any objection to appearing in public wearing his Guards’ uniform with me in bellbottoms. We I took considerable liberties, walking up Piccadilly for example arm in arm whilst eating ice-cream cornets and, on another occasion when Robin and a platoon of his men were, according to some ancient tradition, guarding the Bank of England overnight, he even went so far as to ask me to dinner there. It was apparently his privilege to invite a guest to help relieve the tedium of this chore, but the Sergeant who escorted me up to the small but formal dining room, with its regimental silver and excellent wine, made it quite clear that he found an Ordinary Seaman an unacceptably bizarre interpretation of this right.

Much more dangerously, he came with me to an Anarchist meeting in the upper room of a public house where I had accepted an invitation to speak. The Anarchists, now released from prison, were as idealistic as I had hoped and I was completely bewitched by a woman called Marie Louise Berneri, the beautiful daughter of a revolutionary murdered by the Communists, and the wife (or companion as they preferred to call it) of one of the English comrades. She – and indeed all of them – had an unsentimental goodness and a true vision betrayed alas only by the age-old political and/or religious machinery they hoped to dismantle, and by the willing servitude of the slaves they longed to free. Nevertheless, their philosophy was regarded with great suspicion by the authorities in general, and MI5 in particular, and it was completely unacceptable that a member of HM Forces should subscribe to it. This, much later, I was to discover, but at that time, with blind naivety, it never occurred to me that I was doing anything untoward. Yet dangerous as it was for me to declare my allegiance to Anarchism, Robin’s presence, in his smart uniform, was surely far more of a hazard. He sat there, however, as calm as in his mess, listening to my near-tearful histrionics in the name of freedom, and not even flinching when, in what I considered a daring
coup-de-théâtre,
I first played and then smashed a record of the National Anthem I had bought for the purpose in the HMV shop in Oxford Street. Perhaps in Robin’s case it was a profound ennui, possibly inherited from his father, that made him ready to accept whatever anybody proposed. Perhaps it was simply good manners carried to an unprecedented extreme.

Given his parents’ empty flat, we finally went to bed together without, I suspect, much enthusiasm on his part although, for a full decade to come, we would occasionally repeat the experience when the circumstances were right. Later he was to take to girls but, like myself, like many public schoolboys of the period, he was then entirely gay, and his physical beauty was such as to ensure him an immense success, while his good manners prevented him from ever saying no. Meeting him once in the company of the young Lord Montagu, also in the Guards, I took them to tea with David Webster. David looked at them with unconcealed admiration. ‘I don’t know how you do it, dear,’ he murmured to me. ‘Two of the prettiest things in London.’ I glowed with pride.

Robin’s main liaison at the time was with an old Italian baron who didn’t approve of me at all. I was invited for dinner, but as I preached Anarchism and Surrealism non-stop the invitation was not repeated. I was fascinated, however, to see scattered about the rather gloomy, if luxurious, flat a great many signed photographs from the Pope. This fed my fantasies of the sort of Buñuel-like corruption I longed to discover. I breathed in deeply the pot-pourri-scented air and imagined the day of reckoning on the barricades.

Most of Robin’s friends, especially as they seemed to like me, produced no such visions of liberating revolt. In truth, chameleon-like, I fell in instantly with their easy-going manner, revealing just enough of my Anarcho–Surrealist leanings to amuse them. It was in such a mood that one fine spring morning, while I was spending part of a weekend with Robin, we strolled across Hyde Park, along Oxford Street and up Portland Place to meet a friend of his whom he felt sure I would appreciate. It was a sunny morning and the trees in Regent’s Park were just beginning to hint at greenness. We turned into a Nash Terrace and rang the bell of a large cream stuccoed house. A butler answered it, seeming in no way surprised to find a Guards’ officer and an Ordinary Seaman standing on the doorstep. We walked through a hall and got into a lift. The house, Robin explained, belonged to his friend’s parents but he had a top flat in it. We rose five floors and emerged into a rose-pink world where, standing with a Pimm’s in his hand, beautifully dressed, discreetly made-up and smelling divine, was a man whose face, before he had said a word, suggested something witty and outrageous. Robin introduced us and told me his name was Reggie Kestrel.

Reggie was then in his early thirties, which seemed to me quite old, but as he took a great deal of trouble with his appearance he looked much younger. He was so obviously gay that the Services were out of the question but, as he also suffered from flat feet, the authorities had gratefully rejected him on this ground. Now, relieved from the necessity of doing anything, he was devoting his life to pleasure as far as he could manage on what he claimed was an extremely inadequate allowance from his father. He belonged therefore to that class of person whom the post-war press had already begun to refer to as ‘drones’; a category at one time admired or at any rate tolerated, but only minimally less despised than spivs or black-marketeers in the grey dawn of the age of austerity.

His lifestyle, deviation apart, was that of an Edwardian man-about-town. Rising late and bathing long, he eventually sauntered up to the West End to drink hot chocolate in Fortnum’s with his circle. He lunched in Soho, usually at Le Jardin des Gourmets where he would flirt heavily with the waitresses (waiters, due to either their nationality or conscription, were a comparatively rare species), in the hope, usually successful, of cajoling out of them an extra, and illegal, slice of gateau generously ladled with cream. Reggie was childishly greedy and was beginning to develop a small but definitive pot, a phenomenon which, as he was also quite vain, caused him a certain amount of impotent anguish. In the afternoons he would go to the cinema, preferably the Curzon, while his evenings were devoted to drink and sex. Superficially this might appear a rather monotonous way of life but he illuminated and transfigured it through his dazzling wit and sense of fantasy, so that even the most trivial encounter became an excuse for high camp anecdotes in the style of Firbank, his favourite author.

Reggie and I started an affair at once. Physically he was in no way my ideal, but his sense of fun and the sybaritic luxury of his surroundings were more than adequate,compensation. Brought up to standards of adequate middle-class comfort, I was overwhelmed by his silk sheets, handmade shirts, rich ties, innumerable suits, and especially by his bathroom with its huge bottles of Prince Guerlain, French soap (a present from a thoughtful friend who had helped to liberate Paris), and its vast warm towels. Nor was I unimpressed to discover he was an Honourable. His father, patrolling the house under Reggie’s little nest, was a peer of the realm and, despite my knowledge that to a Surrealist and an Anarchist this was not so much irrelevant as deplorable, I found it absurdly glamorous.