Slipstream (39 page)

I was so entirely immersed in the present of each day that I didn’t notice how many we’d spent together, until one morning Laurie said, ‘We have a train to catch in an hour. We
must go back and pack.’ We did this, and an hour later we were on the train travelling north. We had each bought a large flagon covered in basketry that held the equivalent of fourteen
bottles of wonderful sherry. Laurie had his guitar, and I’d bought two white embroidered shirts – one for Cathy and one for myself. We were far more encumbered than when we had set
out.

Hours went by on the train. We sat opposite each other, and I began to lose the present, to think with a kind of desperate sadness of the future when this idyll would end. I longed to be lying
with Laurie – ached with wanting him. He knew this, although I said nothing. ‘We’ll get off at the next station.’ It was Orléans. We spent a night in a hotel there,
and the next morning went on to Paris where we spent our final night. We had been careful with money and I had a little left. I remembered a small, excellent restaurant in the rue du Cherche Midi
where Michael and I used sometimes to lunch. They specialized in
raie
, skate, with a delectable light sauce. I took Laurie to lunch there – the first time I’d ever taken anyone
to a restaurant – and he was suitably impressed. The
patron
was the
chef, a huge tall man who spoke in a very quiet, greedy voice, as though his culinary art and
our appreciation of it were sacred.

We went back in the train, the ferry and the train again to Victoria Station. There, Laurie stopped at a slot machine from which you could tap out a luggage label on to thin metal. ‘Isabel
I love y’ he wrote before the tape ran out. I have it still. After I’d dropped him in Elm Park Gardens, I sat clutching it. I’d had two weeks of unalloyed happiness, so why should
I cry? It had been lovely and it was over. I wanted to write to Cathy, thanking her for her part in this, but I knew that Laurie would have been incensed. Taking me away had been
his
decision; he wouldn’t allow her a role in it. I did write to Laurie, to thank him.

It wasn’t the end of our friendship. We continued to meet, the three of us, and Cathy, whom I grew to love and appreciate more and more, never changed her attitude to me. In all the years
after this I only had one row with Laurie, when he kicked my cat out of his way, and took offence when I objected. Eventually I said sorry. Years later, I got a postcard of a Mathew Smith painting
on the back of which he’d written, ‘I still think of you with rapture.’ I have that as well. In fact, we continued to write to each other, though often after long intervals of
silence, for the rest of Laurie’s life.

In the autumn I began writing again.

For some time I’d had the idea of writing a novel whose theme was to be what people could change about themselves and what was immutable. I’d put this notion on the back of an
envelope and shoved it into my desk, where it had sat for months like a fuse waiting to be ignited by thought. I have never been much good at thinking about
how
to set about structure or
plot, or indeed the people who are to inhabit it. But I’d begun to discover that if an idea lay in the back of my mind little by little some flesh started to cover its bones.

Meanwhile there was still work to be done on
Bettina
, and I was still working every other week at Chatto. I was also doing a certain amount of television; book programmes were more
plentiful in those days. On one I was asked to interview Laurie, and he was asked to recite his poem ‘Apples’: he got it wrong and got stuck and I had to prompt him. I was worried
he’d be cross about this – when we had played dominoes in Spain and he lost I never heard the end of it – but he chose to be flattered that I knew the poem by heart. I was also
asked to appear on
Table Talk
, a political programme, where we all had lunch, then listened to the one o’clock news and proceeded to discuss its content. I am only mildly a political
animal and was picked because the producer wanted one woman on the programme who wasn’t left wing.

The Long View
was published in the spring of 1956. It was a Book Society Choice, which boosted its sales. I also got a number of good reviews. Jonathan Cape was so pleased that he said he
wanted to give a party for me. I told him I hated drinks parties. What kind of party would I like? A party with food and if possible dancing. I should have it. Would my friends
be able to come? They would. How many? As many as I liked.

The party started at nine and my friends did come, and there was food, and I remember one incident. A tall, good-looking man came up to me and said, ‘I suppose you know that this party is
as much for me as it is for you.’ I said I was sorry, I hadn’t known that, and asked his name. It was Ian Fleming.

Having a book published that was a modest success changed several things. I had more money, and all sorts of people began asking me to dinner. I think it was at Stephen and Natasha
Spender’s that I got to know Cyril Connolly much better, but I can’t remember how I met John Davenport, a critic and friend of many in the artistic community. I’d heard about him
from Michael Ayrton, who said he combined great physical strength with a phenomenally active and well-informed mind. He’d once seen John pinning two six-foot American soldiers to the ground,
a gigantic hand on each throat, while he growled, ‘
Never
let me hear you say,“Who the hell is Henry James?”again.’ Michael also told me that John had a passion for
music and that when he’d come into some money he’d spent it all on hiring a string quartet to play privately for him in his house. I didn’t see very much of John, although he used
to ring up quite a lot, chiefly to discover whether Cyril was there. They took to playing a kind of game, having recently fallen out because John had given Cyril’s fragment of a new novel,
published in
Horizon
, a bad review. ‘I suppose
he
’s there,’ John would say, ‘wasting your time when you ought to be writing. Indolence is very infectious, you
know – you could easily catch it.’ I saw more of Cyril. He was at a loose end having divorced Barbara Skelton – whom I think he still loved – and was not getting on with the
fragment. He was writing a piece every week in the
Sunday Times
in which he reviewed a non-fiction book, and he used to give me meals in very posh restaurants, and sometimes came to
Blomfield Road. Once he brought his ring-tailed
lemur to stay. She was an enchanting creature. She roamed the garden eating all the buds off my lilac, but her beauty and agility
made up for her depredations. She had a benign expression and looked slightly surprised at whatever happened to her. She seemed fond of Cyril, but I balked at the idea of his leaving her with me
for the night. Her habit of sitting on the back of a sofa to shit, even though Cyril explained that, to her, the sofa was really a branch of a high tree, wasn’t reassuring. In the end he took
her off in a taxi.

Cyril was the most wonderful company. Norman Douglas’s remark that everything was worth talking about certainly applied to him. He made me laugh and I loved him for that. We were both
slightly anxious with each other – I because I felt I must bore him with my ignorance. But he was definitely uneasy with me. This might have been partly because Stephen Spender had told Cyril
that he thought I’d make him a suitable wife – a prospect that he might well have found disturbing, but it also had to do with his chronic sense of insecurity, I think. He must have
known that he was exceptionally gifted, but I think his hatred of his own appearance obscured much else.

He once took me to stay for a weekend with a friend of his, a farmer who lived in a large house in Kent. The house is shadowy to me now, but I do remember being struck dumb at the sight, in a
small study, of a portrait that my host said was of Jane Austen. Cyril’s friend said he was a relative of hers. At dinner the first night, a young couple who lived on the estate were the only
guests. It transpired that Edward, our farmer host, was romantically in love with the wife but could only see her with guests and her husband. The evening was a sticky one, and after the girl and
her husband had gone, Edward and Cyril spent ages plotting how Edward could contrive to be alone with her. They sounded like two characters in a Shakespearean comedy, and at any moment I expected
one of them to suggest exchanging clothes so that
nobody
in the ensuing drama would recognize them.

I think in Cyril I encountered yet another man whose brilliance
of mind, whose sophistication of taste was balanced – perhaps
un
balanced would be more accurate
– by some essential immaturity that caused him both confusion and pain, and often confounded the people who crossed his path. I had yet to learn that this wasn’t unusual: I still
expected people to be of a piece. In the time I knew him well I enjoyed his company with its rich mixture of information and entertainment.

However, I was sometimes taken aback by his taste – he wrote off Mozart with the exception of the operas – and I found other aspects of him unnerving. He was a sybarite – liked
whenever possible to eat and drink beyond his means. He was a romantic and was acutely sensitive. He
was
indolent, as John had suggested, and used his great capacity for writing as little as
he could get away with. He could be peevish and malicious, when his face would become that of a fat, angry baby.

But he also possessed the gift of serious appreciation of the arts and particularly of good writing. This last doesn’t sound particularly striking, but in fact it’s much rarer than
generally it’s presumed to be. Our relationship gently ground to an unpainful halt after several months.

There was one final incident at the Jane Austen house in Kent. Edward, our smitten host, flirted a good deal with me on the evening before we left and finally blurted out, ‘I’d do
anything in the world for you. Just say what you want.’

That kind of remark always made me want to tease. I thought quickly. He was a farmer. ‘I should like a whole lorryload of farm manure delivered to my house.’ And I watched his face
for shock or at least chagrin. But he simply said, ‘It shall be done.’

And it was. The following week a lorry arrived and I became the proud owner of a steaming heap of nourishment for my garden.

I’d got my next novel into some sort of shape in my mind. But again I left it. Reading and editing, television, radio and writing short pieces for various magazines ate
up my time.

I went to parties that Olivia Manning gave, lunches mainly for writers, where I met such luminaries as Stevie Smith and Ivy Compton-Burnett. I once shared a taxi with Ivy,
and as Olivia lived in St John’s Wood and I in Maida Vale, Ivy conceded I should be dropped first. She spent the entire ride we had together calculating what would be a fair division of the
cab fare. I was quite frightened by her. In appearance she looked and dressed like an old-fashioned nanny on her day off. She had bird’s nest hair in an invisible hair net, and she wore a
flannel skirt and jacket with white blouse, and double-strap black shoes. There was something steely about her that made me feel extremely shy.

Olivia introduced me to old-fashioned roses, and she had a Siamese cat called Faro whom she adored. I was also regularly asked to Hamish Hamilton’s dinner parties. He was one of Jonathan
Cape’s great publishing rivals. His friends called him Jamie. These dinners were generally star-studded and I met there, among others, Princess Marina of Kent, Somerset Maugham, who was
extremely nice to me, writing me a letter about
The Long View
, which he had bought and read, and Cass and his son, Michael Canfield, the latter then married to Lee Bouvier. Cass was running
Harper & Row in New York, and for several years after I met him, he used to take me out to dinner and dancing at the Four Hundred Club. He was a famous wit and raconteur and was hugely
entertaining.

I had one or two followers, none of whom affected me except with the unease that unreciprocated feelings seem to induce. It always brought out the worst in me – a combination of guilt and
irritation, often turning me into a sulky bully, followed by disastrous lapses when, ashamed of myself, I tried to be kind. Once this involved actually getting into bed, which just made matters
worse. I learned not to do that again, at least. One day, I suppose I thought, someone wonderful will turn up. Meanwhile I had many friends and I was earning enough to keep myself, if I was
careful. I saw a lot of Colin. I loved the way he used language. ‘When Uncle Ronnie turned a Catholic, he became wilfully broad-minded’ –
that sort of thing.
But in general I was neither happy nor unhappy, I was arranging my life in such a way as to shut out the possibility of starting the next novel; a prospect I dreaded since I knew now the toil and
anxiety involved.

Then, on a Sunday morning in midwinter, the telephone rang. It was Romain Gary, a French novelist with whom I’d once dined with Arthur. He looked like a character from a Russian novel
– dark hair, dark moustache and mournful eyes set in a face of faintly olive-skinned pallor. He and Arthur had discussed French literature and politics, and I’d eaten my dinner quietly
as Arthur liked me to do – ‘seen and not heard’. In the middle of the meal Arthur had suddenly cried out irritably, ‘
Vy
do you stare at her like that?
Vy
?’ and Romain, clearly embarrassed, denied that he’d been staring – not at all.

Now he was saying that he had something he particularly wanted to tell me – could he come to my house?

There wasn’t much to eat but, having told him that, I said he was welcome to what lunch there was.

Half an hour later he arrived. I took him into my sitting room and sat down, assuming that he would too. But he stood, leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down at me. Then, in a
matter-of-fact manner, he said he’d been madly in love with me since the first moment he saw me. He’d not approached me earlier because he’d known that the affair with Arthur had
caused me much unhappiness, but he’d been told I was over it now. ‘You may not know, but I am to be posted by the Quai d’Orsay to be consul in Los Angeles and I desire you to come
with me.Don’t worry – the Quai d’Orsay, who would much prefer me to have a regular mistress, are prepared to ship your furniture and anything else you want over there. I think you
would be very happy with me and we should have a good life together. Now, let us not speak of this any more for the present. Let us have lunch.’