Slipstream (49 page)

Shortly after we moved in, we realized that all wasn’t well with Philip and Martin. They were at schools in South London where they were miserable and truanting. I suggested to Kingsley
that perhaps they’d be better off with us, and after some consultation with Hilly, it was decided that they would.

And so I embarked upon the extraordinarily difficult business of being a stepmother. I’d had experience of this already, having had my father’s second wife ranged against me, but I
hadn’t been ultimately vulnerable. My daughter had a stepmother who’d always behaved impeccably, being direct, supportive and friendly to me. You might have thought that these different
experiences would have taught me enough. They hadn’t.

The boys arrived, but hostility was very apparent. They were pleased to be with their father, but it was clear that they felt I was the cause of their parents’ break-up. I decided that all
I could do to begin with was to feed them well, and regularly, and to be in every other practical way as reliable as I could manage. I thought that even if they continued to dislike me, some kind
of trust might come about. What I didn’t do was make any attempt to form any kind of relationship with Hilly. Our feelings then for each other were of mutual fear and dislike, but it might
have been possible to lay these aside and put the boys first. Kingsley was no help in this.

A salient characteristic in the Amis family was passivity. They weren’t initiators; they let things happen and resented or regretted them; they didn’t acknowledge
that the consequences were their responsibility. I think Kingsley, when he thought about it, was assailed by guilt. He distanced himself from Hilly, and he gave the boys money to appease them. He
simply wanted everybody to settle down so that he could write his books in peace and enjoy himself when he wasn’t working.

The trouble about bringing up children is that it doesn’t begin and end by making things nice for them. Some sort of moral direction has to be given. It wasn’t long before I found
myself in the unenviable position of being the irritating killjoy, the tiresome prig. We acquired , for example, a second-hand bar-billiards table for the conservatory, the kind where we had to put
a shilling in a slot to play a game. I suggested this money should be for a charity, and everyone agreed, but quite soon I found that there never seemed to be any money in it. Of course the boys
had found a way to take it. Not important, but they had to stop. When I approached Kingsley about it, he simply said, ‘Well, it isn’t very much money,’ as though the amount was
the point. This was in front of the boys, so they
knew
I was a prig, and their father was a good sort.

These sorts of things kept hostility flourishing. They sulked with me, were nasty behind my back, and I minded very much. Fortunately, both the boys really liked Monkey, who was very good with
them and, indeed, became a kind of uncle. They teased him with affection, and he taught them to play games. They both had their father’s sense of humour – Phil, particularly, was a
brilliant mimic – and these things lightened the atmosphere.

They had been, by then, to so many different schools that it was decided a crammer might be the best way to ensure they passed the statutory exams. So they went to Davis, Laing and Dick in
Holland Park. It was a long time before I realized that they weren’t actually
going
. It was the time of Mods and Rockers, and the boys were mods – winkle-pickers and all. On
Saturdays they used to go out
on the town in search of girls. Once, having got stuck with a couple they didn’t like, they gave us an insight to their world. ‘What
did you do?’ I asked, and Phil answered casually, ‘Oh, we threw water at them down some stairs.’ I made a sitting room for them with their hi-fi in a room adjoining our
kitchen-dining room. There was a lot of pop music and it smelt of hot socks.

Things came to a head one Christmas, their first with us, and I’d tried to make it a good one. I’d bought them each a gold wrist-watch with their initials on the back, and they also
had money from Dad and stockings. Black faces. ‘All we want are the presents,’ Phil said. I lost my nerve and went away to cry.

When I came back, Phil said, ‘We’ve been rotten to you,’ and Mart said, ‘Yes, we have.’ I think this time Kingsley
had
talked to them, and it showed me how
much talking was needed between us.

Occasionally things worked. We were going to the film of
Othello
, and I discovered that neither of the boys knew the play. I suggested we should all read it aloud together first. Kingsley
was keen, so they agreed.

This was about the time when, finding Martin lounging in a disaffected way, boredom seeping from every pore, I asked him what he wanted to do when he was older. ‘Be a writer,’ he
said.

‘You – a
writer
? But you never read anything. If you’re so interested in writing, why don’t you read?’

He looked at me and said, ‘Give me a book to read then.’ I gave him
Pride and Prejudice
. A little later he came to me and said, ‘Jane, you’ve got to tell me how it
ends.’

‘Of course I won’t. You find out for yourself.’ He argued with persuasive charm, but I felt on firm ground: he was obviously enjoying it. That was when he started to read
properly – a very good moment for me.

This was also a halcyon time for Kingsley and me. He was clearly happy – hardly anxious at all. He got drunk occasionally, but was always friendly. ‘I have such a lovely life with
you!’ he would
say repeatedly. He’d bring me back presents when he’d been out to lunch with the Conquests and other luminaries – a bunch of flowers, two
collages he bought at Heywood Hill, the bookseller, or a complete edition of George Eliot. He would take me out to lunch suddenly, to the Étoile, which he knew I loved. He quite liked going
to dinner parties then, and having them. He hated boring dark socks, so I knitted him eight or nine pairs in brilliant colours. He was incredibly disciplined about his work and was a marvellous
example for me, although I didn’t have the same time to do it.

We had two cats: a black one, Katsika, whom I’d criminally smuggled from Greece years before, and a blue Burmese called Malfi, who became Monkey’s cat and lived in his room. There
used to be advertisements for puppies on sale in the Sunday papers. On Sundays the boys used to come and have breakfast in our bedroom, and one morning I said how much and for how long I’d
wanted a cavalier spaniel – a brown and white one. ‘Let’s go and get one then,’ Kingsley said. By then I’d learned to drive a second-hand Mini – Kingsley
didn’t drive – and we set off for a vicarage in North London. The vicar’s wife had a litter of red ones – rubies. I chose one, a bitch, and we drove home with her sitting,
tiny and dignified, on Kingsley’s knee. We called her Rosie Plush and we all loved her. Mart took her for her first walk on a lead down Edgware Road – ‘She greeted every
bus!’

In the summer Kingsley and I went to Greece. At Princeton he’d become friends with Mike and Mary Keeley. Mike, whose real name was Edmund, was a novelist, a professor of English, and the
translator with Philip Sherrard of Cavafy. Mary was Greek and they spent every summer in Greece. We arranged to meet in Athens.

Kingsley’s fear of flying made travelling far longer, but much more interesting too. We went by train, boat and train to Paris, then caught the night train to Venice – a lovely
old-fashioned service that provided an excellent dinner and was famous for its
eau de vie de framboise
. Arriving at Venice at six a.m. on a hot, misty summer
morning was
magic: the city rose slowly from the sea like a disparate collection of mirages, hazy, sharply delineated, shimmering, glittering, pale and dazzling. A first sight I shall never forget.

Our boat left in the evening, so I parked Kingsley in a bar with newspapers and walked. Kingsley didn’t like sightseeing then, and I was no hand at it. I liked simply to walk and be there.
The canals fascinated me, and I longed to go in a gondola, but we only had enough Italian money for lunch. The boat took two nights to get to Piraeus where Mary Keeley met us. Mike was at a
meeting, she said. We’d have dinner and he’d appear in due course. Mary was wonderfully welcoming, and took us up on to a terrace where we drank, and Kingsley and Mary talked about
friends at Princeton and we waited for Mike.

That was the start of several long, hedonistic holidays with the Keeleys. We spent one of them on their friend Alekko’s
caïque
visiting islands, most of which were still
unspoiled. I particularly remember Naxos, with its lemon groves and wide village streets. In all of the few shops there were dusty bottles of Quitro, a lemon liqueur hardly known even in Athens. It
was cheap – it cost about five shillings – and good and powerful. The captain of the
caïque
was keen on Naxos because his fiancée came from there. We invited her on
board for a swim and lunch, and she wore a flowered dress, white shoes and a handbag, and was accompanied by two brothers as chaperones. She couldn’t swim, as her future husband should not
see her in a bathing dress, even though they were – unknown to her family – lovers. She sat on deck – it was intolerably hot – and watched us rather sadly. One of the
captain’s brothers was there too, a boy of about ten, who swam like an otter and was, the captain said, the Scourge of Athens. I bought him a knife, and when he opened it, he gave a fierce
little scream of pure joy.

One summer, the Keeleys hired a house on Spetses for a month. It was the hottest summer for years. Spetses was reputed to be the hottest island in Greece, and we were told we’d chosen the
hottest house on the island. I’d stand under the cold shower until my long
hair was soaked, then type until it was almost dry, and then I’d repeat the process. In
the evenings we’d walk through the small town beset with rubble – the Greeks always seemed to be building – with the seductive scent of unseen jasmine filling the warm dark air,
and then up a small hill on the crest of which was a restaurant much loved by us all. It served tomato salad and cheese with thick slices of bread, and it was the best tomato salad I’ve ever
eaten. The smallest waiter in the world, the owner’s heir, staggered from table to table in his nappy, laying glasses and plates. Sometimes service was slow because, we were told, the owner
had beaten his wife too much for her to work. There were many and varied reasons for not being a Greek wife.

We spent one summer on Rhodes with the Keeleys and the historian and literary critic Paul Fussell and his wife Betty, herself a historian and food writer. We went to Cos and found there were no
available hotels or
pensions
. Suddenly a smiling man appeared and said, ‘Come with me,’ and we all stayed in his house. He and his wife slept in their double bed in the garden. I
slept on a wooden chest. We weren’t allowed to pay.

We found a small boat willing to take us to Turkey and landed at Bodrum, then a small village with no hotels. We stayed with a farmer who seemed to have one or two of every kind of vociferous
animal all proclaiming their identity at night. The lavatory was an inexpressibly deep and murky hole in the ground into which Paul dropped his expensive leather wallet containing all his money and
credit cards. In the morning we went to a café for coffee and bread, and hanging near its doorway were three or four Turkish robes of satin and velvet; Betty and I each bought one.

We went to Kalimnos – the sponge divers’ island – and stayed in a curious place whose owners seemed to be trying to live up to a mysterious standard. We knew, unprepossessing
as the place was, that it would have been worse if they’d succeeded. Part of one summer we spent on the shores of Skyros where George Seferis was staying. He was ill, but wasn’t allowed
to leave the country to get the
medical attention he needed. He and his wife had a house by the sea, and we stayed in the oldest villa, Xenia, a lovely small place a few yards
from the sea. I wrote the first chapter of
Odd Girl Out
there. We used to spend the evenings with George and his wife, for whom the fishermen used to procure lobsters. I went to see the
memorial to Rupert Brooke for whom I’d had a passion when I was about fourteen, but we never went to the village at the top of the mountain. I never saw the little Skyriot horses which lived
in the mountains all the winter and came down to do farm work and be raced on the sands in the summer. They weren’t ponies, I was told, but real little horses – the strain being of
great antiquity.

One evening Kingsley did the Offenbach can-can piece in fits of uncontrollable laughter and I have a picture of Mike laughing at him. We worked and swam in the daytime, and had long suppers in
the open air, drinking a lot. Once Mary and I put candles in a church to ask that we might both have children. Neither of us managed that. Kingsley had said that if I wanted children he would be
delighted. We even named them. At one point I thought I was pregnant, but I was wrong. I went to a doctor but nothing happened. He said the next thing would be to examine Kingsley, but this
Kingsley refused.

I’ve compressed the Greek holidays. They continued for several years. I remember them as times of particular happiness. Kingsley enjoyed the company of Mike and Mary and subsequently Paul
Fussell. They were also, more importantly, times when we could be alone together, an ingredient vital for middle-aged marriages. During many of those summers the boys went to Spain with their
mother. When they didn’t, Monkey, with his friend Sargy, looked after them. Sargy had decided to give up his job in Oxford, and become a painter. He found himself a room off Tottenham Court
Road and sent himself to Camberwell School of Art. I bought him a heavy pot and taught him to make stew. But he was often with us, and gradually became a part of the family.

Very soon after we moved to Maida Vale we were invited to
dine with Stephen Potter and his new wife, and it was there that we met Dolly and Bobby Burns. He’d been a
distinguished surgeon, now retired, and she was the only daughter of Lord Duveen and, as my brother put it, ‘uncontrollably rich’. Parties were her life’s blood and we instantly
began to be invited to them. There were usually twelve or fourteen people to dinner in Chesterfield Hill, all in full evening dress, and everybody whom Dolly could possibly collect went to
them.