The girls who came to skate. They were students, or squatters from the Boulevard des Philosophes, wearing cropped T-shirts with Bread Not Bombs, and Battle of Seattle, and Barbie Sucks Cocks in Hell. And as they dipped and swung their hips and shoulders, inventing circuits of zeros and eights, I thought, frankly, is there any young woman you wouldn’t? And why not? And for that matter, why not the Guinness in the Colombo?
The Jenkins family, from the early days when Burton was still a Jenkins, would go at least twice every Sunday to Bethel, one of three chapels in the village of Pontrhydyfen. And then, when everyone else had gone home, the Jenkinses would stay behind to clean the floor. Richard despised the harshness of the Welsh Baptist soap, but back home at Dan-y-Bont he’d entertain the family at tea-time by repeating the sermon of the day. Already, in the proud melancholy of his youth, Burton could echo in his minor-key voice the wide variety of Thou Shalt Nots.
No games. Richard Burton at scrums, waiting for a back-row to creep round the blind side, then Boom!
No theatre. That first opening night in the West End, stealing the show from Gielgud, just in the way he used a broom.
No smoking. Behind the Co-op, from the age of eight. No drinking. While singing Camelot with Julie Andrews on Broadway, a bottle of vodka for the matinee and another for the adults in the evening. No fornicating. From the earliest days with Stanley Baxter in Streatham’s Palais de Danse, with Irish nurses, usherettes, shopgirls, actresses and sweet little kickers from the chorus. Sex with Ophelia coming back from Stratford, in his car as big as a boat. No fighting. After a gallon of beer and a day-return to the Arms Park, essential brawls in London, with Londoners (why? Because they’re there, bach). No poetry. Except plainstyle, which was emphatically not the preferred style of the young Burton as he bounced from pub to Soho pub in a living proclamation of The Green Fuse That Drives the Flower.
Richard Burton was guilty of all the sins responsible for the ruination of mankind and the degradation of the soul, and at the age of thirty-five, next year, he was condemned by name in L’Osservatore della Domenica, the weekly newspaper of the Vatican City.
But that was next year. For now, Burton still had a painful memory of the facial pustules and boils sent as frequent cautions from God, so fierce and long-lived he gave each of them names. Rhyd ap Llewelyn, and a hot resilient carbuncle on his neck, known to its friends as R. S. Thomas.
The pockmarks would stay with Burton all his life, as reminders of the many things he did that he shouldn’t, that he knew he shouldn’t, but that anyway he did. For how else was he supposed to cope? He’d taken on too much, or the wrong struggle, and had always to grapple with the several lives he conducted at once, knowing anyway he was going to die. So why bother about the boils? Why not return, with added insolence, the condescending stare of Calvin?
I jumped up, throwing away the newspaper, brandishing Burton’s leg-bone open to the naked eye.
No one noticed. I flourished and shook it. No one. I held it like a detached umbrella handle, then balanced it on the end of my finger like a stick for the spinning of plates. Then like a swagger-stick. I jammed it between my teeth. Nobody cared. I laughed out loud, and ran in the direction of the flat, the leg-bone tucked under one arm like a rugby ball. I sidestepped a man in a suit, and utterly bamboozled another, throwing an outrageous dummy to a flying winger who wasn’t even there.
Helena was so unhappy, so unhappy and strong. I’d made her very unhappy, but that I was going to fix. An amendment was in order for today’s schedule of music. In place of our Anglican and earthbound arrangements of the Nunc Dimittis, we would now be singing an extra hymn, Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer, to the tune of Cwm Rhondda, blasting directly skywards and with added descant on the second bread of heaven. Money was no object. We were going all the way to Casa Kimberley, all the way to the moon.
*
For the bones of famous people, Switzerland is the centre of the universe. They are the country’s greatest natural resource, where Europe comes to die.
At Fluntern in Zurich, for example, only two stones down from Joyce, almost his neighbour, was the Italian Nobel prize-winner Elias Canetti (1905–1994). On the way to Kilchberg and Thomas Mann (1875–1955), the bone tourist could divert to Küssnacht on the Zürichsee, for the psychiatrist and analyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Called or not called, was Jung’s chosen inscription, God will be present. As with Davy, the grave looked quite undisturbed, despite the knee-bone in clingfilm in my kitchen cupboard.
The celebrity dead were a rich seam which ran right through the country, from Zermatt to the Ticino border, where for bones the village of Ronco could be highly recommended, not least for Paulette Goddard (1914–1990) and Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970). And at the end of the day, as dusk fell, there might still be time for Herman Hesse (1877–1962), on the sunlit slopes of Montagnola.
I drove Helena out along the lake. After several hours’ sleep, she was more like her old self, though her old self in a rotten mood. She sat hunched inside the seat-belt in her puffa, staring across the flat black water.
I said: ‘We should never have split up. It was a mistake.’
‘Not now, Jay.’
‘People make mistakes. And they get back together. It happens all the time.’
‘You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘Geneva’s made you all disjointed. All get up and go.’
‘I’m getting my act together.’
‘Oh yes? And where does that leave us?’
‘I want to show you something.’
Our first stop was Corsier-sur-Vevey, across the lake from Evian where blue and white mountains rose sharply against the pink label of the mid-afternoon sky. The small Corsier cemetery was a little miracle, a treasure-trove, and we walked along each row of stones, sometimes stopping, then moving on.
‘What exactly is this in aid of?’
‘Look. Queen Ena of Spain.’
After Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, inventor of Esperanto, after Oona and Charlie Chaplin, we were ambushed by James Mason (1909–84 Never say in grief you are sorry he is gone, rather say in thankfulness you are grateful that he was). It was the gloomy English film-actor, of course it was, but my stomach still hollowed, thinking only of myself.
‘I hate it when that happens,’ Helena said, stopping at James Mason with her arms crossed. ‘That always spooks me out.’
Her family name was Byczynski. Helena Byczynski, from Eastbourne in Sussex. I admired the curve of her dark eyelashes, the twitch at the corner of her mouth. She even had a sense of humour, and this was the beginning of a great, great love story, Burton and Taylor, Mason and Byczynski. Helena would teach me how to live, and wasn’t that the point of getting together, with anyone? With Helena I’d have the courage to outbid Onassis, buy the world’s biggest diamond, live on a yacht, write a book, meet as equals with Coward and Bacall and the Duchess of Windsor, or I supposed their modern-day equivalents.
I looked closely at James Mason’s grave. This business wasn’t as straightforward as Moholy seemed to think. And Rifka knew that. It was trickier than a technical problem to be solved with practice and the right tools. It was essential to be emotionally prepared, defended. You had to have the attitude, the brash and the danger. Women loved the danger.
We drove the short distance to the quiet village of Tolochenaz, in the hills above the lakeside town of Morges. I parked the van at the Audrey Hepburn Pavilion, a new building which housed a small museum dedicated to the memory of the actress. The clouds had cracked apart, and this was a beautiful country, green and blue, with snow in the distance in the mountainous upper air.
Audrey Hepburn was buried alone, further up the hillside. As we climbed the winding path, I really wanted to believe, in agreement with the museum in the Pavilion, that some people were stars, kissed on the cheek by God. It could happen to anyone, born with some extra quality not inherited or learnt, but given, like rake-thin Audrey with her radiant smile, the princess of wish-fulfilment in a white
Givenchy gown.
We stood either side of Hepburn’s isolated grave. Some of us were special, with special missions in life. I mentioned to Helena, in a casual kind of way, in this quiet and unfrequented place, looking down at the most simple of stones, that in the whole world there could hardly be an easier way to make serious money than by digging up the famous dead.
Especially in a country like Switzerland, where there were many famous dead people, and hardly any police.
‘You can’t dig up Audrey Hepburn,’ Helena said.
I was expecting her to say that. ‘Nobody would ever know.’
‘She’s a woman. She’s suffered enough.’
Besides, it would be scandalous. Audrey was everyone’s favourite plot: I am a princess. But nobody knows it. She was an angel with a twenty-inch waist, elegant to her December end and so frail and wide-eyed at the death that she liked to be brought to this very same hillside, where the feathering of her breath in the mountain air reminded her that she was still alive. Hers wasn’t a story which could end happily in Moholy’s catalogue, followed by a sideboard in a secretive magnate’s study.
‘That’s for mere mortals,’ Helena said, ‘for dead white males.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Some of those others we saw. I wouldn’t have minded digging them up.’
‘Really?’
Helena winced, and sat down on Hepburn’s flat recumbent. With her feet on the grass beside it, she loosened the laces of her boots.
‘I’m knackered,’ she said. ‘Definitely not the woman I once was. Where’s that bread?’
We’d stopped for some bread and salami in the village, and we ate it on Audrey Hepburn. Helena cross-legged, me with my legs out in front, feet in the grass. All around us were the first purple crocuses of spring, though Helena said they weren’t crocuses, they were bulbecottes, or some such. I was hoping for further small-talk about dead people. There was no one about, apart from us, and we’d also been alone in Corsier. It wasn’t as if anyone actually cared.
‘Well, why not?’ she said, pushing me off the stone with her feet. She spread out her puffa, and lay back with her hands behind her head. ‘The faith is disappearing, isn’t it?’ She bit into an apple and looked up at high-flying clouds banked like cliffs, England in the sky.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose it is.’
‘It is in Geneva. First the churches go, then the graveyards. Graveyards can’t last. It’s a land issue.’
‘Not a life-after-death issue?’
‘Be serious.’
Helena saw it how it was, to an ordinary person not in thrall to outmoded notions of good and evil. Land was increasingly precious, and the less we believed in life after death, the more likely it was that cemeteries would be some of the first land we thought of claiming back. Like here, and in Corsier-sur-Vevey.
‘Alpine meadows, sunshine, big white jagged mountains. It’s a perfect location for executive villas.’
‘It’s a kind of recycling,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘Oh, sure. There’s nothing ghoulish about it. In the least.’
Helena stood up, and flattened down the thighs of her jeans. She heeled off her walking-boots, and watched the ripple of her toes in their white cotton socks. Then she peeled off the socks, and walked in delicate circles over the wind-dried grass, pointing her toes, her feet flattening into one ordained footprint after another.
‘Spot on,’ she said, ‘and to placate the dead, should that be necessary, some of the proceeds from each white male can go to a decent cause. Something relevant.’
Right. She was so right. Some of the money from Humphry Davy, for example, we’d give to research into bronchitis and emphysema, to the continuing benefit of mine victims. The bones of Joyce would pay for English reading and writing lessons at the camp for refugees. Charlie Chaplin would fund an Alpine tour for the Sunshine Variety Club. Sweet Audrey. Even Audrey, if it ever came to that, wouldn’t mind (the angel) if the sale of her bones supported orphaned children in those blasted outposts of the earth she liked to visit as United Nations special ambassador for peace.
‘Theologically,’ Helena said, ‘it’s watertight.’
She was concentrating on picking a small purple flower with her toes. At the third attempt she made it, and limping, favouring the foot with the flower, she brought it over. She lifted it towards me, and I took the flower of the mountain as she loomed above me, the sudden sun behind her head in a spreading corona of light, and I had to shade my eyes.
‘You mean theoretically,’ I corrected her, having also thought it through. But I knew what she meant. It was acceptable to dig up dead people. She was my Elizabeth Taylor, who could match me in my danger. We were the desperate duo, life-long partners in crime.
She knelt down in front of me and took the collar of my shirt in her fists. ‘Jay, don’t go weird on me.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t talk about digging up dead celebrities.’
‘Theoretically, the money earned could improve the lives of the living. You said so yourself.’
‘It’s body-snatching. It’s barbaric.’
‘Well,’ I said, putting my hands round her back and pulling her towards me, hugging her close and tight so she couldn’t see my face. ‘I didn’t actually mean it, of course I didn’t.’ Her small clenched fists were still on my neck, a hard and unyielding obstruction between us. ‘As if I actually meant it. That would be ludicrous. Barmy. No one in their right mind would even consider it.’
No, they wouldn’t. And why should I be different from anyone else?
The more drinks I drunk or drank, the more my left eyelid lowered. And I developed a nervous twitch in my cheek. We were sitting in a restaurant somewhere near the lake, Helena and I, the two of us back in the city and celebrating the fact that I was going to have a baby with the most beautiful woman in the world. Who’d come to find me. And also the fact that I was in my right mind, the same as everyone else, with no intention whatsoever of digging for the dead.
Any more of the dead.
I ordered another half-litre of Swiss white wine, filled my tiny Swiss wine glass, drank it, then filled it again. This was vengeful drinking, as if sobriety had let me down. It was a mistake ever to have flinched from cigarettes, excessive alcohol, and casual sex. In exchange for restraint, I’d been hoping for greater brain-power, the better to assess my own place in a universe full of extraordinary stories about the infinite variety and watchfulness of gods. I now deserved a lapse, because the gods were always having lapses the other way, when I understood practically nothing.
I refilled my glass, and drank, and waited for the miracle. No faith or intelligence was required. Only swallowing, a brief period of standing by, and then all the benefits of a clean and economical escape from the self.
It was commonly agreed that Richard Burton was a genius who failed, but that was a nonsense. Either you were, or you weren’t. In every area of his life, except perhaps when he was sitting quietly in his Céligny library with a book, no, especially then, Burton was someone who was consistently making and reinventing himself. The strain was intolerable, and one more Bloody Mary, one more bottle of vodka, might always banish the fear that the essential Burton was somehow inadequate.
I felt an increasing remorse for bringing him back, but knew of an age-old remedy for feelings such as these. With the base of my glass I traced some curves on the table, and gradually the miracle began to happen. The past was forgettable. Now and in the future, all things on earth were possible.
It wasn’t just the wine. We’d been somewhere for aperitifs, and then somewhere else for more aperitifs. It was a mild evening in Geneva, and we sat outside at pavement tables where I acted suave and self-contained, which for me was odd, but then I wondered what it actually meant to act oddly. Every life, from one angle or another, was acting oddly, and tonight I was just another poser on the pavement with a drink. And then we went somewhere else for aperitifs, and because there was no
Miner’s Arms where swarthy men in flat caps burst into spontaneous renditions of Sosban Fach, I decided on the Blackout Club, in the Paquis.
I coughed, and walked Helena to the bar (just the one, just a quick pick-me-up), and ordered a sherry, on ice. We turned to have a good look at the bar’s representative sample of Geneva’s party people, middle-aged diplomats and Lithuanian women in states of undress between seventeen and thirty. The men were in suits, or catalogue casual, and in one corner some lucky Arabs, insensible to the restraints of Calvin, were thoroughly enjoying themselves. The girls from the cold Baltic preened and shimmied. They had all the right triangles.
At the restaurant, over a pink linen tablecloth, I was charming. I recited some poetry from my standard repertoire (All the world’s a stage, I think it was that). Then my party piece to be or not to be, but backwards.
Helena had already heard it. I’d forgotten that. At first, she hardly drank at all. In the old days, I seemed to remember, she used to like her drink, especially when dressed up, as she was tonight. She was in black, but gloriously, like a widow after murdering her husband. Her new dress started (or ended) just below her shoulders and finished (or began again, going up again) just above her knees. It peaked at the hips and bust, not unlike a similar dress, in blue, on a blonde girl sitting behind Helena and to the right. I made eyes at her, but let’s be fair. She was making eyes at me too, and it seemed highly unlikely that after Helena there would ever be any more women, or even any more wives. I drank another glass of wine, and alleluia the miracle again, get set for the marriage of the century.
I was sitting forward, elbows on the table, chin on the backs of my hands. Helena swatted away my arm so my chin nearly banged my plate.
‘I think you’ve had enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’
Big girls with small breasts. Small girls with big breasts. Big girls with small breasts. Small girls with big breasts. I found myself travelling in a large object commonly known as a bus.
Inside the flat, Helena said she was bushed. I think that’s what she said, so I sat down on the edge of the double bed, and bounced up and down.
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