'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  Giant locusts fly past the window. I leave a message for Mr Corcus to ring me. While in Tangier someone had given me an introduction and described him as being an Anglicised Jew, whereupon David Herbert had clasped my hand and said, ‘You like them, don’t you, dear?’

  I sit in my hotel room and mope a great deal, going over W.’s cables and official letter written from Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The first cable sent care of Paul Bowles’ postal box number said I was to reconsider his pleas, that he missed me and that I was to rely on him and return to Chester Square and would I cable a reply, which I did:

  Your words become meaningless since every one told you want freedom. Your pleas unconvincing, if not why encourage my going? Disheartened by messiness. Allegations proved. Could one consider you reliable? Flying south tomorrow. Love.

  His next cable conveyed that there would be no recurrence of events, the idea of him wanting freedom was quite farcical and that separations only bred suspicion, ambiguity and propaganda. Would I please telegraph a few nice words? I was not to prepare for a long stay in Morocco and if I liked he would meet me half-way somewhere. The gist of the official letter from Weidenfeld and Nicolson was that on my return to England they hoped I would be prepared to help as a reader and editorial associate on a part-time basis, at a rate of £500 pa. I would have to attend one or two meetings a week, but for the rest I would not have to be based permanently in London. This arrangement could start on February 1. They could quite definitely commit themselves to a contract until the end of the year and at the end of the year the contract could be continued automatically. I was to take this as binding and was to let the firm know, formally, say within the next month or two, at the latest, if I accepted. With kindest regards.

  I wrote:

  Dear George, I am feeling much better and have decided that I would like to take the job as reader at £500 a year, starting from March 1. As I don’t want to go back to England until the weather is warmer, would you send the first manuscript with specimen reader’s report by air to the British Post Office, Tangier? Review books are sent to Malaga and arrive quite regularly, so I don’t see why there should be any difficulty. If you agree to this, would you let me know in the proper manner through the firm, with a contract for a year? I have nothing to read, at the moment, so anything will be welcome. Barbara.

  Hotel Mamounia

  Ramadan. Three in the morning. The hum of people awakening, a blurr of movement and noise. Dogs bark; there is the sound of flutes and of a mob newly risen to action.

  *

  On a walk yesterday, I passed a stream alive with small crabs and bullfrogs, their slimy green heads just protruding out of the water. At six in the evening the sky was a pink violet haze. Standing at his stall, a butcher was chopping entrails surrounded by sleek white cats, their necks craned forward, as they expectantly awaited the drips. A large, fat Arab lady in a white kaftan saw my amusement and her eyes mellowed into a smile behind the blue veil. With great pride, a carpet merchant brought out an old newspaper and from it a prized Chleuh† cloak now only fit for dusters. In a covered yard, an Arab was making tea surrounded by distended goatskins filled with water, the wet, matted hair congealed, and propped on top of each hairy flank was a glass of steaming mint tea, awaiting its owner. It rains and rains. No sun. Grey sky. Giant smuts like black hailstones flit down from the hotel chimney. A fat little bird with a grey-flecked head and long tail like a paper cutter sits on the ledge of the terrace.

  The valet de chambre returns with my shoes.

  ‘Déjà? C’est vite fait.’

  ‘Oui.’ He grins. At the door, he says, ‘You stay here long time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ça depend s’il y a du soleil!’

  ‘Ah oui.’ He nods, his mouth wide open showing very good white teeth.

  ‘You here alone?’ I laugh.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘You not married?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘Ahhhh.’ He sighs with relief. ‘Ça bon.’

  Three things I want to buy here, a Berber bracelet I saw in the souk, a handmade blanket and a Berber necklace in the Hotel vitrine.

  *

  Am debating whether or not to move to a cheaper hotel in the Medina. There is one called the Central, mosaic floors, a courtyard with a banana tree and a bougainvillaea climbing the cedar wood balustrade. Even there it’s not cheap. Five hundred francs a day. I am in the throes of deciding when the valet de chambre brings me some marigolds.

  ‘From me,’ he says.

  Feel far less depressed here than in Agadir, where it really seemed to be a city of the dead. Mr Corcus, rather a disappointment, but very kind, gave me lunch every day and took me to visit Taroudant and a Moorish market. It is still raining. But what a beautiful city. The red ochre, palms and minarets, the snow-capped Atlas mountains, olives and luxury hotel with its beautiful garden of orange groves. Birds hop timidly across the terrace to peck at the brioche crumbs. Ravens fly low overhead. Have been picked up by a rather jolly French businessman resembling a grasshopper who calls me ‘His Star of the South’ and happily takes me round sightseeing with a guide. He has heart trouble and has to be in bed by nine.

  *

  Peter Mayne’s Chinaman, Doan, is a beautiful tapette. Attractive and sympathetic with an appreciative sense of humour. We sit in a café on the place, where I try to eat a disgusting bean soup, the mint tea equally disgusting. Doan says he is writing a book on Indo-China. We talk about dreams. He always dreams in colour. Have I read Baudelaire on hashish? We agree that kif does not alter one’s mood. Despair becomes accentuated. The present more intense. The fantasies unendurable. In my present state, the paranoia it engenders is too unpleasant. I shall wait until I’m happy again.

  Doan has an eighteenth-century house with stone floors, raffia mats and heavy cedarwood shutters. It is full of pretty things, a gilded Chinese birdcage shaped like a pagoda, full of budgerigars, a moorish chest lined with green leather which he has turned into a desk by letting down the flap and illuminating the interior. His friends are waiting in the Café de l’Etoile. They all have the same haircut, clipped close to the head and brushed forward across the brow. One, a doctor says, in a high-pitched, gentle voice, that yesterday he prepared tea and where was I? How brown I am. He has a catlike tread and a lisp. When asked if he is coming with us to the Arab house for mint tea, he says, ‘J’ai un rendezvous.’ Then, three of us take a calèche; the French professor and an Arab follow on bicycles.

  ‘Vous êtes la Reine.’ Doan laughs, raising his shoulders and laughing as he lingers on the word, Reine. Clop. Clop. Clop.

  The middle-aged, goaty one says, ‘Comme c’est joli, the sound of the sabots.’ It reminds him of some French film. When we draw near to the Porte de Jeudi, the oldest sector of the town, so called as it is next to the Jeudi camel market, one sees an occasional fruitstall lit by one low bulb. Noticing the glow of pipes, I say, ‘Regardez! Comme tout le monde fume.’ Doan laughs again.

  ‘Eh oui! Et mange et fait l’amour,’ lingering on the word amour. He points out each Marabout as we pass.

  We have a long wait at the entrance to the Arab house.

  ‘It’s always like this,’ Doan says. ‘There has to be a lot of preparation. And the women got out of the way.’

  The room is very clean. The goaty one begins to take off his shoes, but Doan says it’s only necessary when there are rugs. There is a low double bed and the usual cushioned bench running along the wall. The boy tells us he has been twice married, the first time at the age of fourteen. He seduced the girl and his father made him marry her. If a wife is unfaithful she goes to prison. When she comes out she can be taken back or can marry again if anyone will have her. The boy asks if I am married and if so why aren’t I with my husband?

  ‘Our women are very independent,’ Doan says and, turning to me, asks, ‘Is that the right reply?’

  ‘You can say I am in a prison like a divorced wife. The Mamounia prison.’

  Doan
accompanies me back to the hotel. Passing the Turkish baths there are chinks of light in the walls. The Chleuh dancers are still on the place.

  ‘It used to be much livelier before the restrictions,’ Doan says. On entering the Mamounia I exclaim,

  ‘Back to my prison.’ Doan laughs.

  ‘A prison doré, at any rate.’

  On reaching my floor, I hear a woman in the room next to mine screaming, ‘You homosexual filth! You homoschizophrenic filth! First Johnny, then Georgy, now Bunny. You’re a homo. You’re sexual filth who ain’t goin’ give money to no one. You falling asleep homoschizophrenic filth and I know you from way back …’ Then a scuffle.

  ‘… keep your hands off me …’ he pleads.

  ‘I’d like to knock your teeth in, you homo, you …’

  I stand outside my door in my kneelength, corduroy pants listening, when an old lady comes along the corridor. Embarrassed to be seen eavesdropping I am about to return to my room when she stops and whispers in French, ‘It’s like that every Saturday night. I don’t understand what they say, but it’s the same every Saturday night.’

  ‘She calls him a homosexual,’ I explain.

  ‘Quel malheur! Quelle tristesse!’ she repeats softly, and passes along the corridor.

  Sunday

  After a fearful awakening the day got better. But I must not boast too soon. Was given a present of a Moroccan bag by the Frenchman. Then he took me to the Villa Taylor of Churchill fame. We then walked round the souk pursued by a guide who tried to get me to buy in each of the stalls.

  Monday

  Feel much better and less desperate. Put it down to yesterday’s two-hour walk, let’s hope it lasts.

  The valet de chambre just came in bringing my black patent belt that he’s repaired. When I offered him 200 francs, he refused and still hung about, so I said, as he had requested earlier, ‘Would you like me to take your photograph?’ I opened the shutters and put him on the balcony.

  ‘But together,’ he said.

  ‘Not with this camera,’ I pretended. He grinned and I snapped him like that, grinning like a March Hare.

  Cyril rang at seven. He was taking Ali Forbes’ Moroccan girl out to dinner.

  Tangier

  I am here with a party seeing Jane Bowles off to America and have just written to George:

  I think it very inconsiderate of you not to answer my letter. It was you who suggested the job as reader and it now looks as though you’re going to let me down again. How can I possibly believe what you say in your cables, when you back out of everything?

  BARBARA CONNOLLY CARE OF PAUL BOWLES STOP GREATLY DISTRESSED TELEGRAM MARRAKESH RETURNED SINCE YOU LEFT NO FORWARDING ADDRESS STOP PLEASE RETURN AND BELIEVE THAT MY PLEAS ARE SINCERE AND NOT MADE LIGHTLY PLEASE WRITE IT IS VERY URGENT AND I AM VERY UNHAPPY

  Me:

  PLEASE TELEPHONE HOTEL VILLA DE FRANCE LATEST TUESDAY, BARBARA.

  Then:

  TERRIBLY FRUSTRATED TANGIERS LINE OUT OF ORDER TRIED REPEATEDLY HOPE BY TIME YOU GET THIS WILL HAVE GOT THROUGH IF NOT CABLING LOVE AND AFFECTION.

  When he eventually got through on the telephone, he said we had to meet and that he was flying out to Gibraltar to see me in about a week. Would I be there? He added that there was a lot of irritating propaganda around which we must both discount.

  I cabled from Gibraltar:

  Don’t know where I shall go from here. But it won’t be far. Have little faith in your coming as you suggested. But if you send a telegram to the Rock Hotel, I will leave a message to say where I am and can meet any plane at twelve hours’ notice.

  Which I did two days later.

  * A year or two after my visit Agadir suffered an earthquake and the Saada collapsed into a mound of rubble. Robin Maugham happened to be staying in the hotel at the time, but he survived several days trapped beneath a concrete block resting on his bedhead before being rescued, unlike most of the inhabitants of Agadir, now rebuilt as a magnetic winter and spring suntrap for tourists.

  † A Berber tribe from north Morocco.

  Chapter VI

  Renewals

  Diary

  Wonderful hot day. Blue sky and calm. See W. off at the airport. Joan Jenkinson, the heiress,* was leaving on the same plane (‘Your future wife,’ I say jokingly, thinking of her millions). ‘That man’ very affectionate. Waves back at me as he crosses the runway carrying a despatch case, the GP bag, as I call it. ‘You mean like an abortionist?’ W. says. He stops every few yards to wave back until boarding the plane. I wave back. Once he has gone I realise I am rather relieved; it has been an ordeal of guilt. Last night, I had a terrible guilt dream that I was covered in large, flat-topped bugs like morpions, which dug deep into my flesh and could only be removed with a ruler. I awoke with a scream. W. quoted someone as saying that with me he had met his Mrs Simpson and his father had asked him what his relationship with me was. Was it based on sex? W. was going through a grave crisis with Marks and Sparks who were threatening to terminate a book contract he had obtained through his ex-wife, Jane Sieff. He recounted all the gossip. Poppet had said that once, when she was very much in love with someone, I would telephone every morning and say, ‘Found any faults yet?’ Sonia thought I was a heartless liar and nymphoprig, as Cyril calls J., also made some digs. W. said the day his divorce was announced in the newspapers, some people had telephoned to commiserate. One person said, ‘Don’t feel obliged to do anything, she’s over age, after all.’ But the fact that he flies out to Gibraltar to see me (like a Governor, as Cyril put it, visiting one of his unruly tribes in order to redress any grievances) denotes some degree of feeling, I suppose!

  *

  March 6 1956

  An enjoyable journey on the boat to Algeciras, the half-hour crossing being just sufficient to repack the basket and Moroccan bag, and bask a bit without becoming bored. Bright sun and calm sea. Delighted with the day and the prospect of what I imagine will be a happy marital week with hubby. He grins when I see him approaching on the quai, looking suntanned and sweet, his review book under one arm, wearing his food-spattered, brown suede jacket that reeks of bad Tangier cleaning, and I grin back. I am relieved to note that he seems to be in a good humour, without bitterness and pleased to see me. How can I possibly leave him? What is one to do? A long wait on the boat as everyone stands assembled before we are allowed off. Joining him, I say, ‘What an intolerable country.’ Why were we held up for so long? His good humour diminishes and on entering the customs he is at once in a belligerent mood, refuses to carry any of my luggage, and stands about looking proud and puffy. Was it because I had not shown enough affection?

  ‘Did you go to bed with him?’ he asks.

  ‘I am not answering any questions.’

  ‘Then you did. Don’t you have any conscience about who would be the father of your child, if you had one? Now that I know you have no moral scruples of any kind, I really must divorce you.’

  ‘But you have started divorcing me already.’

  ‘That is just lies.’

  ‘But it has been in the newspapers.’

  ‘Have you seen them?’ says Cyril, as though he had gained a point.

  When we reach the hotel, we go into luncheon. Cyril sits snarling and red in the face. Looking down at my wrist and seeing a new bracelet, he says, ‘What a dreadful old woman you’re going to be, covered in bangles and lonely.’ Then he shows me a letter from his lawyer, advising him to carry on with the divorce, and a telegram from the Davises, telling him to join them in England, where they will find him a much better ‘pussy’.

  ‘You know what Mr Bulchand, the jewel merchant, said to me on the telephone after seeing you and W.? “That is no man, Mr Connolly. Don’t you realise he’s just another Sonia with a cock?” Did he ask you to marry him? I’m tired of being the Comic Cuckold. You make me too unhappy.’

  ‘It makes me unhappy knowing that I do. You must go on divorcing me,’ I urge.

  The lunch is not a success and in the middle of so
me abusive statement about Poppet, whom I produce as a friend (Cyril having stated I have none), I get up and leave the table, and go and sit in the garden. Presently Cyril comes out and says, Could he have a few words in a more secluded place, as he is leaving? I give in. The abuse starts all over again; he then gets up and disappears.

  ‘Telephone me tonight at the Victoria, Ronda.’

  Left alone I feel desperate. What to do? Ring BEA Gibraltar. They say there is a passage tomorrow. I book it and send W. a wire. Feeling deserted I go to the hotel hairdresser. At seven I receive a message written in Cyril’s hand, given to someone at the station. If it had come earlier it would have saved the situation. Have a meal in my room. A ghastly night! Woken all night by dogs, a stampede of footsteps along the passage, taps running, cars accelerating, voices, people moving about in the next room, as if we were divided by a thin partition. Feel a wreck. Thinking I am about to leave for Gibraltar, Cyril telephones at seven. State I am incapable of moving. Too tired, look ghastly too, as I have not slept well over the weekend. Cyril suggests we meet at Marbella. I consent. Fall asleep. Wake at nine and telephone BEA, cancelling flight and booking one a week later. Send W. another wire: ‘FALSE ALARM STOP RETURNING TODAY WEEK STOP WRITING LOVE.’ Order breakfast. Later ring Cyril as the weather has changed, cloudy now, and suggest that we go to Granada instead. Tells me to catch the 3.30 train, passing through Ronda. My bill is enormous – the lunch with Cyril on it and some drinks we had during the bicker. Give the remains of the pesetas that W. gave me, but am adamant about cashing the pounds. Supposing I am left on my own again? The hotel very nice about it, say it is all right and no need to leave luggage. Have a delicious lunch in the hotel of sea bass, described on the menu as sea wolf, steamed and served with melted butter, boiled potatoes and lemon. The young manager comes up and has a friendly conversation about my sheepskin coat, says he has one like it, but has difficulty in getting it cleaned, even in Paris. In Madrid, he tells me, there is a place. Delighted to leave Algeciras. The journey to Ronda of great beauty, valleys, mountains, orange groves, toros grazing, white villages, gipsy encampments. Cyril distant and angry-looking, meets me in Ronda with a bag of fried veal in breadcrumbs, tasting of rancid oil, garlic sausage and cheese. Having felt hungry up to then, immediate loss of appetite. Oranges dry and tasteless, too late in the season. At Granada we luckily get a room in a parador. We do a lot of sightseeing, me complaining of the amount of walking; get irritated when he loses his way, a certain amount of bickering. The pending divorce a presumed fact.