Today, I don’t remember feeling any affection in childhood except for my elder brother, who for a time was my only parent. I remember a constant tension in myself that even in great age has not relaxed. I remember little of being very young. I remember the dissembling as we grew up, and the need to cobble together an identity for myself, and how in order to do this I filched from the manners and lifestyle of my peers and betters, even to the extent of pretending I had a settled home life with real parents and ponies. Listening to myself today, watching myself when I have to, I can still detect traces of the lost originals, chief among them obviously my father.
All this no doubt made me an ideal recruit to the secret flag. But nothing lasted: not the Eton schoolmaster, not the MI5 man, not the MI6 man. Only the writer in me stuck the course. If I look over my life from here, I see it as a succession of engagements and escapes, and I thank goodness that the writing kept me relatively straight and largely sane. My father’s refusal to accept the simplest truth about himself set me on a path of enquiry from which I never returned. In the absence of a mother or sisters I learned women late, if ever, and we all paid a price for that.
In my childhood, everyone around me tried to sell me the Christian God in one form or another. I got the low church from my aunts, uncles and grandparents, and the high church from my schools. When I was brought to the bishop to be confirmed, I tried my hardest to feel pious, and felt nothing. For another ten years I went on trying to acquire some sort of religious conviction, then gave it up as a bad job. Today, I have no god but landscape, and no expectation of death but extinction. I rejoice constantly in my family and the people who love me, and whom I love in return. Walking the Cornish cliffs, I am overtaken with surges of gratitude for my life.
Yes, I have seen the house where I was born. Cheerful aunts pointed it out to me a hundred times as we skimmed by. But the house of my birth that I prefer is a different one, built in my imagination. It’s red brick and clattery and due for demolition, with broken windows, a ‘For Sale’ sign, and an old bath in the garden. It stands in a plot of weeds and builders’ junk, with a bit of stained glass in the smashed front door – a place for kids to hide in, rather than be born. But born there I was, or so my imagination insists, and what’s more I was born in the attic, among a stack of brown boxes that my father always carted round with him when he was on the run.
When I made my first clandestine inspection of those boxes, some time around the outbreak of the Second World War – for by the age of eight I was already a well-trained spy – they contained only personal stuff: his Masonic regalia, the barrister’s wig and gown with which he proposed to astonish a waiting world as soon as he had got round to studying law, and such top-secret items as his plans for selling fleets of airships to the Aga Khan. But once war finally broke out, the brown boxes offered more substantial fare: black-market Mars bars, Benzedrine inhalers for shooting stimulant up your nose and, after D-Day, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens.
Ronnie had a penchant for weird commodities provided they were rationed or not available. Two decades later, when Germany was still divided and I was a British diplomat living on the banks of the River Rhine in Bonn, he appeared unannounced in my gateway, his ample frame squeezed inside a steel coracle with wheels attached. It was an amphibious motorcar, he explained. A prototype. He had acquired the British patent from its manufacturers in Berlin, and it was about to make our fortunes. He had driven it down the interzonal corridor under the gaze of East German frontier guards, and now he proposed to launch it, with my help, into the Rhine, which happened to be swollen at the time, and very fast flowing.
I dissuaded him despite my children’s enthusiasm and gave him lunch instead. Refreshed, he set off in great excitement for Ostend and England. How far he got I don’t know, for the car was not spoken of again. I assume that somewhere along the journey creditors caught up with him and removed it.
But that didn’t stop him from popping up in Berlin two years later, announcing himself as my ‘professional adviser’, in which capacity he received a VIP tour of West Berlin’s largest film studio, and no doubt a great deal of the studio’s hospitality and a starlet or two, and a lot of sales patter about tax breaks and subsidies on offer to foreign filmmakers, and notably to the makers of the movie of my recent novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
It goes without saying that neither I nor Paramount Pictures, who had already made their deal with Ardmore Studios in Ireland, had the smallest idea of what he was up to.
There’s no electricity in the house of my birth, and no heating, so the light comes from the gas lamps on Constitution Hill, which give the attic a creamy glow. My mother lies on a camp bed, pitifully doing her best, whatever her best may entail – I was not conversant with the niceties of childbirth when I first pictured this scene. Ronnie is champing in the doorway, wearing a snappy gent’s double-breasted and the brown-and-white brogues he played golf in, keeping an eye to the street while in pounding cadences he urges my mother to greater efforts:
‘God in Heaven, Wiggly, why can’t you get a move on for once? It’s a damned shame is what it is, and no two ways about it. There’s poor old Humphries, sitting in the car out there, catching his death and all you do is shilly-shally.’
Though my mother’s first name was Olive, my father called her Wiggly, rain or shine. Later, when technically I grew up, I too gave women silly nicknames in order to make them less formidable.
Ronnie’s voice when I was young was still Dorset, with heavy ‘r’s and long ‘a’s. But the self-laundering was in progress and by the time I was an adolescent he was almost – but never quite – well spoken. Englishmen, we are told, are branded on the tongue, and in those days being well spoken could gain you a military commission, bank credit, respectful treatment from policemen and a job in the City of London. And it’s one of the ironies of Ronnie’s mercurial life that, by realizing his ambition of sending my brother and me to posh schools, he placed himself socially below us by the cruel standards of the time. Tony and I were whisked effortlessly through the class sound barrier, while Ronnie remained stuck the other side.
Not that he exactly paid for our education – or not always, so far as I can make out – but either way he fixed it. One school, after a taste of his ways, bravely demanded its fees up front. It received them at Ronnie’s leisure in deferred black-market dried fruit – figs, bananas, prunes – and a case of unobtainable gin for the staff.
Yet he remained, which was his genius, to all outward appearances a most respectable man. Respect, not money, was what he cared for above everything. Every day he had to have his magic recognized. His judgement of other people depended entirely on how much they respected him. At the humble level of life, there’s a Ronnie in every second street in London, in every county town. He’s the back-slapping, two-fisted tearaway naughty boy with a touch of the blarney, who throws champagne parties for people who aren’t used to being given champagne, opens his garden to the local Baptists for their fête though he never sets foot inside their church, is honorary president of the boys’ football team and the men’s cricket team and presents them with silver cups for their championships.
Until one day it turns out he hasn’t paid the milkman for a year, or the local garage, or the newspaper shop, or the wine shop, or the shop that sold him the silver sports cups, and maybe he goes bankrupt or goes to jail, and his wife takes the children to live with her mother, and eventually she divorces him because she discovers – and her mother knew it all along – that he’s been screwing every girl in the neighbourhood and has kids he hasn’t mentioned. And when our naughty boy comes out or gets himself temporarily straight, he lives small for a while and does good works and takes pleasure in simple things, till the sap rises again and he’s back to his old games.
My father was that fellow, no question, all of the above. But that was only the beginning. The difference is in scale, in his episcopal bearing, h
is ecumenical voice and his air of injured sanctity when anyone dares to doubt his word, and his infinite powers of self-delusion. While your run-of-the-mill naughty boy is blowing the last of the housekeeping money on the three-thirty handicap at Newmarket, Ronnie is relaxing serenely at the big table in Monte Carlo with a complimentary brandy-and-ginger in front of him, with myself aged seventeen and pretending to be older, seated on one side of him and King Farouk’s equerry, aged fifty-plus, on the other. The equerry is most welcome at this table. He has bought it many times over. He is polished, grey-haired, innocuous and very tired. The white telephone at his elbow links him directly to his Egyptian king, who is surrounded by astrologers. The white phone rings, the equerry removes his hand from his chin, raises the receiver, listens with his long eyelids lowered and dutifully transfers another chunk of the wealth of Egypt to red, or black, or whatever number is considered propitious by the zodiacal wizards of Alexandria or Cairo.
For some while now Ronnie has been observing this process, a combative little smile to himself that says, ‘If that’s the way you want it, old son, that’s the way it’s got to be.’ And he starts to raise his own bids around the table. Purposefully. Tens become twenties. Twenties, fifties. And as he splashes out the last of his chips and beckons imperiously for more, I realize he is not playing a hunch, or playing the house, or playing the numbers. He is playing King Farouk. If Farouk favours black, Ronnie goes for red. If Farouk backs odd, Ronnie raises him on even. We are talking hundreds by now (these days thousands). And what Ronnie is telling His Egyptian Majesty – as a term’s worth, then a year’s worth, of my school fees vanish into the croupier’s maw – is that Ronnie’s line to the Almighty is a great deal more efficacious than some tin-pot Arab potentate’s.
In the soft blue twilight of Monte Carlo before dawn, father and son saunter side by side along the esplanade to a twenty-four-hour jeweller’s shop to pawn his platinum cigarette case, gold fountain pen and wristwatch. Bucherer? Boucheron? I’m warm. ‘Win it all back tomorrow with interest, right, old son?’ he says as we retire to bed in the Hôtel de Paris, where he has mercifully prepaid our room bills. ‘Ten o’clock sharp,’ he adds severely, lest I am thinking of malingering.
So I am born. Of my mother, Olive. Obediently, with the haste Ronnie has demanded of her. In a final push to forestall creditors and prevent Mr Humphries from catching his death while he crouches outside in his Lanchester. For Mr Humphries is not just a cab driver but a valued confederate, as well as a fully paid-up member of the exotic Court with which Ronnie surrounds himself, and a distinguished amateur conjuror who does tricks with bits of rope like hangman’s nooses. In high times he is replaced by Mr Nutbeam and a Bentley, but in low times Mr Humphries with his Lanchester is always ready to oblige.
I am born, and packed up with my mother’s few possessions, for we have recently suffered another bailiff’s visitation and are travelling light. I am loaded into the boot of Mr Humphries’ taxi like one of Ronnie’s contraband hams a few years hence. The brown boxes are thrown in after me and the lid of the boot is locked from the outside. I peer around in the darkness for a sign of my elder brother, Tony. He is not in evidence. Neither is Olive, alias Wiggly. Never mind, I have been born and, like a brand-new foal, am already on the run. I have been on the run ever since.
I have another confected childhood memory that, according to my father, who had every right to know, is equally inaccurate. It is four years later and I am in the city of Exeter, walking across a patch of wasteland. I am holding the hand of my mother, Olive, alias Wiggly. As we are both wearing gloves, there is no fleshly contact between us. And indeed, so far as I recall, there never was any. It was Ronnie who did the hugging, never Olive. She was the mother who had no smell, whereas Ronnie smelled of fine cigars, and pear-droppy hair oil from Taylor of Old Bond Street, Court Hairdressers, and when you put your nose into the fleecy cloth of one of Mr Berman’s tailored suits you seemed to smell his women there as well. Yet when, at the age of twenty-one, I advanced on Olive down No. 1 platform at Ipswich railway station for our great reunion after sixteen hugless years, I couldn’t work out for the life of me where to grab hold of her. She was as tall as I remembered her, but all elbow and no huggable contours. With her toppling walk and long, vulnerable face she could have been my brother Tony in Ronnie’s legal wig.
I am in Exeter again, swinging on Olive’s gloved hand. At the far side of the wasteland is a road from which I see a high, red brick wall with spikes and broken glass along its top, and behind the wall a grim flat-fronted building with barred windows and no light inside them. And in one of these barred windows, looking exactly like a Monopoly convict when you go directly to jail, without passing go or collecting two hundred pounds, stands my father from the shoulders up. Like the Monopoly man, he is clutching the bars with both big hands. Women always told him what lovely hands he had and he was forever grooming them with clippers from his jacket pocket. His wide, white forehead is pressed against the bars. He never had much hair, and what there was of it ran fore and aft over his crown in a tight black, sweet-smelling river, stopping short of the dome that did so much for his saintly image of himself. As he grew older, the river turned grey, then dried up altogether, but the wrinkles of age and dissolution that he had so richly earned never materialized. Goethe’s Eternal Feminine prevailed in him till the end.
He was as proud of his head as he was of his hands, according to Olive, and soon after their marriage mortgaged it for fifty pounds to medical science, cash in advance and the goods to be delivered on his death. I don’t know when she told me this, but I know that from the day this knowledge was entrusted to me, I eyed Ronnie with something of the detachment of an executioner. His neck was very broad, hardly a kink where it joined his upper body. I wondered where I would aim the axe if I were doing the job. Killing him was an early preoccupation of mine, and it has endured off and on even after his death. Probably it is no more than my exasperation that I could absolutely never pin him down.
Still clutching Olive’s gloved hand, I wave at Ronnie high up in the wall and Ronnie waves the way he always waved: leaning back and with the upper body dead still while one prophetic arm commands the skies above his head. ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ I yell. My voice is a giant frog’s. On Olive’s hand I march back to the car feeling thoroughly pleased with myself. Not every small boy, after all, has his mother to himself and keeps his father in a cage.
But, according to my father, none of this happened. The notion that I might have seen him in any of his prisons offended him very much – ‘Sheer invention from start to finish, son.’ All right, he conceded, he did a bit of time in Exeter, but mostly he was in Winchester and the Scrubs. He’d done nothing criminal, nothing that couldn’t have been sorted out between reasonable people. He’d been in the position of the office boy who’d borrowed a few bob from the stamp box and been caught before he had a chance to put them back. But that wasn’t the point, he insisted. The point, as he confided to my half-sister Charlotte, his daughter by another marriage, when he was complaining about my generally disrespectful behaviour towards him – i.e. I wouldn’t give him a cut of my royalties or put up a few hundred thousand to develop a nice bit of green belt he’d gulled out of some misguided local council – the point was that anyone who knows the inside of Exeter jail knows perfectly well you can’t see the road from the cells.
And I believe him. Still. I’m wrong and he was right. He was never at that window and I never waved to him. But what’s the truth? What’s memory? We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us. I saw him in that window but I also see him there now, grasping the bars, his bull’s chest encased in the convict’s uniform, with arrows printed on it, as worn in all the best school comics. There is a part of me that never afterwards saw him wearing anything else. And I know I was four years old when I saw him because a year later he was at large again, and a few weeks or months after that my mother slippe
d away in the night, disappearing for sixteen years before I rediscovered her in Suffolk, the mother of two other children who had grown up unaware of their half-brothers’ existence. She took with her one fine white hide suitcase by Harrods, silk-lined, which I found in her cottage when she died. It was the only thing in the whole house that bore witness to her first marriage, and I have it still.
I saw him crouching in his cell, too, on the edge of his bunk with his mortgaged head in his hands, a proud young man who’d never in his life gone hungry or washed his own socks or made his own bed, thinking of his three pious doting sisters and two adoring parents, his mother heartbroken and forever wringing her hands and asking God, ‘Why, why?’ in her Irish brogue, and his father a former mayor of Poole, an alderman and Freemason. Both serving Ronnie’s time with him in their minds. Both turning prematurely white-haired while they waited for him.
How could Ronnie bear knowing all that while he stared at the wall? With his pride and prodigious energy and drive, how did he cope with the confinement? I’m as restless as he was. I can’t sit still for an hour. I can’t read a book for an hour unless it’s in German, which somehow keeps me in my chair. Even at a good play, I long for the interval and a stretch. When I’m writing, I’m forever bouncing up from my desk and charging round the garden or up the street. I’ve only to lock myself in the loo for three seconds – the key has fallen out of its hold and I’m fumbling to get it back in – and I’m in a Force 12 sweat and screaming to be let out. Yet Ronnie at the prime of his life did serious time – three or four years. He was still serving one sentence when they slapped some more charges on him and gave him a second, this time with hard labour or, as we might call it today with our horrible misuse of the word, enhanced incarceration. The stretches he did in later life – Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Zurich – were, to the best of my knowledge, short. Researching The Honourable Schoolboy in Hong Kong, I came face to face with his ex-jailer at the Jardine Matheson tent at Happy Valley racecourse.
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Page 26