In briefing my detectives I was, of course, beating the air. No detective on earth could have found what I was looking for, and two were no better than one. Ten thousand pounds and several excellent meals later, all they had to offer was a bunch of press clippings about old bankruptcies and the Yarmouth election, and a pile of useless company records. No trial records, no retired jailers, no golden-bullet witnesses or smoking gun. Not a single mention of Ronnie’s trial at Winchester Assizes, where by his own account he defended himself brilliantly against a young advocate named Norman Birkett, later Sir Norman, then Lord, who served as a British judge at the Nuremberg trials.
From prison – this much Ronnie told me himself – he had written to Birkett, and, in the sporting spirit dear to both of them, congratulated the great barrister on his performance. And Birkett was flattered to receive such a letter from a poor prisoner who was paying his debt to society, and wrote back. And thus a correspondence developed in which Ronnie pledged his lifelong determination to study for the law. And as soon as he came out of prison he enrolled himself as a student at Gray’s Inn. It was on the strength of this heroic act that he bought himself the wig and gown that I still see trailing after him in their cardboard box as he criss-crosses the globe in his search for El Dorado.
My mother, Olive, crept out of our lives when I was five and my brother Tony was seven and both of us were fast asleep. In the creaking jargon of the secret world I later entered, her departure was a well-planned exfiltration operation, executed in accordance with the best principles of need-to-know security. The conspirators selected a night when my father, Ronnie, was billed to come home from London late or not at all. This was not hard. Fresh from the deprivations of prison, Ronnie had set himself up in business in the West End, where he was diligently making up for lost time. What kind of business we could only guess, but its rise had been mercurial.
Ronnie had barely drawn his first breath of free air before he had gathered to himself the scattered nucleus of his Court. At the same dizzy speed, we abandoned the humble brick house in St Albans to which my grandfather with much frowning and finger-wagging had conducted us upon Ronnie’s release, and established ourselves in the riding-school-and-limousine suburb of Rickmansworth, less than an hour’s drive from London’s most expensive fleshpots. With the Court in attendance we had wintered in splendour at the Kulm Hotel in St Moritz. In Rickmansworth our bedroom cupboards were stuffed with new toys on an Arab scale. Weekends were one long adult revel while Tony and I persuaded riotous uncles to kick footballs with us, and gazed at the bookless walls of our nursery while we listened to the music from downstairs. Among the less probable visitors of those days was Learie Constantine, later Sir Learie and later still Lord Constantine, arguably the greatest West Indian cricketer of all time. It is one of the many paradoxes of Ronnie’s nature that he liked to be seen in the company of people of brown or black skin, which in those days made him a rarity. Learie Constantine played ‘French cricket’ with us and we loved him dearly. I have a memory of a jovial domestic ceremony in which, without benefit of priest, he was formally inducted as either my godfather or my brother’s, neither of us seems sure which.
‘But where did the money come from?’ I asked my mother at one of the many debriefings that attended our reunion. She had no idea. Business was either beneath her or over her head. The rougher it got, the further she stayed away from it. Ronnie was crooked, she said, but wasn’t everyone in business crooked?
The house from which Olive made her covert exit was a mock-Tudor mansion called Hazel Cottage. In darkness, the long, descending garden and diamond-leaded windows gave it the appearance of a forest hunting-lodge. I imagine a slim new moon, or none. All through the interminable day of her escape, I see her engaged in surreptitious preparations, filling her white hide Harrods suitcase with operational necessities – a warm pullover, East Anglia will be freezing; where in heaven’s name did I leave my driving licence? – casting nervous glances at her St Moritz gold watch while maintaining her composure towards her children, the cook, the cleaning woman, the gardener and the German nanny, Annaliese.
Olive no longer trusts any of us. Her sons are Ronnie’s wholly owned subsidiaries. Annaliese, she suspects, has been sleeping with the enemy. Olive’s close friend Mabel lives only a few miles away with her parents in a flat overlooking Moor Park Golf Club, but Mabel is no more privy to the escape plan than is Annaliese. Mabel has had two abortions in three years after becoming pregnant by a man she refuses to identify, and Olive is beginning to smell a rat. In the mock-raftered drawing room, as she tiptoes through it with her white suitcase, stands one of the earliest pre-war television sets, an upended mahogany coffin with a tiny screen that shows fast-moving spots and just occasionally the misted features of a man in a dinner jacket. It is switched off. Muzzled. She will never watch it again.
‘Why didn’t you take us with you?’ I asked her at one debriefing.
‘Because you’d have come after us, darling,’ Olive replied, meaning as usual not me, but Ronnie. ‘You wouldn’t have rested till you got your precious boys back.’
Besides, she said, there was the all-important question of our education. Ronnie was so ambitious for his sons that somehow, more by crook than by hook but never mind, he would get us into classy schools. Olive would never have been able to manage that. Well, would she, darling?
I can’t describe Olive well. As a child, I didn’t know her, and as an adult I didn’t understand her. Of her abilities, I know as little as I know of anything else about her. Was she kind-hearted but weak? Was she tortured by her separation from her two growing first-born children, or was she a woman of no particularly deep emotions who was simply dragged through life by other people’s decisions? Did she have latent talents crying to come to the surface, but never succeeding? In any one of these identities I would willingly recognize myself, but I don’t know which, if any, to choose.
The white hide suitcase sits today in my house in London and has become an object of intense speculation to me. As with all major works of art, there is tension in its immobility. Will it suddenly leap off again, leaving no forwarding address? Outwardly, it is a well-to-do bride’s honeymoon suitcase with a good brand name. The two uniformed doormen who in my memory stand forever before the glass doors of the Kulm Hotel in St Moritz, brushing the snow from guests’ boots with a dramatic flourish, would immediately identify its owner as a member of the tipping classes. But when I am tired and my memory is out foraging for itself, the interior of the suitcase breathes a heavy sexuality.
Partly, the tattered pink silk lining is the reason: a skimpy petticoat waiting to be ripped off. But there is also somewhere in my head a hazily remembered image of carnal flurry – of a bedroom skirmish I have intruded upon when I am very young – and pink is its colour. Was this the time I saw Ronnie and Annaliese making love? Or Ronnie and Olive? Or Olive and Annaliese? Or all three of them together? Or none of them, except in my dreams? And does this pseudo-memory portray some kind of childish erotic paradise from which I was shut out once Olive had packed her bag and left?
As an historical artefact, the suitcase is beyond price. It is the only known object that bears Olive’s initials from her Ronnie period: O.M.C. for Olive Moore Cornwell, printed in black beneath the sweated leather handle. Whose sweat? Olive’s? Or the sweat of her fellow conspirator and rescuer, a gingery, irascible land agent who was also the driver of her getaway car? I have an idea that, like Olive, her rescuer was married, and, like Olive, had children. If that’s so, were they, too, fast asleep? As the professional intimate of landed gentry, her rescuer also had class, whereas Ronnie in Olive’s judgement had none. Olive never forgave Ronnie for marrying above himself.
All through her later life she hammered this theme, until I began to understand that Ronnie’s social inferiority was the fig leaf of dignity which she clutched to herself while she continued to trail helplessly after him in the years of their s
upposed estrangement. She let him take her out to lunches in the West End, listening to his fantasized accounts of his prodigious wealth, though little if any of it ever reached her, and after the coffee and the brandy – or so I picture it – yielded to him in some safe house before he scurried off to make another fantasy million. By keeping open the wounds that Ronnie’s low breeding had inflicted on her, by deriding to herself his vulgarities of speech and lapses of social delicacy, she was able to blame him for everything and herself for nothing, except her stupid acquiescence.
Yet Olive was anything but stupid. She had a witty, barbed and lucid tongue. Her long, clear sentences were print-ready, her letters cogent, rhythmical and amusing. In my presence, she was painfully well spoken, like Mrs Thatcher halfway through her elocution course. But in other people’s presence, I learned recently from one who knew her better than I did, she was a mynah bird, instantly adopting the vocal effects of whoever she was with, even if it took her all the way down the social scale. And yes, I too have an ear for voices. So perhaps that’s a bit I got from her, for Ronnie had none. And I love to mimic them, and get them on to the page. But what she read, if anything at all, I’ve no more idea than I have of her genetic contribution to my existence. Looking back, listening to her other children, I know there was a mother there to be learned. But I never learned her, and perhaps I didn’t want to.
In computer-dating terms, it has always seemed to me, Ronnie and Olive were nevertheless remarkably well matched. But while Olive was willing to be defined by whoever claimed to love her, Ronnie was a five-star conman endowed with the unfortunate gift of awakening love in men and women equally. Olive’s resentment of my father’s social origins did not stop at the principal offender. Ronnie’s father – my own revered grandfather, Frank, ex-Mayor of Poole, Freemason, teetotaller, preacher, icon of our family probity, no less – was, according to Olive, as bent as Ronnie. It was Frank who had put Ronnie up to his first scam, had financed it, remote-controlled it, then kept his head down when Ronnie took the fall. She even found a bad word for Ronnie’s grandfather, whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety. Where on earth I was supposed to stand in this wholesale condemnation of our male line remained unsaid. But then I’d had the education, hadn’t I, darling? I’d had the language and manners of respectable people beaten into me.
There’s a family anecdote about Ronnie that remains unverified, but I would like to believe it because it speaks for the good heart in Ronnie that so often, and so frustratingly, defied his detractors.
Ronnie is on the run but hasn’t yet skipped England. The fraud charges are so pressing that the British police have launched a manhunt. Amid the hue and cry, an old business pal of Ronnie’s has died suddenly and must be buried. In the hope that Ronnie will attend the funeral, the police stake it out. Plainclothes detectives mingle with the mourners, but Ronnie is not among them. Next day, a member of the grieving family goes to tend the new grave. Ronnie is standing alone at the graveside.
Now move to the eighties, and this isn’t just a family tale, it happened in broad daylight in the presence of my British publisher, my literary agent and my wife.
I’m on a book tour in Southern Australia. Luncheon in the great marquee. I sit at a trestle table, my wife and my publisher beside me, my agent looking on. I’m signing my latest novel, A Perfect Spy, which contains a not very veiled portrait of Ronnie, whose life I have touched on in my after-lunch speech. A lady of age in a wheelchair rolls energetically past the queue, and tells me with some heat that I’ve got it completely wrong about Ronnie being in prison in Hong Kong. She was living with him all the time he was in the colony, so he couldn’t possibly have gone to prison, or she’d have noticed, wouldn’t she?
While I’m still measuring my response – for instance, to the effect that I had recently had a friendly chat with Ronnie’s Hong Kong jailer – a second lady of similar age bowls up.
‘Utter bloody nonsense!’ she thunders. ‘He was living with me in Bangkok and only commuting to Hong Kong!’
I assure them that they are both probably right.
You will not be surprised to read then that in low moments, like many sons of many fathers, I ask myself which bits of me still belong to Ronnie, and how much of me is mine. Is there really a big difference, I wonder, between the man who sits at his desk and dreams up scams on the blank page (me), and the man who puts on a clean shirt every morning and, with nothing in his pocket but imagination, sallies forth to con his victim (Ronnie)?
Ronnie the conman could spin you a story out of the air, sketch in a character who did not exist, and paint a golden opportunity when there wasn’t one. He could blind you with bogus detail or helpfully clarify a non-existent knotty point if you weren’t quick enough on the uptake to grasp the technicalities of his con first time round. He could withhold a great secret on grounds of confidentiality, then whisper it to your ear alone because he has decided to trust you.
And if all that isn’t part and parcel of the writer’s art, tell me what is.
It was Ronnie’s misfortune to be an anachronism in his own lifetime. In the twenties when he set out in business, an unscrupulous trader could bankrupt himself in one town, and next day raise credit in another fifty miles away. But as time went by, communications began to catch up with Ronnie the way they caught up with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I am sure he was deeply shocked when Singapore Special Branch confronted him with his British police record. And shocked again when, summarily deported to Indonesia, he was put behind bars for currency offences and gun-running. And more shocked still when a few years later the Swiss police dragged him out of his hotel bedroom in the Dolder Grand hotel in Zurich, and banged him up in the district jail. Reading recently how the gentlemen of FIFA were whisked from their beds in the Baur au Lac in Zurich and distributed to selected prison cells around the town, I see Ronnie forty-odd years ago suffering the same humiliation at the same hour at the hands of the same Swiss police.
Grand hotels are the conman’s catnip. Until that dawn in Zurich, Ronnie had stayed in any number of them and his system had never failed: take the best suite the best hotel has to offer, entertain lavishly, endear yourself to the doormen, headwaiters and above all the concierges, i.e. tip them handsomely and often. Make phone calls all over the world and when the hotel presents its first bill, say you have passed it to your people for settlement. Or, if you are playing the long game, delay the first bill then settle it, but nothing thereafter.
As soon as you sense you’re outstaying your welcome, pack a light suitcase, slip the concierge a twenty or a fifty, and tell him you’ve got pressing business out of town which may detain you for the night. Or if he’s that kind of concierge, give him a fat wink and say you have an obligation to a lady friend – oh, and will he kindly make sure your suite is safely locked because of all the valuable kit it’s got in it? – having already made sure that whatever valuable kit you’ve got, if any, is already in your light suitcase. And maybe, for extra cover, you give the concierge your golf clubs to look after by way of reassurance, but only if needs must, because you love your golf.
But that dawn raid at the Dolder told Ronnie that the game was up. And today, forget it. They have your credit card details. They know where your children go to school.
Might Ronnie with his proven powers of deception have made a spymaster? True, when he deceived people he also deceived himself, although that wouldn’t necessarily disqualify him. But if he possessed a secret – his own or anyone else’s – he was positively uncomfortable until he had shared it, which would certainly have presented a problem.
Show business? After all, he’d made a good fist of looking over a major Berlin film studio under the pretext of representing myself and Paramount Pictures, so why stop there? And Hollywood, as we all know, has a well-attested habit of taking conmen to its bosom.
Or how about actor? Didn’t he lov
e the long mirror? Hadn’t he spent his whole life pretending to be people he wasn’t?
But Ronnie never wanted to be a star. He wanted to be Ronnie, a cosmos of one.
As to becoming a writer of his own fictions, forget it. He didn’t envy my literary notoriety. He owned it.
It is 1963. I have just arrived in New York on my first ever visit to the United States. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is riding at the top of the charts. My American publisher escorts me to the 21 Club for a grand dinner. As the maître d’ shows us to our table, I see Ronnie seated in a corner.
For years we have been estranged. I had no idea he was in America, but he is, and twelve feet away, with a brandy-and-ginger at his elbow. How on earth did he get here? Easily. He called up my soft-hearted American publisher and plucked at his heart strings. He played the Irish card. One look at my publisher’s name tells him he is of Irish origin.
We ask Ronnie to join us at our table. Humbly, he accepts, bringing his brandy-and-ginger with him; but only for a quick drink, he insists, then he’ll leave us to ourselves. He is sweet and proud and pats my arm, and tells me with tears in his eyes that he hasn’t been a bad father, has he, son, and we’ve done all right together, haven’t we, then? Yes, yes, we’ve done fine together, Dad, just fine, I agree.
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life Page 28