Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  I told him I had played soccer but preferred cricket. ‘Surrey man myself,’ he said. ‘But that’s not why I’d like to see Lock in Australia. Wardle, he’s a defensive bowler, but Tony Lock! There’s a match-winner for you. I know Bill Edrich. Met him in business. Reckon he lost £10,000 by turning amateur. Only did it because he thought he’d get to captain England. I reckon he’d’ve got as good a benefit as Compton if he hadn’t jumped the gun. My guess he doesn’t make above ten thousand a year in his job. I would’ve coughed up for his benefit; can’t help liking old Edrich.’

  ‘Drinks, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Not only drinks, old boy. That’s why they daren’t take him on tours. Every time they did, his wife divorced him afterwards. Some people have all the luck. Only joking. I like to combine business with pleasure myself. These Arabs, you know, they’re incredible. Reckon they’re impotent if they can’t function sexually about five times a day. In Addis I saw this local doctor giving these natives a shot in the behind. Smack!’ He crashed his fist into his palm. ‘“Drop your pants,” this doctor’d say, and then, smack! In went the needle and off they went.’

  ‘What did he give them?’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite harmless. Vitamin B, something like that.’

  ‘What was wrong with them, then?’

  ‘Wrong? Nothing. They can only come twice a day so they think they’re impotent. One of our chaps was out in Saudi Arabia for three months, without the wife, you know, planning the furniture for one of the big nobs’ palaces. They think nothing of spending £400,000 on a single palace. They kept putting things off but he stayed and stayed. The Arabs were amazed at him.’

  ‘His persistence?’

  ‘No, no, no. They couldn’t understand how anyone could go more than three days without his wife. I think they kept him hanging about to see how long he could go. You know, if I had my life over again, I’d like to go up to the Varsity and then become a journalist. I often think of things I’d like to write up. Never do. I suppose you have to get born with the gift.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Only sub-editors have to be born with the gift.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s what I’d like to be if I had my life again. Sports journalist. What a life! I’m keen on sports, you know, and I think I could make a sporting journalist, get on with people and so on.’

  When we docked at Gibraltar, he gave me his card. If my ship was delayed, I should come and look him up at the Rock. He could lend me some cash if I needed it. I had time before boarding the ferry to Algeciras to walk up the main street. Player’s cigarettes were one and fivepence for twenty. I bought the Sunday Times and The Observer in a dark brown teashop full of army wives and squalling children. It was good to have an English cup of tea again. I saw that Ken Tynan had called Leslie Bricusse ‘a flaccid comedian from Cambridge … Ruthlessly cut, he might escape obloquy.’ The great iconoclast of the 1960s wrote, in 1954, in the tones of a sententious sixth-form master.

  I had been on holiday from myself, in a state of weightlessness that rendered me all eyes and ears, free of sentiment, alert only to the present. Now, reading the London press, I was heavy again, not wholly dismayed by what Tynan said, yet conscious of England as a place of sly and eager knives. I was reminded of Leslie’s adhesive wish to be my partner in writing all the kinds of things that I had no wish to write. I hated the songs his Sirens sang, but feared that I lacked the will to escape their allure. It gave me good reason to stay away from England.

  Once aboard the USS Constitution, I had to share a cabin with an American of about thirty called Dick Knights. He slept in his vest and pants and had a rancid odour. I avoided him during the day. The crossing to Naples, via Genoa, took two days. Most of the passengers had embarked in New York. On the last night out, they were given a farewell dinner: paper hats, garlands, rattles and bells. ‘Americans’, I noted, ‘think they are giving you a treat if they let you behave like children. Such occasions license their latent infantilism.’ I was neither American nor British, it seemed, and neither Jew nor Gentile.

  After dinner, an accordionist played Neapolitan tunes and sang them with an accompaniment of the children’s rattles and squeakers. The Purser, tall, Germanic, with a balding egg-shaped head and a nose like an ant-eater, played double bass. The ship’s photographer, short and thick, with wavy brown hair and a handsome, apish face, was Master of Ceremonies. He crooned and got the words wrong and did a tap routine. His hair flopped about; he waved his arms and flopped on the floor an unhinged gollywog, oh, and he smiled, he smiled and smiled. He came back to the microphone, panting. It squeaked – naughty! – as he adjusted it in order to gasp: ‘After doing that, anyone else would be out of breath!’

  When the band had packed up, the children pulled the balloons from the walls and collected the empty hats. The purser reappeared with a fat German. They had lighted cigars behind their backs. They would go up to a child with an armful of captured balloons and, as one talked nicely, the other popped the balloons. The room was soon full of crying children. I wanted to go and hit the bullies. I walked over and looked at them. They seemed to realise that they had gone too far. The purser unstuck more balloons from the walls and tried to force them on the children. They redoubled their cries. He became tough and mature: they must shut up or go to bed. They stood, open-mouthed, still tears on their cheeks, holding balloons they did not want. The purser walked around the saloon responsibly, tearing down the decorations and peeling sellotape from the walls. He whistled as he did so and upped children, tenderly, from his path.

  I was on deck, reading Nietzsche’s Le Gai Savoir (a present from Jacques Croiset), as the Constitution steamed into Genoa. A woman in a red suit came by and started to talk to me in Italian. She was shiny-faced with hairy legs, a pointed nose, wide contorted lips. She must suddenly have caught sight of the person waiting for her on the dock. She shrieked and ran about in arrested spurts, as if snagged on a leash. She cried in gasping convulsions and plunged her head in her arms as if the sight of her friend was too exciting to bear. She resurrected her head and resumed the panting sobs. Her fur fell to one side and she dropped her umbrella.

  The man on the quay raised his arms above his head (it had a soft hat on it) and waved, more friendly than passionate. The woman panted and groaned as if delirious. When the gangway was lowered, she ran down it, scampering, half-falling, towards the dumpy man. An American woman told me that the woman had tried earlier to talk to a young Lebanese. When he said he spoke no Italian, she dealt him a sharp kick on the shin, which inflicted ‘a terrible wound’. Might it be that the man in the soft hat was not the lover she imagined but some relative delegated to escort her to an institution?

  As I walked down the gangway at Naples, I felt a clap on my shoulder. It was Dick Knights. ‘Where are you going to stay?’ He stuck with me. ‘We could maybe share a room.’ I found it impossible to deny him. We went to a big hotel on the Via San Felice. A single room would cost me more than sharing a double. I had three more rancid nights ahead of me. In the morning, I escaped Dick’s company and went to Pompeii on the narrow-gauge railway. I had no camera and did not at all wish I had one. My notebook was enough.

  Men cluster round the entrance to the scavi, trying to sell postcards, some obscene. You go up a steep street and under a damp arch. The road is of round muffins of grey volcanic rock, like elephants’ feet, veined with mud. The city looks bombed, scythed off at a height of about eight feet, except for some temples, the theatre and a few houses. The place brings home to me the faintheartedness of the classical education. What good are appraisals of literature and historical characters without reference to the architecture, art and social habits of the ancient world? It is idle to chide Catullus or Juvenal for their obscenity or Ovid and Martial for their lasciviousness without appreciating how accurately they reflected the habits and attitudes of their contemporaries.

  The House of the Vettii has a wooden box at the front door. You give the guide a few lire and he reveals a pain
ting of Priapus weighing his elongated prick on the scales. The guide then took the male tourists to the locked door of what he called ‘the fuck room’. The wall paintings depicted a menu of sexual positions, an animated illustration of what grammarians call conjugations. There were more of the same in the lupanar near the Stabian baths; the men all red-brown and muscular, the women inclined to fat and very white. The pictures seemed more instructive than titillating, as if the women did not want to have their time wasted by incompetence; many showed women in the dominant position. There were five cubicula, each with a stone bunk and bolster, in a space no larger than the living room at 12 Balliol House. The partitions between them were about seven feet high, like those between the ‘cubes’ in the Lockite dormitories. The cash desk at the door had a slotted urn for coins, a seat for the madame. Upstairs there were private rooms for the rich or those with more complicated appetites. The guide made sure we understood the merits of the various postures and was given cigarettes for their names.

  I ate pizza for the first time in Naples. I was reminded that Aeneas was told by an oracle that he should land his men when he came to a place where the natives ‘ate their tables’ when they dined. Antiquity was suddenly all around me. I walked up to the Naples museum and paid a few more lire to go through a gated arch into a room with more obscene paintings, lifted from Pompeii. I took keener note of a round canvas by Brueghel the Elder. A venerable figure in a blue-black cloak, face almost hidden by its fall, was walking with the aid of a stick; behind him, hunched in villainy, a boy of fourteen or fifteen, fat and deformed by a goitre or some glandular deficiency, expression brutish and sly. With a wide-bladed butcher’s knife, the boy was cutting the old man’s red purse-strings, which hung from the lower folds of the old man’s gown. The purse dangled like a heart; you had the feeling that the cutting of the string would also cut the old man’s lifeline. The monstrous child was encased in a pair of hoops that intersected at right angles. The circular motif of the canvas was repeated in the bizarre cage in which the malign boy was framed. It had a cross on the top. Behind, there was a windmill, grazing sheep, an untroubled shepherd.

  My last night in Naples, 8 December 1954, coincided with the end of the ‘Marian year’. I took notes as I watched from the iron balcony outside our hotel window:

  A blaring band moved up the Via San Felice and turned left into the Via Medina. It was followed by a parade of ordinary people, wearing brown or dark-blue suits and modest dresses, led by a marshal with a flag. A thin fence of citizens watched the contingents go by; so many people were on the move that it seemed that only a few were left to admire their piety. Platoons of schoolgirls in black smocks and white Eton collars were kept in order by nuns, their habits inflated by the wind like black balloons. Then came older girls, under a blue-green banner with a forked yellow tongue on it. Four outriders held streamers attached to the four corners of the flag to keep it at full stretch.

  Next, a section of starched nuns with unlit candles; followed by girls in virginal dresses that shone in the gloaming; fresh, solemn faces, budding lips and white hands. As the evening thickened, people brought lamps and easy chairs onto their balconies. Down the road, towards the Corso Victor Emmanuele, the Christian army changed its nature; file on file, in glittering coils, marchers came with lit tapers sheltered from the breeze with paper muzzles. The light brought the dark; people lost definition; all you could see was the show of black robes, velvet settings for the spangles of candlelight. ‘Ave Maria!’ they all sang, the deep voices of the priests, the innocent notes of nuns and virgins. Broken-stepped but unstoppable, they were borne past us up the hill until the whole slope was filled with the dazzle of tapers. Through half-closed eyes, I saw twin snakes of golden light, chains of stars, pressing upwards under the urgency of the chant. A loudspeaker van surged up the open centre of the road. Bystanders should come to the Piazza del Plebiscito to be addressed by the archbishop.

  When the leading lights had disappeared, a row of priests in white vestments, others in black cloaks, scampered along; some had doused their tapers, one or two slipped away down side streets. The remaining ranks broke up. Earlier contingents had the serenity of martyrs; the stragglers lacked coherent conviction. Then a whole new army appeared, with tapers lit. Like an orchestra that falters and then recovers its unison, the parade resumed its grandeur; but the hurrying all-too-human tail-enders breached the magic.

  At last the dignitaries appeared, fat old men stumbling slower and slower as the duration of the upward march sapped their energy. Finally, up strutted a posse of swordsmen in blue cloaks, policemen alongside, and the image of the Virgin in an illuminated truck of the kind that usually carried bricks but was now upholstered in greenery, floodlights flaring through it. More swordsmen followed and a wide crowd chanting ‘Ave Maria!’ Behind the culminating concourse, the lights of automobiles and buses. Laggards were hooted aside by drivers with schedules to honour. The secular usurped the clerical with no pretence of respect. Soon the street was full of the usual loud, unmannerly rush of nocturnal traffic.

  I was relieved to be done with the company of Dick Knights. I neither liked nor disliked him. I asked him no questions and he asked me none. What was strange, and has happened many times since, is that I was unable to break a casual relationship that I found unappetising. It has been the same with agents, producers, collaborators and neighbours. I fear those whom I cannot disarm with genialities; I take polite pleasure in deceiving them with smiles. Dread of unpopularity keeps me amiable to people I should prefer to lose. More times than I can count, I have accepted commissions for things I do not want to do, for fear that I might never be asked again by people whom I have small wish to know and whose patronage diverted me from more worthwhile work.

  It was a comfort to be on the train to Rome. Hill towns clustered on the razor edges of sharp hills, pinks underlined with green and umber, whites clouded by weathering water, buildings blended with landscape. Where was that woman walking, basket under her arm, along a mud-caked lane, head high, as if with the discipline of a vessel upon it? Black cattle shifted over the thick green, turned their heads to the train like stately buffoons. Acre on acre, mile on mile, the common world of the Mediterranean peasant; gates, fences, herds and flocks and their solitary guardians, soon to be their killers. I had seen them in the cracked mud of the Moroccan desert, among the dunes where the sea works the shore; in creaking carts on the bald stoniness of Spain, real people in dungarees, djellabas, denim. It was easier to be ignorant of the city than to leave it. Horace, even in those artful verses, meant what he said about his Sabine farm; Virgil, in Eclogues and Georgics, contrived genuine sentiments into urbane hypocrisy (he gloried in his town house on the Palatine). Then I remembered a number that Gordon Pask had written back in Jordan’s Yard: ‘The country’s the place for vice / The country is not quite nice’.

  In Rome, I found a third-floor pensione on the Via Cola de Rienzo in Prati. You had to put ten lire in the ascensore before it would take you up. As soon as I had dumped my luggage, I boarded a bus to the Piazza di Spagna. In those days, the blue-faced American Express offices were next to the little house where Keats died. Yes, there were letters from Beetle. I sat in the sun on the Spanish Steps, between the flower sellers, and discovered that she had never received the long, urgent letter I wrote to her in Barcelona, although I had referred to it, and repeated my desire to be married to her, in a later one. Of course she wanted to marry me. She would come to Paris on Boxing Day. I should be able to recognise her because she would be wearing her new dark-green coat; it had a little fur collar and she loved it. I blinked and looked up. Men were unloading Christmas trees from trucks parked against the boat-shaped fountain in the square. A boy darted through the traffic, drank hard cold water from one of the spouts, shook his head, ran off.

  I went into Babington’s tea rooms, on the other side of the Spanish Steps, and ordered a waffle. The green cups with white interiors had linen napkins folded into them. There were co
pies of Tatler, the Illustrated London News and the New Yorker. Foil-wrapped Christmas puddings stood in a row on the chimneypiece. Silent, elderly waitresses wore caps and aprons, like my grandmother’s Winifred Stanley, with a bow at the back. Two women were talking about bridge; there was a club near the English cinema, on the Via Venti Settembre. I wished I could go there and play without cease until it was time to go to Paris and meet Beetle. The women told me that in London they played at the Ladies’ Carlton Club. They were impressed by my membership of Crockford’s. I was back in the world of one-upmanship.

  The women were staying at the Grand Hotel, where Marlon Brando stayed, they told me. Meals cost 3,000 lire. They claimed not to be rich, but they roughed it only in the best places, confident that anywhere lower down the scale they would encounter bedbugs, larceny and indecent assault. One of them (small, black-suited, dark-haired) had to ask me where I went to school. When I told her, she said that she had thought I was a Carthusian; Carthusians had a singular way of enunciating. I was marked, I thought but did not say, by a kind of vocal circumcision. When I mentioned how beautiful Fez was, the other, tallish, blonde, woman said that thirty years earlier her brother had been dying in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Of course, he didn’t know he was dying, poor lamb, but an hour before he did, on New Year’s Day 1924, he said, ‘When I’m better I’m going to take you to Fez.’ She had still never been. Perhaps they would fly there next week.