By the time Leslie Bricusse’s provincial tour came to an end, Charley Moon was being shot. Jock Jacobsen’s watchword, ‘There’s such a thing as timing, fellers’, came to fruition: the Rank Organisation, which had its panelled home at Pinewood Studios, offered Leslie and me a contract to write two films in the coming year. There was no distinction between our remuneration: we were each to be paid £1,150. Jock began to call me by my first name.
Leslie had found an accountant whose services he recommended. Eric Barnacle was a pockmarked, slab-faced clerk with the usual spectacles, the usual grey flannels and sports jacket, the usual cubbyhole office (on the north side of Oxford Street). He told me that he hated being an accountant. When he woke up in the morning, he was sorry to discover that he was still the same boring person. He bored himself even in his dreams. After the paperwork was done and signed, he proposed that I pay him and the Revenue simultaneously. ‘It’ll save trouble if you just add the two together and make the cheque out to me. I’ll pass the tax on to HMG.’ I had a strong feeling that I was doing the wrong thing, but I did as he asked.
A year later, the Revenue demanded payment for what Barnacle had promised he was going to pay. I found that he had absconded with what was always described in those days as ‘a chorus girl’. The law eventually caught up with him. When he went to jail, I was not sorry; neither was he perhaps: he had succeeded in being somebody else for a little while. He now had some furniture for his dreams. Since he was not a chartered accountant, no professional insurance covered his delinquency. I am still credulous, but not so easily conned.
After Beetle had nursed me through a long, debilitating, very sweaty bout of glandular fever, Leslie invited us to stay in his parents’ house in Shirley, near Manchester, in order, once again, to ‘tickle up’ the book of Lady at the Wheel. While ill, I had had a very high temperature and agonising headaches. The janitor’s wife and her friend Joan were in the habit of having loud conversations in the yard outside the bedroom’s dark window. One morning, Beetle’s mother arrived, with a bag of necessities: smoked salmon, cold chicken, a cake from Maison Sagne in Marylebone High Street. We told her how persistent and percussive the noise was. Ray had a simple solution: she would give the talkative ladies ten shillings and explain that I was unwell.
Socialist principles led me to insist that we not demean the working class by offering them money; the right thing to do was to reason with them. Ray promised to take care of things in a way that would not be offensive. I heard her explain my condition, and winced at the silence in which I knew she was giving them the money. The ladies never disturbed me again. I consoled myself that overtipping was one thing Marcel Proust and Jean-Paul Sartre had in common; prolixity was the other.
While we were staying with his parents in cold suburban Shirley, Leslie gave me driving lessons in his new white Ford Consul convertible. Since I was nervous of pressing too heavily on the accelerator, the L-plated car did many kangaroo leaps. Leslie sat, imperturbable, beside me until I achieved some kind of competence. He promised that one day I should be able to change gear and go round a corner at the same time. It seemed unlikely.
On our return to London, Beetle and I took BSM driving lessons. We both passed the test first time. I cannot remember ever again having to perform the tricky exercise of ‘backing around a corner’. We went to Lex Garages in Soho, hoping for a bargain from Trevor Chinn. He took us up the steep ramp to the first floor and pointed to a second-hand green Ford Anglia, PLD 75. ‘This is your car,’ he said. It had no heater and was not in gleaming condition but we had his promise that, for £250, we would never do better. He was probably right: with a transfer depicting all the roadsigns likely to be encountered on the Continent stuck on the inside of the wind-screen, we were to drive many, many miles in it on all kinds of rough roads, even if I did have to turn round and back up a one-in-ten gradient in Andalucia. When, several years later, I came to trade in PLD 75 for something better, Beetle’s cousin Geoffrey had no doubt that it was composed of the welded halves of two cars that had been in shunts.
Herb and Judy Oppenheim came to England in the autumn of 1955. They had been touring Europe ever since they left me in Granada. At dinner in Chelsea Embankment, they were pleased to tell Beetle that I had talked about her ‘all the time’ when we were travelling together. As she cooked pineapple lamb in the tiny kitchen, the Oppenheims were quick to whisper that they were not surprised that I had married such a bright, beautiful girl. They were proposing to go to Sicily, their last excursion before they returned to the States. What did we say to joining them?
They were still driving the little Simca with an unsprung bench seat at the back. Comfortable enough for three of us and the smaller Linda, it was tight for five. I was different now that I was with Beetle. Our intimacy soon made Herb and Judy uneasy. The warmth that I had turned on them when we were in Spain was now directed almost exclusively at Beetle. We were less tolerant of Linda and her understandable misery than I had been when I was grateful for the lift and the company.
We went south along the Route Napoléon into the foothills of the Alps and then Herb branched off to take the frozen and seasonably ‘déconseillé’ Mont St Cenis pass into Lombardy. He negotiated the deserted, alarmingly icy corduroy road with purposeful skill. The high road was the most direct route to the stadium, designed by Luigi Nervi, near Torino, with the largest unsupported roof in Europe. Herb’s three-dimensional camera put it on record.
We still had a long way to go. On the level road from Turin to Pisa, Judy took the wheel, to give him a break. Not used to low-powered, stick-shift European cars, requiring synchronous skill with the clutch, she drove only in top gear. After she had had to slow down to pass through a village with a fair, the Simca regained speed with clunking reluctance. Out on the narrow, tree-lined Lombardy road, Judy decided to overtake a large, fast-moving lorry. Having pulled out into the only other lane, she failed to accelerate with sufficient firmness to get on past the throbbing lorry. It did not diminish its speed. We willed her to change down to third gear and accelerate on past. The moaning Simca yawed back and forth. We rolled on in the tight space between the high wheels of the truck and the thick, frequent plane trees. Huge hubs and black tree trunks came and receded, came and receded. Had anything come in the opposite direction, we should certainly have been killed or badly injured. Eventually, we were past the lorry and Judy regained control of our course. The silence was sustained and divisive.
In Pisa, Herb pulled up outside a hotel adjacent to the Campo dei Miracoli. We could stay in the car while he went in to make a deal. I advised against bargaining with undue insistence. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s pretty well November, right? Believe me, they’ll be only too glad to cut a deal.’ He came back out to say that the place was ‘strictly minimal’, but they had offered an enticing rate.
After dinner, which ended with a floral bowl of zuppa inglese, Beetle and I walked out into the cool darkness to look at the Leaning Tower. Judy was putting Linda to bed. Herb emerged alone and walked on the wide grass. We did veer over and talk to him, but the rupture proved irreparable; not least because he seemed to blame Beetle for it.
Judy never drove us again. We reached Naples in good time to catch the night ferry for Palermo. Before going on board, we dined at one of the row of restaurants on the quay. Each had an orchestra, in full fig, playing in front of it. The grander ones had three-tiered platforms on which instrumentalists in black ties were conducted by some inglorious, tail-coated maestro. We had fish soup with squid and giant prawns in it and split the bill with precision.
A row of open carriages with beribboned, blinkered, nose-bagged horses was waiting on the quay at Palermo. To reach the hotel that Herb had selected, in the centre of the city, we clopped past Baroque villas behind ornate gates. Not long before, an Alfa Romeo had exploded in the driveway of one of the villas, the mafia’s routine way of killing a recalcitrant politico and encouraging the others. The razing of the antique dockside quart
er, and its replacement with yellow, gimcrack tower blocks, would not start for another decade. 1950s Palermo had sinister shadows, even on a fine autumn morning, but it was still grandiose with the mouldering palazzi of the decadent nobility who would find their stylish sarcophagus in Giuseppe Tomaso di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo.
Herb’s guidebook knew just where to go and what to admire. We drove up to Monreale to see the Byzantine mosaics in the cross-bred cathedral (part Catholic, part Greek Orthodox). In Cefalù, we lunched in a waterfront trattoria. Herb invited a solitary diner to join us. He was an ex-GI who had been in Sicily ever since the war. I imagined that he had been seduced by the myth of Aleister Crowley, the pear-shaped Great Beast 666, who had lorded it, during the 1920s, in the adjacent Abbey of Thelema, where he proclaimed that the only law was ‘Do As Thou Wilt’. Somerset Maugham’s skimpy novel The Magician paid scathing homage to the intimidating charlatan. In the late 1960s, I played soccer in Brian Glanville’s twice-weekly pick-up game in Hyde Park. Among the casual company was a wilted individual who had been an acolyte in Crowley’s Abbey. D. H. Lawrence too had passed that way; he blessed the unsmiling Sicilian males with primal phallic virility.
Herb asked whether our temporary friend had a disability pension to sustain him in Sicily. ‘No, I can stay here because, OK, I do occasional jobs for people locally, which keeps me eating at least.’
‘It’s certainly a beautiful spot to be stuck in,’ I said.
‘Think so? Hate it; hate the people too.’
‘Why stay?’
‘How about I’m wanted by Uncle Sam for desertion? Pays to keep my head down, only not a whole lot.’
We drove on to Taormina. The transparent November sea off Giardini Naxos was just warm enough to swim in. In the evening, we played bridge, in a scintillating storm, in on–off–on light in the glassed terrace of a little hotel up on the hill, next to the Roman theatre. Herb’s schedule kept us looking and leaping with timely vigilance. In the Greek theatre outside Syracuse, where boozy Aeschylus previewed one of his plays, I slowed things down with an abbreviated lecture on the Athenians’ disastrous Sicilian expedition in the grand harbour, which we could see in front of us.
Then it was time for Agrigento. The old town, high above the famous row of sixth- and fifth-century Doric temples, had been damaged in the war; but it retained the tight heat of ancient Akragas, where the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles was born. Today’s eviscerated city is an agglomeration of concrete, on which the mafia has the monopoly. While the Oppenheims had breakfast, Beetle and I walked to the ruins. I heard myself lecture her on the temples’ gods as if we were strangers. The expedition had divided us from my friends and, to a degree, from each other. We lacked the wit or the will to put things right. Nothing unpleasant was said by any of us. Everything I said was very polite, in the British style.
We did the full round of the island, where the ancient sites, from Selinunte to Segesta, were still unfenced. The villages reeked sweetly of straw and donkey dung. In the sudden twilight, peasants rode past in their carts, rakes and scythes silhouetted in a stiff frieze against the last of the low, lurid light. The carved tailboards of their carts bore polychrome hand-carved reliefs of folkloric figures. There were few cars. Just short of a box-bridge, on a wet evening, we were overtaken by an Alfa Romeo with flaring lights and a loud klaxon. As he took the narrow-shouldered bridge, the alpha male driver lost control. The car spun round, once, twice, within the stiff bracket of the girders, halted for a split second, then plunged on as fast as before. Beetle and I, on the bench at the back, looked at each other. Herb glanced at his mirror and saw the look. He smiled a blue smile.
Outside Castelvetrano, where the outlaw Salvatore Giuliano had died five years before, after lording it over the region in a short season of international fame, we bought unglazed terracotta dishes and a bell-shaped jar from a wayside vendor. A year later, Gavin Maxwell would embellish the Giuliano myth in God Protect Me From My Friends. Half in love with a ruthless and virile bandit, Maxwell’s elegy dignified him into a modern Robin Hood. Leslie Bricusse and I visited the movie producer Raymond Stross, a short, fleshy man of small charm, hoping that he might want to make a movie out of Giuliano’s story.
We were served with tea by his luminously beautiful young blonde wife. Clare endeared herself to me by murmuring, in a convent-educated undertone, how wonderful I had been in ‘Joe and the Boys’. Stross was not seduced by our enthusiasm. Eventually the film Salvatore Giuliano was directed by Francesco Rosi from a script by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, the senior of Lucchino Visconti’s trusted scenarists, whom we would meet in Rome in 1964. Suso sustained the Giuliano myth by portraying him almost entirely as a distant figure. In brave relief, he could stand for a sullied, gun-toting saviour in a white mackintosh.
Riding north in the Simca, Beetle and I held our Sicilian pots in our laps, like obstinate trophies of the worthwhileness of the trip. After disembarking from the ferry at Naples, Judy decided that Linda was fretful only because the car was so full. The two of them would catch the train and meet us again at Ventimiglia, on the French border. Alone with me and Beetle, Herb was as nice, and informative, as he could be. He even let me drive. There was a level crossing at the top of an embankment somewhere along the Appian Way. I had to stop, on the tilt, at the top. I tried, as Leslie Bricusse had taught me, to hold the car by idling the engine and staying in gear. I must have depressed the clutch too far. The car rolled backwards down the long slope. Luckily, there was nothing behind us. I waited at the bottom, until the barrier was raised, and then drove up the gradient and over the railway line. After a few more tactful miles, Herb resumed the wheel. Judy’s absence sat with us.
Herb determined on one last detour, via Marseille, in order to see Le Corbusier’s suburban Unité d’Habitation. It exemplified the modernism that Siegfried Giedion claimed would make people better, more sociable and well-adjusted by encasing their lives in a common, clean-lined framework. Glass and concrete were expected to furnish a world purged of baroque exaggeration. Architecture was the moral brassiere of the future: its uplift would make mankind positive and outward-looking, preferably through picture windows. The tenants of the Unité d’Habitation certainly enjoyed a brighter life than we did in our SW3 basement; but Le Corbusier’s regimental uniformity echoed the brave new classlessness we were supposed to admire in Sovcolor documentaries in which untiring Ukrainians sowed, reaped and sometimes sang their way to the socialism at the end of Comrade Stalin’s rainbow.
Herb seemed unaware of Europe’s demons or how the hydra could always grow new heads. Perhaps because he did not look like a Jew, he appeared not to feel like one. He considered anti-Semitism a social disease. Architecture, he thought, could redesign nature and make life’s rough places smooth and easy to keep clean. Like the photographer who called on everyone to say ‘cheese’ at the same time, the master-builder would fix a regular smile on humanity’s face.
As we returned north along the Route Nationale 6, in discrete silence, Herb spotted in the Guide Michelin that there was a three-star restaurant at Saulieu, the Lion d’Or. Beetle and I recalled not eating there when on the way to Ramatuelle. Herb reckoned that if he stepped on it, we could make it by half past one. Wouldn’t it be nice to seal, and heal, our trip with a great meal? We did not arrive till nearly a quarter to two. Herb played the rich American, but neither charm nor his pocketbook could recall a chef who had quit his kitchen once the last plats de résistance had been scanned on their way to table. All that anyone could offer was some pâté and salad and a dessert, from a limited list. What was meant to be a celebration was cold comfort.
In Paris, we parted from the Oppenheims, with a show of gratitude and a last contribution to the cost of the gas. The rectitude of my goodbye reminded me of my tight-lipped father. I was sad and relieved, Beetle merely relieved. She never saw them again; I did, when I was in New York in 1967, for the première of Two for the Road. Herb’s career had peaked with his designs for the
Playboy Club in New York City. He was now on the board of a liberal synagogue. Linda was fifteen, a pretty young girl who remembered, with more good humour than I deserved, what a pain she had been on our travels. If they ever saw it, the Oppenheims just may have seen themselves in the characters of the Maxwell Manchesters in Stanley Donen’s movie. Linda was never as obnoxious as the fictional Ruthiebelle.
Beetle and I caught the train to Calais with the terracotta pots and jug and returned to Chelsea Embankment. When we turned on the light in the living room, it revealed a congress of cockroaches, the size and colour of prunes. I stamped my foot and they took cover, without haste. The next morning, I resumed work on The Earlsdon Way. Every evening, Beetle scanned the day’s output of pages. If she guessed that my heroine, Karen, was based on Hilary Phillips she did not remark it aloud. As a reader, Beetle was tactful, but not passive. At one point Karen’s valetudinarian mother Lesley complains of her bad shoulder. Later, her husband Edward asks how her shoulder feels. My typescript had her reply ‘What shoulder?’ Beetle suggested that I delete the ‘what’. Less was more accurate: ‘Shoulder?’ was exactly what Lesley would have said. A decade later, Beetle became one of Jonathan Cape’s best readers. Even Edna O’Brien was grateful for her always specific attentions.
Tony Becher had become co-editor of the Cambridge Review, a prim 10-point print publication, its long paragraphs aimed at senior members of the university. He asked me to review David Garnett’s Aspects of Love. I found it to be of no intimidating brilliance. Reviewing resembled the composition of prosaic Latin verses: you had to be elegant and sparky within a limited space and, if possible, end with a twist. It was a quick means of getting your name in print and you could keep the book. Garnett’s novella combined Bloombury sophistication with winsome sentimentality. In the 1990s, Andrew Lloyd-Webber asked John Schlesinger and me to turn his and Don Black’s musical version of Garnett’s novella into a film. The operetta version had stuck, tight, to the plot and dialogue, which struck me, once again, as falsely simple. When John and I proposed bold changes, the project was shelved.
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