Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  La Petite Auberge was the first place to announce its luxury by serving a flower and the morning newspaper on its breakfast trays. Perhaps in part to demonstrate to Monsieur L. that we were still together, we returned a few times in later years. The décor became more and more elaborate and the prices with it. The moment de déclic came when, as we were shown to our table, the hostess took Beetle’s handbag from her and hung it, officiously, on a little hook affixed to the underside of the table, quite as if smart people would have known that it was there. I was not wholly sorry when Lalleman lost one of his stars, and then another.

  Eizabeth David’s French Country Cooking in hand, I did most of the cooking during our month at the Villa Tethys at Le Canadel. It was no memorable pleasure to sit on the beach with Joan and Baron, who wore a snap-brimmed trilby. They were still together, but otherwise apart. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Jenny stretched, beautifully, on a flat rock. Eight-year-old Alan scowled and fretted and did not want to play cricket. Beetle looked after Paul, who scuttled around the sand, while I went and shopped for my evening culinary performance. When no one was up at the villa, I sat on the terrace and typed a few more pages of The S Man.

  Baron had celebrated his new affluence by buying an 8mm camera. It happened to be running when, without having previously adopted an upright stance, Paul got to his feet on the marble floor and walked fifty-three steps. Baron had to go to London in the middle of the month. On his return, he presented me with a white chef’s toque, with a light-blue flash on it. The weeks went slowly. We seemed to have less in common with Joan and Baron by the end than when we met them at Noves. We have never again gone on holiday with other people.

  I thought it would be quicker and cooler, and romantic, to drive to Spain through the night. The daytime roads would be cumbered with returning holidaymakers. We arranged a foam rubber mattress on the back seat of the Ford Anglia and set off in the early evening to drive first below Montpellier and Narbonne and then along the north side of the Pyrenees, past Pau, before reaching the border at Hendaye. The Guardia Civil at the deserted Irun crossing regarded us with unwelcoming suspicion. It seemed that they could not imagine anyone having an innocent reason for visiting Spain. In Franco’s kingdom, time seemed to have stopped in 1939.

  The narrow carretera was pitted with pot-holes and loud with snorting, bald-tyred pre-war lorries. The bulbous green hillsides carried tall cut-outs of black bulls with dangling football-sized cojones. Pairs of glowering Guardia Civil, in shiny black helmets that looked like portable typewriter cases, patrolled – one on each side of the road – swinging their green woollen capes, antique Lee-Enfield rifles on their shoulders, the Caudillo’s occupying force. Since Paul was wide awake, we drove on through the day, exhausted and ill-humoured. The fragility of what I took for granted was abruptly evident. After a night’s sleep, I felt more exhilarated to be out of England than ashamed to be in a Fascist country. Driving the long road south with its many bumpy detours, I decided that I should never again work in tandem with anyone or think about money, no matter what Dr Jan van Loewen had to say. Spain might be in bondage; I was free.

  Anna Freeman-Saunders’s house was in a dusty fishing village called Fuengirola, beyond loud Torremolinos on the way to Gibraltar. Calle Tostón Diez y seis had two bedrooms and a living room opening onto a patio blazing with geraniums and draped in purple bougainvillea; beyond the patio wall, the sea. The Calle Tostón was a long, tight row of one-storey houses with a three-storey apartment building at the end, just before the grey beach.

  The day after we arrived, I started a new play. The Roper House was based on some of the things that Judy Birdwood had told me about her wayward, now dead, husband Rudolph. Nearly everything I have ever written has been based on what I have seen or heard. I have had little shame at using things I have been told. Something seems to impel people to tell writers their secrets, even when they can guess that they will make use of them, perhaps because of that. The novelist’s mind had better be full of the rags and bones of other people’s lives. It can take years for incidents to grow into a story. Some remain memorable, however trivial, but never germinate. I recall sitting in a flat in Girton House, Manor Fields, belonging to a man called Harry Matthews. I have no memory of how I came to be there. I had never spoken to him before and never spoke to him again. I was nineteen and proud of being in love with Beetle. Mr Matthews told me that he was very unhappy. He was sure that his wife was unfaithful to him with some young person who lived in Manor Fields. She liked young men. He was sure she would like me. Did he suspect me of being her lover? Why did he ask me to stay and talk to him about Beetle? Why did I feel that I was his soft prisoner, both wanting and not wanting to be free of him?

  I finished The Roper House in less than two weeks. Its main character was an amalgam of Oswald Mosley and an architect of the same arrogant genius as Frank Lloyd Wright. I named him Stephen Taylor, after a menacing boy, and a fast runner, whom I had feared, for the usual reason, when I was at prep school in north Devon. Alone in the patio in the Calle Tostón, I did not give a thought to the Royal Court Theatre or to the playwrights who had eclipsed me in Ken Tynan’s Observer play competition. As a writer, I have never imagined myself to be competing against anyone.

  The day after The Roper House was done, I started a new novel, The Trouble with England. I typed ceaselessly until lunchtime, whenever that was. Beetle went to the beach with Paul. Tom Maschler had passed on Anna’s instructions to pay our cook, Salvadora Martin, 300 pesetas a month, never more. A widow with four girls to raise, Salvadora always wore black. Her husband had been a fisherman, killed in an accident at sea. There was no compensation. She arrived, all in black, in the morning either late or later, carrying a black bag containing what she had found at the market for our lunch. She lit the charcoal stove and fanned it into flame with a wickerwork paddle.

  On sunny days (‘oy so’ she would say, for ‘hoy sol’), Salvadora sang songs with a lot of corazón in the lyrics; on glum days, ‘que lastima, que pena!’ was the theme. Between two o’clock and three, she would call, ‘Señorito, la comida!’ Our diet included lenguados, ritsoles, boquerones, tortillas, tomates relleños, gambas, paella, almondegas con arroz, berejena y judías, an edible Spanish lesson that covered the long concrete patio table. The absence of many of her teeth compounded the effect of Salvadora’s Andaluz accent. ‘Lenguados no hay en mercado’ (there are no soles in the market) became ‘Langwa-o no hay en mercow’. As we ate, Salvadora would say, ‘Todo!’, quite as if she really meant us to eat it all. En verdad, she cooked enough to be sure that black bag of hers left the house plump with what was left. It eased our consciences at paying her so little. She might be moody with us, but she was unfailingly, if teasingly, affectionate with Paul. ‘Pablo, niño guapo, niño feo’, her incantation had something of the contained heat of flamenco.

  Fuengirola’s fishermen had to haul their boats up the beach because Franco persisted in denying their request to build a jetty. Early in the Civil War, the villagers burned the church and chased away the priest. No one talked about those days. Salvadora promised us that everyone appreciated the tranquilidad that Franco had imposed. Anything was better than the disasters of war.

  Several of the other houses in the Calle Tostón were occupied by estranjeros, expatriates, with artistic pretensions. Our neighbour to the right was a painter called Larry Potter, a graduate of Cooper Union and the first American black man we ever met. Slim, smart and glad to be out of the States, Larry admired Juan Gris before all other modern painters, and Herman Hesse more than Ernest Hemingway, who had been in Fuengirola that summer. Papa was writing up the series of mano-a-mano bullfights starring the rival toreros Luis Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordoñez. Larry’s neighbours were German, Hans and Juliana Piron. Professional translators, he was Jewish, she was not. They had come to Fuengirola from primitive, sparsely inhabited Ibiza. It was cheaper to live there than anywhere else in Europe.

  Hans was about to go to Frankfurt
for the book fair. He hoped to pick up enough work to feed him and Juliana and their children, Claudia and Juani, for the next year. Juliana told Beetle that work was not the only thing he picked up; he also had his ‘flirts’. She seemed philosophical about it; it did not occur to me that perhaps it suited her. Not yet forty, Hans had a heap of arty grey hair, boss eyes that bulged behind thick glasses and a prompt aptitude for laughing at his own jokes. Juliana was forty, just, blue-eyed and beautiful enough for age to worry her, a lot. Softening breasts hung loose under a dark-blue cotton dress. Claudia was eleven, blonde and had her mother’s blue eyes; Juani was more like his father. Juliana’s father lived with his money in Buenos Aires. He did not approve of Hans, but he did send expensive presents to Claudia. Hans had survived the Nazi occupation in Holland, where, he soon told us, he had been ‘in the Resistance’. Larry Potter said, ‘What it comes to is, he stole coal.’ Juliana cherished a receding dream of visiting the isles of Greece.

  Larry Potter and Juliana were both asthmatic; they understood each other. While Hans was in Frankfurt, they got together. Larry had a lot of charm. He even charmed a certain Miss Anson, the holidaying chairman of the Conservative association in Hemel Hempstead, into coming to a party he was giving. When he kissed her hullo, the matronly Tory lady said, ‘Imagine if the Blues could see me now!’ I was drinking some anis seco when a freckled woman with big brown curly hair, wearing a green knitted dress, came and pulled at my orange turtlenecked sweater. ‘What’s this?’ Her name was Charlotte Gordon and she was a sculptor, she told me.

  Further down the street lived Paul Hecht, the poet son of a New York hack-driver. He had saved for his trip to Spain by working for three years on building sites in the Bronx. Now he was learning to play flamenco guitar and living with a good-looking black American called Joan. I asked Larry Potter what she did.

  ‘Joan? She sleeps a lot.’

  When I told Larry that I had finished a new play, he suggested that I should read it to the ‘community’. I said I had only one copy, so I should have to read all the parts myself. ‘Who better?’ I was afraid that The Roper House would be too British for a mostly American audience, but it held their attention pretty well. Larry surprised and flattered me by being able to quote or paraphrase several of Stephen Taylor’s speeches after a single hearing. I told him that until I met him I had not believed the story, retailed among classicists, that ancient Athenian audiences could actually recite large sections of a tragedy after it had been staged only once. ‘The work’s good enough, why not?’ Soon after my one-man play-reading, Hans came to the door with news that some German TV station was offering a prize of 800 Deutschmarks for a television play. ‘I sink we do it,’ he said. But I sought differently: Larry’s enthusiasm made me keen to get my new play to my fan Betty Judkins in Dr van Loewen’s office.

  A Wild Surmise

  XXII

  HARRY AND CHARLOTTE Gordon rented a big house in the Avenida José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The street does not carry the same name in today’s democratic Fuengirola, which has a summer population of a quarter of a million. José Antonio was the Falange leader, killed by the Republicans in 1926. The Gordons had made enough money on Madison Avenue to take a year off to paint and sculpt in Spain. We were soon told that Charlotte had been the youngest art editor ever of Seventeen; she had been ‘let go’ because of temperamental differences with the magazine’s managing editor.

  Harry’s cool first-floor studio was big enough for the large canvases on which he did his hard-edged stuff. Top New York galleries were keen to give him a show when he got back, but there were very few he was willing to go with. Not yet thirty, he had the aspect and bow-legged trudge and furrowed frown of a man braving undisclosed sorrows. He did like to tell jokes, though. The one I remember was about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. They’re riding down a canyon when they see 5,000 Indians at the far end; they wheel round and there are another 5,000; the Lone Ranger looks up and sees … 5,000 more on the skyline. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, ‘Well, old timer, looks like we’ve finally had it this time.’ Tonto says, ‘Where’d you get the “we” shit?’

  The Gordons had been art students together in Philadelphia, where his father, now dead, was a policeman. Harry told us that one day, when his father was on point duty, a man who had had a few drinks came over to him and said, ‘Officer, is my fly undone?’ Harry’s father said, ‘No, it’s not.’ ‘Then how come I’m pissing?’ Charlotte’s father Leopold was an Austrian refugee and an inventor of genius, somewhat like Gordon Pask. He was employed by RCA. Some eighty patents for his many inventions belonged wholly to the company.

  Harry’s face would change when he told funny stories, of which he had a good number. The creases changed from vertical to lateral when he smiled. His laugh promised that he might easily be happier than he was. He had been raised as a Roman Catholic. When Christmas approached, we invited him to a communal roast turkey, baked in the village oven. Harry claimed not even to know which day it was.

  Hans and Juliana owned an elegantly boxed mahjong set. Once the children were settled, they came to our house, carrying a suitable table, and taught us how to play. The game proved to be a picturesque form of rummy, with oriental tiles instead of cards. Hans’s commentary added a little spice. ‘Now I sink I finish it quickly,’ he would say. His English was as fluent as it was foreign. His parents, Max and Else, lived in Málaga. Max was an enlarged, much louder form of Hans, who was already larger than the kind of life I was used to. Max wore a black cape and a black beret and pretended to amorous rights over his ‘daughter-incest’. Juliana suffered more than she welcomed his embraces.

  Every Tuesday, Beetle and I wheeled Paul up to the next village, Los Boliches, to catch one of the few copies of the Sunday Times on sale along the coast. On the other side of the carretera was a big villa with a high wall around it, facing onto an empty lot. Pink and black pigs rootled among the garbage. The villa’s stone-arched wooden gates were always shut; the shutters too. The property was said to belong to ‘El Alemán’, the German.

  Soon after we settled in Fuengirola, we saw in someone else’s newspaper that Harold Macmillan’s Conservatives had won the general election. We never listened to the radio. There was no television. Macmillan’s winning slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’ seemed to promise that England’s best hope was to remain in a state of faltering complacency. ‘Supermac’ was its woebegone miracle-worker. I had no wish to go back.

  I wrote at least five pages of my novel every morning, often more. The unceasing clatter of my typewriter keys dismayed Paul Hecht and amused Larry Potter. I stopped briefly, in mid-morning, when the cartero opened the little gate on the beach side of the patio, and unloaded the mail onto the tiled table. I gave him the usual peseta for his trouble. If the letter was one I craved (from George Greenfield, for instance), I made it two pesetas.

  One day, as Christmas approached, Hans came to our house. After asking, as always, ‘Did you get letters?’ he wanted to know if we meant to have a Christmas tree. It would be nice for the children. Where might we find a Christmas tree in Fuengirola? ‘On ze way to Marbella, on ze right, there’s a whole forest of them. We go one night wiz an axe and … why not?’ I was too prim to relish the prospect of rustling conifers, however many there might be of them. Imagine if the Guardia Civil happened to come by. I announced a fortunate cold. Hans was displeased at my lack of nerve, but he did not go and cut a tree for himself.

  After doing my Trollopian quota of work on The Trouble with England, which had been sparked by the paralysed man who came into the pension Florida and left his mouth-paintings on each table, I gave an hour or two to playing the honest hack. In John Prebble’s style, and – in the chapter on the Tay Bridge disaster – with the help of his book, I compiled breadwinning chapters of tragedies and horrors. I wrote the segment on the murder of six million of Europe’s Jews using as a crib Lord Russell of Liverpool’s catchpenny paperback, the sales of which had been enhanced by the
photographs of naked women being paraded before grinning SS men. In the course of my commissioned drudgery, I was philosophical enough to say that the so-called ‘Jewish question’ was not a genuine question at all; hence there was no call to answer it. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations stood in its light-blue jacket on the chimney-piece.

  In the afternoon, I craved exercise. Harry Gordon and I got in the way of kicking a soccer ball around on the patch of land adjacent to the carretera, beside El Alemán’s shuttered villa. Now and again, a large American car would drive past with off-duty GIs in it. Its licence plate announced: USAAF MORON. One day, the judas door in one of the big brown wooden gates of the villa opened and a trio of Spanish boys ran out and joined us. Pretty soon, we had enough regular players to make up two sides.

  Gene Masson, a professor of painting from Miami, Florida, joined us occasionally. He had never played soccer before so I suggested that he go in goal. One day, Esteban, one of the Spanish boys from the German villa, hit a shot so hard that Gene, making a casual swipe at it, broke the little finger on his left hand. He held it up and laughed and said, ‘Guy just broke my fucking finger. He broke my fucking finger, see that? Lucky it’s not the one I paint with.’ Gene had been a war artist in the Pacific with the US Marine Corps. He did not think that Harry was really a painter; ‘hard-edge’ was a style that was convenient for designers: they didn’t have to know how to draw. Harry’s pictures were all different and all the same. Harry’s view of Gene was that he was a typical sun-belt, old-style artist who couldn’t ever interest a progressive New York gallery.